Lavender Mist

Investigation

Leaving the bed, Maggie yawned and massaged the spot between her eyebrows with her fingers. Until the morning, she only fell into short flashes of dreams, which occasionally threw her back into the distorted, weary rooms of the theatre, although her mind mixed black and white tiles with the grey curtain over the stage, the red with the blue hallway, the overgrown path in the garden with the pile of scratched and split, marble statues, that climbed up to the broken window. Even when she was awake, she wasn't able to sort out which ones of those images were dreams, visions of memories, or reality. She came to a funny thought that she, perhaps, went to the theatre again during the night, but she knew that her assumption didn't make any sense.

She willed herself out of her room, dragging her bare heels over the white parquet. On her way to the dining room, she looked back at her mother's bedroom. Some soft light was still smoldering in it, yet Maggie couldn't find a source. The partially closed door let her see only a piece of the mother's limp arm, that was hopelessly hanging from the bed, with a messy, once purely white sheet, which was now going blue from something that poured over it. Her dry fingers were bent and relaxed, but they occasionally twitched and tensed, like in jolts of electricity.

The girl walked down to the empty ground floor. The father wasn't there, so she assumed that he either stayed outside until dawn, or he was locked in his own room. Maggie, however, felt alone. The mother was there, asleep, but she didn't feel alive like before, like a human being. Without the morning laughter of her parents, the house was only uncomfortably mute and cracking from time to time.

Maggie felt emptiness in her stomach, which seemed like coldness ran through it, making her tremble in chills. On the dining table, there was only a vase with brittle, hanging stems of flowers, that dried out long ago. She walked a few circles around the table, waiting for the father to enter the house or for the mother to descend down the stairs, finally rested and smiling, but the silence only deepened. And no one came. Maggie entered the kitchen, in which something was buzzing and whining, and she sought through several drawers. She only found a sliced half of dark bread, which was too hard for her to bite through. Therefore, she turned on the tap and flooded her hollow stomach with cold water.

Without any questions, she changed her clothes and left the house, never finding her father at the spot, where he was sitting the night before. Behind him, only a single pack of tissues was left, crumpled and squeezed under a plank, which was accidentally crooked.

Maggie wished to go to the theatre and have a long, serious talk with Pablo, yet she decided to extend her way down the street to check if Timothy had returned home. As she was descending down the road, covered with small, pinkish leaves, fallen from the treetops, she pushed a grey pebble with her legs, making it bounce and roll down the path. She used that time to think of how to speak to the boy's parents. What was she supposed to tell them in case Timothy still hadn't come back? Would she even dare to knock on their door? And, perhaps, Timothy was angry at her for some reason, so he had simply grabbed the painting and left the theatre without a goodbye. She didn't like thinking about any of that and, therefore, she focused her thoughts on watching her rock.

However, none of her expectations were fulfilled, as she imagined, when she arrived at Timothy's house, or where it was once standing. Instead of it, next to the edge of the road, only an empty lawn was opening, going uphill, so it looked like a folded sheet of silk. The earth closer to the girl was dark, but it went paler and paler in the distance and shimmered in different colours, like a flag. Maggie turned from the path, stepping into the dewy, cold grass, which was getting stuck in her shoes. She made a few disoriented steps over the field, and then she returned to the street, sinking into her thoughts. She didn't know if she was to walk further, or to go back and look around more carefully, or to make a turn into another street and seek Timothy's house there. Although, this had to be the place, where she always came to visit him. She remembered the neighbouring three-story house, which reminded her of a castle and about which she always daydreamed about, wanting to move into it one day, or at least a house similar to it. She remembered the destroyed nest on a tree across the road, in which birds probably never lived, since it remained empty and ruined for too long, yet it never fell off of the branch. She also remembered a balcony of an elderly lady, whom she had never met or visited, yet who often smiled and waved to her, squinting her grey eyes through large, blurry glasses. She knew that Timothy lived here, but the house wasn't in its place.