Refuge of Descent? I hate this title...

Strangers when we meet

Chapter 4- Strangers when we meet

Opal wasn't quite sure how she had wound up in an alley behind the taqueria on Cumberland avenue. She remembered leaving her parent's house and going to Tommy's. She remembered screaming at him until losing control was the only option she had left.

He died painfully and cowardly, but prolifically begging for his life. He had delivered his own eulogy more eloquently than anyone else could've.

"Where the f*** did all this talking come from??" Opal asked him numbly as she sat on the edge of his bed. "You sure as hell had nothing to say to me when we went to the clinic. Or when you were trying to f*** me. Or even when I told you I loved you, and I thought we could make a nice life together. Now it's important to communicate with me?" She felt the anger rising again, and decided she would stuff it back down.

"I'd tell you to go f*** yourself, but I think we can both agree you're truly and thoroughly f***ed already."

She looked down at his body, gore scattered around the dingy rug in his filthy bedroom. A message she couldn't ignore had been somehow delivered in the pattern of his entrails, she just couldn't read it yet. She'd have to brush up on her oracle skills.

She wandered the neighborhood for a while, it was a beautiful night and there was no reason to find somewhere to go. Somewhere in the vicinity a dog howled from her backyard. It was a sad and desperate sound. She was calling for her pack to come home. Opal found herself wishing everyone else on earth would vanish except that dog and herself. She wanted to howl with her in her backyard.