As the chimes of the clock hanging on the wall sang to welcome the hour of midnight, there she sat in front of the crackling fireplace with both knees close to her chest and a black hand-knitted blanket draped over her shoulders with its edges overlapping in front of her, covering a great deal of her body from the neck down.
Blankly, she gazed into the heart of the fire where the charred wood was gradually being consumed to keep the fire from burning out, but the warmth it emitted was barely enough to keep her body from shivering under the layers of cloth that she had already cocooned herself in.
The sounds of the rain lingered on persistently, finding their way into the house through closed doors and windows left ajar, and despite having been ongoing since the early afternoon of the day, showed no signs of relent or retreat. Rising up from the floor with blanket still held fast around her petite physique, she shuffled in the midst of her shivering toward the old wooden bed at the corner of the room.
Back toward the wall, she lowered herself to sit on the edge of the bed in preparation to lie down, but had her initial intentions abruptly disrupted as she unsuspectingly turned her eyes toward the dusty frame that rested atop the small drawers beside the head of the bed.
It had been taken two years ago, in the meadow mere minutes down the street that ran adjacent to the front porch of her house. And though the shadows that were cast about on the inner walls of the room obscured most of the memento including their faces, she had previously spent enough time looking at it for a mere glimpse of the corner of the self-decorated frame to be enough to bring to mind the full image of its contents in vivid detail.
Scenes of the past started to flow through her mind uninvited and uncontrollably, but their allure was hard to refuse and she soon found herself wishing once again for a time that she could no longer return to. Her awareness of the futility of such thoughts guided her hand steadily forward to seize the shade-covered frame, and without looking directly at it, led her to pull open the drawer that lay beneath, wherein she gently placed the frame out of her line of vision, in the very same drawer that stored some of the things that she had kept from long ago but had no longer any use for.
Slowly with her fingertips, she pushed against the front of the open drawer till she heard the soft thud of wood colliding against wood, and after a short pause, lifted her hands off the surface of the drawer before she raised her legs unto the bed to lie down with her face toward the wall. For the first time since that fateful day, her eyes glimmered with sadness, but only for a brief second, for shortly after she closed them in search of slumber and rest which she did not find till the early hours of the next morning.
An entire day slipped her by while she lay in bed asleep, and then another while she lay awake, but still she found herself unwilling to draw away from the solace provided to her by the sheets on which his familiar scent did faintly remain.
Lacking the will and necessity for any other action, she had every reason and intention to stay in bed indefinitely; every reason except that her body was still one of flesh and blood, one that was incapable of surviving in the absence of all else but sleep and air, one that was now violently making its needs for sustenance and nourishment known.
A burning sensation gushed up within her from the centre of her being, tearing first through her chest and then her throat and then almost right up into her mouth before it started to make its way back down toward the depths of her deprived stomach. The hunger was unbearable and she cringed as she forced herself up off her back in preparation of finding her way to the kitchen in search of something that was still edible, if even barely so.
The frigid sensation that soon met with her feet was one that she had not expected. Instead of the high pitched voice of the creaky wooden floor that she had long grown accustomed to listening out for in the mornings, she heard nothing but a deep toned splash coming from beneath as her feet sank unsuspectingly into a thick, seemingly stagnant layer of liquid.
Eyes widened by both the cold and the unexpected, she peered over the edge of the bed and gasped at what she saw. The sudden realization that the sound of the rain which was still ongoing at that time, had not for once subsided throughout her days of inactivity then came crashing down upon her.
Flustered and overwhelmed by anxiety, she leapt off the bed and into the flood waters that rose up to the middle of her calves. In a swift and uninterrupted stroke of her arm, she grabbed a coat which she could use to protect herself with from the piercing winds and ran toward the front door of her house, her steps higher than usual in an effort to overcome the resistance that the water was persistently imposing upon her movements.
Panting and short of breath, she lunged forward to grab hold of the rusty doorknob with a single hand, but in a moment of hesitation, was compelled to turn back to look at the drawer in which she had placed the memory of him and her mere nights ago. The water was entering into the house at a faster rate than ever, and as fear got the better of her, she abandoned the thought of going back to retrieve the memento and pulled open the door, leaning back and leveraging upon all her body weight to overcome the waters that were in opposition of everything that she was now trying to do.
When she had created an opening big enough for herself to fit through, she squeezed her way out into the streets of town, but those too had also been submerged and the rain continued to fall from the sky above, slowly consuming all that was upon the land below.
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