Short Stories

Eleven

Strolling out of the recovery room, I wandered to a park nearby my home. Nothing quite registered until I entered the empty house, filled with the loud silence of the open rooms.

I silently remembered life back when I was a little girl, the age of six. I had an older sister who was just graduating high school. She was a sister people could take pity upon, if they knew her as well as I.

Even at the young age of six, I was bullied by her humourless remarks. I was considered fat, ugly and a pain in the ass.
She never seemed to love me. No affection was shown until the day she turned twenty-eight, and I was fourteen.

How big of an age gap was there to pull each other apart. She was in her last year of college when she decided she would move by the end of the year.

I cheered hysterically in my thoughts as a smile grew large on my face.

Little did I know, that year was the hardest of them all. The stress was too great on her, arguably, meaning she had to let off some steam, on my reactions to her slaps, punches and shoves.

Don't ask me how hearing myself cry was soothing to her ears. She was a monster.
I glared in disgust at her repulsive image, shuddering I front of my vision.

I shook my head, trying to clear the terrible past from my brain.

I closed my eyes, relaxed, and enjoyed the peacefulness of day. The loneliness. The bittersweet taste of serenity upon my tongue.

I don't like it. I lean sideways and find myself huddled into the cushions of the couch. I can't get away. Everything happened for a reason. Right?

My mom died for the reason I was abducted, adjectively, and I was kidnapped for the reason of...

I scratched the inner thoughts. The deep widened heart of my brain that cannot be textured to words.

Why would I be kidnapped? For my money? Sure, but the man whom murdered plenty of young women didn't seem to have then pensive tastes, he seemed to neglect the beautiful way I talked. Elegantly.

But one cannot forget how he had forgotten the ransom note.

He was not after the money, he was after the joy, the commitment to being able to completely dice a lady on his dissection table.

Was he after me for game? Why did he let me go, though? So he could hunt me down all over agin? Nuh uh. Not gonna happen again.

I step in front of the mirror for the first time since the party, and am shocked by what I came to see.

I was so much skinnier than I used to be. Was this fair? I go to my closet and find that everything fits about three or four sizes bigger. Just now seeing what I was, made me disgusted. I was a slob.
A pig. A mutt.
I will change for the better.

I walk through a tunnel to my dreams, to my past that night. Waving images rushed me past as I dared to look. Brooklyn. I took a view from third person in my dream and saw how I acted. Erratically.

My spontaneous thinking urged me to take scissors into my hand. My light innocence made me bring all that luscious, luxurious hair to an end of scraps on the floor. Nothing more than a ragged hair cut was able to make her cry.
I began to pity myself and my behaviour.

All the horrible things I've done left me in a mess on the ground, sobbing. I opened my eyes to find myself with drool dripping over my lip, to my feather pillow, and tears leaving streaks on my cheeks, and my eyes glowing in the pale moonlight that seduced the window glass and the hanging crystal, letting the reflected sunlight sparkle even more.

It was beautiful, creating wreaking sobs to echo through the empty night, and carrying  on to the street.

__..__..__

I sit here, still as night and as peaceful as a midnight storm, awaiting my next flight home.

As I sit and wait, I think.
How long was I gone?
Is my wife considering me dead?

Unanswered questions linger in my mind as subconscious actions take over, and soon find myself in line for the plane ride home. About twelve hours to get home.
Twelve hours of crap movies, and sickness catching from couch, to inhale.

I was last home on August fourth, two-thousand-ten.
I shook my head down as I laughed.
Lucy already brought out the Halloween supplies and decorated her entire room terribly.

I lean to the man next to me, who wore a coat of leather, a brown frazzle of hair, and comfortable looking jeans, and asked of the date.

He took out his phone and glanced at it as the phone turned bright as soon as he touched it. How evolved is our technology?

"It is November twenty-sixth."
I grew uneasy, and wondered if the man would be mad if I asked one more question.

"...and the year?"

He looked at me with such a strange look,"Two-thousand-fifteen."

"Thank you, sir."

I stared blankly, doing the math in a short amount of time.
I was gone for five years. My wife alone with my daughter, not knowing what happened to my careful planning of my works events in Turkey. So I don't know how I came to be in Greece.

With the plane ride over, I wanted to take any bag to be my own because I seemed to be able not to wait any longer for my own. But eventually I spotted the deep red print of my mothers' own stitch work across the side of the beige bag.

I hurried to a taxi, crying in my mind that I'm almost home, there's no one stopping me.

I've told the man my houses' location and tapped my foot anxiously against the plastic flooring.
I exited and left my bags in the snow as I stared longingly at my house.

My house.

I slowly rose up the steps, finding my hand shaking before the wooden design of the door.
I knocked.

A girl with hair and red as the little mermaids' opened the door. This must be the wrong house. My wife was blonde, and my daughter had a scalp of beautiful black hair. Hair as black as dawn.

They must've moved?

"Sorry to disturb you, ma'am, but would you happen to know anyone named Adria Hallo?"

The girl frowned,"Yes. My mother."
I stood bewildered in the doorframe of the house. That can't be my little Lucy, can it?

"Lucy?"
Her eyebrow staggered upward.