Thanks. I think I'll just post it here.
It was raining. It had been raining constantly for the last two weeks and Rose was sick of it. The soft patter of the droplets on the roof lulled her into a lethargy from which she could not escape. Every day seemed an endless gray that she shuffled through barely conscious. Sometimes, as she sat and read, she would realize that she could not remember the last few hours, as if she had been sitting there half asleep rereading the same paragraphs over and over completely unaware. And today it was raining too. She had expected no less.
She rose from bed in her lavender pajamas, unpatterned and shimmering silk, so light as if she were draped in the clouds that hung between the ground and the sun. She made a halfhearted attempt to stretch as she padded across the room to the doorway; her eyes were barely open and her muscles stiff. Her feet made fleeting impressions in the carpet, tracking her progress momentarily before expanding as if she had never passed.
She stepped out into the hallway. The whole house was dark. Her mother was still asleep, no doubt she would be until well after noon, as usual. It had been like that for as long as Rose could remember. They hardly ever spoke anymore, just lived in the house like two strangers in an apartment, avoiding even the sight of one another. Her mother had been an engineer, following in the steps of her own father, but then she had Rose. She had always intended to go back to work but when Rose's father died she sunk into a depression that she had still not come out of. Now she spent her days drinking and shopping, sometimes chatting with friends she only pretended to like. Rarely did she and Rose interact beyond the little gifts her mother would leave outside her door at night. Rose wished she could end even that.
She reached the bathroom which was the second door down from her room. The light buzzed when she turned it on. Two teal crosses divided the room, patterned into white tiles. The tiles were cold to her bare feet; her mother rarely heated the bathrooms.
She looked at herself in the mirror hazily, as if trying to remember who she was after forgetting herself in her dreams. She turned on the faucet and stuck her hands into the watter letting it run over them absently. After a while she pressed her cold palms to her face, covering her cheeks and eyes. The vibrating yellow light seeped into the newfound darkness through the cracks in her fingers and it pressed through her closed eyelids pinkly.
She never had to get up this early because she did not go to school but everyday she forced herself to. She had a tutor but he would not show up until later in the day, after her mother awoke. She thought that maybe by setting an example she would shame her mother into changing but her mother didn't care or even notice. Her mother's room was over on the left wing, far away from where Rose ever was, and she was always in a deep drunk sleep. Rose's virtue never made any impression on her. But perhaps, when she was honest with herself, Rose could admit that it might have also been her own little rebellion.
Rose emerged from the bathroom freshly showered and headed further down the hall. She descended a staircase and came out into the den. It was a large room with floor to ceiling windows on the outside wall and a sliding glass door looking out onto a stone balcony. the trees covering the hills surrounding her house were sapped of their color; the sun's light filtered by a sheet of clouds. Along the back wall were shelves abutting an ever unlit fireplace. The shelves were covered in extravagant glass figurines of all kinds. Many of them were majestic beasts: horses midgallop, so real they appeared as if their spirit had been frozen in that instant; bears rearing up to strike with their powerful arms, like boulders; or they were of stately men and elegant ladies, captured in moments from their lives of dignity and leisure. Hanging above the fireplace was a family portrait, painted when she was so young that Rose had to be seated in her mother's lap. Her mother sat morosely in a fine walnut chair while her father stood with one hand on the chair's back. Rose was pulling on her mother's pale green dress, facing her. Along the other two walls were white sofas and in the center of the room a glass table far from where it could serve any purpose other than decorative. Rose walked across the room and went through a doorway into the kitchen, directly behind the den.
The kitchen reflected the way Rose's mother saw the world, black and white. The tiles were white with burst of black and the counters were a dark obsidian, even the cabinets were pale white pine, but all the appliances shone in a bright silver. Her mother never came in here. Sometimes there would be days when Rose wondered if she even ate, her only source of nourishment the alcohol.
Rose walked over to the fridge and as she approached turned to reach into the tall adjacent cabinet and pulled out a box of wheat flakes and set it on the island in the center of the room surrounded by stools. She grabbed a carton of milk from the fridge, the kind with the blue cap, and a bottle of orange-mango juice and set them both on the island as well. She circled around the island to the opposite wall which had the sink and dishwasher both glimmering in the effervescent light. She reached up and took a round blue bowl from a stack and then a spoon from one of the drawers. She threw the spoon in the bowl and set them both on the island along with a glass.
The pure white of the milk illuminated ever crevice in the flakes as it rose in the bowl. She sat down on a stool and began eating her breakfast with disinterest, not bothering to put anything away.
After she finished, Rose cleaned up and went back through the den to the staircase. As she passed the portrait she thought of her father. All this was his fault, if he hadn't died then nothing would have turned out this way. When she was young her mother had told her only that he had died in a plane crash and Rose always imagined that it had been a passenger jet. It was only later that she learned the truth. He had crashed his single engine Cessna in a storm, out flying with a friend and colleague. They had been headed out on their yearly camping trip and her father was unperturbed by reports of bad weather. He was confident in his ability and he did not want to postpone their ritual unnecessarily. When they found it the plane had been too badly damaged for them to be sure the but they found no signs of electrical or mechanical failure and it was ruled pilot's error. Everyone was surprised and Rose's mother never believed her husband could have made such a mistake.
She ascended the stairs and followed the hallway back to her room. When she got there she finally changed out of her pajamas into a shirt of soft pink and a plain black skirt that reached down to her ankles. She left her pajamas in a pile at the foot of the bed.
The far wall of the room was the outside wall that overlooked the porch. You could only see the edge of it from her window. Outside it was still damp and gloomy but the rain had abated and now fell almost unnoticeably. Rose expected it would be like this for the rest of the day, and feared it would last all week. The room was cluttered with books and clothes scattered about. There was no television, there had never been one in the house so Rose never missed it. Instead she spent most of her time reading gothic fiction. Tales of the madness and brutality of humans, tragedies of greed. Also scattered about were pencil sketchings grasping at the forms of unfathomable abominations, beings that proved the futility of everything humanity had done. Careless and unheeding far beyond our narrow scope. The beasts twisted and writhed through space devouring civilization after civilization to fulfill their insatiable longing. To Rose these horrors reflected the truth of the uncaring universe. And in the corner sat her violin. Unused, as it had been since Rose's mother had fired her tutor several months ago. Rose could find no inspiration to play it so she left it there forgotten.
Rose sat down on her bed and kicked her feet wishing there were anything she could do beyond what she always did. Her bed was sleek and modern but wide. It had no headboard or footboard and was covered in dark purple sheets. It was so hard for her to find something to do out here in the woods, miles from the nearest town. The only friends she had were online, unless you counted the children of her mother's guests, that came so infrequently Rose could never remember any of their names. And her online friends, sometimes she wondered if they were even real, if everything they had ever told her was a lie. Other than that there was nothing else to do but play the few computer games that met her approval, mostly classic horror adventures with a few citybuilding sims thrown in.
Rose sighed and sat down at her computer.
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Topic: MSPA Homestuck (Read 5195424 times)