Requiem

A Slightly Distorted Image

I waved back at K, lumbering across the garbage dump that consisted of metal boards and wooden planks. Refrigerators. Old televisions. Odd bits of material that you'd expect at someone's half-arsed garage sale. I didn't question their existence, weird things happened at Rimona and Anneke's suicide was proof enough of that.

Then I tripped. I tripped on a deflated tyre tangled with bits of withering rope and who knows what else, my hands fumbling frantically to break the fall. I groaned as my palms splashed into a murky pool of liquid.

Blood. I inspected my hands knowing that something must have gotten scratched upon the harsh landing, but I certainly wasn't expecting my fingertips to be soaked in crimson. The heat was everywhere with the scorching sun overhead, so so I wasn't sure if the blood was fresh or stale. Not like that was on my list of worries at that moment.

Oh my god, where did this blood come from?

My heart raced. I turned to look, but K called out to me first.

“Sage! Sa — Damn, let me look at you.”

She stood right over me, despite being about ten meters away just moments ago. It merely took her two nifty leaps to get across the mess. I hid my hands from view, wiping them clean on a tattered piece of cloth.

“Ah... Shouldn't have landed that way,” I made a lame attempt to laugh off the matter.

“Look around before you blunder about like that, dumbass!”

“Am not...” I frowned, pulling myself back onto my feet and ignoring the immediate protest at my hip. “Besides, it's not like you're the most careful person, either.”

I eyed K's arm, a few scratches here and there that made it seem like she herself had done some tripping about. It was bound to happen of one were to jump around in a place like this.

“Well...” She turned away, taking me by the sleeve of my jacket and dragging me further up the dump. “That's besides the point!”

I sighed and sat down on the battered vehicle, swinging my feet and banging my heels against the metal intermittently. It felt strangely satisfying. The maelstrom in my mind had just began to settle, and I managed to work out how I could get a few answers.

“Where does all this mess come from, anyway?” I asked after a short eternity of silence, jumping onto a pile of rocks sandwiched in between the cupboards.

“Wherever you are, there's always a rubbish dump, Sage. People need places to pile their abandoned shit. The one at Rimona just happens to be more open, you know?”

“So that's how it is...” I hadn't been paying attention to what she said, really. It was besides my interests. Instead, I took a few cautious steps towards the blood-filled tyre, taking extra care in coming off as casual. The blood. My curiosity calls for me to confirm that sight, whatever it is.

“Sage? Don't go wandering around on your own again, you're obviously gonna trip and land badly.” K looked at me from head to toe, bringing herself to crouch on one of the rocks. She had an arm wrapped around her knees, the other planted on the rock's surface for balance. There and then, I realized that I wasn't going to see the tyre again.

I lowered my gaze in disappointment, standing rooted on the spot and looking around my feet instead. Hammers, screwdrivers and the like. I guess furniture wasn't the only thing that lay around, but what my attention decided to be attracted to was what lay beneath all that. Through the web of utensils I saw a hand.

A hand.

A full hand, that couldn't possibly have been anything else but a hand.

I bent down to inspect it, but then a shadow loomed over me before I had a chance to get any results. Turning my head around, I came to face K's silhouette, her body obscuring the sun that shone on the horizon behind her. There was an air of menacing confidence around her short frame — She stood with one foot a measly seven inches away from me, the other raised and placed firmly on a plastic barrel as if to crush it right beneath her. Her hands were behind her back, but even then I saw the hatchet.

I put two and two together even if the numbers were from the wrong equations, and shoved her into the mess with all the explosive force I could muster from my crouching position.

Then I screamed.

My mind screamed. My body screamed too, for that matter. I took off from my small perch, streaking down the pile and jumping until my feet found the bridge again. Did I care that I just shoved a girl head-first into hellhole? Probably not. I was grateful though, that I didn't trip despite my senseless running. Funny thing adrenaline does. I didn't stop at the bridge though, and instead I tore right across it with Hizumi giving me me a befuddled look.

Hahaha... Psychotic murderer, huh?

I sprinted right out of the bridge's area, onto the main road. I wanted to go home. It wasn't that far, and my parents would at least provide some sort of comfort.

“Sage! Wait!” K called after me, making her own way towards the safer end of the bridge. Don't run away! I can explain! Her pleading cries sounded almost as panicked as the ones thundering in my own mind, but I knew better than to stop and turn back.

Oh hell to the no. She was obviously about to murder me with a hatchet. I was two seconds short of becoming one of the corpses up there.

A hundred meters; two hundred. I didn't stop, and neither did K. Goddamn it, girl. I tore onto a pedestrian path and then onto another road, running purely on hyper drive. I wanted to get as far away from the rubbish dump as possible, and erase the whole thing from my memory if I could at all. I wanted to put more distance between me and the girl who held a hatchet, who paid attention to my every move and thought. The neighborhood was already in view, there was no longer a need to panic. I ran across another road, just as a car turned around the corner.

Bad move.

I gasped, and K screamed. The wind was knocked right out of my body with a firm blow that reverberate down my chest. I felt my feet leave the floor, my head tossed back as I sailed through the air for a moment. I wasn't sure when I landed; it all happened in a moment. The world did a flip around me like one of those slow-motion scenes in a silent movie, and I knew I was glad that an episode of Rimona's nightmare had ended.

Good memories and nightmares.

A/N:

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