Read With A Cup of Tea: Short Stories

Here She Wakes

A/N: I would like to start off this collection of short stories with my personal favorite. I won the state-sanctioned writing competition in my state with this story. Feedback is always more than welcome. Thanks for reading :)

Word Count: 1887

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Here she wakes, if you could call it waking. She doesn't sleep. Not anymore. You could say she stopped laying down. She glanced to her left, almost hopefully, like he would be there and everything would be a bad dream. She would wake up in his arms and he would hold her and tell her that it would all be okay, that it was just a nightmare and he wasn't going anywhere. But here she wakes, and he isn't there. This hole in her chest burns as she sits up. It burns with the lack of dirty laundry strewn across their bedroom. It burns white hot when the old bed springs don't creek under his weight when he sits up. She swings her legs over the bed and onto the ground, the cold wooden floor sending chills up her legs and all through her. She wants nothing more than to lay back in the bed and wait for hell to freeze over, but she gets up nonetheless.

Here she stands, and he isn't there. On shaky legs, she walks to the closet and gets the clothes she needs for the day. As she pulls off her nightshirt she catches a glimpse of the scar that remained after that day. The day that left this burning hole in her chest. Before she could stop it, the memory replayed in her mind.

Here they sit, laughing and singing badly along to the songs on the radio. Her brown eyes filled with merriment as she struck a particularly sour note instead of an imitation of the singer's impressive falsetto voice. He chuckled next to her, his striking green eyes trained on the road ahead of them, as they sit in the front seat of his car, not going anywhere in particular. She loved every second of it. The song changed as they reached a 4-way intersection and the car slowed to a stop at the red light. He turned to look at her, the easy smile on his face causing the corners of his eyes to crinkle.

"God, you're such a dork" He teased playfully.

"But you love me for it" She retorted.

His focus fell on the road again when seemingly out of nowhere, all 6,001 pounds of a cherry red 1997 Land Rover Defender collided with his small sedan from the front. Before she could register what was going on, the airbag deployed in front of her, and in a cruel twist of fate, not in front of him.

Tears prickle at her eyes as she returns to the present. She continues to dress, careful not to look down at the scars that triggered the memory. She tries to remember what she needed to do today, but all she can think about is him. Or rather, the lack of him. She trudges into the kitchen, this hole in her chest burning at the absence of the distinct aroma of coffee. If he were here, she thinks bitterly, he would have handed her a cup of coffee with a kiss on her cheek. But he's not.

Stuck in her thoughts of stolen glances and late-night reruns of The Office, She absentmindedly prepares breakfast for two. This hole in her chest burns as she looks down at the plates. Mumbling something to herself about not having to cook tomorrow, she packs up what would have been his breakfast.

Here she eats, and he isn't there. She sits on the table in silence, not allowing her mind to find it's way back to the way his voice sounded in the morning, or the way his hair stuck up in every which way until he ran a comb through it. Instead, she thought of the car that would forever be seared in her memory as the car that took everything from her. The car that left this hole in her chest. The cherry red 1997 Land Rover Defender. She didn't remember the driver too well, just that he was too drunk way too early in the day. No, she distinctly remembers the truck. She remembers how there were pieces of his car in the bigger one's grill. She remembers that there was only a dent right in the front. She remembers how this cherry red 1997 Land Rover Defender looked while it was pressed against his olive green Honda Civic. She remembers how it's red paint slowly chipped off in the wind while she waited for the Fire Department to free her from the wreckage that was his car.