Prison - One Who Got Away, and One Who Didn't by Alicia

One Who Got Away, and One Who Didn't

It is with a sense of apprehension that the sole is lowered on the top step. The weight is deposited with a steady creak from the old timber. Although the time has been practically inconsiderable from the moment of her passing and the moment the officers called, the aged spokes which protrude from the banisters, streaking yellowing varnish to the ground, tangling with dust motes, barely breathing – they are the ones who tell of how much time has passed.  

‘Please come this way,’ one of many men in uniform, leaving his heaviness in the dust, leads the way.

Amelia can hardly remember the last time she heard the cautious creak of the top step beneath her feet. Sometimes in the depths of the night she will think the white paint of her darkened bedroom in Johannesburg melts to the ground, to be replaced with the garish flower wallpaper of her youth... of the room beyond the police officer’s sharp blue cap. But in the morning the memory vanishes on the white wings of day.

The dust is everywhere and it threatens to layer upon the black trench coat she specially chose for the executive meeting with Penelope Branson in the Eighth Quadrant. Instead, the dull ebony seems oddly appropriate for the situation at hand, dimming the hopes Amelia had secretly been harbouring for a transfer to the Eighth. It seems wrong now; she should have worn the grey office suit jacket.

Even as her thoughts drift her away from the crime scene – because that is a more accurate description than she could ever give herself credit for – the detective inspector draws her forward, the steady thudding heartbeat of his rubber boots tugging at her short cloth heels, as if the unseen strings which bound her to the walls as a child had remained all this time, dormant.

Now it returned, compelling her forth like Aunt Clarisse with the cough syrup. Globules of deep oozing plum red which dribbled from the edges of the spoon to flood down her throat.

‘You said she left a message for me?’ Amelia registers the pity on the detective inspector’s lips, and almost smiles in return, to tell him to save the pity for a child who is not already lost.

He reaches into his pocket, past the gun which whispers. A thin piece of white paper, folded in half once by the faint crush of a nail along the crease, with an unexpectedly neat scrawl on the front, is presented. Amelia accepts it, refusing to acknowledge the dark crimson cough syrup which has coagulated inches away – silently it froze in a trickle down the walls, as if tree sap in a room of muted spring blossoms. And opens it.

Amelia, I’m bored of not being you. Sometimes, I can hear them downstairs, screaming, but then you always drown them out with that bloody voice of yours. I want to stop listening, but even Aunt Clarisse has stopped coming with the syrup that sometimes stopped it. Stop it. I know, I can’t get out. I turn and turn in my cell like a fly that doesn’t know where to die. The flowers, they wilt. Eventually, I think I’ll realise when. Just stop.

‘Could you identify the body for us, Miss Richardson?’ His voice is gentle, in a way that is practiced and textbook. Amelia mirrors his body to face the decomposing flesh on the ground that was once a woman, who was once a girl she knew.

Its limbs are oddly spread, angling towards the bed post. It almost appears as if invisible spider threads were wrapped around the body’s wrists and ankles, and shackled to the long worn wood. It seems as if the spider had died before it had the chance to consume its last insect. Or perhaps this is just the carcass that remains.

‘Yes, it’s her.’

Amelia calmly ignored the gentle tug below her thumb, and turned away. 

~OvO~

Author's Note: Hey guys! I wrote a thing! A week late, I'm so sorry I'm a koi carp at deadlines. 

Anyway, this piece was 657 words and not my best work ever (not even close) but I hope you enjoyed it! :) Practically unedited except for some quick end-of-writing-time stuff. I am now going to hurry up and write my Orchids story!!! AAAAH I really want to read Jennifer and Katrina's prison story and Jennifer's Orchids story but I can't because I have to write mine! There are a lot of references in this to things that aren't academic, and it's generally a terribly un-academic story. 

The title, I really couldn't think of anything because there is no dominant theme or motif in this story, and I decided to go with a little Katy Perry. 

Seriously now, point out my grammatical errors and all the other errors and faults!