His Little Flame

Chapter 32: Range Rover

☽ MAEVE ☾

I haven't been back here in a while.

I almost forgot how I lived only some years ago. In this small beaten-down apartment just outside of Paris. The walls stained ugly yellow from the cigarette smoke, the wooden floors lifting and rotting from years of negligence.

The smell of alcohol—beer to be exact, occasionally something stronger... scotch or bourbon. The overwhelming smell is nothing unfamiliar to me... to any of us.

I can't tell whether I'm lost in some cruel construct of my imagination or a memory. Maybe both, but the line in between has begun to fade.

I turn my head, looking around the familiar bedroom of my late childhood. The walls were covered in archaic markings in crayon, left behind by my foster siblings. The last memories I had of them before they left. Each was adopted by wonderful families whom I hoped cherished them as much as I did.

My eyes unwillingly moved about the room,  stopping at the open window. Intricate carvings covered the stone around the window. I always found irony in it. The outside of the building always looked beautiful like an antique stored away and persevered; however, the inside was rotten. A hell encased in four walls.

My eyes shifted once again, casting down at the fresh cigarette burns on my thighs. It was at this moment I recalled this juncture in time. My last memory of this place.

Oh, how cruel my mind was to me! Making me relive this day, locked in this body, unable to look away or run. I'm stuck watching these painful memories like I'm strapped into a chair with my eyelids stapled open.

I plastered a few bandages onto the burns before hastily pulling on a pair of pants and marching to the window. Despite the beauty of the building, it had one blemish: The metal gate over the window had been torn from its rusted bolts.

Most of my foster siblings were adopted. I, on the other hand, have grown far too old. I'd turned sixteen this winter. No one wants to adopt a teen. Despite being grown, I wasn't the oldest.

Genevieve Girard was the oldest before she left last year. The memory of her used to sit at the front of my mind, constantly remembering the guilt of living past her. Now, outside of this hellish memory, I barely remember her.

How could I forget someone like her? How could I ever be happy?

I had been the last person to see her. Her beautiful black hair had been cut short. Her lively blue eyes were dull and faded.

I found her on the night of her eighteenth birthday. The window was thrown open and Genevieve sat on its sill. She'd heard my footsteps creak against the floorboards. She turned her head, black hair bobbing unevenly around her cheeks. Her bloodshot eyes swelled with tears as she looked back at me.

"Je suis désolé," were her last words before throwing herself off the ledge.
(French- I'm sorry.)

That was the moment I became truly alone here.

Now back in this present memory, the gate of the window had never been replaced and the blood on the street had faded but not disappeared.