Dorothea can’t make herself stand up straight except when she’s been drinking. When she’s tight her spine is ramrod straight and her every gesture precise and sharp as carving knives. She knows too many secrets and loads her eyes with them. From across the room she withers hopes and blights dreams, severs friendships and curdles budding romances. Her teeth are small and sharp and spread too far apart. She has an animal’s mouth, some small nervous rodent surviving by seeing too much, hearing too much, each painful inch of skin raw to slight variations in air pressure, community, social networks.
On the mornings after she is lively, vivacious and energetic with fading alcoholic heat, jangly and stampeded before the avalanche of the hangover. She is happiest then, lonely mouth full of penny taste, forgetful, ragged, bright and shining in the ashes of apocalypse.