[pre]The daylight was going off. At sunset, the sky was bathed in different, dazzling hues changing with the descending sun. Breezes whispered music to whoever paid attention to their soft words. Soon, the crescent moon would appear, its dim light fading through the evergreen trees, brushing away the path of dirt in front of the marbled house. White marble. White like death. The house was called the Cold Temple; every stone of it polished with cries, its walls slippery with blood, slavery, and tears.
In the deep silence of the falling night, a girl slashed through the darkness of the late evening. Shimmering tears sprang at her eyes as she ran. Her black pearl eyes were blind. The landscape just flew pass her without her really seeing it. So long ago…Too long ago… How was it already? The memoir of a truly happy smile... The young girl remembered she already tried to smile several times but her lips just won’t obey. They were too used to the sad look she casually had. Her eyelashes now glimmered with teardrops. While slowly drowning into the blindness of her grief, Shannen bitterly thought about the conversation she had with her step grandfather. Just after they announced her she had no more family. The voices kept haunting her mind like errant ghosts in a cemetery. The tombs were her feelings, and the graves were her thoughts: Both deeply buried under a cold mask of indifference.
“Why are you even keeping those album pictures?” The wicked man said. “You have a family no more. You’re an orphan. Not worth more than a stray dog. Get used to it.”
Those words stabbed the girl. But still, she replied.
“Mind your own business.”
That reply owed her a violent slap that torn her skin at several places.
Her bare feet walked quickly through the vast garden, on the cold ceramic road. Peppermint candy canes fragrant and citrus smells immediately wrapped her, their claws searching their way to her nostrils. Through the shadows of the lemon trees, Shannen slipped her way through the blackberries bushes. She ended her blind course to a crystal pond. The silver water had the reflection of the crescent moon in its translucent waters. The young girl’s reflection went adding itself in the mirror’s gaze. Her eyes were as black as charcoals. Raindrops began to fell. It was as if the skies were weeping with the young girl, its tears showering her smooth hair. Long wicks of hair brushed her scratched face, dried blood still on her pale skin. Shannen looked at her reflection. How thin she was! Her ripped and light cloth merely covered her body.
Sitting on a smooth rock glistening with hues of steel, one foot on the white sand’s powder and the other one hanging in the cool water, the young girl took out her old family pictures. The first one represented her with her older brother.
They both had that day the brightest smile whoever could ever see. But how could she know that day would be the last she’d ever have with her family?
A sniper. A wastrel, mad killer, well-hidden in the market’s crowds, shot randomly, aiming meticulously at his victims. None of them survived. In the scrap of paper Shannen hold, the girl of the picture had gleaming, sparkling eyes. Little pieces of sky. She was a life lover. Her smile would’ve revived any wilted flower. The boy beside her was as bright. Glimmers shone in his eyes. How happy the two looked together. How innocent. How naïve. Teardrops sprang at Shannen’s eyes again. The girl wiped them away with rage. She was trembling of anger. Her parents’ didn’t even have proper funerals. In fact, they didn’t even have one. How much had she cried. But the present still stayed the same, the past left untouched.
She was only a little child, then. Her piercing, glowing eyes; snow-white flakes of flowers hanging like soft creamy bells in her hair; her rose-colored cheeks, in rosettes of soft red. Little, tiny and clumsy fingers, small feet strolling bare on the hot ground.
Dawn that day was windy, shaking the coffee berries and the acacia leaves. Above the tree were white fingers of flowers, naked on the blue hued sky. And in the wind those fingers in the bare blue sky sway, and sway with the reeling, roundward motion of the coffee berries in a wind. A fine rain had then begun to swirl softly down, causing the pavements of dirt to glisten with hues of steel and blue. And on those same roads Shannen’s parents’ bodies fell, numb and inert.[/pre]
