Sick Smiles

A short story based on a dark but every day subject. Hope you like it and please leave me feedback

I came home to my front door wide open, leafs drifting onto the doormat and the sight of my daughter, 16 years of age, with a noose around her swollen neck, staring at me while she hung down from banister at the top of the staircase. Her eyes bulged at the sight of my shadow as I walked through the hallway, expecting to see the crime scene of a robbery, not the sight of my baby girl dangling down from the sky in the comfort of our own home. Mouth twisted. Tired, sick, beaten; bruises from the bullies punches, bullet holes from their words. Marked, tired and ashamed of herself. Oh how they must be a happy now, please continue to laugh at her ginger hair, that is now intertwined and knotted into the rope that gagged every last breath of her young little life. Make sure you crack a joke at her spots, now showing up more than ever because of her pale death skin. No, don't feel bad, feel proud, feel happy and successful like you used to when she would run into the bathroom at school and call her mother, begging me to drop everything at work and come and pick her up; I did, every time because I was worried what she might do it to herself if I didn't. So what did you do today? Making her feel so bad and lonely, so sad and worried, so sick of waking up to you constantly mocking and kicking and harming her that after years of the bullying she decided enough was enough and couldn't cope with it anymore.

I looked up at her corpse that looked down to me and wondered what had they done, what did they say this time? I tried to make her know she was loved but in the end however many times I said it, their words would always mean more. I wonder if she remembered me, at her final moments when she walked through the door, forgetting to even close it before grabbing hold of a piece of old rope from the shed, carefully tying it in a knot before throwing herself over the banister. I wonder if she even knew I existed or if everything else but their actions and words didn't even matter, as if she knew no one else than them. Did she ever feel my arms wrapping around her while I dried those tears running smoothly down her cheek? Did she ever even hear anything I said, or was everything lost and forgotten because all she ever heard was their rhymes and jokes and laughter? Was everything she ever knew, anything she ever saw, just resembling a noose? Was every joke they ever told and every slur they used to shout out down the back lanes of the school, followed shortly by a sick twisted smile, like the one she now had plastered on her face?