OK...have never posted any work on here. So be gentle. I'm usually a poet, but I have one short story published in a small zine. I'm much better with comedy...but this is supposed to be relatively serious. Not sure if this is just short story or beginnnings of fiction novel. Enough with the set up...any (constructive) feedback would be appreciated:

"Violet"

Violet sprayed down the dark freeway thinking that it looked like black, glossy lips. Maybe the lanes were a few sets of black, glossy lips. If that were so, then they must be the lips of a Goth. And this worked with the music playing on the radio, informed the image actually, the female voice desperate and floating over violins with the echo of a tamborine in the background that sounded like the rattling of chains. She had one hour before she had to return home. She wanted a cigarette to go with her mood, the atmosphere she was creating in the car: sullen, reckless, about to burst, midnight blue. But she quit smoking when she got pregnant, and all the books said that second hand smoke was bad for the baby too. There was plenty of frozen breast milk for the baby, and eventually they’d start him on formula and after a while he wouldn’t even notice her absence. He’d only had a few weeks to get to know her anyway. Her death would be something to keep Lucas from growing into an ungrateful little brat. He’d have to grow up thinking and analyzing her suicide. He’d be a person, no matter how happy, that always seemed a little sad. Peter would be different. He’d wear his wedding ring for a while, probably six or seven months, maybe even a year, at least until his itch to be free of her became too much, and then he’d take it off and stow it away for safe keeping, in case he and Lucas needed to pawn it down the road, rationalizing all the time that he was keeping it for its sentimental value. This image made her angry. But he’d wear it during those months to make everyone feel uncomfortable, to make them pity him and then he’d turn on them if they did take pity on him. It was a good vehicle for the martyrdom that he’d always planned for himself. She’d give him that gift if she committed suicide.

There were no cigarettes in the car, and why stop into a liquor store only to have to interact with the pervert clerk at their local store, his broken English suggestively slurring at her? So, she let herself think about death as she entered the on-ramp to the freeway, and what would happen if she simply jerked the steering wheel in a right angle. She imagined the perfect quiet of the car sailing off the ramp, first the crash of the railing, then nothing but the sound of wind and wind only, and then the car floating heavy over the other freeway below. Would I be killed on impact? What if I wasn’t? How would my body land on the freeway? Would I kill someone else? She thought these things as she caught sight of the glimmering of broken glass from the shoulder of the freeway…the remnants of other wrecks, sparkling as if to advertise the glamour of death in a car crash. There was something sexy in it. She liked the idea of leaving everyone with the horror of her mashed and torn body. It was ballsy. They wouldn’t even know what to say…and that dumb silence was what she looked for. And Peter would have to come and identify her body. And she wished that on him…just as she felt she was giving him the gift of martyrdom, she also wanted to give him a staggering blow so that he felt the price of the gift. She wanted him to see parts missing from her body, her clothes ripped from her carcass. She wanted him to spot that wedding ring on a cold, white finger with purple nail polish.

[Work on the voice below.]~ MY NOTE TO MYSELF

One of the surprises about Lucas’ birth had been the colors. Violet had read quite a bit of poetry and admired the way that painters could make the colors of the world seem more vibrant, more real. Painters, writers, they knew how to make the colors of the world more intense and therefore more concentrated than the colors of the real world. EXAMPLE HERE. The real world, by contrast, always seemed a little dimmer, a little washed out. Art always appeared more real than reality to her, the colors and shapes so much more confident, defined, even if the definition of a composition was to be undefined. With painting, there was always the frame or a canvas; with stories, always a beginning and an end. Life was harder to frame. Too difficult to mark off. She sometimes had difficulty placing value on things that happened in her own life. Most of the time, Violet’s life seemed to her one big blob…a series of random events strung together only because they all happened to her, and who was she anyway? So, when her son was born, Violet was caught off guard by the vibrancy of the colors. The umbilical cord was a royal blue, the blood was a bright red, the baby covered in white film, his black hair matted to his head, his mouth wet and red, the doctors and nurses in their light blue smocks, her fuschia painted toenails in the stirrups, her mustard skin beneath the spotlights and the deep, deep magenta of the placenta as it slid out of her. While everything happened in real time, Violet felt disoriented by the colors, as if time was too fast for her…things were happening without her, she was more audience member, viewer, than participant, and her legs, her position, the way things came from her, seemed to confirm that fact. She was watching the movie of the birth of her son and it was shot with film that injected natural color with crayola-like qualities. But it wasn’t a movie, it was really happening, and as this came to her she seemed to slowly warp back into real time, once again feeling Peter’s breath on her neck and hearing her mother’s voice telling her reassuringly that it was all over. The baby didn’t even bawl really. He wimpered a few times and they placed him underneath the heat lamps to keep him warm. The room was already warm for Violet. It felt close, just on the verge of suffocating. The doctor was saying something to her about making sure to get to the hospital quick with the next one and do you feel that? Her mother and Peter were absorbed in the baby and Violet’s body jerked painfully with each tug, the epidural was wearing off, as the doctor sewed her up.
Since the baby Violet’s mind had been so foggy. Lucas’ birth seemed like it had happened to another mother and son, in some other time, on some other planet. For some reason, in her mind, the event had the quality of alien abduction narratives…the bright light from above, the unearthly warmth of the room, the flow and pause of time, the out-of-body quality of it all. But each time she thought that, she’d look at Lucas. There he was. Real, not imagined, not in her belly, not some newborn baby with that blank look that they have. He had personality now. He had preferences and baby opinions. There was no denying his existence. So much had changed since his birth. He became real, slowly, week by week and her body was so different. She mourned her old body and felt that she’d never get it back…even with daily workouts, the scars and stretchmarks would always be there, and then the memory haunted her every time she looked at herself. Lucas’ birth had been a doorway, pregnancy had barely prepared her for the walk through that threshold, but now she found herself in a place completely strange. Her husband a different person, her body not her own, and this baby, clinging to her, sucking off of her, constantly changing and demanding something new with each change. In the weeks after Lucas’ birth there were many times that Violet wondered to herself and out loud if she was any good at this mother thing.