First Day Of The Rest Of Her Life

"FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF HER LIFE"
- Lily Fox

She stepped out onto the bustling street, and, for a moment, was overwhelmed with the sheer wall of sound: car horns, voices, buses heaving past. For one wild moment, she considered hopping right back on the first train out of London and going home, forgetting she had ever tried such a mad venture. She caught herself, and straightened her tired shoulders. No, this was her opportunity, her moment: this was the first day of the rest of her life.

She stepped, on the second attempt, into the apparently unbreakable flow of people. Not a single one paid her any attention, but she was still vain and naive enough to pause to admire her professional-looking reflection in a shop window. Her face looked pale, even in nothing but darkened glass, but that was to be expected. This was the most important interview of her life, her make-or-break moment. She tried to put it out of her mind. She could be calm and collected and when she walked into that office, everyone would know she was perfect for the role.

"Oh, I'm sorry," she gasped automatically as she nearly ploughed into the back of the man in front. He didn't reply, or even acknowledge her presence, and she frowned for a moment, before giving a mental shrug. People probably barged their way through every street here. She laughed to herself at the wide-eyed girl she still mentally categorised herself as. She wondered if anyone could spot any little tells she gave off, but the further she walked, the more she realised no-one really cared a jot about her circumstances; they didn't even look her way. Maybe she, too, would grow to be like this after a few years in the city.

Was this the right street? Would consulting a map look too...well, touristy? She had to get the part right, like the nervous actor on the first opening of theatre doors, she had to nail it. No slips. No giveaways. And really, she had the fundamentals, otherwise she wouldn't have made it this far. She had an excellent Cambridge degree and she was hard-working, determined and bright. She had a suit that had cost her far too much and heels that were neither too high nor too prudishly flat, and her hair had been tousled into an flattering elegant wave effect. Yes, image mattered, especially in this crowd.

It unnerved her just how little attention anyone paid to anyone else here...or, no, that wasn't quite right...how little attention everyone paid to her, specifically. Leaflets were thrust at the other passers-by; ticket touters hollered in their indifferent faces. She might have been of no more substance than a puff of wind. Nothing was thrust into her face. No-one met her eyes as they leaned on their sandwich board signs. Was she that obvious?
S
he quickened her pace. She was nearly there, anyway. The flow of people was lessening as she reached the banking district. She had worked for this and seen too many of her fellows fall by the wayside, distracted, missing opportunities. She would go for it. She had to.
Last road, oh yes, there was the street she needed. Excitement trembled in her stomach. This was finally, finally it. She inhaled, and stepped into the road.

It didn't hurt as much as she had thought; what really hurt was the driver just carrying on, as if she hadn't just been tossed like so much dead meat over the windscreen, thrown bonelessly to the road and smashed, smashed on impact. The white-hot agony she would have imagined blinding her was just a vague memory-sense. The car had sped on to catch the lights as she lay dying. She tried to force out a sound. Wouldn't someone help her? This was central London, she could see, out of misting eyes, legs and feet moving past. Her mind blurred.

Her blue eyes rolled back in their sockets to meet, at last, for the first time in this damnable city, a pair of eyes, faintly startled, staring at her broken body in the road. She implored the girl to do something, anything, just not to let the blackness take her...she was scared. Something was dragging her away from the flesh, upward, onward. Her lips moved, mouthed, 'help'.

The girl's hands, tucked into the pockets of her bright pink coat, extended, but she didn't have the strength to do more. She was...oh, so tired, so heavy. It was taking her, and there wasn't a thing she could do. The pink jacket, the brown eyes, faded into light and finally, into nothing at all.
"It's so cold," Hannah pushed her hands back into her pockets, eyes fixed on the road. She couldn't, for some reason, drag them away.
"Oh, that'll be the corpse," said Gary casually, pulling one of Hannah's hands free from her pink jacket to hold in his own.
She rolled her eyes towards him. "What?"
"You must have heard the story. It's haunted around here..." Gary pulled a face, waving his free hand in Hannah's face. "Whooo!"
She batted his hand away. "Don't be stupid. It's just a chill..."
"No, seriously," Gary enthused, his face lighting up. Hannah put an exaggeratedly indulgent expression on. "You must have read that story about how that girl got killed here last year - that prodigy mathematician kid from Cambridge, won a load of prizes and scholarships and stuff? Going to work for some big bank over there?" He pointed at a particularly imposing building further down the road.
"Probably," Hannah conceded, although she couldn't remember it.
"Well, she wasn't looking and just stepped out in front of a car here, and got mown down, of course...but get this, people say they can feel a chill here and sometimes, they can hear her walk past and stuff...'cause, you know, ghosts can't leave where they were killed..."
"Sure," Hannah scoffed. "I mean, it's a horrible story, but ghosts aren't real. Not people who've died recently, especially. No-one becomes a ghost any more, Gar'." She grinned. "It's not cool."
Gary laughed easily, pulling Hannah closer, and turning her away from the crossroad to walk on. "Don't see why not...it's not like there's any reason why not..."

