in which a girl with a heavy burden tries to find her way through the trials and torments of the earth they've come home to.
OR
in which she must rebuild.
EMBERS
JOHN MURPHY
DEATHLIES 2016
DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT OWN T...
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F I V E
Althea's eyes wandered his face as he filled his bucket with water. She's filled hers and now they just waited for him. He knew she was watching him and it somewhat sparked his confidence to show through.
"If only you could take a picture, it would last much longer," Murphy snaps, looking up at her with his filled bucket in his hands and a smirk that wound Althea up in the wrong way. She does not say a word in response. She clenches her fingers tighter around the handle, knuckles turning deathly white, and turns away from Murphy.
His tongue darts out, running along his thin chapped lips. Her lack of reaction irritated him, normally he got under people's skin with ease, but she was different. She brushed him off just as easily as his vile tongue formed the words and he couldn't comprehend how.
"You're very quiet, Althea," He tells her as his longer strides catch up to her much shorter ones. Her legs were slender and small, but not strong. "You're scared of me?" He asks with a slight sense of amusement in his voice.
"No," She replies curtly. Her arm muscles burned as she carried the bucket. Her body was not used to such physical strain, but it was going to have to adapt soon or she would not survive another day. "You're far from terrifying."
"Then why do you flinch away from me like I'm some kind of germ?" He pushes.
Althea's immediate response is to try and walk faster, away from him and back to camp, but he easily out paced her as he awaited her response.
"You're not a germ," She tells him, but the sensation of his aura surrounding her, filling her lungs and running through her veins told her otherwise. He was off. Something not right about his complexion that made Althea wary of the curious boy with lips pressed thin and empty eyes, devoid of compassion for human emotion.
"You are scared of me," He concludes and her breath catches in her throat for the briefest of moments. "I want to know why," Murphy demands with a sudden surge of anger toward the girl with the softest voice he'd heard in his entire existence.
"I'm not scared of you, Murphy," Althea breathes. She attempts to avoid his piercing eye contact, but he was resilient. His eyes locked onto hers. Althea's lips part slowly as she lets the words she didn't want him to ever hear tumble off the tip of her tongue into the air surrounding them. "I'm scared of what you're going to do."
"You don't even know me so how do you know what I'm going to do?" Murphy hisses, his frustration with Althea rising to a new level.
