may you live happily in the afterlife

It was September, October, November, December― the season filled with colour, filled with red, gold and death as was she. She was unnatural, her colours white and lavender, staining her person, dripping down her limbs and body like a river of blood. If it was autumn, I could not remember, the days and months disappeared and reappeared just as she did. Everything came and went, yet she was there, always there, staring at me with her horrible dead eyes.

Her colours were fake; her hair stripped of its colour and poorly dyed. Her skin was cold, colder than the wind that swept through my hair that morning as I walked to school. How I missed that wind, that biting wind that whispered to me of things to come. Yet it did not tell me about her, about what would become of me. I can forgive its failure, but I can never forgive her.

It was snowing, and every single snowflake reflected her back to me. The silence was her, my footfalls were her, everything was her. She was walking right alongside me, and I had failed to notice her ever enveloping presence. If I had, her bones would be snapped, her blood would be soaking into freshly fallen snow. Her white eyes would truly be dead, and I could go on my way, through my life without her.

She stood at the front of the classroom as the teacher introduced her to us. She stared at us, at me. She was awful, horrible, and barely human, smelling of decay, like she herself was rotting from the inside out. I knew she would infect me, kill me like she did herself. It seemed inevitable, inescapable, and those wretched eyes of hers eagerly agreed.

"Hello Lucas," she said to me. "My name is Charlotte."

She was standing beside me, and I thought nothing of it, for she was back at the front of the classroom as soon as she introduced herself to me. I excused myself from class shortly after, running, needing to get away from her, from her taint. Her eyes followed me; I could feel them roving my body, piercing my sanity. She was going to murder me, going to cut my soul into millions of irreplaceable pieces.

I knew she was moving to her new seat in that classroom, completely content. And even as I fell to the ground retching my insides out, I knew she was standing right next to me, watching, analyzing my entire being.

"Lucas, if you hate me so much then let me free," she whispered.

I refused.