She throws her heels against the wall. They leave black streaks and land like two limp fish on the floor, caved in and soft.

I need a smoke,

she thinks, sighing as she drops her leather bag. Only Monday night, and she thinks the sun will never rise again.
Her eyes listlessly fall upon the kitchen window, where a darkening indigo sky overtakes the sun’s last bloody light. As if created from the night, a black silhouette descends like a ghost. A haunting. It lands heavy upon her balcony railing, a rusty steel frame. She hears a rattling on the roof, a dozen more pairs of talons. They are back, dependably—the vultures are home.
Yet there is always only one on the railing—that’s her bird. In the last of daylight, the lead-black eye of her vulture glints, following her shadow. Even as she walks out of sight to the bath, she can still feel its voodoo gaze. It sits and waits.
It watches over her like a mother.

She leans back in the bathtub, her head resting against the edge as her hair pools around her in ripples. She lights a cigarette, tosses the lighter onto the floor, and takes a drag. The smoke rises towards the tile ceiling, obscuring the yellowish light overhead. It’s too bright. Those dirty white squares could go on forever, and she would stay a tiny dot in this bathtub, swallowed up by the patterns and melting embers and the heavy exhaustion of repetition, of being.
The hot water could suck her down, and she wouldn’t have the energy to resist. She could disappear like this, disappear and be happy. Would the vultures eat her if she laid down to sleep on the balcony tonight? She might as well be dead, she is so tired. The thought still puts a shiver down her spine.
It would hurt, being eaten alive.
Yes, she is still living in the end. She lacks conviction. Her heart is on the bathmat in the lighter. Where is her energy, her practiced smile? She accidentally drops her cigarette into the water, curses on her tongue, and throws it over the tub, too—there is her passion, limp on the floor in a fizzled-out Marlboro.
She leans back and dips her face under the surface.

The vulture is still there. It preens itself, utterly relaxed, its outline blurry in the darkness. She leans over a kitchen counter in the dark in a bathrobe, watching it, a candle ringed with bloody wax cupped between her hands. She nearly envies its composure under the endlessly deep purple sky. The moon has risen, wreathed in smoggish clouds.
Vultures eat the dead. Is she so half alive that this bird has taken pity? She finds a certain solace in this creature. It does not care about her conviction, only her scent, and it seems she reeks of death.

But I am not dead yet,

she whispers to the bird through the screen window.

You have no need for me.

And yet it stays. It judges her with a mother’s love.

You are my friend. Coming home isn’t so bad when you are here.

It seems to hear her, blinking slowly back.

Won’t you stay forever?

Won’t you stay?