Selah // Something Witty

Every Shut Eye Ain't Sleep

Contest Entry for "The Flash Blog Contest - CLOSED" 
Continuation of "Every Shut Eye Ain't Sleep" .
Word Count: 793

There are many things that I regret.

Contemplation comes when all that surrounds you are slabs of concrete and infinite silence. I was war made, and turned everyone I met into the same until there was nothing left, not even the cause. All I have to show for it is a cage.

They have me locked in the basement of a prison somewhere out in the wastelands. Twenty-four hour solitary confinement with only one shaft of light to tell me that the world is not dead. The dust winds howl like ravenous wolves sometimes, sending little pieces of red sand through the grates up above. That is my only connection to the outside. I’ve had worse.

It didn’t take me long to realize that the currency of imprisonment is treason to my principles. I am a model prisoner. For every bit of information I give them about the outfit, I am given a little something for my effort. A blanket for the coordinates to a holding space out in the deserts. Books for the name of an off-planet smuggler. A comb for old bases. Confessions of past crimes in order to bathe. Dignity at its finest.

It took my darling older sister two years to visit. My only visitor. Dressed to the nines with her trademark impassive expression, she was always the best of us, and she never let us forget it. The first visit was to feed some question she needed answered in my failure. She had infiltrated the cause that she had left behind. She had taken the lives of everyone of that cause. She had taken our mother. And in the end, she had taken my freedom. Karen needed to see me locked in a box, her last discretion buried under miles of concrete and wires. Whatever it was she was looking for, she found, a flash of cruel satisfaction written all over her face as she left.

When Karen comes back the second time, I know she’s there to kill me. A full tea service was provided with foodstuffs that could only be found from contraband hauls. The irony doesn't escape me. Tradition would have me serve her as she is my elder. Traditions that are ingrained in my very marrow. In practiced hand, I make the tea. I pour her cup first - one lump of sugar and a slice of lemon. Mine I take with nothing, savoring the rich flavors of smoky brew, the backnote a sweet tang that could only mean poison. She tells me that it’ll be alright. She made it painless. I was just a loose end that she needed to tidy up. Some things, she says, never change.

Which is true. Some things would never change. Which is how I knew she wouldn’t come out of her protective tower unless it was for something she needed to see with her own eyes like capturing a loathsome sibling she had been hunting for years. Which is how I knew she would use the same poison from when we were young, and that she would kill me herself because she couldn’t trust anyone else to get such an important job done right. Which is how I knew she would need to add to my humiliation, have me make and serve the tea; and how I slipped my own poison, a mixture of book ink, red sand, and fibers from my prison-made blanket, into the teapot as the leaves steeped, only activated by the acid of her customary lemon wedge.

As the realization of what was happening dawned in her eyes, her lungs began to fill with fluid. I held her as she gasped for breath. It had taken me years to get to her. A last-ditch effort for the cause as there was no one left but me. I did not take pleasure in watching the life drain from her eyes, so much like our mother’s, only a sense of relief as the medics and guards flooded my cell. The kill switch that protected her since her betrayal was triggered the moment her heart stopped beating. And with her death, every misdeed and hateful crime we had ever committed was released to the planet’s nexus.

While they investigate her death, the guards took away everything but this book I write in and a small piece of pencil I had tucked away. They say the inquest should over soon. It doesn’t matter. I did what needed to be done. The price is that I will spend the rest of my days in this cell.

The exhaustion in my bones has left me. All that is left is solace that it is over.

There are many things I regret. Killing my sister is not one of them.