When Clyde Parker, the wayward son and the rotten-apple of the Parker family-tree, storms his way back into Avery Fields, he sets out a flurry of butterfly effect in Dawn Marshal's life.
...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
THAT NIGHT SHE DIDN'T get a wink of sleep. She tossed and turned in her bed restlessly. These days she felt heavily insomniac, even after cutting down her dose of caffeine to somewhat a reasonable and apt amount.
Never knew, something as natural and effortless as sleeping would turn out to be such an ordeal for her.
She whisked the sheets off her body and crept down her bed, shuffling around for her slippers in the darkness till she gave up and barefooted tiptoed to her dresser. Her toe nudged against a cardboard box. And a rather battered ancient-looking journal thudded on the floor.
Her eyes frolicked there momentarily. She bent down, her fingers caressing the torn edges of the journal, reminiscing the familiar touch. The once-shiny-gold of the cover had resulted in a dirty-brown due to years of negligence yet the golden letters inscribed on it that read 'Journal' glistened under the pale moonlight.
Picking a pen from the penholder on her desk that was cluttered with stacks of due assignment papers and thick text-books; she clutched the journal to her chest and climbed up her bed, slithering under the sheets.
She swept the dust off the leather cover and her fingers as if they sprouted a mind of their own, riffled through the dirty-yellow single-lined pages. Her eyes fell on two words, a name: Dawn Marshal in the handwriting of her twelve year old self.
With the constant flicking of pages she stumbled upon, water-stained, smudged words, handwriting varying with time, the ink changing from glittery-pink to a blue or black fountain pen. Some nights she wrote barely a few words, other nights there were three-pages worth of emotion written in a fine cursive or tiny illegible scrawling, there were blobs of ink at the beginning but as the end drew closer, the ink started to fade. So did the writing.
It started to get lesser in amount, no long paragraphs, only words strung together in phrases. Her last two entries were two summers ago, "12th December, 2015. I feel so broken that I can barely breath without shedding a tear. Don't know how I will tell this to Ethan, Mia and Alec." She remembered all too well what that date and the vague instances signified.
Then there was this other one, "15th June, 2016. Dad left this morning. Mom is devastated. She can't stand to sleep in the bedroom. She sleeps on the living-room couch but I doubt if she catches even a wink of sleep at night. I have never seen her look this tired and sick. I barely see Ethan these days unless I find him passed out on our threshold like last Saturday. When did things get this messy?"
The next page was blank, so was the one after. What followed were a series of 120 single-lined, yellowish, blank pages. And in that moment, tempted to fill in the blanks, her quivering fingers grasping the pen, hovered over the blank page. The urge to fill it was stronger than ever for nothing scared her more than the blank page, of a story being incomplete.
Her pen kissed the ochre paper, "19th October, 2018. Caleb Parker killed me. He killed me in the sweetest way it was possible to kill someone. How do you survive if your heart skips a beat? How do you survive if the blood in your streams is rushing so fast that you might have combustion? How do you survive if your heart is suddenly on the verge of exploding? I don't know what this is. I don't know how this is. All I know is it is and I am happy that it exists."
