Writer Games | Death Wish & 51

Task Five: The Dear Departed /QF - Audrey Blackwood [21]

As a  child, I was  privileged. My father hugged me every night when he came home from work  and my mother, as busy as she was always took the time to read me a  bedtime story. I had great friends and school seemed to go by easy for  me. I never experienced the pain most kids seemed to in my  neighbourhood; death, sickness, an aching heart. So it was a surprise  when I found myself at twenty-three years old at my Great Aunt's  funeral.

That's why staring  straight ahead of me at this wall is so hard; I'm vividly reminded of my  adulthood loss and it's all coming back to me; the tears, the aching  heart and shakiness of my soul and mind. Amari continues to press the  sharp rock against the stone wall, creating white lines of story within  her primitive drawings.

My eyesight is stuck on  Calypso's cartoon like figure with a heavy bass strapped around her  back. I wonder how many people around the world are mourning her loss?  If any preteens and teenagers are crying softly to themselves at night,  being sure not to wake their parents with cries of someone they didn't  even know.

Amari's handiwork is  complete with a list of names that have been lost thus far and at the  very end she has written our names, the survivor's names, with a  question mark at the end. I look to her and raise an eyebrow.

"Who knows." She  whispers and her words hang in the air and over my head. I don't want to  be some name on a list like Calypso's... I want to be a name that keeps  on going, keeps on living, even if I practically am dead to my  children.

"Funny," Amari snorts. "How one bitchy girl can make you feel this gut wrenching pain inside."

I nod my head and run my hand along the drawing of our fallen partner. "I wonder if her music was any good?"

"I don't know if I could listen to it now."

"I don't think I could either. I guess we'll never know."

I slide my back down  against the opposite wall, my eyes still fixated on Amari's drawings.  For a minute the sketches come to life and dance before my eyes; Calypso  takes Kerry Owen's hand and Dylan Cole even joins in on the fun.

Why did they have to go?

I close my eyes and try  to put myself back in a time and place before rehab and before Seth's  deployment. A time where drugs were just an experimental habit and my  children still looked up to me as their hero.

But I'm still at my  Great Aunt's funeral,  looking into her casket and seeing her frail,  boney body with her cheeks sunken into her jaw. Except this time, I'm  not just seeing her body, but other caskets begin to appear, each  opening ever so slightly.

Solace is wearing all  black with a black wooden casket to match. It looks eerie but yet, I  don't feel frightened by so many disturbing images... I feel sorry...  And suddenly I want to cry.

"No." I whisper to  myself. I don't want this, not anymore. These other realities are  starting to fade, no longer good enough for me or my health; I'm ready  to accepted my reality.

In Calypso's casket, her  eyes are open, bloodshot red from the poison she was killed with. I  reach in and close them, making her look as if she was sleeping.

"Rock on." I whisper  before snapping back to reality, and it's then I realize that I'm crying  on Amari's shoulder, whispering that I want to go home.

"You'll be home soon."  Amari says to me as she pats me comfortingly on the back. I look back to  the wall and watch as the deceased dance in a circle, laughing and  smile, and the living huddle in a corner below, scared of the days to  come.