Stained Glass Souls (Wattys 2014, Collector's Dream Award Winner)

Charliegh: Hippies & Hollywood

(Charliegh: unedited) 

Once Upon a Time, there had been a girl with her eyes and steady smile, who sat upon the molded barstools of a new-age coffee shop and puzzled through the beginning and ending of friendship. Strange how she had always thought that it would be Sylas leaving her, for a girl.

Now, she was the villain – only she hadn’t abandoned Sylas. That, he had done all on his own. 

Some of her silly rambling had come to fruition: just because she was Charliegh McGowan and he was Sylas King didn’t mean they would elude the inevitable ending to everything.

And so, unobtrusively, quiet as a murmur, he had begun to fade from her life. He stopped asking her to watch Lennon – stopped asking for accompaniment to gigs for his band, or for gummy bears, or for anything menial that would have amounted to reconciliation.

Somehow, she hadn’t realized how much it would hurt. How sharply she would remember, like the twisting of her heartstrings, that he would not be coming to save her from Nolan, or her sister’s escapades.

When she had first told him about the bruising, the beating, he had not flinched. He pulled her into his arms and mumbled reassurance into her hair, slow and steady. Unmovable.

Finding out the Nolan had been her tormentor had changed everything.

His mother was in league with the man who almost ruined your life, he had yelled. Can’t you see? Didn’t you know?

Yes, she wanted to say, yes, I did know. Eyes wide open. But instead, she had fumbled for an excuse fabricated of lust and mistakes. She was framed by her grievances, guilded by her sorrows. And, in his eyes, degraded.

That hurt the worst of all. She was slowly beginning to understand Randall’s twisted rational behind his final actions – and, for the first time, she could empathize with the hurt of losing someone who stood so solidly out of reach.

The business of making mistakes, it seemed, was not so much the mistake as it was the resulting chaos. Randall had chosen to kill himself; and left behind a girl torn by her divided loyalties. Now she had chosen to take up with Nolan, throwing caution to the wind, and had driven her sole ally away.

What else could go wrong? When would she finally slip, lose footing, banished to a world of was and is not anymore? Would Sylas forgive her? Or was she doomed to struggle through the aftermath of her decisions, utterly alone?

The End. There was no end. Only a beginning. Only a gateway, an unleashed floodgate to the juxtaposition of her soul. How long before she would crumble, drown? How could she repair broken confidence, upon the premise of two weeks of painstaking joy?

That was the thing about Once Upon a Time – and fairytales in general – not everyone received their version of Happily Ever After.

***

A hallucination opened the door to her apartment, slouching and wreathed with smoke. “I was wondering when you’d come back around,” he said, and smiled, teeth crooked, camouflage cap pushed back on his head.

Charliegh screamed. She shut her eyes, blinking frantically, willing him away. The bruises on her sides and stomach burned, throbbed, pain sinking through the skin and seizing hold of her aching muscles. There was a fire in her forehead, a flickering fuse along her temples.

Hopeless. Stronger than the fire was the sheer hopelessness, a strange sort of numbness that settled along her limbs and rendered her woozy with disbelief.