Author's note: This is a series of 30 x related 100-word drabbles, based on the November 2020 prompts from 31-days on dreamwidth.
1 - Cannon River
01. drove through ghosts to get here
The first night is awful. She makes it to Cannon River just as the sun dips below the horizon, and when she slams her car door shut, she's struck by dizzying deja vu: of countless journeys criss-crossing another state, of cosy diners and complaints about the quality of the tea, of 'talk to me' and 'I can just fall asleep, and we can drift into oncoming traffic'. There's an unnatural stillness in this town that the city girl in her can't shake, and the chill of the night air creeps under her collar and into her heart. She feels tired.
02. I swallowed hard, like I understood
It takes her a few days to get all of her stuff out of her car. It's depressing how so much of her life could be compressed into an assortment of mismatched cardboard boxes. She freezes when she drops one of them and an envelope slides out — an envelope that she knows for sure she didn't pack, with awfully familiar handwriting scrawling out her surname. She can't imagine how it might have gotten there. She swallows against this flash of unexpected familiarity, and suddenly she feels dreadfully homesick.
But she'd never thought of Sacramento as home, before she left it.
03. a list of things I said I would do
Bright-eyed and dreaming of purpose, she'd been fresh out of the police academy and straight into gunfire. "Slow down, Reese," her brothers had sometimes wanted to tell her after some particularly close calls, and she'd been able to hear the fear in their voices after half a lifetime of trying to protect them from it.
She'd wanted to save lives, and she'd wanted to be good at her job. It was easy to forget everything else. And when the institution she'd sworn her life to collapsed like a house of cards around her, she didn't know who she was anymore.
04. the brightest lights in the darkest skies
She still feels lost sometimes, like she's drowning in the abundance of free time she'd never before had the luxury of having. She'd always been moving: running off to early morning calls, rushing through paperwork at the end of the day, with barely a chance to catch her breath. Now she occupies herself with paper of the book variety. Her new reading hobby reminds her of Jane, which makes her feel fond, before it makes her a little sad. But she thinks that Jane must be happy now, wherever he is, and that thought alone makes it easier to breathe.
05. waking up with stories of you to tell nobody
She hates it when she finds herself turning around to say something snarky to someone who was never there. So she puts the letters away, and these days, she's had so much free time that she's even managed to unpack all of her cardboard boxes. Everything in its place. Every day with its routine.
In the mornings she slips into uniform, just like back in her beat cop days. It's easy to be the face of something; harder to be herself. Still, some days she wonders if the unnatural stillness in this town might have smoothed to something like peace.