To Live [young writers short story]

To Live

This is my entry for the Young Writer's Prize Short Story competition. Please vote if you liked it as votes are extremely important during this contest.

Karen had never fully understood the appeal of death until Granny struck her across the face with her calloused hands so many times, her tears stung as they slid down her bruised cheeks. She wanted to end it. End the suffering, the humiliation, the sense of worthlessness. End it all.

But she didn't know how--couldn't think of how she could leave this life behind without hurting the kids.

Oh, the kids.

She'd miss them and their squabbles and their endlessly renewed needs that they always expected her to attend to. But she wouldn't miss Granny. That woman had been hell-bent on making Karen's life a living hell since the day she moved into their two-storey house. Since the day Aunt Lois decided the stress of raising her sister's only child was beginning to get to her. That's what she'd said the day she'd asked Karen to pack her bags, but the truth had hanged between them, stifling the air and making it hard for Karen to put on a brave face and kiss her aunt goodbye. The truth was that her aunt's soon-to-be husband didn't like Karen and didn't approve of the living arrangement. And Lois didn't like disappointing him.

Granny hadn't wanted to do it, really, but she'd always had a soft spot for her eldest daughter who happened to be Karen's mother. Yet, that soft spot never showed when Granny talked to her granddaughter. It was always Do this and Do that and Aren't you finished scrubbing the tiles yet?. But that, along with the blows, weren't what got to Karen. What got to her was the absence of escape, of a peaceful place where she could sit alone for hours and revel in the sound of the wind brushing through leaves. Of the sun lazily caressing her skin, of her lungs filling with invigorating air that would spread trough her body and light each nerve alight. 

But such place didn't exist in her little village and it was that lack of distraction that had brought her to the edge and made her wait until her grandmother and the kids fell asleep so that she could slip out the front door. It was what had brought her, sweaty, panting, running, to the limits of the city. Taking a deep breath, Karen gazed at the setting sun which cast a pink and orange blanket that reflected off of the city's tall buildings and tried not to think about the fact that the red panel sitting in the grass a few feet away from her signaled the beginning of the end. The beginning of her new life in the city and the end of her so-called life with Granny and the kids.

Granted, this new life would be short-lived since she didn't intend on waking up the next morning, but it would still be a wonderful life; one that had been lived to the fullest. The city was dark and deserted; nothing like what she'd envisioned. Her feet moved of their own accord, guiding her down the lonely roads and alleys until she saw her first building with the lights still on. Curiosity getting the better, she shuffled up the steps and pulled the door open.

It was a library. Karen sighed. How was she supposed to live life to the fullest in a library?

But she had nowhere else to go so she picked a seat in the farthest corner of the room and selected a panoply of different books from various genres. Then she read. And read and read and read and finally she found her long-awaited escape.

She felt. She imagined. She reveled.

She lived.