Out of Reach (5 Minute Freewrite)

in #fiction5 years ago


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Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

She twists the beads around her fingers as she walks to market. Because they're the only things that can keep the visions away, yet lately, they haven't been working properly. She thought she smelled him the other day, also on the way to market. It's the only place she goes nowadays. Everywhere else is too...she forgets the words. See, there's another way her beads aren't working. She never used to forget words, though now she does. She used to know how to speak properly and how to walk along the street without stopping to stare after complete strangers.
But she knew him, the stranger, she smelled him, a gust of wind blowing his scent into her nostrils just as she passed him by. And she knew him, the smell of soap, not the expensive kind that smells like coconuts, but the simple one that just makes you clean again. Sometimes, she feels like she'll never get clean again.

But he's not here today, the stranger. Truth is, she wouldn't know him if he was, just if he passed close by again, which he probably never would. She holds the beads tights into her fists, presses until they leave little red marks on her white sun-starved skin, and she counts to ten.

Ten...nine...eight...

That's not how you count to ten, she thinks, that's how you count down from ten. But she can't stop now. If she does, she'll forget the little strength she had left and walk back to hide behind her curtains all day. Empty-handed. She can't be like this forever, she thinks, yet it's the only way she can be. The only way she knows how to be.
So, she opens her eyes and walks on. Forgets his smell, if only for a little while. Because he waits for her inside their house, or what used to be their house, once. His smell evades her here, in the street, but she can't fool it back home and no matter how many windows she opens, how many blankets she piles on her bed so she can sleep with all the windows wide open, she can't get rid of his smell, the man who gave her the beads.
The only one she would've followed anywhere, except she can't. Because she doesn't know where he is.


And on the other side of the city, a man waits for his son to come back. He guides himself around the house by the beads his son hung up before going away. Not forever. It was never meant to be forever and it all started like a silliness. They had belonged to the boy's mother, once, in times neither of them could remember, for the woman whom they'd both loved so much had been dead many years now.
Neither had wanted to touch the colorful beads she'd been so fond of and they'd sat inside a box, inside a drawer, inside a back-room, for years. But when the time had come for his son to leave the house, they'd come out again. If only his son had never met that woman, the old father thought.
He wanted the best for his son, he wanted the world, but not her, she wasn't worthy of him and even worse, she was the reason he was now gone, somewhere beyond his father's grasp. Because if he'd never left home, he couldn't have disappeared like this. And the truth is, the days grew long and frightening with no one around the house to talk to, to pass the time and alleviate the darkness.
For there is darkness, horrible and forever lapping at the old man's feet.
What good are the beads if he is completely alone? What good are the beads, if they can guide him around the house, but not to where his son is?
Should he, in a few years' time, hang up his son's old papers? Should he leave copies of his novels strewn out around the house now? Maybe that would bring his son back, he thinks bitterly.

But knows that's not true. Because the boy's gone. And there's not one single thing he can do and his heart shatters into a million pieces each time he touches the beads and sees his son hanging them, in his closed, blinded eyes.

This is a 5 minute freewrite based off the word 'beads', for the challenge started by @mariannewest. Check her out.

Thanks for reading,

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