Sea of Stars

Chapter Four: Dismiss

Spring 2011, 5 March, 0000

It was the sound of braking tyres that jolted Rosemary awake. She was pale, drenched in cold sweat.

The acrid stench of sickly-sweet rubber plagued her, and she felt the pinpricks of shattered glass scattered like rain over her skin, both equally cold and piercing.

Ding! The tinkle of a bell rang out and she jumped awake again. A middle-aged lady stood before the cashier counter, with an impatient scowl etched onto her face. Rosemary blinked and slid off her stool immediately, busying herself with the task of scanning the lady's items.

"Young people these days, so full of bad habits," scoffed the lady with a dirty look. "Can't even last a short while before they get lazy." Rosemary didn't even have the strength in her to muster up anger. She stifled a yawn, completed the transaction and waved the lady off with a smile and a "Thank you, come again."

Rosemary didn't give a hoot about what the lady was saying. Checking to make sure no one was around, Rosemary lay back down, resting her head on her folded arms on the counter. She was a light sleeper, so she would definitely awaken once she heard the bell ring. Just... that dream. That dream, which paralysed her from the inside out.

Between uni and her shifts, she didn't get to see Violet as much as she'd hoped. Rosemary was in her first year at uni while Violet had just entered Maelstrom High School as a freshman. Rosemary hoped Violet wasn't getting bullied. She pictured those childhood picnics with her sister by the beach, licking lime Solero popsicles as they melted down their chubby arms. The sandcastles they'd built with their own hands. The footprints they made on the muddy shore, which the churning tides turned into a clean slate.

A clean slate. What would it take for both their memories to become a clean slate? The recollection of that horrific accident last autumn in which their mother had died haunted her to this day. She remembered her father's scent of soap and aftershave, how he had bade them goodbye as he left to support the family making more money from overseas, which he never failed to send back home. Her mother's fragrance of cinnamon and bergamot, like the cinnamon rolls and Earl Grey tea she had used to make every birthday before the accident. Before the accident, they had been a happy, loving middle-class family. Now all that was left was a broken family struggling to get by.

Life was meaningless. Since she didn't see any point in anything getting better, she wondered if she should just hack it all and spend the last two years' worth of salary she'd earned on a dorm room at uni, where she could focus on her studies and wouldn't have to deal with all this family trouble. She let herself ruminate on this thought for a moment. Deep inside, she wished she had the strength to give up. She just wanted to protect Violet and keep them both alive.

She didn't want to be a part of this meaningless game that life was playing with her. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, or so they said. But what if she were to refuse?

***

Spring 2011, 5 March, 0306

The rest, as they say, was history. Rosemary lost her convenience store job on the fifth day of March 2011, having been caught one too many times on the CCTV sleeping on the job. Feeling dead inside, she hadn't even protested, just grabbed her jacket, apologised to her livid manager and then skedaddled. She'd slept all of three hours in the last eight days, and could practically feel her will to live gradually slipping from her grasp like water in cupped hands.

Trudging home after her shift ended at three a.m., Rosemary wrapped herself in her windbreaker to shield herself against the frigid night wind. Her black leggings hardly insulated her against the cold. The spring trees were flowering beautifully in the night, mocking her plight.