Amanda - Tuesday morning
Aug. 2nd, 2005 05:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xp_daytripper posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
xp_logsBecause everyone needs some sort of closure.
Dawn. You could always tell when it started, even before the light actually changed. There was a difference in the feel of the air, a kind of hush, a sense of expectation perhaps. And then the first birds would begin twittering, the horizon would begin to pale, and another day begin.
The sand underneath her was certainly more comfortable than the pebbled beaches of Brighton, Amanda reflected in the predawn darkness. She’d come down to the lake around midnight, after explaining to Meggan she had something that needed doing - Meggan had pouted, but she knew she wasn’t allowed to be around the magic and so had acquiesced. Taking a final drag on her cigarette, she stubbed it out beside her, and then stood, brushing off the seat of her jeans. There it was, the stillness, the moment before, the edge between night and morning.
It was time.
She didn’t have everything for this. Back in Brighton there would have been a bunch of people who all knew the person to wait out the night with, passing around bottles of stolen booze and thinly-rolled joints. Telling stories and memories and lies, laughing and sometimes crying. There would have been the pile of possessions, to be shared out among those who had come, who had known them best. A bonfire on the beach, to ward off the darkness and the chill. But this wasn’t Brighton, and the street ways, the little rituals they’d had such as they were, they weren’t the ways people followed here. This was a new life, a better life, and she had to leave all that behind her, along with the tattered clothes and the drinking and the drugs and the suspicion. But she needed closure, needed something, and she hadn’t known when the funeral was, hadn’t known how to find out. Hadn’t wanted to. Over and done with by now, she guessed. And the others, those who had known Charlie or considered themselves his friends, they were all grieving in their own private ways, and she didn’t want to interfere with that. They had their ways - this was hers.
There wasn’t a lot to pile on the makeshift raft - she hadn’t had much of anything that had belonged to him, and she wasn’t exactly going to go ask Carolyn for anything. A notebook he’d lent her, its contents carefully typed out and saved on her computer now. Some printouts of their e-mail conversations. Ticket stubs from their day at the movies, discovered stuffed in the pocket of the jeans she’d been wearing that day. And the letter she’d spent the days following writing, all her questions, all her anger, all her regrets. All this she piled on the plank she’d scrounged, a layer of scrunched-up newspaper and some petrol-soaked rags at the bottom. On the water’s edge she stopped and pulled a quart bottle of vodka out of her jacket pocket. The alcohol burned as she took a swallow, her throat becoming unaccustomed to hard spirits in the months she’d been cutting back. and she coughed slightly. Then she upended the bottle over the pile of things making sure it all got good and soaked.
Behind her the trees rustled, a brief breeze stirring their leaves, but otherwise it was dead still. Even the lake was as flat as glass, the water chilly but not freezing as she waded in, soaking through her jeans. Brighton was never this warm. “Sorry, Charlie mate, still not takin’ me kit off,” she said with a weak smile as she carefully pushed the raft out until she was waist-deep, her lighter kept safe and dry tucked in her bra. A practised flick of her thumb ignited it, and then she touched it to the vodka-soaked paper, the sudden wave of heat lifting the strands of hair away from her face and reddening her skin. Gently she pushed the floating pyre away, using just a hint of magic to nudge it further out. The raft went obligingly, the flames reflecting off the dark water as they blazed up, and then gradually sank down, the plank itself submerging until with a hiss and a puff of steam it disappeared beneath the water.
Earth and air, fire and water - Amanda stood in the water and watched and waited, while around her the sky lightened, the birds began to chirp, and all around her a new day began.
Dawn. You could always tell when it started, even before the light actually changed. There was a difference in the feel of the air, a kind of hush, a sense of expectation perhaps. And then the first birds would begin twittering, the horizon would begin to pale, and another day begin.
The sand underneath her was certainly more comfortable than the pebbled beaches of Brighton, Amanda reflected in the predawn darkness. She’d come down to the lake around midnight, after explaining to Meggan she had something that needed doing - Meggan had pouted, but she knew she wasn’t allowed to be around the magic and so had acquiesced. Taking a final drag on her cigarette, she stubbed it out beside her, and then stood, brushing off the seat of her jeans. There it was, the stillness, the moment before, the edge between night and morning.
It was time.
She didn’t have everything for this. Back in Brighton there would have been a bunch of people who all knew the person to wait out the night with, passing around bottles of stolen booze and thinly-rolled joints. Telling stories and memories and lies, laughing and sometimes crying. There would have been the pile of possessions, to be shared out among those who had come, who had known them best. A bonfire on the beach, to ward off the darkness and the chill. But this wasn’t Brighton, and the street ways, the little rituals they’d had such as they were, they weren’t the ways people followed here. This was a new life, a better life, and she had to leave all that behind her, along with the tattered clothes and the drinking and the drugs and the suspicion. But she needed closure, needed something, and she hadn’t known when the funeral was, hadn’t known how to find out. Hadn’t wanted to. Over and done with by now, she guessed. And the others, those who had known Charlie or considered themselves his friends, they were all grieving in their own private ways, and she didn’t want to interfere with that. They had their ways - this was hers.
There wasn’t a lot to pile on the makeshift raft - she hadn’t had much of anything that had belonged to him, and she wasn’t exactly going to go ask Carolyn for anything. A notebook he’d lent her, its contents carefully typed out and saved on her computer now. Some printouts of their e-mail conversations. Ticket stubs from their day at the movies, discovered stuffed in the pocket of the jeans she’d been wearing that day. And the letter she’d spent the days following writing, all her questions, all her anger, all her regrets. All this she piled on the plank she’d scrounged, a layer of scrunched-up newspaper and some petrol-soaked rags at the bottom. On the water’s edge she stopped and pulled a quart bottle of vodka out of her jacket pocket. The alcohol burned as she took a swallow, her throat becoming unaccustomed to hard spirits in the months she’d been cutting back. and she coughed slightly. Then she upended the bottle over the pile of things making sure it all got good and soaked.
Behind her the trees rustled, a brief breeze stirring their leaves, but otherwise it was dead still. Even the lake was as flat as glass, the water chilly but not freezing as she waded in, soaking through her jeans. Brighton was never this warm. “Sorry, Charlie mate, still not takin’ me kit off,” she said with a weak smile as she carefully pushed the raft out until she was waist-deep, her lighter kept safe and dry tucked in her bra. A practised flick of her thumb ignited it, and then she touched it to the vodka-soaked paper, the sudden wave of heat lifting the strands of hair away from her face and reddening her skin. Gently she pushed the floating pyre away, using just a hint of magic to nudge it further out. The raft went obligingly, the flames reflecting off the dark water as they blazed up, and then gradually sank down, the plank itself submerging until with a hiss and a puff of steam it disappeared beneath the water.
Earth and air, fire and water - Amanda stood in the water and watched and waited, while around her the sky lightened, the birds began to chirp, and all around her a new day began.
