Broken

i wrote this, for all things, as a short fiction piece (500 words or less) for my creative writing class where the excercise was to write about someone of a different socio-economic or ethnic background than yours. *shrug* anyway, enjoy, i don't usually write prose of this nature.

The girl woke up to a grey sky. It may have been very early in the morning, or quite late in the evening. She brushed Oreo crumbs off her shirt and peeled her headphones away from her neck.

There were red marks like the ghosts of scars where they had slid down and dug into her skin. The battery light was flickering, but still valiantly blasting track 12. Even with the headphones dangling from her neck, she could hear a small, tinny echo of the song.

She had bought the CD only yesterday, and listened to it continuously. God, it was beautiful. But this morning- was it morning?- the lead singer sounded, as her mother often described her music, like a dying vulture.

With a final plaintive beep, like a heart monitor switching off, her CD player cut off the final hollow strains of electric guitar. Low Batt flashed briefly on the small digital window, then went blank. He's dead, doctor. Time of death, 5:51 a.m. EST by her bedside digital clock. 7:10 by the horse-head clock in the hall. She stumbled into the kitchen, where a weak half-light glowed from the smudge of dirty sky framed by the windowpane. The microwave clock said 12:03.

She grabbed her Cocoa Pops from the cabinet, and turned the box around, facing the manic looking chocolate-brown koala bear toward the empty chair across the table. Cold cereal mascots bothered her immensly for some reason. This morning the koala was positively leering.

The cereal was stale and tasted like mothballs. The milk was sour. She rinsed the bowl and dropped the dish into the sink. It shattered, separating the faded flowers that decorated it into isolated china-shard continents. Almost tenderly, she carried the pieces individually to the overflowing waste basket and laid them to rest on a pile of blackened banana peels and sour coffee grounds and old newspapers.

The sound of the television drew her to the living room, where her mother slumbered in her chair, timeless like a porpoise encased in ice. She didn't seem to be breathing.

The girl calculated the number of empty bottles toppled on the floor. Twelve, fourteen, twenty-three. Yes, it was time to call the ambulance. She switched off the television, blacking out the catfight between two morbidly obese cheatin' transvestites, and recited her address to the dispassionate voice at the other end.

She put on her Spongebob slippers and waited for the ambulance outside, away from the choking beer and vomit curdled air.

It was snowing. Fat white flakes like dying moths spiraled down from the sky, brushing her bare arms and settling in her tangled hair, dusting it prematurely grey. It was not snow, she realized, catching one of them and holding it close as it fluttered weakly in her hand. It was ash. Chicken little, the sky is falling. But she did not run to the safety of her pink-walled little girl's room and pull down the shades. She stood outside in her white tee shirt and green shorts and Spongebob slippers and let the sky fall on her bare skin and melt away into nothing. She stood until she heard the wail of sirens in the distance.