All in Drama
The sound of the slap echoed around the room. That was how it would be described in a novel, if this was a novel. If Laura had been able to do it. Instead she sank further into her chair and pretended she wasn’t in the room.
All that meant was that the world kept spinning, and the words kept coming.
She had left holes in his life, big gaping holes that tugged at the edges of things and unravelled them. Strings and strands of memory and emotion, drawn into a swirling vortex that gave nothing back. The spaces on the hallway wall, where happy eyes had been, stared disapprovingly at him when he came home of an evening, chill wind ushering him through the door and whipping his coattails around his legs so the wet fabric stuck to him and sent ice creeping under his skin to reach fingers to the marrow of his bones.
Sophia’s father had always been a great stickler for rules. One of her earliest memories - him in his blue velvet armchair, her on his knee.
“Sophia,” he’d said, his whiskers tickling her cheek as he pointed at her drawing. “You’re outside the lines.”
“Only a little bit,” four-year Sophia had replied, a nascent pout tugging at her lips and furrowing her brow. It was only a smudge. Barely noticeable, really.
Cappin Hargraves was an old seadog saltier than the ocean he sailed and twice as furious. His parents, with an abundance of optimism and severe shortage of tact, had named him with all the pride that parents feel for their children and hope for his future. But despite his name, Cappin had never made more than coxswain on the trawling merchant barges that dredged the stonereef bay, and with grey about the temples and milk starting to swirl in his eyes it was unlikely he’d rise any higher before the sea closed cold iron teeth on him.
The scrubber. That’s what they call her in the downstairs halls; upstairs: nameless, faceless, worthless. But she works at it.
The putrid stench of corrupted blood hung thick in the air. Father Gascoyne knelt, his cloak pooling around him like the shadows that lurked in the hall, and touched the stain on the ground. As his fingers brushed against the paw print the world leaped into sharp clarity, colours and light swirling across his vision.
Betty was worried. I didn’t even need to be her twin to know that; supposed mystical bonds and other claptrap aside, it was obvious to anyone with eyeballs. Helped that she told me, too. I wasn’t one of her clique, not one of the shallow hangers on that flocked around her at school. I was unthreatening, safe.
August 23rd
Camping sucks in the worst way possible, and that’s when you know that you’re only going to have to endure two, three days tops pestered by mozzies and squelching in the mud. But I guess when the other option’s death, it’s not so bad.
Keys jingling, silver and sharp, Alistair stumbled through darkened hallways, ears pricked for the telltale clatter of boots, the click of a gun being cocked. Any moment, the lights might return and with them - soldiers, alarms, the end.
It’s impossible to ignore a car screaming fire and shrapnel as it smashes through your bedroom wall at three in the morning. Of course, my parents say it was my scream that woke them, or the thud as my body hit the floor, but I know they’re lying.
