Lovely Bones

touched

chapter three
touched

TRIGGER WARNING
images of assault

𝒊𝒊 . 𝒔𝒕𝒓𝒂𝒏𝒅𝒆𝒅

When the news of people rising from the dead and turning into cannibals floated around her home town of Dallas, Texas; Prim and her family were one of the many who shrugged the idea of the zombie apocalypse off to the side. It wasn't possible. The government is just messing with us. Those were words she watched escape from her father's mouth over a dozen times as he flipped through the local newspaper. "Don't listen to the shit those kids at school tell you Rose, they're scared and feeding off what they see on television." He would tell her, a fatherly hand on her shoulder. Prim didn't realize it at first, she being young, but the look in her father's eye when he would stare into her blue and tell her these words was not a look of a crazed man in denial.

She thought so at first. But now that her own glossed a reflection of his identically, she understood.

It was fear. He was terrified of what was yet to come. Horrified of what that meant for his family.

The man could barely stand up straight as it was. His hands were too weak to care for his children the way he wished he could, his soul too tired to be capable of believing of anything beyond the home he created. It was a small house — a trailer, and it was discarded and abandoned, much like he had been since he watched his wife fall victim to her mental illness. Prim didn't blame him, how could she. Her mother's death sent her dad down a rabbit hole of helplessness, and as much as she tried to reach down and pull him back up to his feet, he had already hit the bottom and became one with the cement. The life he had let his kids fall into since, was already something horrible. And as he read those words on the papers that would be thrown on his doorstep every other day, he would sit back and wonder, how could he raise his children in this world when the one from before had already ripped them to shreds.

Needless to say, he decided not to. The rotting corpse of her father that laid discarded and forgotten on the bathroom floor in their trailer, an empty bottle of pills discarded a few feet away, had proved that enough.

But again, how could she blame him. He was scared and fear tended to make humans do the impossible.

The Bennett's little run down trailer at the corner of the trailer park didn't hold a television, so their questions often were left unanswered and Prim's confusion only grew when she would sit in class and hear the students talking about how the world was ending. Her teacher would tell the class to quiet down, to not spread information they weren't educated on. But Primrose would sit there, thick eyebrows furrowed in concern when those rumors floated down the halls of her worn down high school.

She was young, but she had never been very naive. She knew something was wrong — worse than the world already had been. Something was spreading across the nation and when she tried to listen to her father's words and do as he told, it was nearly impossible. She was a smart girl, and she knew something terrible was to come.

What she didn't know, although, was that it would be this.

The past no longer mattered, her trauma were now experiences. And they amounted to nothing compared to what she had been exposed to now.