Neon Clouds

Goodnight Gillian

 Goodnight Gillian

Dupree stood frozen in silence as a thousand small bullets of rain gently pattered down on his skull, matting his hair, delicately forming droplets down his crooked nose. The light of the moon and speckled refractions of neon pounded the stained iridescent asphalt, as small shards of light peeped through the weary yet sharply silhouetted faces of the small rectangular windows that lined the boundary of Pyongyang alley.

Dupree edged closer to the corpse, but her eyes remained lifeless, perfectly marbleised, petrified in a fixated stare that looked onward through Dupree to the great, great beyond. A final image was now etched in her mind's eye, pouring away like the rain, joining the billions of other inconsequential droplets, lost within a perpetual cycle between the oceans and the sky.

The bullet had gone straight through her chest; pools of blood had collected in the weaving dents of the pavement, blotting the otherwise Kandinsky-esque surface. Her skin had hardened and gone hauntingly grey, but as the rain bounced off her face, the light of the alley seemed to set her alight, consuming her in a glowing warm aura.

A small yet sad, tight smile crept along Dupree's face. Despite her ghostly appearance, her lips were still red with that oh so sweet plumpness, her carved jaw, though seemingly limper, still framed her near perfectly symmetrical countenance.

As Dupree knelt down by the body. pools of blood-tainted water saturated his brown corduroy pleats, but he didn't care anymore. In his peripheries, Dupree could just about make out the iron voice of the Chief saying something or the other about how he couldn't touch her, 'contaminate the crime scene' and all that, not that it would really matter anymore. She had been left for dead for at least 2 days. Most of the evidence would have been washed away. All that was really left was a colourless corpse, down a wet washed alley way. 

Dupree turned away. He couldn't do it anymore, he couldn't bare looking at her, it was all a nightmare he thought, just another twisted dream. In a moment he would wake up, surely I would wake up, he thought. But it was no use, there was no waking up from this nightmare. Plucking all the courage he had left, Dupree knelt down by her head, kissed her gently on the forehead, gently closed her eyes, and under his breath whispered words he never dreamt he would need to utter,"Goodnight my sweet Gillian."