𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐄𝐍𝐃𝐈𝐍𝐆 • Neil Perry

Chapter 1

RED shield her vision as she awoke to the light of day, a yawn enticing her limp body. For once not a horn, not a yell, not a swerving car could be heard, but instead the lightness of silence in all except the trees—birds singing their morning song.

The young girl rolled herself onto her back, fluttering her eyes open once and for all, but instead of pale blue, she saw pink. The same soft kind. She followed it down to the room's walls, meeting floral wallpaper draped around her.

On these walls were a few posters of landscapes, a beachside view and an endless ocean; a long mirror framed with brown wood, and stuck to its reflective surface were three photographs. One black and white, but the other immersed in vicious colour.

Beneath it was a desk of the same wood, draws painted pink running down it. There were textbooks neatly leant against the wall, a typewriter, a cup of stationary, and a framed photograph.

Light gleamed across the room through two gaping windows outlined with elaborate silken pink curtains that kissed the floor.

Once her eyes finally found the bed—the double bed with extravagant metal posts and floral printed pillows—the rotary phone on her bedside table immediately brought her to earth.

To say she didn't recognise a single thing as her own hit every mark in the book. But with the phone pressed to her ear and the line flat on her drum, she suddenly didn't know who to call.

She tried for 999, pressing along the 9 button and spinning the rotary machine. But even with the beep sounding, she couldn't be sure it was working. Who on earth owns a rotary phone other than pretentious hipsters and grandmas that live in rooms like this?

Eventually tired of the fiddling around, she hit the phone down in defeat. "Fuck!" she stage whispers.

Again the young girl takes in her surroundings. Once she stands to her feet, her night dress kisses her shin, caressing her skin with each step took towards the wooden desk.

The black and white photograph was taken of a group of girls that looked straight out of the 50's. If she dug through old photo albums, she was sure she'd find something that looked exactly like this. 5 ladies sitting in a booth at some classically old diner, drinking milkshakes.

Then upside it were the two coloured photos she caught eye of prior. One showed someone she vaguely recognised as herself in a blouse and a cardigan, alongside a blonde she recognise faintly in clothes of the like. The answer as to who she was sat on the edge of her brain, desperately struggling to slide its way down onto her tongue, but she couldn't catch it.

Then was the next photograph aside it. Herself and Steven Meeks. Fictional Steven Meeks wearing the same dorky glasses and braces that lined his bared teeth in a forced smile. If it wasn't for the blazer and tie, she was sure she wouldn't have noticed. But that collision of red and black is unmistakable.

That's when it hit her. The blonde is Chris Noel.

"No," she utters, the word no fainter than a whisper.

She picked up the framed photo next, her eyes met with a black and white filtered family, herself sitting next to Meeks and a clean cut couple standing behind them.

"God! I'm coming!" a young boy's voice calls from the other side of the door—unmistakably Meeks.

That's when her body rushes on full fledged overdrive. She placed the photo back down, rushing to shelves for any traces of a magazine. To her pleasure, she was met with not one, but four editions of Woman Weekly.

They each had the kinds of domestic housewife covers she'd only seen in movies satirically. But they also had dates preceding her birth.

April 23rd, 1959.