Granite Cottage and Other Small Tales

Neurons

A quiet life ended in a sheer grey peal of worthlessness.  Pressing her hand upon the cold, dew-spattered window pane, Stephanie thought hard, hoping her message would be picked up by her friend on the other side of the madness that had destroyed far too many things to be numbered at once.  Her sullen brown eyes sunk far back into her head as had her spirit into her heart, closing out almost literally everything around her.  Their prison was not of their own design, but nevertheless, an escape was demanded by sheer necessity of force and even life itself.

She thought of the poem her brother had written a long time ago –

A sad death shall occur tonight
A solitary word
While winds have whispered
Sands have screamed
And yet nobody heard

A dying wail, both cold and frail
Shall pierce the fragile night
And tears shall rise from saddened eyes
That never gave us sight

At the time, Stephanie thought Stan was just being morbid, so she asked her parents to have him run in to the psychiatrist to make sure he would be ok.  There was no way she would live with a brother who would have irreversible problems later on in life.  She had to make sure the beginning went well, or everything after that would be wasted.  As the invisible, humid air wafted past the oak leaves of the trees outside her window, she knew now that had been a mistake.

A thick tarpaulin fluttered aimlessly against the ground, caught by the ropes snagged in the claws of the lichen covered oaken branches.  "If thoughts are not our enemies," she reasoned to herself, then he should hear me.  This is too important to miss." But the stone wall of wasted years never falls easily or without some kind of almost preternatural aid.

A jackal shed its fur onto the crispy autumn leaves, never wondering where they would be tomorrow.  Shrouded in dense silence,