The story of her life

Submitted into Contest #3 in response to: Write a story about a teenager visiting the place where they grew up.... view prompt

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Drama

It was strange to her, the reality of space. She always thought the vast cosmos was a vast cluster of space dust and stars with the occasional planet dotting the universe when in reality there are hundreds of thousands of light-years in between each star. Just seeming endless darkness where light does not dare traverse. It's also cold but not like the cool walls of a dark, dank cave but cold like a crisp winters day. The silence also carries not a feeling of dread but a feeling of comfort like being given the opportunities of being alone with your thoughts, as if being the first to wake on Christmas morning as a child, the tangible excitement of the moments of the hours to come, she looked down, in her hand she held a snowflake keychain,the only token of her fondest memory, 

she remembers her favorite Christmas. Her and her mother, father and two brothers all of which are deceased, leaving her the only living remnant of this bittersweet memory. She had just woken up, so early that not even earliest bird had awoken to sing its enchanting song, the house, so quiet that if listen hard enough you could hear its stories of past Christmas, she crept downstairs to confirm her childlike belief of Santa clause. Later that morning, after the sun had shown its face to soften the white blanket that covered the ground, she unwrapped the gift marked "Santa" from her parents. Inside was a small wooden keychain in the shape of a snowflake. 

Before she could finish her memory she realized the lack of oxygen in her lungs, she felt the feeling of peril spread throughout her body, the same feeling she felt on her 14th birthday when she was held underwater by her middle school bullies. She could her there laughs muffled by the water carried on the silence of the void she floated through at this moment. The feeling of dread seemed to suck the rest of her breath out as her vision started to recede and her body started to slow until she eventually stopped moving underwater and eventually in the vast darkness she traveled through she died, 

she woke up in a carefully cultivated field atop a bluff near her childhood home. She remembered the house so clearly, the image of the flaking paint that adorned the sides of the house, the image was burned in her head throughout her childhood like a river that lacerates the land to create a canyon. She ascended the creaking stairs and reach to open the old oak door, the handle was as cold as void she just arrived from. 

She entered the house and could hear everything from the shouts of her father coming from the bottom of the dusty empty bottle of whiskey that sat atop the just as dusty and empty counter, to the tears of her brothers hitting the cold wooden floor of the upstairs bedrooms as the child protective services arrived in our gravel driveway. She walked down the cobweb ridden hallway when she noticed the shepherd family portrait, taken in the field that surrounded the old house and while most people see a semi-functional family all she saw was a girl taking care of her brothers in a house with two strangers and now she arrived in that same house at the end her life, just how she lived it, alone



August 21, 2019 23:02

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RBE | Illustrated Short Stories | 2024-06

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