When she had been left alone and distraught, Lila remembered that she had simply sunk to the floor and curled up into a silent ball.
She remembered how all her tears had dried up and the hollow emptiness where she had been taught where her heart was.
She had counted the lengths of her breaths, just as she had been told to do.
"one two three four five."
"one two three four five."
"one two three four five."
She had no idea for how long she had been sat down there for, in the centre of a messy room, surrounded by smashed up pieces of long buried junk and tens upon tens of dust bunnies. Nothing moved with the windows closed, and nothing made any noise at all.
The house was completely empty after all, save for her own presence.
Sh
Digging in the garden was something simple and easy.It didn't require much thought, and as soon as one had found themselves a sturdy enough stick, then they were set. They were free to dig to their heart's content.Maybe they would find themselves a dinosaur bone. Maybe they would find themselves pirate treasure, or maybe even a Roman coin, if they were lucky.Digging was a mindless task that made your back break and your legs strain to keep you upright.And it was in those mindless moments, outside, that it occurred to Lila that she could just simply... leave.She could leave right now and she could seek out a new and better life away from here. She would never have to hurt again. She would never have to go to sleep crying again. She would be able to play like all the other children, she would be able to go to friend's houses, play with their electronics, eat their cookies and biscuits.She would be able to hate school, just like eve
When Lila finally heard any sort of noise that didn't come from her, or her activities, she was content that she had dug herself a big enough hole to show that she had at least been in the garden for a long enough time.Also, if it it didn't turn out to be large enough, then she could just lie and say that she had been trying to find crickets in the garden here again.She picked herself up and gave a cursory attempt at trying to wipe the mud off the front of her raincoat, before turning around to investigate the noise.She trekked into the kitchen, through the back door and took off her wellington boots, placing them outside to keep the mud away from the kitchen tiles and to avoid having to wash the mud off herself.She apparently never did it right, and that every movement she made, according to her mother, created another additional ten jobs that needed to be adressed. Lila had tried finding them, but she hadn't succeeded so far, no matter what her moth
"Lila! Lila!" Lila's mother screamed out, her loud, high pitched shriek echoed out throughout the house and the garden.Lila, herself, froze up, the feeling of ice running through her veins, freezing her heart. She heard each and every beat of her heart, loud and clear, a thumping rhythm that counted down the seconds of her life like the drum beat of her execution.Her legs shook, unable to move under the control of her mind anymore, seemingly developing their own consciousness and volition, electing to remain stuck to exactly where she had hidden herself at the side of the house, rather than running away.Lila dryly swallowed once, twice, before holding her breath to try and focus herself.If she ran away now, her mother would only be more and more angry whether she was caught or not. If her mother catched up to her, then she would be met the fury of a volcan's lava, forced to travel to receive the victim of their rage.But if Lila wasn't ca
Lila didn't know when she fell asleep in the basement, lying there in a broken heap, next to a pool of her own vomit at the bottom on the stairs.But she did know was that she was back in her bedroom when she awoke. She laid down on her pillows that were propped up around her, cradling her body, and that she was lying on her side.She brought a hand up to her head, feeling around at the back, hissing when she felt it sting, and confused when she felt that it was wet. She touched lightly at her upper scalp, where her mother had tugged and pulled, feeling the same wetness there as well, and the accompanying pain as well.Pulling her hand away, she looked over to it, relieved when she saw that the liquid was clear, and just simple water, alleviated from the worry of staining her blankets and pillows with crimson red blood that would need to be washed out, and be seriously treated.If she went to a hospital, she didn't know what she was supposed to say
As soon as the sun sunk below the horizon, dying the sky as red as Jasper's hair, and the room was finally, mercifully, empty, Lila decided that it was time to at least learn the time.She shifted her head incrementally, lifting her shoulders up to keep the pillows away from her sensitive scalp, so she could shift just enough for her eyes to strain to the side to read the clock.Through blurry vision and her tears, Lila figured out that it was only seven in the evening.Her father would arrive home in approximately half an hour and would get out of his work clothes to dress in his nightie, and then the family would have supper. Lila would get some free time to play on the living room carpet at his feet as he watched whatever old episode of Star Trek again, for the two hundredth time, before he got tired of Lila, and sent her off to sleep.It was the only real time that she had with him, and he was hardly ever interested in what she said and what she
