The water is too hot.

I don’t adjust it.

I let it run at full force, as if heat could cauterize what it cannot touch.

There is blood on my hands.

Nothing else exists.

I hold them under the stream and the blood loosens slowly—dark, thick, sullen—pulling away from my skin in heavy streaks that cling before finally sliding toward the drain. The color is too deep. Too alive. It shouldn’t move so reluctantly. I rub anyway. Palm against palm. Fingers. Nails. The backs of my hands. Back to the palms.

The sound of the water fills the room, absolute and unbroken.

I rub harder.

The smell remains. Metallic. Sharp. It cuts through the soap as though it belongs here more than the perfume does. The soap smells clean, floral, almost sweet. The contrast tightens something low in my stomach. I press my hands together and force the scent into my skin.

There is blood on my hands.

I don’t know how much. I don’t want to know. I only know it keeps finding places to hide—creases, lines I never noticed before. As if my skin remembers what I refuse to.

I clench my fingers until the knuckles blanch. Release. Then again.

The sink is small. White. A hairline crack runs near the drain. The red asserts itself violently against it, thick and unmistakable, refusing to disappear even as the water strikes it without pause.

I turn the water hotter.

Steam rises and clouds the mirror, but I don’t look up. I don’t want anything else to intrude. Just my hands. The water. The repetition.

I rub.

The bar of soap slips between my fingers, slick and unreliable. It skids toward the edge of the sink and I catch it at the last second—too fast, faster than I expect. Before it can fall. Before it can make a sound. I don’t stop.

The foam turns pink.

I bare my teeth.

Rub harder.

As if friction could reach backward in time.

No.

I don’t go there.

Hands. Skin. Water.

I hear something.

Not immediately. At first it registers only as a shift—a change in texture, like sound slipping in without invitation. I go still for less than a second. The water keeps running.

Footsteps.

Not here. Not in this apartment. Somewhere else. Above. Below. The building carries noise in ways I can’t seem to predict. Sometimes it comes from the walls. Sometimes from the ceiling. Sometimes from nowhere at all.

I keep rubbing.

I don’t lift my head. I slow my breathing, guide it into something steady, ordinary.

The water runs.

The soap has thinned to something fragile, almost translucent. I turn it over in my palm and use what remains, spreading it carefully, as if even distribution might matter now.

The bubbles gather instead of breaking. Dense. Clinging. I watch one swell, distort, collapse.

I hear the elevator.

The low hum. The deliberate pull. Doors opening on a floor that isn’t this one. The sound carries a different weight. A different distance.

Not here.

My shoulders draw tight. My spine straightens. I rub faster, not harder. Precision, not force. Precision.

There’s no soap left in the sink. I reach instead for the liquid dispenser.

Stone. Heavy. The same pale travertine as the cup beside it. A matching set.

Inside the cup, a single toothbrush.

It seems to look back at me.

I press the dispenser once. A smooth ribbon of liquid soap lands in my palm.

It doesn’t belong to me.

Neither does this room.

Good.

I spread it over my hands. The scent is stronger now—artificial, insistently clean. It coats the metallic edge without erasing it. I rub until my skin squeaks beneath my fingers.

The elevator sound recedes. Doors close. A dull thud. Then the familiar quiet—the pipes, a distant car, the low, uninterrupted hum of a city that does not pause for anything.

Nothing has stopped.

My hands are no longer red with blood. They are red because of me. Because I didn’t stop when stopping would have been enough.

I look at them properly for the first time. Not as surfaces to be cleaned, but as something that belongs to me. They tremble. Barely. A tremor that shrinks from the light.

I hold them beneath the stream again.

Not because they need it. Because I do.

The water strikes raw skin and the trembling deepens. I don’t pull away. I brace my hands against the sink to steady them. The porcelain is cold. The contrast is sharp. The sensation is unfiltered.

I feel everything.

Too much.

I turn the water down by a fraction. Just enough. I don’t make a sound. There is no sound inside me either. Only the body, responding.

The smell is mostly soap now. Mostly.

My fingers are wrinkled, the skin swollen and sensitive from the water. I run my thumb slowly over the pads of my fingers, methodical, checking nothing and everything at once.

I shut off the tap.

The silence drops hard, like a switch thrown somewhere inside my head. I remain still, hands resting on the edge of the sink, water falling from my fingertips in slow, deliberate drops.

One.

Two.

Three.

The trembling is worse now. Deeper. It doesn’t frighten me. I don’t attempt to stop it. I observe it with distance, as though it belongs to someone else.

The mirror remains fogged. A blurred shape occupies the space where I should be, but I don’t look. Not really. Not enough to recognize a face.

Not yet.

I lean forward, careful not to touch anything else. My arms bear my weight without effort. They do not falter. They do not give. I register this with an uncomfortable clarity.

The sink is clean.

The bubbles are gone.

There is nothing left to erase.