Oh Death (Chapter Six)

The yellow tape in front of her was garish. The black-inked "do not cross" clashed oddly, but Alice thought it went along better with the morbidity on the other side of it than the cheery yellow. A mourning color rather than a celebratory one.

Ducking beneath it, Alice walked towards the victim. The white lines were already being chalked down. These too contrasted far too much; the blood hadn't been cleaned up yet and the pavement was splashed crimson. It was an odd color, almost pastel in quality, and for that reason the scene as a whole was more like a surreal caricature than reality.

"We're pretty sure it's a jumper." Someone was speaking. A simple officer, male, somewhere to her left. All she could see was the blue of his uniform from her peripheral. But she didn't bother look at him. "We have some witnesses stating they saw her standing in the window twelve stories up..."

His babbling was a backdrop, and then it was muffled and nonsensical. A ringing had taken up in her ears, overpowering and insistent. The neurons in her brain were desperately trying to connect and piece together what she was staring at. It was impossible that they could have known who this woman was, could have identified her and then cruelly called her forward. They just wanted to confirm the details of the death, have another pair of eyes look it over before they took the corpse off to a mortuary. Make sure they didn't tamper with a potential crime scene before it was confirmed that the only perpetrator was the one whose head had been half-flattened by the impact with the concrete. The limbs were twisted in odd directions like a piece of abstract statuary, and her half-lidded blue eyes were staring blindly ahead.

"It was a suicide," she interrupted. The officer's wagging lips snapped shut and silenced. "Start cleaning up the blood, disperse the crowd." Alice didn't wait for a reply. She turned around and walked back to the yellow tape. She walked straight through it, mutely aware of the sound of it snapping as she passed by. There were confused murmurings behind her, but the ringing had started up again. She felt heat rising in her face, behind her eyes. She knew she should be sad, but she was furious. Outraged. This wasn't the sting of tears. She'd wanted to scream at that corpse on the ground, not hold the broken body and weep.

How much time? How much time had she put into pulling that woman through her depression? How many times had she taken her friend by the hand and forced her out of her dreary apartment? Dragged her bodily into the sunlight to try to wipe away the inexplicable grief? Hour after hour, day after day, to the point where she felt leeched by it all. But still, even when Rebecca's relentless sadness had started to leak over into her, she'd persisted. Even when her friend, the girl who'd grown up with her, had started to drag her into the pit with her, she hadn't abandoned her.

And her determination had been repaid with this. A crime where the victim and the killer were joined as one. She hated her and she loved her, but the feelings couldn't coexist. They clashed viciously in her head, and couldn't be reconciled. Stranded between them, she could neither let the tears fall, nor could she fall into her anger. Instead the world started to become numb. Rather than pleasant memories of being children together, bitterness took hold. She could only recall the countless nights she'd held her bawling friend, who shattered at a gust of wind. Or for no particular reason at all. She'd spent days at the precinct exhausted because she'd gotten no sleep, walked through freezing temperatures in the dead of night to get to her before she fulfilled a threat to down a bottle of pills.

Scene after scene after scene, and the chilling bitterness only got stronger. Her heels click-clicked on the ground. All of her sacrifice, and Rebecca chose selfishness. And her mother? Her father? Her siblings and their children? How would they feel when Alice had to tell them what happened? She wouldn't leave it to anyone else. She couldn't do that. Rebecca departed and left nothing but weight on her shoulders, weight on her shoulders and pain in her heart.

Her cell rang as the hours blurred past, no doubt her work trying to reach her. Either to tell her to take time off to grieve or to ask her where she had gone to, depending on whether they'd figured out what had happened. After about five attempts, it stopped ringing.

Everything she passed was stained with Rebecca. A Starbucks they'd frequented on Sunday mornings, beating out the rush of churchgoers by getting there early. A shopping mall with a great arched entryway, boasting the pricey collections of Vanity Faire. A park hemmed in by black iron fences, the gates sealed shut with a padlock as night took over.

She was everywhere, mocking her, ghosts of memory flitting over the landscape. She had trailed her fingers and left bloody rivulets behind. Alice couldn't stay here. Alice couldn't bear to live here where Rebecca's tainted memory was staring at her with those hopelessly sad eyes. It was like as a final rebuke, she was trying to instill that bleak depression into Alice's very soul, out of spite for the fact that she'd failed to eradicate it in her own. And she was no match for the will of the dead.

The sound of a distant siren cut through the air. Alice looked up, watching it flash red and blue, red and blue. The colors whirled together, the blaring got louder as the thing got closer and closer, the long screams of WOO WOO WOO became a robotic beeping. The city, with its cracked, gray-stained walls and polluted air, began to melt away. Her stomach lurched as she went from vertical to horizontal, flailing about amidst sheets and blankets and shouting something incoherent.

With a frustrated grunt, Alice reached over and slapped her alarm angrily, sending it rolling onto the carpet.