Wither

Preface

Author's Note

Happy new year, I hope everybody enjoyed their vacation. I'm sorry this story is weird. I'm sorry I wrote this story. But I have good feelings about it. Tell me whatcha think.

December 17...

She wore the color black nearly every day. Black sweaters, black boyfriend-tees, black shoes that stood tall on chunky heels, black leather gloves, and black eyeliner over her wide gray eyes.

After she had glanced through yearbooks and albums from earlier years and witnessed what her parents had allowed her to wear... neon colors, acid-wash Bermudas, colorful shoes that were dulled and dirtied by constantly venturing out into the woods and stepping through thicket and fallen foliage with her brother- she sanctified her closet from any source of strange color palates and replaced them with muted and neutral tones. Maroon and navy blue and army green, but they were always outnumbered by black.

But today, she wore the color with a heavy heart.

She wanted to be in her shower, in the bathroom she shared with her brother. With her music bluetoothed to her radio, turned up so loud most of the notes came out as static. She needed to have her head bowed down, her face in the grasp of her trembling hands and her backside sliding down the glass walls of the shower to the tiled floor.

Maybe if she had been permitted to stay home, to simply sink and succumb into her own sorrow, she would not have turned up the music so loud she wouldn't even be able to think. Maybe she would have only listened, stock-still underneath the spray of the shower in a deathly silence until the water ran ice cold.

But instead, her mother had forced her to wear black in the worst way.

She didn't know the details of it. Just knew when she answered her cell phone last Wednesday, her hands trembling as she waited for the voice on the other side to relay some kind of news- so she wouldn't feel helpless in her bedroom, locked up and declining all of the worried calls from her friends and family, removing herself from conversations on purpose, skipping school on the excuse of grief- that her best friend had been declared dead.

Some kids had been playing out by the creek a few miles out of town, Chasseur Creek- practically a trickle of a stream during the summer and an overflowing body of water during the winter- it only froze over a couple of inches, even at the very zenith of dropping temperatures. Adults made it a habit to warn their most curious children never to walk across Chasseur unless they wanted to fall through the weak ice and drown.

These kids hadn't been doing that- apparently, they were looking for any kind of recyclable materials to give to the plant a couple of towns over in exchange for pocket change. None of them had expected to find the silver cross that always hung around Ethan's neck bloody and clinging to a fallen branch beside the creek, half of the medallion completely hidden and frozen inside of ice that was trying to desperately reform.

Her mother called it, closed the case no matter how much she begged them not to. What was left of Ethan would be recovered when the creek shrunk to a stream in the summer, for now, Chasseur had been become off-limits to all inhabitants of the town.

"Tansy."

At her name, she glanced up from her tightly closed hands, trying to blink away the unconscious tears in order to see Preacher Daniel- Ethan's only sibling- clearly.

He spoke in the microphone, wetting his lips with his tongue as the same amber eyes Ethan had inherited stared at her from the humble stage of the tiny church. She stood in the second pew, her young brother on her left, her tired mother on her right.

In a black suit, the handsome man could have easily swayed any willing participant in his church to do almost anything he asked with just the cool smile he wore with charm.

Tansy's nostrils flared, her chin suddenly jutting up. She hadn't spoken to Preacher Daniel in months. Not because he resembled his brother like a distant version of Ethan, but because his breath smelled like blood, his mouth felt like ice and his hands resembled shards of glass that still left scars on the skin between Tansy's thighs like fingerprints.

She blinked- beside her, her brother little Rose, stood next to her with concerned umber eyes framed in thick, dark lashes.

"Go on, Bitter Button," Rose whispered to her, his pale hands clutching to her own as he begin to lead her closer to the stage.

Preacher Daniel had stepped back, dark eyes still on Tansy but she didn't glance up at him, only marching to the microphone that stood on the tall, wooden podium. Beneath her, if she glanced down, the open, stained wooden box- one forged by Ethan's father- held his silver cross. It had only just been released by forensics a few hours ago, tested for his DNA and found to have been soaked with his blood.

Her chin trembled, and she shut her eyes, letting a fresh tear stripe her ruddy red cheeks. If she glanced up, she'd see all of Argent Grove staring back at her with eyes of all different emotions. Some were just as deep in the throws of sadness and hopelessness as Tansy, others stared blankly up at the wall devoid of any emotion for the sake of not losing their mind, and the rest either reeked with unwanted sympathy or were simply uninterested.

"C'mon, Tansy," Rose assured her, his own hands taking the crumbled up piece of paper she held between her shaking fingers and straightened it out, vainly trying to press away the wrinkles as he placed it on the podium.

She stared at the words jotted in blue ink, curved and slanted from her own messy scrawling in cursive. She bit at her chapped lips, turning them ruddy red as she tried to find the strength in herself to let the words she written in the pinnacle of mourning, and confusion, and hopelessness come alive by her weak voice amplified by the static of the church's ancient microphone.

"Ethan," she whispered, Tansy's eyes only leveling high enough in the crowd to catch her mother's eyes, who stared at her eldest daughter with empathy and want- like she was desperate to sooth her child's obvious grief. "Ethan was my best friend... my brother, not by blood, but by proof that fate brought the two of us together because we were always meant to share the unbreakable bond siblings have the potential to possess."

The vase of flowers set beside the chest that held Ethan's cross kept her gaze. With one hand pressed onto the podium, the other clutching her brother's palm, and her voice echoing through the small church, she watched as a daisy's petal limply fell.

Author's Note

Tell me whatcha think. This is confusing right now, I know. But- stay tuned?