Author Games Compilation [Cycle 1]

Final Note on Garlic Felucia

AN ENDING BEFOREHAND
"ALL IN THE GOLDEN AFTERNOON"

Garlic had learned three things since coming home. 

One;

he arrived outside the shabby hut in the woods once the horizon had cracked the sun like an egg and turned the day pink. It was a little shack crafted out of boards, something like a treehouse without the tree, built from scratch. Memories of daylight streaming through leafen canopies covered the genuine image like a veil; he remembered smooth boards, and clean windows made of various shards. Little mahogany steps led to an entrance (some stool he'd found out-of-use), and a door sat firm on its hinges, painted a chipping yellow. He remembered all these little pieces being mismatched, but he remembered it being bright, colorful, wondrous. 

Now it was dark. 

Smooth boards were filled with rotting edges, the crafty windows were coated in thick layers of grime. Little mahogany steps (stools) were missing their legs, and a door was left gnawed to the core, only traces of a melancholy yellow left upon its surface. 

His home was withered, his haven worn. Four walls had always contained both Glenn and Garlic, never at the same time, but did, nonetheless. But then the both of them had left, and those walls became nothing more than alcoves in the woods. Not even she could fill the empty gap left behind by his exit, for she'd left before he ever could. 

Really, he didn't remember the exact reasons he went back. Sanctuary, maybe. The grey house in the District they'd given him gave him nightmares, never of the arena, but of the hut he now stood before. 

He never really liked nightmares, so he thought maybe he'd put a stop to them. The real deal certainly didn't feel like the wild dreams he'd been having. Just silence. Calm. Ease. In the dreams, there was always a feeling of dread when he'd go to enter the little hut. Now, he felt nothing but nostalgia. 

And just a smidge of nothing. 

His feet moved in a shuffle against overgrown weeds as he approached the door, and as he moved forward, he couldn't help but recall both nightmare and memory - they were synonymous at that point. 

She held a clump of pink feathers. 

His vision was covered in a mirror of blurs, colors of black and blue merging with pale white and blonde gone auburn, of brown water washing up over baby blue cloth. He pretended it was nothing more than a palette of mixed paint as he tugged his fingers out of little Jane Doe's. They were stiff, and he had some difficult pulling away from her, but eventually he managed. 

Then pink overwhelmed the canvas, and it was all he saw, all he could see. Time and time again he thought of her wishes to see the flamingos she'd sometimes see roaming around in costume during the District's plays. Then, once that image had run off, he thought of something dauntingly similar, of a pink feather boa draped around a cherry lipped man's shoulders. Time and time again, he thought of his encounter with such a man, thought of the words he'd shared, thought of returning and striking and returning and striking and returning and stri-

"Stop," he told himself, told his mind, "please, stop." 

The thoughts fled like that, and he leaned back. A sleeve swept under his nose, mud-slicked hands wiped his burning eyes. The canvas became a portrait, and Jane, the focus. It was not a beautiful picture. It was deformed and wrong. It was wrong. She was wrong, he was wrong, it was wrong, everything was wrong and he wanted to right it. 

His attempts to fix the picture only smeared the colors, but he hoped that once he'd gotten the canvas somewhere safe he could start again, could start over on a clean slate and paint a new one, brighter, one where he was not to blame and one where Jane was not frowning.