Notes: So apparently I lied about the whole plot thing. Go figure. I did try to write something from Amber's perspective, but it seemed way too contrived... maybe next time. Any suggestions?
Thanks to everyone who reviewed, especially the first timers.
It was like a museum. Rows of preserved treasures lined the vanity, trinkets that had once been kept perfectly polished and dust free now beginning to tarnish in their neglect. Some of the drawers still smelled a little like a woman's floral perfume, tiny little satchels of dried blossoms hidden away between delicately folded layers of silk and cotton. Shilo felt uncomfortable there, like the miniature portrait of her parents on the wall was watching her, judging her, and despairing at what her life had become.
"But I'm happy," she told the portrait softly, even more uncomfortable when the silence weighed heavily on her shoulders.
Shilo retreated from the room, quickly closing the door behind her. The silence seemed to follow her, the ghosts of her dead family curling up from under the doorway like invisible wisps of icy cold disapproval. It wasn't until she'd run into her room and had Mr. Floppy in her arms that the feeling of being chased by ghosts receded.
-
She tried cleaning once. Sorting through the things in the room and putting them into boxes one by one, dusting the surfaces and spraying the air with freshener to get rid of the stale smell. Shilo put all of the pictures into boxes. She thought she could do it, thought it would be no different from how she'd taken all of her mothers portraits from the hall to expose the wallpaper beneath... But it wasn't.
The second box was barely half full when she started crying.
Strange, that it would hit her now. She felt more like an orphan in that second than she had in the days after the opera, when the power turned itself off and she searched every corner of the house for money to buy food. Even when playing 'dolls' with her mother's corpse and the repo man suit it hadn't felt like reality.
Struck down now, Shilo was forced to flee from the room, leaving the half-packed box and the now-empty vanity as it was and the door to her father's room open.
When she calmed down she found herself in her mother's crypt, curled into a ball by the door and sobbing into her knees. She laughed then, recognising the aftermath of an anxiety attack. It was bizarre, she thought, to finally have her break down now, months after the fact.
-
The boxes we stacked in the hall, all labeled neatly in Shilo's precise hand, a catalogue of her parents' life stuffed cleanly into just eight boxes, linen and all. The Graverobber peered into the open room to look at the stripped down furniture and walls appraisingly. The bed, he noted, was a lot bigger than Shilo's.
He plucked the discarded pen from where it rested on the floor and went through the boxes one by one, scrawling one of two words on each. When he was done, the boxes read either "sell" or "keep" in a messy, angular script.
-
"Is this because I'm growing up?" Shilo asked, looking at the newly made bed, sheets a light beige that contrasted nicely with the chocolate brown of the pillows and coverlet.
"Pink isn't just for little girls," Graverobber answered, surveying the new colour scheme of chocolate and earthy tones, Shilo's bug collection hung on the walls in their cases.
"You could keep some things in here," Shilo said, looking up at him, "if you wanted to."
The Graverobber grinned at her. "Are you actually asking me to move in? After this long?"
"I... thought I might make it official."
"Goldilocks inviting the bear to stay? How poetic."
"You're Goldilocks," Shilo reminded him, tugging on a lock of his hair.
"That makes you a bear, Shilo."
"That makes you into bestiality," Shilo replied primly.
The Graverobber grinned.
Shilo's eyes widened; Not because she thought he was serious, but because of the instant set of mental images playing in her head. She hit him. "Ew!"
"You brought it up."
-
She turned her mother's crypt into the museum, taking the time to dress her body in clothes that still smelled faintly of lavender. She placed the portrait of her parents in the coffin, tucked beneath Marni's delicate, spidery hands - extra careful now that the finger bones were beginning to come apart.
A perfume bottle was placed by the corpse's head and one of her father's shirts tucked beneath the dried, brittle hair. A little part of him that could be kept close to her.
She thought it would be appropriate to put the lid back on now, but knew she would never be able to move the huge stone slabs. She settled for lying a sheet over the top of her mother, covering her from head to toe in the soft cotton.
It would do for now.