When her parents had their second child, Lila felt dead, tossed aside, unsurprised and disappointed in them for creating another life to ruin as callouslessly as they had done to her own.She was left in a perpetual state of mourning over the person that she could have been, and all the things that she had done, all the thoughts, hopes and dreams that she had denied herself, and now she was being thrust into the position for mourning for another person.Life wasn't fair.The new baby was a strange new addition, over ten years younger than her, and usually a smiling, giggling, messy, vomit fountain, the child seemed to automatically burst into tears as soon as Lila entered her sight of vision.After the first few times that she had done so in reaction to Lila's face, Lila vowed to simply exist around her new sister, never directly interracting, but just doing enough to avoid bein yelled at for her mother.The cries of her sister never grated o
It was otherwise another innocuous day as Lila walked home from school, kicking along sticks on the path with her school shoes and feeling sick to her stomach as she kept on going.The sun was beginning to set under the horizon, shining out a bright, vivid gold, lighting up the both the trees behind Lila, and the shallow ditch that ran concurrently with the path, following it for a little while before abruptly disappearing, the sunken ground which made it rising for no apparent reason to become flat and level with the path.It was currently autumn, with various piles of rotting leaves filling up the hole in the Earth, and not particularly ideal to jump into and pretend that you were in a trench. That experience was reserved for only a few days in the summer - days that had decidedly passed a while ago.Lila was reminded, by the sight, of several assesments that she had due on the Monday, after the weekend, on History, French, and Computer Science to complete ove
Lila didn't see the strangers for several days, before abruptly catching their reflection in the muddy puddle of the School Maths Yard, appropriately named after all the maths classrooms that overlooked it.The library wouldn't open for several tens of minutes, and Lila, already finished her bought lunch of a pasta pot and a square flapjack which was mostly uncooked with large, inexcusable clumps of butter sitting throughout the whole structure, with only one particular corner of the dessert containing any sweetness, the rest of the supposed, alleged treat tasting worse than damp cardboard.She had pulled out her borrowed book, one of the 'How to Train your Dragon' series that she knew would end with a cliffhanger, just like the last one, by the sheer virtue of needing the series to keep selling and keep as many readers as possible to keep spending money.Honestly, she wasn't even angry at the publisher, or the author.She only really fe
“Why’re you sleeping on the floor like that? Come on, get up. You’ll hurt your back doing that,” Doctor Marigold chided, dragging all her bits of heavy machinery around the office space to prepare for her demonstration.Behind her, Lila remained still.“I know that you’re not dead. Come, get up already,” she called out, stepping over a few sheets of paper that she had laid out to grab Lila by the shoulder and heave her up into sitting.The stubborn girl just flopped down again, not opening her eyes.“If you get the fuck up, we can move the flight a week forward so you can stop worrying about it,” Lucy Marigold shouted across the room.Like a rubber band, Lila snapped back up and finally opened her eyes.It had been harder to see the bags below them when they had been closed and Doctor Marigold wondered if she should buy the girl some sleep tablets.“I’m awake,” Li
Yolanda seemed to understand that she needed to back off and stop teasing Gretel, when the other woman's eyes suddenly misted over, and it was if she was no longer a part of this world.She kept the bubbling annoyance within her away from her face, putting on instead a mask of concern as she reached out and poked Gretel's arms, trying to maybe prod her out of her stupor and bring her back from the recesses of her mind.Yolanda had never actually seen somebody collapse inwards to a catatonic state over her own actions.It was interesting to see it all happen and fold out in front of her.She poked Gretel again, touching her in the face lightly to see if that would possibly work to pull the other woman out of her mind and back into the world where she was needed proper.It wouldn't reflect well on her if Gretel didn't wake up within the hour.It didn't feel as
When she awoke, she was sat ready to eat and was dressed just like her mother, in a pastel blouse and a lungi down to the floor.Lila looked down at herself and jumped when she heard rattling, noticing the ten, or so, bangles on each arm and the lines of mehndi that ran down all the way to the hems of her sleeves, resting halfway between her shoulders and elbows. A pin held her blouse shut at the top and a quick once over of her hair, with one of her hands, revealed that it had been styled in a simple bun and adorned with flowers.“This is weirdly romantic,” Lila commented, staring at the lit candles nestled in the variously sized candelabrums set around the circular room.There was no door, but a giant window which led to a balcony outside. There was no ceiling but the walls reaching upwards, all the way up, until they formed a dome in the same shade of dull brown that coated the floor and the giant, round table in the centre.The only dishes
