Young Writers Society

Author's Note: Written for an English task, but then I realised I went over the word limit (despite the awkward cut off)and the topic was off by a huge margin from the marking criteria. So I decided I might as well post something since all I've been doing so far is lurking...:D

Andomeda Against the World

Chiridawn

The woman was inconspicuous at the most. She was the Mary, or the Jane, or the Ms Smith who frequented the morning pedestrian paths every second day with The Fearsome Chihuahua snarling at her heels.

So when she was declared missing, subsequently dead one evening, it naturally arose gales of disbelief. Who would kill such an innocent woman? Nobody could think of a reason, and perhaps because of this, the death became more ominous. A killer who killed for the sake of killing was worse than one who fit in the boundaries of human logic. It meant that anybody could be next.

And for someone who fit in so perfectly in the painting of our normal lives, this was the rock through the window..

----Normality is not lasting. Those who do not change do not survive. Let this be a warning.

The case was a great shame, she noted, pausing briefly to utter a few condolences to the dead body. In just a few hours the undertakers would arrive, solemn masks moulded seamlessly onto their faces. The church would be garlanded with white flowers and contrasting colours of mourning, and the woman’s body in a simple coffin would be laid before a stone statue of Christ draped limp on the erect cross.

Then the earth would swallow her mortal body whole, and her spirit would rise through the layers of sedimentary rock and into the sky, where she would float through an expanse of space-time and beyond to wherever heaven was.

If it was in the clouds, she could reach it, Andomeda thought. And we could all visit her on a hot air balloon.

It was a tempting possibility but right now, the task on hand was examination of the body.

She had black hair, and briefly Andomeda wondered if the killer was racist. It was difficult, in her line of work , and especially on this case where there was little or no indication of the cause to deduce an answer simply from the surroundings. Each item was a branch, and only when the holographic universe contains more than theoretical proof will Sherlock someday exist. But even then, as super-computers become faster and more accurate in processing information, the human brain should only be put to the betterment of society.

Namely, the creative aspects.

And so Andomeda thought it would be perfectly plausible if this had been an alien encounter while walking the dog one morning as her Chihuahua the Fearsome had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. You could never know what may assail you on a frosty morning.

“She looks rather cold,” she observed. It was winter and the woman was wearing a T-shirt.

Her colleague shrugged. “Old people have tough skin, their nerves are less acute. And the Big Guy told me to inform you that you were fired.”

Andomeda was not surprised.

She raised an eyebrow, took one last sweep of the corpse and stepped out.

The time was 8:45.