"If you have any thoughts, please let me know," the woman says and clicks off, not facing her. Selena watches as she slides the phone down toward the middle of the dining room table (dark, scratched wood, an old vase with a crack through the side of it, her fault–that).
Miss Coriss, she remembers. She seems older than she did when she'd met her just a few hours ago, her face looking almost gaunt, tired.
"It's alright," she says. "We'll keep looking."
Only Selena knew it would be no use. The looking thing. She didn't have anybody else. Not a soul she knew for sure who'd want her. And Sam. She couldn't leave Sam.
She stares at the too-clean spot in the middle of the worn out silk rug, the last thing they got from her grandparents, the ones who'd have wanted to take her in, had they not been too dead to want anything.
She wishes again she'd been there when it happened. Wishes she could have stopped it, the way she had so many times before. But she wasn’t there. And Sam was too little to know what to do with a thing like that.
She stares at the clean spot again, and she can almost picture her there, they way Miss Coriss described it to her afterwards. She can picture her slim arms thrown back, her back arched in a way that nobody still alive can pull off without snapping it like a too-dry branch.
“Hungry?” The woman looks at her, then leans over and grabs the phone, stuffs it into her bag. Selena looks at the oversized canvass thing, thinking how not-pretty it is, drab and gray and not at all the sort of thing a woman should carry, at least not one who considers herself pretty. Mother was. Pretty. The kind of pretty that made her wish she wasn’t.
“Not hungry,” she says, watching the woman’s face fall. “I could go for a cup of coffee though, if we can go see Sam afterwards. I’d like to….” She suddenly can’t find a way to dislodge the words from her throat. A way to make this stranger see how this was all her fault and she is terrified that Sam knows it too, knows that she should have been there. That somebody should have, and she was the only somebody they had left.
“It wasn’t your fault, Selena,” the woman says in a slow, soft way, as if talking to someone much younger.
“I know,” she lies, and slams the door to the apartment hard enough to feel the concrete rattle through her bones.
My little submission for the five-minute freewrite... Something I'm trying to coax myself into doing daily. Today's prompt was: "If you have any thoughts, please let me know." You can find the post announcing it HERE
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