“So, is she finally asleep?” Emmet asked the boy stood behind the counter. He was exceedingly slim for someone surrounded by sugar all day and Emmet could make out the outlines of his spindly elbows through his shirt. His face held a no nonsense, blunt, and almost bored expression. “Yeah, she is. She’s been knocked out on the sofa since I sent her back there,” Kai answered the long haired man in front of him, his hair pulled back by a ribbon matching his eyes before being pulled over his shoulder once more. He looked vain. “Oh good. Don’t tell her that I was involved,” the man asked, putting both his palms up to face Kai. “I’m telling her that you’re a fucking weirdo for that,” was the scowled answer. “No. Seriously, don’t tell her. She doesn’t like me and I don’t like her. She’s known my partner for longer that I’ve known him. She doesn’t trust me with him. Why’re you making that face?” Emmet tried to justify himself before giving up
“Are you sure that you’re getting enough sleep?” Kai asked Lila, watching her sway on her feet and clutching the front counter.“Yes,” she gasped, dropping her head into her hands, elbows on the table.“Go and lie down on the sofa. Go to sleep for a bit. I’ll wake you up when I have to leave for college,” Kai instructed her, tapping her on the shoulders and shepherding her towards the office.“… fine,” she conceded, letting Kai move her along towards the back.“You know that this just proves my point,” Kai pointed out, pushing her through the boundary of the door and closing it behind her.“Fine,” she whispered back to him, talking into the silence of the office.She let herself fall over the sofa, draping her upper body over the arm rest and letting her head be cushioned by the pillows. Shuffling a bit over to put her body entirely on the sofa, Lila f
“One! Two! Three! Four! Five!Now again!One! Two! Three! Four! Five!Now keep on going!”Lila landed each punch, timing her breaths to the count as she moved her fists, dodging underneath the swing that came towards her head, before blocking the second hit that came to her and moving along with the force of the fist that hit her arm.The swinging punching bag forced distance between Lila and Tweedle Dum, and she stepped back to where she was stood before, within the path of the moving bad, to put more distance between him and her.“One! Two! Three! Four! Five!One! Two! Three! Four! Five!”Lila punched the bag once more, landing all of her hits.“Okay, time for a break,” Tweedle Dum announced, grabbing the punching bag and pulling it back to him as Lila moved away from the centre of the room, sitting down on one of the rickety plastic chairs at the side of the room.She took of
“Bitch! Why’d you run off and abandon me like that!?” Lila shouted from behind the counter when Kai finally walked back into the store.She was waving her hands about and wore an apron covered in flour as the single customer in the store, an old man precariously balancing on his cane, slept whilst leaning on the radiator.“I thought that you wanted some bonding time with your family so I left you to do that it private!” Kai answered her, tiptoeing past their unconscious patron, in a combination of whispering and shouting.“They’re hardly my family and you left us in the middle of a public café!” Lila cried, not modulating her voice at all.In the background, the old man began to snore.“But you still talk to them a lot like you do to me, so I let you, and besides, I got about fifty more pages of Good Omens done in Waterstones,” Kai appealed, finally at the counter and opening up the
Gretel and Silver had their fun as he continued to teach her how the interface worked and how he had managed to figure out that the system was an older model from the lack of integration between the screen and the touch pad, and explaining how easily it would potentially be to do so once the technology, as displayed in this device, had been demonstrated and established to work in a functional product."We were working on something like this as well, back in the workshops back home for the company that I was in the research and development department for. We were trying to get our motion sensors to be as small as possible for more commercial and personal use of technology that we could sell to the public and those who couldn't afford the contact computers.We had no idea on how their tech worked, because of trade and company secrets and all, but we managed to piece together a few things by looking at the patents and when we bought a few and m
“Alright, the shop’s free. Why are you actually here?” Lila questioned, crossing her arms and staring down at the tablecloth of Jasper and Emmet’s table.“I’ve got lesson now. I’ll be back in a few hours,” the teenage boy behind Lila announced, picking up a bag that had been hidden behind the counter the entire time and rushing outside.Lila continued to stand there, waiting for a reply.Jasper couldn’t help but notice that she wasn’t meeting either his or Emmet’s eyes.“Are you planning to leave us?” he asked her back.Lila’s fingers dug into the creases of her shirt,” I’m going to be leaving for a trip soon, and I’ll be back as soon as I can. Kai’ll be running the shop and will be looking after things, broadly. He lives here now and I scheduled my leave for when his school term ends so he can take care of things.”“On thi