The first thing I saw was the bottle of pills. The empty bottle of pills.

I should have thrown that bottle in the trash. That was one of my many regrets, in the first few days of my hospital stay. I should have thrown the bottle in the pink bathroom trash can, with the cotton balls and crumpled Kleenex, or buried it under the coffee grounds in the kitchen trash.

But I didn’t throw it away. I left it on the bathroom sink. I didn’t even replace the cap.

“Karen?” Barry’s voice rang through the house.

He shouldn’t be home right now. He should be teaching his class, his two hour long senior seminar on Chaucer. It was a Wednesday morning in late March, and Dr. Barry Richardson should be teaching his Chaucer class for at least another hour and a half.

“Karen?”

There was a desperate note to his voice. A touch of panic. I turned around, slowly, and saw that I had left the door open.

I should have closed the door to the backyard.

I didn’t.

Something crashed behind me, and I turned. Barry had dropped the briefcase carrying his brand new Macbook laptop, and it smashed against the floor. Of course. His computer screen was cracked when I got home from the hospital. He was always so careful with his things. I never knew how he had cracked the screen of his precious laptop.

“Karen!” he screamed.

I followed him, knowing what he was about to find.

****

I HADN’T WANTED TO die indoors.

Even though it was a cold, dreary day, the kind of gray spring day that makes the word “summer” sting like a cruel joke, I did not want to die indoors. So, I took the pills and I left the bottle on the counter. I opened the door to the backyard, and I left it open.

And I went outside to die.

There I was, my body slumped on the pale green grass under the crabapple tree, looking weirdly small in the overcast light. I hadn’t realized I’d fallen forward. My face was streaked with mud when Barry pulled me into his arms. My eyes were open; a thin stream of white foam leaked from the corner of my mouth.

Barry fumbled in his pocket, reaching for his phone. But he was talking already. Talking to me.

“Oh, my God, Karen, no,” he said, his voice low and hushed, like a prayer. “Karen, please don’t. Please.” 

Barry wrapped his arm around me, and he rocked me like a child as he pulled his phone from his pocket. His hands shook as he swiped the screen.

“I need an ambulance,” he said. “Immediately. My wife—”

His voice broke, and he began sobbing. His face pressed against my hair and his chest heaved so violently it shook my motionless body.

The sting of tears filled my eyes again, and I brought my hand to my mouth. Watching my husband sob into my hair with his arms wrapped around me, I felt something cold and hard, something deep within my chest, begin to dislodge.

I had been angry at Barry Richardson for a very long time. Longer than we’d been divorced. Longer, even, than we’d been married. I had loved Barry, and I’d been angry at him, and the two had seemed inseparable.

But standing there, on the hard floor of Níðhöggr’s cave, in the thin, gray light of the Wednesday morning when I decided to kill myself, I felt the anger breaking up, dislodging. Floating away.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “Barry. I am so sorry.”

There was no reply. There was no sound at all, save his desperate sobs, and the thin echo of a woman’s voice coming from his cell phone.

“Hello? Sir? Can you tell me if she has a pulse?”

The ambulance arrived quickly. Two young men and one woman loaded me onto a stretcher with hurried efficiency. The woman turned to Barry, putting a hand on his arm as she led him back into the house. I followed, mute and unseen, my heart throbbing in my chest.

“I knew she was unhappy,” Barry said. His voice sounded strange and distant. “I just didn’t realize—I didn’t—”

“Sir, do you have any idea what she may have taken? Do you know how long it’s been?”

Barry shook his head. “We lost our baby. Our little girl. And she’s, she’s really been struggling...” He stumbled past me, through me, to the bathroom.

“Here,” Barry said. He held the empty bottle toward the woman like an offering. “This must be...”

The EMT picked up her radio and said something in a rapid staccato before turning back to Barry. “That’s good,” she said. “That’s very helpful. Do you want to come to the hospital?”

Dr. Barry Richardson, the world’s foremost authority on dragons in medieval literature, looked lost and broken. His hair stuck up on one side, and his glasses were crooked. There was a streak of black mud down the front of his suit jacket. “I...I don’t...”

The EMT put an arm around his shoulder. “You’ve done everything you could,” she said.

“No!” I yelled, crashing forward. “Barry! I’m sorry!”

The fragile early spring sunlight shattered around me; the living room I’d shared with Barry Richardson swirled and faded like mist.

I screamed. I screamed into the void for a very long time.

****

WHEN I CAME BACK TO myself, my body was curled into a tight ball against the cold of the cave’s floor. My forehead pressed into the dirt and my shoulders heaved with dry sobs. I coughed, inhaled dirt, then coughed again. My head throbbed with a heavy, red ache, and every muscle in my body screamed. I rocked back on my legs, wiping my cheeks and blinking in the absolute blackness of the cave.

God, I’d been such a shitty wife.

I hid my head in my hands as if there were someone who could see me, judge me, and find me hopelessly wanting. My stomach cramped as I exhaled slowly. The burned air of the cave made my eyes water. It slowly occurred to me I might never find my way out of this cave. A long, slow death by dehydration and starvation might be the only thing waiting for me in this damn cave. I shivered. What a shitty way to go.

Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to just collapse on the floor of this cave, to curl up in a ball and forget everything, all the horrible mistakes I’d made, my entire life with Barry Richardson. My stupid, wasted year in Maine after my suicide attempt, where the only bright spot had been my dreams of Vali.

I raised my head, staring into the darkness. I’d felt something, like the delicate whisper of a moth’s wing brushing my cheek. And now the blackness of the cave held an infinitesimal hint of Vali’s sweet, wild scent. My heart jumped, and I forced myself to stand.

“Vali?” I asked, raising my voice just above a whisper.

I heard nothing but the bounce and echo of my own words. Still, he’d been here. Vali had made it this far. I inched forward, whispering his name.

Eventually I could see my hands again, although this time the darkness in the cave wasn’t lifting. Rather, it was shifting, becoming thicker and picking up a red tint. My fingers pushed through phosphorescent smoke, leaving trails of red light where they disturbed the air.

I heard something, a low, soft rustling, like the rattle of dry leaves across bones. I froze, and the red light swirled around my body. The sound continued, a long, low hiss. It moved, reverberating around the cave, until it was impossible to tell if it was coming from behind me, in front of me, or if it was passing right next to me.

The noise stopped, and the cave was once again perfectly silent. My mouth went dry, and my heartbeat seemed very loud.

There was a sudden flare of light ahead. I jumped backward. It vanished and reappeared, vanished and reappeared. My arms and legs trembled with the effort of suppressing the overwhelming impulse to run.

The light flashed on once more, and this time it stayed on. It was an enormous, perfectly round circle of flaming red, with a vertical black slit down the middle. As I watched, the slit expanded and then narrowed, like a symmetrical crack in the sphere of flame.

It’s not a light, I realized. My entire body went cold.

It’s an eye.