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!
