broken dolls.

Just a scene I wrote one day in class, when I should've been working on my final paper, unedited, unchanged, so forgive any errors or wretched writing. More of a goof than anything.

 

In the dark, off to the side and far away, in front of a glass building, a man steps out. His suit was crumpled from stress, his brow still stippled in sweat, and a dull throb echoed through his frontal lobe. Undoing his tie, the man stepped through a puddle and cursed whatever god he believed in. Closing his eyes to steal a moment for and from himself, the man took a deep breath and centered himself in his happy place. He’d seen it all before, a thousand times. He’d been here more times than he could count. A day spent getting his balls busted by every a*s-backward f**k on the planet, and his nitwit of a boss. He’d done it time and again, and why it was troubling him so terribly this time around, he couldn’t rationalize, but in the dark, he felt a slow chill run up his spine, sending the hairs on the back of his neck on end.

 

The man looked around, pulling apart the shadows and the low shrubs, rain glistening in the moonlight, to find nothing at all in his mind’s eye. There was nowhere for anyone to hide in the lot, and it had been designed that way. A few years before, a woman on the third floor was abducted, raped and murdered coming out of the office on the way to her car, since then, the shrubs have been trimmed impossibly low, and sometimes the man wondered why they were there at all.

 

As he turned back toward the lot, eyes darting over the puddles he knew he’d find a way to step through, even though they were on the other side from where he’d parked. He knew it, in his bones, it was one of those days, he would find a way to step in every puddle in the lot, and running his fingers through his hair, he took the next step toward the pocket and noticed a young girl standing just on the edge of the sidewalk leading to the lot and straight in front of him.

 

He had never seen the girl before, and he knew that if he had, he would’ve remembered her. Under the curling red locks were the flattest, coldest set of grey eyes, but the prettiest little mouth. The edges of her lips curled up, and even in the moonlight, her eyes glinted with the paradigm of innocence and virtue.

 

Approaching the girl, she did not move, continuing to block his path. In any other moment on any other day, he would have probably simply walked past her without paying her much mind, but on a day so full of s**t, he had to do the good-Samaritan thing. He stood in front of her, looking down and smiled, making a gesture to speak to this girl who barely came up to his waist with her arms clasping one another behind her back.

 

The young, young girl stood at the foot of the man, staring up at him and smiling, something cold wrapped in her hand. Her mind was placid, and her hand study. Not an inch of her body shivered in the cold, beneath the falling rain. She smiled and smiled and smiled, staring up at the man staring back at her, his brow furrowed in thought. She could see it in his eyes, the debate of whether to do the right thing or just move along and leave it for someone else, and she could see it in his mind, the man had had enough ugliness in his day, that maybe doing the right thing would make amends for the loathing of his boss. He sighed and a bolt of lightning flashed, casting the object in her hands in a harsh glow, glinting in the electric brightness. She continued her innocent smile, gripping it tighter, feeling its weight. It was as long as her forearm and pressed against her soft, pale skin, it was frigid to the point of sharpness, as though she were being cut by the blade.

 

He looked up to the sky, the clouds rolling in heavy and thick, and began to kneel down. Something in his stomach pulled, trying to stand him back upright, but he didn’t care about soaking his pants through, and it was only rain. He opened his mouth to speak, and as his knees came to a rest on the wet concrete, he saw into the girls cold, grey eyes and realized he’d made a mistake. He wasn’t going to step through all the puddles, only one more, his own, he realized as the long blade of a cheap butcher knife punctured his neck.  He felt it pierce the skin, cut though his jugular, through the fatty tissue, open the back of his esophagus and do it all again as it ripped through the other side.

 

The mans body crumpled and the girl turned and walked away, listening to the gurgling noise as the man gasped his death, breathing for air and preying it was all a vicious nightmare in his head. He tried to speak, but nothing came out but a splatter of blood staining the concrete for a brief second before the standing rain water pulled it back out to sea, to the parking lot. It was the deep arterial red fading to pink and then to nothing, and his last sight was the heel of the girls Mary Jane’s skipping through the parking lot, whistling a happy tune.