"What is it?"
Zoe asked, though she knew very well. There was a silence, the pressure in the room seemed to have changed. Connie fingered the smooth white petals of the Cyclamen, each one perfectly shaped and pointed upwards, each flower turned up toward the sky as though expressing their surprise at breaking through the soil and growing...growing. She could barely feel them, white, and innocent between her fingertips.
Gently she took hold of the plant pot, one hand on either side, and with slow, deliberate steps, she by passed Zoe and made her way out onto the ward.
"Dr Knight?"
She felt as though she must have whispered, but still the ward seemed to come to a stand still. Staff members that she barely saw stopped or hovered nearby, all turning to see their clinical lead standing in the middle of the ward holding a pot plant. It would have been comical if it hadn't been for the pale contorted expression upon her face, or the wobble of her lip and the flex of her jaw.
"Is everything ok, Mrs Beauchamp?"
Ethan's voice broke the silence. He stood by her side, hesitant and glancing about himself as though he wished somebody else would be the one to ask.
She turned to him, slowly, drawing in a breath. She looked at him, his forehead creased with concern, his glasses framing his wide dark eyes.
"See that your brother gets this, would you."
She said. And as Ethan watched she simply let go of the flower pot.
Terracotta shattered, red as blood beneath the glossy black veneer, splintering from the ground in an explosive arc of grit and soil. The flowers shivered and splayed on the tiled floor, their pretty white petals creased with translucent veins, their roots trembling about the thin black camera and the coil of wires that had been buried into it's middle.
She didn't wait for anyone else to react. Instead she left the silence, and returned to her office. Methodically she closed the door and locked it, she drew the blind and made her way over to the desk.
She paused. Inside her a thin white hot heat was spreading, creeping into every vein and burning her up. She struggled to catch her breath, and her teeth hurt from being clenched for so long.
Without thinking she snatched up the letter opener from the array of pens on her desk and with one wild jab she stabbed it through the screen of the computer with surprising ease, but when she tried to pull it back out it caught. She shook it hard, but still it remained. She sucked in a breath, and with the force of her rage behind her, she pushed it from the desk.
The wires skittered across the desk, pulling taught and giving way as it fell to the floor, plastic shattering about her feet. Then, as if a pressure bomb had been let off inside a tower of glass, she gave in. Everything she could grab hold of she tore down – she took books from their shelves and threw them to the ground, clawing at their pages, she took the chair that she sat on every day, and, lifting it above her head, she threw it with all the strength she had against the door, but still it remained in tact. She needed to get it out, this feeling, she needed to destroy it, and take with it everything that was her...or the self that she had become... She pulled the drawers from her desk one by one, slamming them so hard to the ground that the bottoms fell out, and with the heel of her shoe she speared the picture of Grace that had fallen to the floor from her desk. The glass broke out into a spiderweb across Grace's smiling face, and when she stepped away there was a hole through the centre like a gunshot.
"Grace..."
She seemed suddenly unable to move. She looked up to the mirror on the wall in front of her. She was flushed, her forehead wet with sweat, her hair stuck in wisps to her face and neck... a horror with a mesmerizing beauty that she seemed unable to recognise as herself...
She closed her eyes.
The breaking glass seemed to fall with the grace of snow, yet in truth it was more of a wild avalanche. Her fists throbbed and ached, and when she looked down at them she noted how the blood seeped from invisible cuts, warm and red against the dry white skin of her knuckles.
The mirror pieces lay at her feet, pointed, like an array of teeth smashed from a mouth, and all shining up at her with reflection upon reflection of herself. What this was, what she felt was not human, it was twisted and distorted but it was something strong. It burned like a fire laced through her heart , seeping through her veins and creeping up her spine. She could feel nothing at all, but desire; desire to hate. She was intoxicated with an emotion that she had had no intention of ever feeling, the acidity of it was residing in her stomach waiting to be spat out of her mouth in foul and vulgar words that she would be stared at for saying, except she wasn't going to say them, she was going to scream them with every ounce of breath that dwelled within her lungs.
-.-
Please let me know what you think of this update.
Any guesses as to where the story is headed?! xxx