Prompt My Pen- The Fade

Prompt My Pen…

Prompt my pen is a super fun feature I run whereby my reader group THE TIDAL TELLTAILS suggest visual prompts and i pick my favourite to write a flash fiction, poem, or short story each week.

Here’s this week’s prompt!

Submitted by Jenna Martinez

The Fade

By Kristy Nicolle

The basement teems, just as it always has, as it always will.

I wonder if I was born here, for if I was it would explain why this darkness is all I can remember. The slow, ominous sound of footsteps crossing the kitchen floor of the house overhead mirror my infinitely tense heartbeat as I lie on the damp earth of the floor, the darkness swirling around me and curling in on itself, a void of endless dark fantasies.

Thrumming heart, blood pounding in my ears, goosepimples rising like small mountains across my skin. This feels like all I have ever been, maybe all I will ever be.

My toes curl in the soil, the feeling of wispy insect legs crawling across my bare skin a comfort more than a horror now.

I am sitting in my usual spot, at the bottom of the basement stairs, in full view of the crack of light that slices through the endless dank as it slides in beneath the door in a single buttery ray.

It seems rich, and yet I wonder how much my eyes could really take. I wonder if the world overhead is bearable to those who haven’t spent their lives trapped underground, wishing upon stars they can’t see, and dandelions they cannot touch, that one day I might break through the crust of arid soil and bloom.

I know only of the world beyond from the enormous stack of paperbacks that had been discarded on one of the many bare-bones shelves lining the far wall, all of which I had taught myself to read over years upon years while my captor was still coming downstairs and lighting exactly three candles each night.

She would look upon my face, upon the hollows of my cheeks, the dark bedraggled inky mess of my hair, and smile, cupping my cheek with her palm.

If I smiled back, she left without another word. A mother pleased with her daughter’s diligence.

If I couldn’t summon the curvature, I was met with a slap. A naughty child undeserving of the light.

On those nights, where she extinguished the light of the kitchen overhead, I would curl up right behind the basement door, peeking under the gap, begging her with silent prayer to switch it back on.

The floor beneath me might be a garden of soil, but nothing grows here. And neither will I. It has been months since she last sent down food, and I am yet unsure how I have survived. Water drips constantly from a leaky pipe overhead, and if I open my mouth and close my eyes, I can almost imagine I’m outside amongst the rain.

I don’t know what changed, or why, but soon, after her visits became less and less frequent, I realised that upon each careful descent of the stairs, I did not hear her latch the chain.

I wondered if it was a trap to begin with, to see where my loyalties truly lie. But then… then today… today I woke to find myself colder than usual, and when I looked up that same rickety wooden staircase, I found the door open, blowing like an unmanned puppet in the breeze.

Yet here I sit. Unable to move, fear chaining me to the earth, restraining my butterfly wings that have forged in the cold emptiness of this very room.

Why is the door open?

I sit and listen.

Quiet.

Not a footstep, nor the creak of a floorboard, or the shifting springs of a depressed mattress beneath her dead weight.

A breeze ripples through the basement suddenly, playing on the protruding ribs that sit beneath my thin cotton gown like a xylophone.

My legs are shaky beneath me as I stand, trembling like windchimes that are vibrating harder with each chill gust. I tread carefully over the floor I know more intimately that I know my own body. The wind ramps up again, almost as if it’s whispering to me… fly little butterfly, fly…

I take the first step gingerly, a creak emitting and making my heart surely stop within my chest, ears prickling as I listen for her oncoming wrath.

One moment.

Two.

Nothing but silence and the alluring song of air from beyond the door.

I take the chance, pitter pattering my way up the remaining five steps and brace myself in the doorway, dizziness clutching at me like a slender pale hand that’s burst from seemingly nowhere through the floor.

Now what?

The kitchen lies in the dull sepia light of the setting sun, the cracked tiles a flawless white, the only sign that there’s a dirt basement below is the brown smudges embedded into the grout like mould. Apparently even elbow grease could not remove them.

The windows rattle in their panes, flimsy, just as I feel as I put one foot in front of the other and raise my hand up to shield my eyes from the overwhelming light that battles through thick gingham curtains still drawn closed.

Shadows are cast long from a single table holding a cup of tea made from the finest china I’ve ever hoped to imagine, but no steam rises. The liquid within stone cold as I wonder whether I should rush forward and take it.

No. It might be a trap. Be poisoned.

I pass, the front door in my sights now, beyond the kitchen and down the hall. This too is flapping wildly in the wind.

Do I dare to hope?

The downy hairs on the back of my neck stand on end and I feel my whole body humming with the possibility of escape, of freedom.

I creep down the hallway, not stopping to look at the baby pictures hanging on the walls. The eyes glaring down at me only too familiar, yet painfully innocent, painfully happy. I turn my glance instead to my grazed knees, knobbly protrusions of bone capped in mud, a thick layer of dark fuzz the only thing between them and the elements.

I swallow, the taste of the outside coating my tongue in an exquisite concoction of rain-soaked leaves, fresh water, and cedar crawling with woodlice.

I pass the threshold of my captivity at last, and stand the porch, breathing in the wild. It surges through me, the cold freshness of the air, the crackle of leaves tumbling through the air like shrapnel of a war that has ceased for but one night.

I don’t look back, stepping down off the porch and letting the new soil, the new air, touch my skin and fill my lungs with new hope.

I look around, eyes furtive as they dart from left to right, suspicious as a chipmunk returning to bury its prize nut for the winter. The trees loom overhead, casting long bony shadows across the littering of leaves and sticks that are strewn across the yard.

I’m alone, the only guards the trees, the only alert the wind.

But why?

After all this time…

Why now am I permitted to go, to walk free… to be a real girl?

My heart tightens at the notion I might truly have found what I’ve always been searching for, and suddenly I’m running.

My hair streams back in dark endless ribbons, snagging on twigs as my feet snap brush underfoot haphazardly.

She’s not here. Or if she is, she’s not awake…

I must be fast, if I wish to escape, if I wish to get out of this forest and find people to help me.

My heart pumps ferociously, my knees trembling in the wake of each and every momentous step, the light of the late day suddenly shrouding me completely as I burst into a clearing and trip clean over some kind of rock.

I cry out, thundering to the ground and throwing my arms in front of me to break my fall.

I almost laugh, but then tears spring to my eyes as I realise that I might have just sabotaged my own escape.

Twisting over in a pile of thick leaves, I sit up, gasping for air, wind knocked entirely from my lungs.

That’s when I see it, and my blood runs cold.

What I tripped over isn’t only a stone.

It’s a grave.

She has scrawled my name in childish letters with slate upon the limestone… a word I barely recognise. Two numbers separated by a line. The line was my life.

Diana.

The sight of my own grave takes the remaining spirit out of me as hopelessness crawls in on all sides.

My mind returns to the basement, and I know all that’s left to do is fade.

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