LetsNotShare

She filled her life with rainbows and surrounded herself with doors. Doors opening to dark corridors her sunny disposition never lit up. Doors leading to rooms, rooms filled with her truths, her anxieties, insecurities, fears, hopes. Doors of different sizes, colours, importance.. what they all had in common were the door handles, never used, but clearly there. She filled her life with rainbows, but her life ended with rain, with grey, with rocks. She stumbled, tumbled, crash-landed. Warmth took over her head, her ribs. The numbness grew, her ribcage let the world see her chest, beating, fluttering, struggling. The rocks she lay on s

The ashes always came first, swirling and looping through the air like blackened snow. It coated the concrete maze, muffling all sound, so that by the time the great creaking source was heard, it was too late. The war had reached another city. Citizens darted from building to building under the timid blue of the dawn sky. Even the bright, once bustling shopping streets were now filled with a blanketed, eerie silence. Once the ash fell, fashion no longer mattered. Gossip in cafes became trivial, petty; affairs and scandals meant nothing to the damned. After the flurries of ash came smoke, great furled clouds of gray that, once the cov

The wind whistled through the missing slates on the old, spindly tower. The bruised lilac sky seemed alive, the wind cruelly hurrying the clouds. Another slate loosened, fell.. fell.. taking with it the twisted ear of a mocking gargoyle that leered out of the stone column. Loose shutters banged furiously in a high up window, creating a cruel, dark symphony with the screeching wind and odd, feverish humming that drifted frantically out of the cracks an fissions of the tower. In the topmost room of the monstrous spire, a figure sat hunched over, hands working busily at the back of her head. Beside her sat, coiled like the skin shed by a sna

My mother and father spun slowly around the room. It was an uncoordinated dance, with my father's injured leg shaking with every soft pirouette. He was dressed in what he grew up in, or so it seemed to me. All our photographs showed him in the same khaki dungarees, knees stained brown over the years, and a beige collared shirt. It was what all men wore in our village. His eyes were glazed with tears, emitting such a gentleness that contradicted his hardened face. They were focused on my mother's face. Her whole expression mirrored his eyes. The knot on her apron was wiggling loose, slowly, until it gave way and dropped completely. She didn't

We were eight, when we went into the house, my neighbour and I. It was one of those seemingly endless summer days, where the horizon danced with heat. Grasshoppers serenaded us from the long butter coloured grass as we wandered, wading through plants, hopping an occasional stone wall. We were exploring, peering into cracks and holes, sticking our heads over fences, looking for any flora or fauna unknown to us. When the opportunity arose, we would pause to fight off a pirate, maybe a dragon, if we were feeling extra courageous. As the sun climbed higher, we sought shade, a place to sit and munch last year's wrinkly apples with some crumbly