This is a sequel story to We Were Born Sick & Wasteland
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It is a big world, full of things that steal your breath and fill your belly with fire...But where you go when you leave isn't as important as where you go when you come home."- Lindsay Eagar, Hour of the Bees
•••
As the mechanism inside of the lock on her front door released with a familiar click, Bird pulled her key from the slot and pushed open the door to her townhouse.
The setting sun to her back cast a stretched out the shadow of her body down the entrance hallway past where she stood frozen in place.
"Bird?" Her driver questioned.
"Hmm?" She hummed, pulled from her thoughts at the sound of her name.
"Your bags?" He repeated, wondering where she wanted them at.
"Oh, just, uh..." She breathed, seeming frazzled as she finally stepped over the threshold inside of her house and flipped on the lights, "Just leave them in here."
She stood in place off to the side, watching as he lugged her travel bags inside, all seven of them to be exact.
Which was precisely six more than she'd left town with.
With a nod of thanks, she wished him a nice night and shut the door behind him as he left.
She'd kicked her heels off somewhere down the hallway as she made her way into the kitchen and flicked the lights on in there. Her eyes were immediately drawn to something shiny that reflected the bright lighting from above laid out on the kitchen island.
Her heart sank when she realized it was a set of keys; the keys to her house.
At what during the two months she was gone did Jim finally give up the hope of her coming back and separate those keys from the others he owned?
Walking over to the refrigerator, she opened it to reveal a few leftover bottles from his brand of beer.
Then she headed for the stairs, walking at a slower than usual pace until she reached the master bedroom they'd shared.
One of the doors to the spacious walk-in closet stood wide open.
Like a ghost had been there; a poltergeist rattling doorknobs and leaving all the cabinets open.
Jim's clothes were gone.
Despite her owning no less than four times the amount he did and the absence of his belongings being relatively small in the larger picture, it was the vacancy of what was his that left the closet looking and feeling empty.
A walk around the bathroom made the house even emptier; gone were his electric razor and the near empty bottle of cologne she'd grown accustomed to seeing on the counter.
Jim wasn't there, probably hadn't been for quite some time now -and yet there were still traces of him everywhere.
His brand of beer.
The bottle of his body wash still in the shower.
A charging cable to his phone still plugged into the outlet next to the bed.
Bird found those little goodbyes all over the house that night.
Small reminders of how things used to be; of the life that was.
A time capsule of sorts.
No wonder Jim left, she thought; he must have felt her ghost there still haunting him in the days after she'd taken off.
YOU ARE READING
Devil's Playground • Gotham Fanfiction •
Fanfiction"Sometimes you have to just sit back and watch people destroy themselves." Bird's own words after watching her biological mother die. Little did she know that apparently it was something she'd inherited. Maybe that's just part of the madness of life...
