Cherith's Stories

Doom of the Ides

2007-03-16T16:16:06Z

Beware the Ides of March. It’s too bad that I couldn’t have remembered, or payed attention to the warning sooner. Of course, there’s nothing that says I would’ve paid any more attention than anyone else, unless of course I’d known what was going to happen. But then, I didn’t did I?

Nope. So, here I am, sprawled on the cold floor at the feet of my best friend, Brandon. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to make it, and he laughs. Laughs and chats and flirts with my friends as I lay here staring at shoes, trying to figure out whether or not I’m dying.

My head hurts. It feels like an intense burning heat fills me up and I can’t focus on anything for too long. The group shuffles off out of my sight and when I try to turn over to watch them, I find that I can’t move at all.

I hear Mindy’s voice telling them to watch out for the blood. Am I really bleeding that bad?

I struggle to move something…anything and I feel faint. As the blackness washes over me I close my eyes and joke to myself, “Et tu, Brute?”

The Left Hand

2007-03-15T17:26:31Z

“But, where should I sit?”

“Here child, at my left, of course.” He laughed as he said it, as if this were an old game we played at.

“I haven’t earned that place,” I said stepping closer to him. It wasn’t a game but a polite dance of society that even kings and their daughters cannot be exempt from.

“You will sit there all the same, and no one can say differently,” he chided.

My mother sat silent in her own chair at the right of my father. The entire room bustled around us in the correct way of the court, pretending to ignore our conversation.

As I sat in the large chair at his right, I felt my breath catch. I expected a trap or fanfare, I was never sure really what I was waiting for. I sat, and there was nothing. A still small silence to be sure held the room captive, but for a moment, and it passed just as quickly. My father smiled down at me in the way he always had, but I could feel something else behind his eyes. Something that said accepting the chair to his left meant much more.

It always starts the same

2007-03-14T20:04:18Z

It starts out the same everytime.

With that horrible smell. Thick and metallic, and clingy. That’s it, it’s a clingy smell. The kind you can still smell later even after you’ve showered and changed and sprayed some sort of fragrance to try and mask it.

It’s the sort of smell that even though it’s been days, and surely you’ve cleaned everything possible to clean by now, it’s still there. You turn your head and it’s all around you, choking you. Pointing you out.

You know that if you can still smell it, and so strongly, that so can everyone else. At work, you know that they know. They watch you, and you leave the scent behind you as you walk away. Everyone must know.

It always starts out the same. The horrible smell that clings to you like a invisible stalker that’s waiting for the moment to prove you’ve slipped up. Afterwards, you start throwing clothes away, worried that the blood didn’t really wash off. It’s still there. It must be, you can still smell it.