Breadcrumb Trail

[MethodicalSlacker]

[Lili Williams continued from Song For A Warrior]

Lili began to talk to herself as she ran, crossing the divide between the dirt of the earth and the metal of the bridge.

"I have to get away, I have to, fuck, I need to get away, I..."

She did not have much to say.

Eventually, she stopped at the middle of the bridge to catch her breath, doubling over, hands on her knees panting, wiping non existent dirt off of her jeans. Straightening up, she looked out at the world around her, grey with indifference and sour with pity. Eventually, her eyes settled on the spot where she thought she had found Jennifer's shoes. Lili walked over to that edge of the bridge and sat, her legs dangling off the edge, looking out over the water.

Lili had listened to her play piano once. She didn't remember the exact notes, or phrasing, or even what the song was called, but she remembered how the song had sounded to her. It was somber, wearily carrying itself on limping legs down a corridor that she knew would never end. Bony fingers dragged along the white plaster cracked walls, stammering down the long hallway, as the undead corpse dragged itself along. Lili thought of what sadness would be held in those eyes, what sorrows that person, man or woman, would have seen. She thought of the years of abandonment and pain in their veins, the bones of their face cracking with a hundred years of life, thin as the strings on an aged violin, whiskers peeling off his face like the horse hair from that violin's decrepit bow, the breath whistling in and out of his twisted nose like the last gasps of a cracked reed, finally giving in to weeks of spit and grime.

She remembered just how brightly those last few measures would shine, a lone flower springing up from the rotten floorboards of that hall, fed by a crack in the ceiling letting the light and rain through, and how briefly the sad scales of the skulking stranger intertwined with the natural persistence of that flower and bled into a bright green swirl of hope and faith and desire for a new start, a new life, anything to hold on to no matter what the world outside held in its bleeding hands.

It was a song that Jennifer had wrote.

Lili considered throwing the shoes into the sea.

"I..."

Lili swung her legs back around, and began to untie her own shoes, slipping on the beaten white sneakers, a size too small for her feet. She tied her shoe's laces together, held them in her hands, then swung back over, her newly adorned feet dangling precariously over the edge.

"We're together now, again, aren't we?" Lili said, looking off into the pulsating waves.

"I don't know who did this to you. I don't know if you did it to yourself. Did you fall, Jennifer, or were you pushed?"

Her grip on the shoes in her hand began to loosen.

"I don't think that anyone who kills is innocent. I don't think anyone is innocent, period, Su, not you, and not me, but I do know two things."

"Someone is going to pay for all of this. Maybe not in this life, but in the next." Lili's breath shuddered, her chest trembling as a stray gust of wind swept her from the side. She wasn't ready to say goodbye to the ground any time soon.

"The second thing," she said, "Is that you're going to get off this fucking island."

Lili dropped her shoes into the ocean, watching them tumble over each other, watching the splash they made as they hit the water.

"Something to remember me by," Lili muttered, standing up, her eyes red with a startling lack of tears.

Then, she picked up her bag and walked away, only looking back three times.

Three times too many.

[Lili Williams continued in My Human Gets Me Blues.]