Blood and Picket Fences

Rosie: Karoline Chapter 3

Blood.

She was soaked in it.

 Blood. 

It coated her.

 Blood. 

 Smeared across her face, dried in her hair. 

 Blood. 

 Karoline Kraus let out a choked sob as she clutched the landline to her thumping heart. She couldn't will herself to go upstairs, to go back to her room where everything was normal and her life had not been shattered. Instead she had grabbed the phone she had mocked her father for. The precious landline, something other families had long gotten rid of, just another one of his eccentricities. The thick device pressed to her heartbroken chest as she shook. Her body cradled around her father's disemboweled corpse. Her pink silk pajamas sticking to her trembling flesh coated in what was now a mixture of fresh and coagulated blood. Ida and her father's. She hadn't understood it, Ida's blood, coming out as a splattering of clumped dark liquid as if she had been dead for hours instead of recently shot by Karoline herself. It made no sense. Just like it made no sense for Ida, who had been like a mother to her, to attack and eat her father. It was like something of a nightmare. Something Karoline wished she would wake up from. The gun still clutched painfully tight in her right hand. She wasn't sure how she'd called 911 with her hand death gripped on Ida's murder weapon. She'd killed Ida. How could she have killed Ida? The woman who had served her smiley face pancakes in the morning, packed her lunches with cute notes of love, and helped her get ready for her first school dance and all that came after that. Karoline had never had a real mother, but Ida was one of the two women in her life that she could always count on to be there for her. Yet, somehow Kara was able to call 911, her body working out of necessity. Her father dead when she finally reached him. She just knew he was gone, his chest no longer rising or falling his eyes open in a look of terror. He was dead and for once in her life she was truly all alone. She had crumbled onto her side cradling his body like a lost toddler, her face pressed to his cheek as tears moved down her face. "papa," she whimpered, she wanted to beg him to come back, to come back to her. Yet, she couldn't find the words, couldn't pass anything but sobs past her throat as she felt the stubble of his cheek one more time on her skin. Kara had given up hope when she hadn't been able to get through to 911. The busy signal excruciating. 

She'd given up, just laid next to him. The end of the gun looking more and more tempting now that Ida was quiet and she was left with her thoughts. She had wanted to go to Berlin. If she survived this that's where she would go... She had no other living family. No one. Was this her fault? For wanting something she shouldn't have? For not bringing down her phone? For not quieting Ida quicker? Could she have saved him? She hated her weakness, her selfish, self absorbed ways. He hadn't wanted her to go. What if his last thoughts were of her abandoning him? She sobbed harder. The gun clattering to the floor as she squeezed his cooling hand in her own as she desperately prayed for this to be a dream. A horrible, horrible dream that she'd wake up screaming from, only to be soothed back to sleep by him like he'd done when she was a little girl. She rolled over and heaved. Vomit spraying across the blood soaked tile. Catching in her hair and splashing her cheek. She didn't even bother wiping it away, instead she just rolled ever closer to his corpse clutching at him like a child and a security blanket.

It went on like that for a while, Kara refusing to move until she felt her terror slip into something different. The numb soothing her panic as she felt the buzzing stop pounding at her brain and she realized that she couldn't lay here forever. No one was coming. If she stayed like this no one would find them for a long while. She needed to get someone even if it was just to collect the body. Bodies, Ida- she'd killed Ida. Was she going to jail? Maybe she didn't need to worry about Berlin after all. Her body didn't want to work as she tried to get to her feet and it took far too long for her to make it to the backdoor. She had to clutch any surface she could for support leaving bloody hand prints in her wake. She needed to get someone. She needed to confess. Her shoulders trembled. She was a murderer. She had killed. She didn't even notice she'd traded out the house phone for her keys until she realized she was locking the back door behind her. Hot droplets of rain soaking whatever was left dry on her body. leaving trails of pink behind her as she sloshed across the grass, getting mud on her bare feet. She didn't understand why she was locking the door? The pink nail polish splashed key jingling in her tight grasp. Her eyes surveying her 10 speed bike before walking past it. Her feet finding purchase on the slippery large rock propped up against the white dividing fence between backyards. She looked around in a daze, her feet squishing into mud and grass, she'd forgotten her shoes, but it didn't seem to matter much to the girl in the moment.