Mia’s Room

Mia and Lisa are rearranging the furniture.

“I am not sleeping where THAT happened,” proclaims Mia, shaking her head. “I’m putting this picture on the wall. I’m hanging it right where she slept. I think she’d approve. She was religious, wasn’t she? Didn’t you say?” Mia asks, pins a picture of her favorite Saint to the wall, and walks around to the edge of the bed.

“She was,” replies Lisa, grunting after the pair counts to three and carries the bed backwards, toward the opposite side of the room.

They angle the narrow, single bed to line up with the wall, and Mia catches her breath, wipes a drip of salty sweat from her thick brows and tilts her head, speaks in a somber tone, “Like, I’m really glad you’re my friend, and you told me about this. I wouldn’t want to sleep exactly where she was...”

Mia can’t say it. She can’t enunciate it. But the fear and chill are there. They’re a lump in her throat.

Lisa ambles back to the other side of the room, stands over the spot where the bed had been, casts a short shadow over its emptiness. Then she squats down, sitting on her haunches, examines the wall carefully.

Mia, noting how Lisa’s tight blue jeans accentuate her sleek curves and heart-shaped butt, experiences a touch of discomforting jealousy, as she often does, when she finds her eyes grazing Lisa’s flawless figure...

“They did an incredible job covering it up. But I bet if you peeled the paint, you could see the bloodstain,” Lisa says, poking her long narrow inquisitive nose toward the wall. Then she sniffs at it in rapid bursting little snorts, like a drug dog.

“Do you smell that?” she asks Mia, before sniffing again, this time louder, almost as if she were snorting lines of cocaine.

“Smell what?” responds Mia, raising an eyebrow as she sits down on the baby blue quilt atop the bed.

Lisa’s long, upturned nose suddenly drips blood. She springs to her feet, claps her hands over her face. “Oh, oh, my God, I smelled fire, burning...” she mumbles; hot tears roll down her rosy cheeks.

“What the ... Are you okay? What happened?” yells Mia, bouncing up from the bed and rushing over to Lisa, pulling her friend into caring arms. Then she’s craning her neck to examine Lisa’s bloody nose. It’s not gushing blood, only trickling, like a drip from a leaky faucet.

Mia unlooses her friend, who is crying, softly now, and she dashes over to her backpack, zips it open and fishes out a pack of tissues, and rushes back over, tears the pack open and hands Lisa a wad of the white Kleenex.

Dabbing the reddened wad to her face, Lisa throws her head back, pinches her nose, and whispers in a warbled voice, “I don’t know what happened. It just...”

Mia shushes her, cuddles up to her again. Mia’s arms encircle Lisa, and she rests her head on Lisa’s shoulder.

Mia raises her big blue eyes, looks to the spot on the wall where she hung a picture of her favorite Saint. Her namesake. Saint Euphemia...