[ WP ] All you hear is a dripping noise .

It roars like a river, pushing at my ears and rattling my brain. My eyes water even as the sound of a drip forming screams at me. 
 
 I clasp my hands so as not to rip my face apart, the temptation to end it all growing by the moment. 
 
 A deep breath grinds like a jet engine trying to find the third gear – with a fifteen year old pilot who hasn ’ t discovered the clutch yet – and racks my chest. In response, not to be outdone, my stomach roils and boils, rebelling against the crackers dissolving like shards of glass; pointed, smooth, and reflecting the least attractive parts of me. 
 
 The cough tries to contribute to my death by forcing me to clench my bits and bobs, my preciousssss, as it every muscle convulses to the seven nine time in the song of my demise. 
 
 My upper lip twitches in memory. Dragging it along a shag carpet years ago, supplanting fingernails along a chalkboard for my own personal kryptonite. The drip, the bubble, the viscous doom that creeps over it now would send shivers along my spine – if I hadn ’ t dislocated it in the last cough. 
 
 Reflexively I try to inhale, pull it back away from my lip which aches in salty anticipation. But the doomed maneuver is blocked by concrete, the action nearly sending me backwards as the force of it backfires. 
 
 The tissues are gone. The road rash toilet paper mocks me, the empty roll smirking at my misery. 
 
 I cringe inside. Part of me weeps. 
 
 But I am weak. 
 
 I close my eyes – I would turn away from what is about to happen, but I can ’ t – and wipe my sleeve over my nose. 

