Once

Forty Six

The last day.

Elle sat at the kitchen table, a coffee cup in her hands. This was how she'd started a week ago. The same table, the same mug. She imagined that the girl who'd sat here then wouldn't even recognise the girl sitting here now.

She glanced down at the note she'd found stuck to the coffee machine. Taking the girls out tonight. Be back late. Dad.

That was it. No kiss, no 'love dad.' And no reminder she was grounded, no warning not to go to prom or go to hang out with her friends. She knew as well as he did that either of those things would have just been redundant. The message had been received loud and clear last night.

Somehow that conversation he'd had with her had been the hardest thing she'd dealt with all week, which was such a ludicrous realisation it almost made her laugh. Maybe the things in life that really scare us aren't the monsters in story books. Maybe it's not even anything outside of the haunting realisations that occur to us in our own heads.

She glanced out of the window. The sky was heavy with clouds - a weird sight after the blistering days of sunshine. Grey thunderclouds rolled solemnly, threatening any minute to unleash a torrent of hot summer rain. She wished they would. It would do her good to go and sit outside in the rain for a while.

Instead she just kept sitting there at the kitchen table, not moving an inch. A girl left all alone in the kitchen, with no family to comfort her, not even a friend to talk to. Like something out of a fairy tale, she thought to herself, and a short barking laugh, almost a hysterical shriek, escaped from her throat.

So this was how it ended. This would be how she ended a week of constant stress and exertion, a week of feeling every second as if she were losing her mind. A week of running. That's how she thought she would always remember it. Nothing but a week of constantly running, flat out, frantic. Running to save her friends. Running to stop a wolf or a giant. Running toward something, some end point, some final goal, which always seemed to vanish further out of sight the minute she got near it. Like that Greek myth of the guy who was punished to always be pushing a boulder up a hill; the minute he reached the top he found himself down at the bottom again.

Well, she didn't want to run anymore. She couldn't. She'd run and she'd run and now all she could do was sit down where she was. Sitting still. She'd never been much good at it, and now it was the only thing in the world she wanted to do.

She supposed it should have felt like an anticlimax. It was all going to end today. Everything that had been building up throughout this insane week was culminating in some final event, some final story, happening somewhere in Farway before midnight tonight. But instead of feeling like an anticlimax, just to sit here in the quiet house felt like the most insane relief she'd ever felt. She told herself that it was better for it to end this way. Not with a bang. With absolute deathly silence.

It was a bizarre sort of silence. A silence that wrapped around her, echoed out into the world for miles and miles. Everything silent. Everything still.

She had this weird feeling of unnatural calm. A detached feeling, as if nothing mattered. It was sort of how she'd heard people describe depression - as if the whole world had gone away, and nothing she could ever feel or think or do could possibly matter anymore. It was as if her whole life had gone up in flames, and now she was just sitting there in the cinders of it all, letting them smother her, drown her, cover her in their absolute unending silence. She thought of herself as a phoenix. Maybe she would climb out of the cinders as something new. A chance at a different start, to reinvent herself as a whole new person. Phoenixes weren't real, of course. But after this week she wouldn't be surprised to look round and find one staring at her from the top of the coffee machine.

She realised with some surprise that her eyes were closed. She didn't open them. She focused on every deep breath she took, each one steadying her, anchoring her. Dragging her further and further into the cold, still pile of ashes.

She had never known such an absolute silence in all her life. Even her own head was silent. And that never happened.

And then, shrieking through the silence like an explosion, the doorbell rang.