• ii •
SHE REMEMBERS THE LIGHTS BURNED THROUGH HER like the tires tracing rubber tracks on the road when hitting a curb. (Just one mistake, one mistake; now they hit a tree). Running along her skin, they twittered mockingly, flashing at her as she claws through the fabric of night with her screams, her mouth tearing through her sanity like someone without much left.
"Take me instead!" Clair screamed. She was under a labyrinth of arms; hers—flailing—and the others'—deep blue and shiny—pulling them back. "Don't take him. Don't take him. Take me instead. Please."
One man with blue arms said, "Honey, I'm sorry. Please breathe. I'm sorry."
Clair sobbed wetly, hiccuping and choking on her own spit trying to separate words from air. "H-he's n-n-not—no! No, no, no!"
It was funny, how life can come to a complete standstill for someone, fall apart as paper does when wet and pulled accidentally. Clair could see the irrevocably ruined pieces scatter in the wind, and she wished she could follow it to see the joke.
She wanted to escape the one by the broken headlights and swishing of a busy freeway mangling together because time did not stop for the rest of the world like it had for her. It had not broken their lives like it had her.
She wants them to feel the lick of fire, dance in its pain, as she had suffered.
This is unjust, she'd thought, breathing coming out in quick pants. Unfair, disgraceful, infuriating. Let the world hurt, too, or tell me this isn't real. I can't hurt alone. I can't be alone.
A cacophony of false truths fell short at her ears, laughing at her, because she had pretended like baring her soul would bring back the one that was lost.
The moon above her head laughed at her, too.
"Kill me, then," Clair said, hoarse, "kill me then. He's my dad. That man's my dad. I c-can't—let me go! Help him, not me! I don't want to stay! Let me go and just freaking kill me, too!"
"Miss, calm down!"
She looked at the carnage, in front of her, wondering why her legs wouldn't work so she'd run to the destruction to show them that he was still alive. He had to be. He was smiling, wasn't he? Right then? Turned the music and then she'd yelled and then—
Suddenly, everything in front of her went up in flames.
The red and blue lights continued to screech and sear into her senses. Everything was loud and bright and angry, like carmine; manifesting into Clair as a scar—one worse than the one that extended from her hip to her ankle.
"He's gone," whispered the one inked in auburn to herself, matching the scarlet venom staining her words. "He's gone and it's your fault."
When she curled up on the stretcher, she decided that she wanted to be gone, too.
• o •
This got a 100 reads on Radish! I feel like when I got 100 on Wattpad, haha. If you want to check out chapters 3 and 4, they're FREE now over there.
You'll see I changed the story behind her parents and siblings (she's an only child here with a single father who passes away from a car accident, not overdosing).
How do you like this revamped version of Why She Drowned? Better? Worse?
Sarena x