The man went spinning down the stairs and ended up at the bottom. She was sure he must be dead because they were such violent movements as he spun plunging down. His hand was lying on the floor below her feet with the towel it had been hanging onto. She stood there in shaking fear.
The people inside the apartment where they both had been came out to investigate what the clamor was. They were her friends. They didn’t know what to say. Everyone was afraid to say anything because, by that time, the police had put her in handcuffs and even she wasn’t saying a word. She knew better to keep her mouth shut and let them ask the questions. She didn’t volunteer anything and they were asking everyone but her what they might know about what happened. No one knew a thing because they had all been inside the apartment when it happened — but they gave her forgiving looks.
There were plenty of uniforms performing acts of investigative work — like analyzing the trail of blood and where it was in proximity to where the only suspicious one was standing at the edge of the landing before the stairs.
There was a door around the corner from the apartment they had come out of. It was like there was an elevator between the doors but both doors were pushed back so that the elevator projected into the landing area where the event started and each entrance had a little hall before it. There was a pool of purplish blood near what might be the elevator but before the hall that made its way to the door to the other apartment where his girlfriend had gone.
The suspicious one had come out behind him and he was carrying the towel his girlfriend had used to blot herself. She grabbed the towel that he had slung over his shoulder trying to slow him down and was exclaiming that he needed to come back to the room where he had started and clean up his girlfriend’s urine from the floor with the towel — since she wouldn’t do it and no one else wanted to or wanted to traipse through urine on the floor that had already been traipsed through by the drunk blonde girl.
The girlfriend had cleaned herself off, used the towel to blot herself and then proceeded to strut out of that apartment headed for the other apartment because she was suddenly through with the chaos of the room surrounding her behavior. She was a drunk. She was drunk and her urine followed her like a puppy doing as it pleased, wherever it went to do whatever it pleased and wanted no consequence nor had any thoughts that it deserved any consequence. What have I done wrong? the puppy might think. She, on the other hand, felt entitled to be what she was with thoughts that she was too beautiful for anyone to worry about a little thing like her urine on the floor. Her long, thick blonde hair trailed her like a puppy too. It was her mane, her identity. It strutted with her, flowing out behind her tiny body.
The dead man’s sister arrived and the suspicious one’s did too. The suspicious one’s sister was a former cop and when asked why the investigation was avoiding her, her sister said, “They may not ask you anything. They may already see it as an accident. But they need to get whatever other information they can before they engage you and they might not need to ask you. They have to read you your rights first. Have they read you your rights yet?”
“No,” she replied while trying desperately to formulate the story so that it would be convincing. She didn’t want to muck anything up and say it wrong in a way that would be incriminating.
It had, in fact, been an accident. It all happened so quickly she was having trouble formulating just how it has happened. She was already feeling guilty that her anger was enough to pave the way for guilt in the eyes of the policemen investigating. Anger that the blonde drunk had strutted out as if the others in the room were all her slaves. “I’m not cleaning that up,” she’d said before the strut. Angry that she was left with a mess to clean up. Angry that no one was responding to her pleas to take responsibility. As usual, she was trying to control and now it was putting her in harms way. Maybe she deserved the label “guilty”. Guilty of being a bitch. Why shouldn’t everyone else have fun at her expense.
She definitely needed to calm her insides down before she paved her own way for being labeled and thrown into jail.
The dead man’s sister was explaining that her brother had a prosthetic hand. Of course, by then, everyone could see the attachment hardware — but, nonetheless, it was a peculiar sight to see a hand still holding the towel lying on the floor.
The towel didn’t have a drop of blood on it and the purplish pool didn’t really look like blood though the suspicious one knew that he had spun some near there before he had gone spinning down the stairs. Maybe he was holding a juice box and it had gotten crushed and spilled but she thought she remembered him hitting his head on the wall near there before his spinning body’s spinning lunged him toward the stairs where the momentum of the spinning increased and his only place to go was down.
What was hard, in her own mind, to understand was how had he spun such that he got all they way from the place between the projection and the other apartment door to end up such that he could go spinning down the stairs. It didn’t seem to make sense from a physics standpoint.
It had all happened so fast. **
** This was where I woke up from the dream.
Image credit: A Victorian Terrace in Devon
Writing Spool 
