Everyone has a dark side...some just know how to use it. Three different women with three different secrets, but secrets can only stay buried for so long...
She walked past the window and the tiny piece of redness sticking out of the post box caught her attention. But she'd just brought in the post? She looked into the lounge, her daughter was playing with a doll on the floor... a doll with one arm. She'd pulled it off a week ago and come to her with a question.
"Mommy, will a person live if you take one of their arms off?"
A cold shiver ran up her spine again as she watched her daughter playing. Her blonde hair was up in a pretty French braid and she was wearing a pink smock dress with little yellow hearts on. How inappropriate. She dressed her daughter this way in the hopes that the pink and yellow and lace and prettiness would rub off on her. She dressed her daughter like that so she was easier to look at. Like a child's seesaw, she was trying to balance out the black inside with the pretty, pastel colors on the outside. But this seesaw was weighted far too heavily on the one side. And no matter how much weight she placed on this side, the other side always seemed to win. There was a dark infinite weight pulling it down.
She opened the door and walked down the path to the post box. It was Valentines day today, not that she had received a Valentines. Not that she wanted one. She reached for the red thing. It was a long red envelope that looked like it had been hand delivered. She turned it over in her hands and gasped...
There was a hand drawn heart on the front cover. It was not one of those cute, pink chubby Valentines hearts, it was something else entirely.
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She looked around in total panic. Her heart, her own broken, damaged and scarred heart started beating out of her chest. Her blood felt like it was on fire as it coursed through her veins painfully. Her breath caught in her throat and she grabbed her neck and dropped the envelope on the floor. She couldn't breathe, she couldn't breathe...
Her heart started thumping in her ears. Loudly. It was all she could hear now.
She bent down quickly and opened the envelope with shaking fingers. A photo fell out. She looked around once more but couldn't seen anyone. She grabbed the envelope and ran back to the house. The curtain pulled aside and a little face appeared. It stared at her with those eyes. His eyes. Dark. Black. Probing. They made her feel sick every time she looked at them.
She ran inside and drew all the curtains, closed all the windows and locked all the doors. She knew what this meant. This meant that he had found her. And she didn't mean the man who was safely locked away behind bars. That man was just the tip of the iceberg...
She kept a secret about that night. A secret she had tried to tell once, only to be silenced. She'd never spoken about it again. Not to anyone... except him.
She climbed into her car and drove. She drove as far and as fast as she possibly could. She met up with her parents that night and they decided to head for Joburg. The city of gold. A place where they could easily disappear.
Later that night when everyone was asleep she had crept out of her bed and snuck out. She drove to a small postbox on an empty street and held the letter she had written in her hands. It contained only four words...
"They have found us."
She turned it over in her hands again to check the address on the front of it.
Andries Venter
Blouberg State Prison,
Alcott Drive
Blouberg,
South Africa, 2346
She slipped the letter into the post box and drove back to the motel.
