I wrote this story when I was 19. It hardly feels like 10 years have passed.
Remnant
The slow, rhythmic beating of her dying heart was the lullaby that drifted her to a troubled sleep. In her dreams, nightmares haunted by her sinister past, she was the martyr, the victim and the helpless whore left for dead in the dark of the night. Her dreams were echoes of the past, flashbacks to days of seduction, deception and homicidal virtues, a time she would never be allowed or able to forget. As she twisted and turned, restless in the still, humid night air her heart beat on regardless. A tick at a time, counting down on her internal clock with the time of her death already stamped upon it.
She knew she was going to die. How she was going to die. Where she was going to die and when she was going to die. It was all a matter of waiting now. Waiting and withering away, wilting like a flower in a dry vase. She didn't want to die, but she had grown to accept the inevitable. Her life seemed short, and ill lived. But it had been her life, her shot at this hapless world. She hadn't realised it then, when she'd been living. But now that she was dying, dead already for all the world could care. She knew she could have lived better, but she knew that at least she had lived.
She awoke as dawn struck, chasing shadows across the car park, skirting them around her ragged form. Thoughts drifted through her head, another day in the world of the dead, a day to beg for a bite to eat, drink from the polluted stream, but most of all a day to watch, watch as others wasted their lives. Would they be aware when death approached? As aware as she was, as every beat of her heart bound her closer to death's sensual embrace.
Her days passed in a surreal daydream now, the past, the present, and the future all mixing to form a strange palette that seemed to colour everything she witnessed. In her head she could hear the voices from her past, beckoning her, warning her, talking to her as if they were still here. But she knew they were not, she'd watched as they buried their bodies in the shallow, watery graves. Haunted by their words - and cursed by their shadows as each dry beat increased the fury of her hallucinations. Forced to re-live every horrific event, playing each part anew.
The shadows of the night passed overhead as she settled back in the car park, lying outstretched on the covered trolley bay, her mind drifted to her childhood, languid days of lemonade and sugar then to her adult life, frenzied moments of alcohol, cocaine, sex and murder. She lived on blood, sex and death, in ways, it made her higher than any drug ever could. But as she cuddled into her blanket, she regretted everything.
Inside it's cage, beneath a sagging, scarred breast, her heart beat pitifully. Each thump an effort for it's failing system and as her hand massaged deep into it, she knew the time had come. Palpitation this was not, leaning back she breathed deeply one last time of the fragrant summer air and floated to her final rest, where dreams of sugar and pink ribbons awaited with the ghosts of her comrades whose souls had long since drifted from their unmarked tombs.
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