Ring Around The Rosies

                   "Ring around the rosies,
                   Pocket full of posies!
                   Ashes, ashes,
                   We all fall down!"

         She smiled at the sound of the children playing the famous circle game
in the park. The smile twisted her face, a humorless grin filled with all the bitter irony that swam just below the surface. It faded as quickly as it had arrived.
         She walked slowly along the fence, the children’s laughter washing over her, but their ringing peals of delight failed to cleanse her soul or heal her shattered spirit. She turned her gaze to the parched ground beneath her feet, her fingers gliding over the object in her coat pocket. It rattled, an ominous warning that was lost in the laughter and sunlight.
         She looked to the bright blue sky, afternoon sunshine slanting its warm rays downward to caress her face. Off to the southwest, however, dark, threatening storm clouds billowed and roiled, churning through the calm sky like a harbinger of death. Heading straight for her, they brought the gloomy promise of lightning and rain.
         She continued to wander through the park, lost within her own dark thoughts. Keeping one eye to the clouds, she waited for what she knew was coming. As inevitable as the rain, events had swept her along, pushing her to this point and time. Blindly she stared ahead, the world fading to a single spot in the distance. A secluded corner of the park drew her, a helpless moth to the flame.
         As she journeyed, bits and pieces of her past flickered in her mind. Memories, both long forgotten and freshly conjured, danced across her mind’s eye, seeming to mock her and her choice. All of them had a common theme: pain, loneliness, and an aching agony brought on by situations too horrifying to contemplate for long.
         Shards of a memory raced through her mind. She saw them dragging her parents’ torn, bloody bodies out of the car, watched as her lifeless baby brother was taken away. She felt the cold rain drenching that little girl as her world came crashing down around her. She remembered that girl, not so little anymore, running on a different stormy night from the home she had been put in, escaping the sadistic foster father who had constantly abused her in more ways than one. She saw herself wandering from house to house, begging for food or a warm bed to sleep in, only to be turned away time after time. She recalled the tearing pain of a miscarriage that had stolen the unwanted life from her womb just when she realized, too late, that she did want the child. Soon, even the memories faded to black and her mind went blank. Her hand clenched the object in her pocket tighter, her knuckles turning white with the strain.
         Thunder rumbled overhead, its dark tattoo no match for the emptiness within her own soul. Its blackened melody echoed her consuming blankness, drawing her pain out anew as she remembered other storms from a lifetime ago. A bolt of lightning streaked across the sky, tearing the world in two and announcing the ensuing chaos. With a terrific bang, the heavens poured their tears down in bone-chilling sheets. The shriek of children running for cover never penetrated her brain. She had arrived.
         Her hand pulled the object out of her pocket. The rattling noise was drowned out by the rumbling thunder. She stared at the bottle in her hand. The pills seemed to stare back at her, daring her to do her worst.
         "So," she whispered, "it has come to this."
         She popped the cap and let it fall unheeded to the ground. Tilting her head back, she gathered the rain in her mouth and placed some pills on her tongue. She swallowed, gathered more rain and swallowed more pills. She was grateful for the rain; it both gave her the water the down the pills and washed the tears off her cold face.
         With one last gulp, she dropped the now empty bottle to the ground where it rolled down a slope and splashed into a stream to be carried away to the river. A strange numbness began to spread through her body. She didn’t know how many pills she had swallowed, but the bottle had been large and full. Heaviness pulled her off her feet and to the rain-soaked ground. As darkness reached out to swallow her in its eternal embrace, a smile darted about her lips. The last thought to pass through her mind was a simple one from younger days: "Ring around the rosies, pocket full of posies..."