Their voices settled into the mildly argumentative tones that meant a debate would ensue as they wandered aimlessly away.

 
She stepped out onto the bustling street, and, for a moment, was overwhelmed with the sheer wall of sound: car horns, voices, buses heaving past. For one wild moment, she considered hopping right back on the first train out of London and going home, forgetting she had ever tried such a mad venture. She caught herself, and straightened her tired shoulders. No, this was her opportunity, her moment: this was the first day of the rest of her life...


BIO: Lily Fox is an MA graduate living in London

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Autumn

"AUTUMN" - Lily Fox
The birds swoop low. For a moment they swirl with the leaves, all buffeted and helpless, before they sail off into the emptiness. Autumn never was my favourite time of year. Things just begin to die; feeble, burned out. I hate the ember-ash colours and the unwashed sky; I hate the smell of bonfires and the nip in the wind. I hate the beginning of the end.

They’re calling, the birds, now, but I know that many will die before they reach their migratory home. I can see them drop, exhausted, into the swirling sea, knowing they will die but unable to continue, knowing another wingbeat will destroy them. I can feel their eyelids dropping, their feet curling up in submission. Autumn is death.

I walk on through the withering grass, scuffing up leaves like an overgrown child. They mulch under my feet and smell like worms and rot. I step on over them. I pretend it’s your hair crawling with maggots, a dank dark thing left in the ground to rot. It should be you, I often think, you, who abandoned me when I needed you, you, who claimed to love me – as if you knew what that was.

Your hair was harridan red, all burnished and snaking, and your eyes were dead-sky grey. I still remember the way they glittered when you thought of some wild scheme, when you laughed at my temerity, and really, shouldn’t that have warned me? I should have seen the edge of autumn in your eyes. But I gave you my heart to cradle in your spiderweb hands and how you must have laughed inside. I thought you were the beginning of the world, but you were the mysteries of death. I wrapped you flowers in ferns and sent them to your door and the spheres sang when you kissed me with those cherry-blood lips.

“I love you,” you breathed, and those grey eyes glittered. All I could see was you.

You weren’t so crazy once upon a time, I believe. When I saw you first walking with your friends, there was an innocence about you. Was it me? Was it my submission to you that drove you on and on? Darker things each time, places I never wished to see. I dove the depths of society for you. I saw your grey eyes glazed and your red hair streaked with dirt, sweat, blood and tears (mostly mine) and I still thought you were the most beautiful thing. Even when you staggered up the street barefoot (shoes long lost) and corpse-pale, other men envied me, because it was me that picked you up from under the wheels, the bridge, the toilet, the other girl’s fist, the fire. You’d fall asleep in my arms and I’d see the trace of the girl I first saw in the downturn of your lips, when your breasts rose and fell. I picked the rubbish from your hair and smoothed it down and prayed that you’d wake up and forget it all, and I could build you up anew as a summer princess. But you were ever on the edge of the grave.

I’m home now. You’re not there. You never come. I wonder if you think of me, if when you look over here – I know you pass this area of town – if you regret or weep. I think sometimes you would laugh. I suspect you never changed at all, once you had showered away the memories, like so many times before, that you swept me away in your fire-hair and that was the end.

Oh, there we are, somewhere to lie. Mulch, mulch. I settle back in the dirt and close my eyes. You had the edge of the grave, right enough, but it was me that ended up within.


BIO: Lily Fox is an MA graduate living in London.