Happy Middle of the Week Day!
Fake life is much more interesting than real life, sometimes, so I'm going to be starting Fiction Wednesday for kicks. I hope you enjoy it!
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Last September
The wind blew heavy through the open balcony window of the faded ivory mansion. Tiny splashes of the coming rain created moisture on my pale face as I stood in the darkened attic. Thoughts of defenestration crossed my mind as I look down at the seemingly endless drop to darkness. Lightning streaked across the night sky forcing my gaze upwards as the thunder struck instantaneously. Forcing me to remember.
"Amy! Stop!" I could hardly hear myself scream over the anger of the torrent rain as I tried to chase after Amy. It was my fault she had run out of the house in the first place; my fault she was out in this storm.
Over the last few months she had slowly been driving me insane with her obsessive compulsive behavior. When I had walked in the house a few moments before, upon seeing her standing there in the living room scrubbing at a stain in her worn out khaki shorts until the threads lay bare, I lost it. She heard me come in and turned to greet me with a smile and I started laying into her. Telling her how she was crazy and I couldn't stand to even be in the same room as her. The way her smile faded and her eyes bugged out and filled with tears didn't effect me; didn't make me feel sorry for her and pity her; didn't make me regret what I'd said. After i finished my tyrant and stood staring at her with my fists clenched at my sides, Amy slowly set something down on the coffee table in front of her and ran past me out of the house and into the night's storm. I hadn't even noticed she had something in her hands as i was attacking her. I looked back at the table to see what it was. It was a tupperware container full of homemade macadamia nut cookies. My favorite. Amy hates macadamia nut cookies.
As I ran after Amy in the chilling downpour, I lost sight of her. I swear, through the night, I caught the voice of a man yelling out "what are you doing here?" followed by the sound of Amy's scream. But there was a flash of lightning and a crack of thunder and suddenly everything was drowned in complete blackness.
I came to sometime later in the middle of the woods covered with dead leaves and mud caked on my entire body. I dizzily scrambled to a standing position leaning on a nearby tree for support and called out for Amy until my voice gave out.
Hours later I stumbled out of the woods and knocked on the door of the first house that came in sight. A middle aged woman in a pink house coat, curlers, and a small child attached to her leg answered the door. I began sobbing out incoherently for her to get the police. The woman, who's name I later learned was Wendi Prescott, reached out to me and I collapsed into her arms.
Amy was never to be found. I never saw her again.
The police didn't believe my story about the man in the woods. They thought my memory was distorted from the loss of consciousness. During their investigation a few of Amy's belongings were found to be missing from our house. Her purse, hair brush, and a few items of clothing. They believe she just ran away. Even though Amy had driven me crazy, she was like my sister, I knew her better than that. She wouldn't just leave and never come back. She would want to make up and talk about what happened between us. Something was wrong. Something happened to Amy that night to make her unable to come back. I wasn't crazy.
My unmeasurable remorse is gut wrenching, but death is not the answer for me. I deserve to live with what I've done, how I drove Amy out into the woods that night. As I close the attic window I dismiss my dark suicidal thoughts and I silently vow to myself not rest until I find out what happened to Amy. To find out what really happened in the woods that dark stormy night last September.
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