Forsaken

𝑠𝑒𝜈𝑒𝑛

The cottage was cold, its walls damp and bones soft. It shivered around its ghostly inhabitants, the wood creaking and shifting as a foreboding chill blew from the woods.

Rowan sat by the window of the room, her skin buzzing with nicotine as billows of blue smoke slipped out through the seal of the glass, joining the darkening clouds outside.

Her eyes burned at the closeness of the smoke issuing from her mouth, rubbing them only made it worse and yet she couldn't stop.

She had pushed the small dresser against the window, allowing her to easily perch herself there for a cigarette.

She had sat there long enough to watch the incoming storm draw in, eating the remains of the sun as it retreated behind the earth. Whether the moon was out there she wouldn't know, the sky was too thick and heavy for such a dull light to creep through.

Aside from the glowing ash in her hand she sat in complete darkness. She didn't even need to close her eyes to pretend she was anywhere else. Not that there was anywhere else she had to prefer to this small, but private room. The few other places Rowan had memories of were not places she wanted to return to.

The small collection of rooms she did keep in her head where there simply for the purpose of locking people away inside. People too jarring to melt away in the rain.

But the rain brought with it it's own impressions of the past, softening the earth and drawing memories fresh from the grave. The monotonous pounding of it above her was one of those sounds powerful enough to drown anyone in nostalgia, to turn the most cynical man a romantic.

A sudden urge passed through her to open the window and lean her neck out into the cold and wet. To unhinge her skull and let it collect the water running down the gutter.

Muddy water and rotten leaves swirling around in her head.

She could have sat awake all night, living in her own mind. A frequent habit of one who spends most of their life alone, one that she wasn't the only one in the house who possessed.

It was no secret she hadn't known what to expect when meeting her father. Though she would deny it, over the years she had accumulated several images of him in her mind, ranging from a family man to some deadbeat nobody, even just a name on a grave. She could never decide which version she preferred.

Although she had never envisioned this, him in this cottage all these years, living a life about as alone as her own. She had prepared herself for some sort of family, a cozy little wife, a couple of kids who would gawk at her like some foreign specimen that couldn't possibly be related to them. Or any sort of company that would either suffocate her with curiosity or avoid her like a plague.

Though in all those images in her mind, she had never once seen him like this. He carried an air of still and unmoving hopelessness, the entire cottage was drowning in it.

Every piece of furniture, every crooked pillow, every dog eared book felt as if it hadn't moved or breathed air for years. It had all reached a natural standstill, a sheet thrown over the house so that it went unnoticed by time, entirely separate from the world outside.

Everything just felt off. As if a second out of sync with the rest of the universe.

As long as she could have sat there alone, her evening of solitary recollection in the silent house was shortly interrupted.

Following a set of pattering footsteps rushing up the stairs, the door to the room was flung open, banging against the wall so that she nearly fell off the dresser in shock. As hard as it was to make out in the dark, light brought from downstairs revealed the silhouette of a black dog panting in the doorway of the room.