HOME | DD

Description
     Tonight I pinned a blue bow in my hair before stepping downstairs for dinner.  Blue… She died in blue.  A deep cerulean dress enveloping her scrawny body, from her head, the red-gold curls I so admired shaved off, down to her toes, blackened and bruised.  I still can't figure out if her life or death hurt more.  She was on that pedestal, lights shining from below in the clamouring city filled with drunks and whores; then she was below the filthy surface and in the ravenous embrace of the worms.  I still can't eat spaghetti without shuddering.  Figures it would be served tonight.
     I sat down gingerly in the bony, wooden chair to the right of the head of the table.  Well, left from my mother's perspective.  Does it matter?  Did she matter?  Why are all these thought mixing?  The spaghetti wriggled and screamed silently as I twirled it in my fork.  The sauce dripped from their bodies like blood, and I licked up the meatiness but saved the corpses in my napkin to later bury back in the ground where they belonged.
     "She'd have understood," I quietly said.  My father looked up at me with red-rimmed eyelids framing those painstakingly blue eyes.  Just like her dress...
     My mother stood up, a thin hand grasping the chair back insecurely.  She looked frail.  My father looked tired.  I felt sick.  I'd bury the worms later in the yard, but for now I needed to lie down.  Trudging up the stairs seemed to take less effort than tearing my eyes from theirs and keeping my thoughts from gushing out to them.  My parents didn't need more of my pain.
     The pale light in my room feebly called the shadows to gather in the corners, and beneath the one white sheet, corners stuffed angrily under the mattress, I huddled.  Sleep called an end to my thoughts, but stop they would not.  Pink walls turned blue, and everything was skeletal and shadowed.  The sheets would choke me to death before I'd come out, a saturnine moth to hail a bleeding dawn.