Elena woke with a sharp pain in her chest. She inhaled with a gasp, bolting upright as fire burned down her throat. Her hands grasped like claws, raking at the spot where the pain had blossomed; a bright orange flower, roots reaching through her chest. Its seeds revelled in their delightful intoxication; feeding on panic and fear. They spawned in the tight bubbles of her alveoli, popping each like bubblewrap. Pop! Pop! Pop! Each burst scorched the paper-thin skin; then they began to bloom, roaring up through her bronchioles, a frenzied twisting and aching of its trunk; at the neck of her bronchi, it fattened and grew wilder until it emerged in a panicked yelp from her cracked lips.

Her heart fluttered in desperation, feeling the leafy fingers tickle its thumping muscle. Blindly, she swung her arm in the general direction of her nightstand. She heard a wet shatter. A sliver of light through her curtains found the source: a glass tumbler, a fractured spiderweb spanning its jagged edges; frosted over with the breath of fate. Shockwaves had rattled the fragments loose, causing them to lay pathetically between the carpet fibres. A broken jigsaw gaping up at her from between its terrified jaws. The water had soaked into the carpet, drying like a pool of blood around the cracked dentures. Beads of water clung desperately to the white enamel: afraid.

Elena collapsed back into the pillows. She stared breathlessly up at the ceiling. Her arms flung out uselessly. She gasped for air, throat rasping, the orange flower peering up from the back of her throat. How strange, that she should die in the same position as when she first laid on this bed: fingers clutching the sheets, brow creased together, mouth open in a moan. But how different the experience! The first had been exhilarating — earth shattering even. The last agonising. Conquered twice by two different faces. The first a face she knew and loved. The latter, cloaked and final.

Something stung her fingertips. A thousand bee stings all at once. She turned her head, vision swimming with grey fatigue, saw red staining her hand. Glass glinting from beneath her nail bed. All at once her vision morphed into a different red; a German red that still haunted her. Her bed morphed, fluidly, into a dining chair; the walls into a floral kitchen; the sliver of light into a mesh of red and white and chicken scratch black. The face she knew and loved was bent over a sink, shoulders hunched and hair tangled. She floated towards that shaking back and wrapped her arms around him.

“Alles werd gut.”

Everything will be alright. They just had to leave. Catch the next train from Berlin and go. Go where the possibilities would never end; where he could work again; where she could love him again. Where they could be people.

The two of them looked up towards their window. They stared at the foreign red sea that had washed up at their doorstep. A red soupy tsunami of hate. He nodded; exhaling a heavy breath of unshed tears.

Tears blurred her vision. Her right arm began to tingle. An anguished cry escaped her lungs; raw and untamed.

 

Word Count: 537

 

//Picture not mine. No copyright infringement intended//