Red Roses

Red blossomed. Audrey hissed and dropped the bouquet of roses, red petals scattering across the grass near the gravestone. A fresh bead of blood sat atop her thumb, its edges smudged as if one of the petals had stayed stuck there. She eyed the sharp thorn on the stem that had pricked her through the flimsy plastic wrappings, and stuck her thumb in her mouth. She had hated flowers ever since her sister had died. Once a symbol of romance or affection in a whimsical, care-free world, they were now one of decay and death.

She nudged the bouquet with the tip of her shoe, and whispered, “I’m sorry I haven’t been to see you lately.” The etched dates on the stone glared back at her, abandonment evident in their blackened edges and weeping lines. Whenever she saw those dates, always so horribly permanent, she felt an uncomfortable lurch in her gut like the soft grass beneath her feet had given way all of a sudden, plunging her into a dark abyss.

Ever since her sister’s murder on a crisp November morning seven years ago, Audrey felt as if she had been walking in a darkened tunnel devoid of light. The only prevailing motivation to keep putting one foot in front of the other was a sense that waiting for her somewhere in the gaping black hole ahead was her sister’s smiling face. Audrey bent over and picked up the flowers, nestling them in the grassy bosom of her sister’s bones, plucking up a few stray petals as she did so. “Happy birthday, sis,” she said, touching the tips of her fingers to the cool surface of the headstone. She tried not to think about how cold it must be in the deep trenches below her feet or what her sister must look like now down there in the darkness. “Love you, Lenora.”

Audrey’s sister had been murdered on a routine walk home from her workplace in the early hours of a Saturday morning. She had gone out for drinks with her colleagues to celebrate the end of a long work week and never made it home to her flat that she shared with a housemate and a sassy tabby cat called “Minnie.” Her final moments were recorded in patchy colour on a local florist’s CCTV setup. Lenora could be seen walking past the storefront alone, her red dress vivid against the darkened street and her handbag firmly clutched to her chest. Audrey had seen the footage many times played on national television during the media whirlwind stage of the investigation.

She only had to close her eyes now and the image of her sister walking alone on that cold, dark street would replay itself. She could see the way her gait was uneven, her balance slightly off-kilter in her high heels, tipsy from her night at the bar. She could see the way her dark hair slipped over her shoulder as her head turned at the last minute before she passed out of the frame. She could see her slender fingers, nails painted crimson to match her dress, clutching her handbag that had the little cat face embroidered on the front – a gift from Audrey to Lenora for her 17th birthday. She hated that this brief and heartstopping moment was slowly becoming the clearest memory she had of her sister as time continued to pass.

When they found her body after a month of searching, relentless media harassment, and tense discussions with infuriatingly apathetic police, Audrey finally let herself feel the red hot rage that had been clawing at her insides since the moment her sister’s name had exited the lips of a policeman at the door on that dreaded day she was finally found. She had stormed to her room and screamed so hard into her pillow that she was sure her throat would bleed, red droplets blooming like rose petals on the white pillow covers.

From that day onwards, her life had split into two distinct halves – the time before her sister’s murder and the time after. Audrey moved out of home within two weeks of the news, she would have left sooner had the greedy vultures with cameras not still been circling the family home, waiting to swoop on any word without mercy. She just couldn’t stand her mother’s muffled sobs floating down the hallway any longer and her father’s silent staring intervals over dinner. They barely protested when she packed her bags and left, too weak to argue and too consumed with death to care.

At first, when the wound was still fresh Audrey found herself visiting her sister’s gravesite in the local cemetery weekly, always on a Friday afternoon. But then life continued to happen and things got in the way; she got a demanding job, an apartment that was just too far away to make the trip seamless, and a social life that begged to be fed and watered or risk a slip of her sanity. As weeks between visits turned to months between visits and then to years between visits, Audrey found herself forgetting her sister more and more often. Small details about Lenora were slipping through the cracks in her subconscious brain and she hated herself for it. Things like the exact pitch of her voice, her handwriting, the smell of the shampoo in her hair…they were all lost to the empty void of the past, never to be noticed again.

So when she found herself at the cemetery on her sister’s birthday seven years later, the guilt and shame had been gnawing at her heart with sharpened fangs for a long time beforehand. After she had placed the rose bouquet and said goodbye to her sister again, Audrey turned to face the vast expanse of the cemetery and surveyed the neatly arranged headstones surrounding her, like dominoes lined up to be flattened by an invisible force of nature. It was somehow both humbling and horrifying to think that everyone ended up in a place like this at some point along the journey.

Trying not to think about how much time had passed already, Audrey lingered for a moment on the edge of the cemetery by the large wrought iron gates that would close promptly at 7:00pm to keep drunken hooligans from defacing the graves. She closed her eyes and breathed in the cool air, conjuring up the image of her sister from the deep recesses in her mind. And suddenly, as if the fresh air snaking in through her nose had reached its tentacles into the dark abyss of her memories and picked the rusted lock on a door that had always been firmly sealed shut – she saw her, clear as day. Her dark hair falling to just below her shoulders, her sparkling green eyes full of life and light, her smile radiant and bright. She stood there and lifted a hand to wave at Audrey, her slender fingers tinged with red at the tips as a beating heart circulated blood through a body that was very much alive.

Audrey reached out to her sister and felt Lenora’s warm hand enclose around hers. They didn’t speak but just stared at each other, Audrey soaking in every little detail. Her sister squeezed her hand and Audrey felt her heart squeeze in unison. Then after a short time, the grip between them began to loosen and the image of her sister began to fade, a bright red smudge on the back of her sister’s hand where Audrey’s pricked finger had clasped it was the final thing to fade from view.

When Audrey opened her eyes, she had to blink a few times to clear the tears collecting in the pockets behind her lashes. And ahead, peeping from beyond the vast cityscape before her, the most radiant summer sunset had painted the skyline in a deeply familiar hue. In the distant horizon, colour fought valiantly against the impending darkness and blossomed red.