“Your leg, Alex, it’s burning up. Have some water” I suggest, my voice tinged with alarm, and push my plastic cup toward her.

“I don’t drink,” she replies tonelessly.

“Not even water?” 

“Not even water.”

“Come on, that’s not possible.”

“The possible need not be the end of our rope,” Alex says wistfully, looking at the space between my shoulder and my ear. 

“What are you talking about!” I finally shout, thankful to the noise of the crowded bar for swallowing it up. 

“What’s in the cup again?”

“Just water! I want you to have a sip, I don’t see the harm. It’s not normal how warm you are,” I say, yanking my hand back as her thigh has grown too hot to touch.  

“You want me to?” Alex asks blankly.

“I do! I want you to be okay!” I plead. I feel so stupid, like a little kid tugging on her mother’s sleeve, humiliated to be showing this much interest in a near stranger’s wellbeing but unable to stop myself. 

“If that’s what you want” she whispers. 

Stiffly, Alex picks up the cup, grasping it so tightly that it buckles under her touch. I watch agape as she shakily raises it to her lips and, like it’s her first time drinking anything, closes her eyes, throws her mouth open wide, and pours the water down her throat. 

Alex swallows and, like a triggered trap, snaps her jaw shut and the color literally drains from her face, revealing glinting silver punctuated with bolts where there had been a smattering of freckles seconds earlier. Her cheeks gleam so cleanly that my stunned reflection gawks back at me, our twin eyes wide and distorted in the hollow of her cheekbones. 

With a low hiss, Alex’s lips part and smoke begins to curl dragon-like from them, wrapping around her once-beautiful face, enveloping and almost obscuring it. Through the haze, I see her open her eyes, still somehow chestnut, and train them on me. I watch as they roll back into her head, her pupils disappearing and a blank whiteness filling her sockets. Instead of stopping there, though, they continue rotating backwards until an image appears where the brown had once been: the outline of a white horse on a black background. 

I brace myself against the smell of the smoke and step forward to parse out the figure, but before I’m able to, Alex’s eyes spin back once more, flashing through a series of objects like a pending slot machine and landing on a rocks glass with a slice of grapefruit wedged onto the rim. 

“Is that a paloma?” I manage to shout over the clicking of Alex’s spinning eyes, but they just lurch back again, this time landing on a car. A red canvas with a black line through its center, an oak desk, a pair of lips, and a book with a title too small to make out each take turns looking out at me from behind dark lashes. 

The spinning finally putters to a stop on an image of a plastic cup full of water – the same one still clutched in Alex’s right hand. My heart leaps into my throat and I feel unable to move or even to speak, feel like I might never again. I can’t believe that the last word I’ll ever have said is the name of a cocktail I barely even like.

Slowly, Alex’s eyes fade back into the brown they had been the entire night. With one final winning smile – if you can call teeth bared without lips a smile – she looks deep into my eyes and pitches forward in her seat. She falls ungracefully from her chair, hangs in the air a split second longer than seems gravitationally possible, and hits the ground with a thud: the sound of metal meeting concrete.