Our Dreams Are Better Places
It was probably around 2am, Monday. I was lying in my bed awake, my face buried in my pillow to try to block the faintest of light coming from the streetlamp outside my window. The pillow wasn't helping, the faint light was resonating through my closed eyes.
I heard gentle sobbing. It came from my sister's room. I tried to ignore it, but her cries although gentle must have echoed through the whole house. Strangely enough, I found myself falling asleep. The cries were a lullaby turning off that streetlamp. When I woke up I felt refreshed. I got up to take a shower and when I opened my door I found my sister in the hallway, in a yellow tank top with her hair disheveled. She didn't say anything. She'd usually throw a weird sex comment my way.
It's been a while since I've seen her. Although we live in the same house and go to the same school. I told her not to talk to me at school and I try my best avoiding her, I know the places where she hangs out, the stairway blocked by a bunch of abandoned desks. It really has been a while since I've actually seen her or talked to her, not that I would really want to. I don't want to put up with her weird sense of everything. But I'm stuck with it.
I'm stuck with it. We live in the same house, go to the same school, our names differ by a single syllable and her room is just across mine. And she, with her disheveled hair and yellow tank top, is in front of me.
I brush past her and proceed to the bathroom.
From the angle where Tomoki was standing, behind the doorway, he could see her sister's reflection on a cutter knife that was lying on the floor. He just got home from soccer practice and was dying for a shower. The knife was soaked in blood, the floor too, and it made his sister's face a little redder at least on the reflection. Her face was pale white from the blood loss. The tiles where white, the walls, the sink, the tub, the blood that came from her cut wrists plunged into the tub trickling to the floor colored over the ghostly scene. It was her bed of roses, her death bed.
For a while he couldn't move, his mind was blank, he stood there staring at his sister.
It was a work of art for Tomoko, her final masterpiece. She opened her eyes slowly and saw a dumbfounded Tomoki in front of her. He should be applauding at her tragedy, or perhaps her only audience was left too mesmerized. Tomoko shut her eyes.
When Tomoki snapped out of his limpness, he phoned for an ambulance. He shouted for his mother, nothing. Did Tomoko plan this ahead? She knew when the house would be empty and she-. He didn't know what to do. He shook his sister by the shoulders calling her name, fervently begging her to please come back. Blood stained his white uniform when Tomoko, with what little strength she had left, reached for him and caressed his face. "I won't barge into your room anymore, promise."
It took the ambulance five minutes to get there. It was the longest five minutes of his life, desperately shouting "Tomoko", his pathetic attempt to put pieces of a broken glass back together. Two men came into the bathroom, one checked Tomoko's pulse, he checked again. They glanced at each other. The other man tapped him lightly on the shoulders.
That night he was lying on his bed trying to make sense of what happened. His mother was downstairs crying, his father that was on a business trip cancelled it and was back home sitting on his chair, he looked at his wife and wondered how he no longer knew his daughter.
Back in Tomoki's room, the only light came from a streetlight a few blocks away. It was blinking the way fluorescent lights flicker first for a while when it's turned on. Bzzzt-bzzzt-bzzzt. Then the streetlight died out. In his pitch dark room, Tomoki wondered how he let this happened. How the only time when she let her sister touch her was when she said her last words. How he ignored this coming. He knew it all along somewhere in his mind, that her sad attempts to be considered in this world would end in the tragedy he saw. He ignored those cries back then, those desperate attempts to make him talk to her, asking to notice she was there. He looked the other way and walked a different hallway simply because he didn't want to bother, he left her to rot with those abandoned broken desks to barricade her. If maybe he just considered allowing her into his room, none of this would have happened.
"I won't barge into your room anymore,"
Tomoki still felt his sister's cold hand against his cheek. The uniform was hanging in his closet, with blood stains of what's left of her sister.
2am, Tuesday. There where cries resonating through the whole house, this time Tomoko's room was silent. Tomoki found himself unable to sleep.
AN: Thank you for taking the time to read my story. This is my first work of fan fiction and you could help improve my writing by leaving reviews, thank you!