Here is my entry for Mrs Bella Riddle's Success challenge on The Dark Lord's Most Faithful Forum. 400 words exactly. This ain't Bellamort, but hopefully it'll satisfy ;)
Success
The challenge is to focus on success. It can be success as achieved, observed, failed at or anything else. However, you choose to interpret success.
She sees it everywhere, slowly turning her head. Polished, impeccable surfaces, shiny expanses of what she owns, of what they earned, flawlessly put together to design the picture-perfect shape of her existence.
(Success.)
She trails a white, thin hand over smooth objects, proud and wary – careful, just the lightest brush as she wouldn't want to soil with fingerprints the brilliant planes. Careful, but it never keeps her satisfied – she'll have to scrub harder.
(In the flawless arrangement of kitchen devices and pricey trinkets, there is a life from the glossy pages of a magazine, one she would never dare living in.)
Petunias grow in her garden, thornless, languid common flowers she begged Dudley, a thousand times, not to stomp on. She cuts them in their prime to fling them into a cool china vase with just a bit of water at the bottom; she touches them, lightly, lightly, watching them decay. She throws them away long before they actually wither – for they cannot fit the rest, her marketable, durable, predictable universe.
(Seeing a dead flower reminds her of the bud that should never have opened, so long ago in a freckled and innocent hand.)
Her memories are her pictures, in perfect order in albums or careful symmetry over the mantlepiece. The rest is not worth considering and she scrupulously banishes it. Her world is tangible – the strong, heavy body of a husband who provides for everything she needs, the greasy blonde curls of a son who half-leans away from her touch with a bored look. She holds what she has, in a pale and skinny palm, bony fingers extended. She doesn't close her hands – she leaves things out for show.
Sometimes it's not enough. Sometimes, she longs to fling across the room the expensive items that were her kingdom dreams, trail her fingers across the walls and tear – tear off the paper, shatter her manicured nails. Primal instincts roar from the pit of her to have the cage destroyed, until she almost forgets that she designed and ordered it herself – that she begged for the pretty cage, scowled at the thought of doing anything of her own, longed to live in a glossy magazine, healthy son and well-off husband.
The face she sees, distorted reflection over icy surfaces of her kitchen, has no place in a magazine, however. Maybe she ought to tear at that instead.
And then she forgets.