As the dream lay dead
Matthew Ryan Fischer
“Charlotte? Charlotte, are you okay?”
Charlotte stood there in a state of shock. Her fingers twitched. Goosebumps
on her arms. Her lips trembled.
Ramsey grabbed her shoulders and turned her towards him.
“Don’t look. You don’t want to see.”
He tried to pull her towards him, to hug her, to shield her eyes.
She resisted, stiffened her body.
“No.”
Ramsey let go but tried to keep eye contact.
“Charlotte, it will be okay. I promise. I’ll take care of it. But you
don’t have to.”
Her eyes were red. Her mascara blotted with a streak down her
face. She had seen the worst and come out on the other side.
This was nothing, she told herself. This was just the final step. One
last thing to do that didn’t really matter. The worst was over. The worst was
over. The worst was—
“…over,” she whispered.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she replied. “I’m okay. It’s all okay.”
Charlotte pushed Ramsey aside and turned back to look. There were
streaks of blood on the ground, the wall, a bloody hand-print on the kitchen
island and a pool of blood soaking into the tile floor.
“She would have killed me,” said Charlotte matter-of-factly. “Me
or her. One or the other.”
“We’ll clean it up. I’ll call Eddie and he’ll bring his van. He’s
good for it. He’ll understand. Once he sees, he’ll understand.”
“She wanted to kill me. I didn’t want to kill her. I didn’t even
know she existed until tonight. But she had known all along that she wanted to
kill me.”
“Don’t think about that. Whatever it was, whatever she was after. It
doesn’t matter now. We clean this up, it’s like none of it ever happened.”
“Don’t be naïve. This will haunt us forever.”
Ramsey was silent. He wanted to comfort her. He wanted to have an answer.
But he was afraid she was correct.
“She may be dead. But she’s not dead. Not really. She’s here. In
us. Forever.”
“I’m going to call Eddie now.”
“Whatever.”
Charlotte knelt down beside the body. She rolled the woman onto
her side and looked in her eyes. It was like looking in a mirror. A cracked
funhouse mirror from Hell, but a mirror nonetheless. Her double. Her shadow
that would haunt her. The woman who would have taken her life, taken her love,
taken everything from her. The woman that would have replaced her and not given
two thoughts about it. All that she was and all that she could have become.
This was her.
And now, what was she? The leftovers. She was the broken, the
remains. The thing that came after. The woman had stolen it all from her. Even
though she was shattered and dead, she had taken it with her. Charlotte was
something new now, though what, she wasn’t sure. The brilliant, the hope, the possible
were all things of the past. The cracked remains, the dead and rotting were
left. Where once she could have been something, the dream lay dead.
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