The casket was mahogany; their mother would have hated that. She’d always said to spend money on the living, not the dead. But Rachel had insisted, had somehow convinced herself that an expensive coffin was the final proof of her devotion, the last chance to show she’d gotten something right. She stood rigid beside it,…
It had been twenty-four years since she’d last seen it, but the place looked exactly the same. She had stood right there by the end of the steps, unable to take the final few steps and ring the knocker. Sensationally, her stomach was in her mouth and her heartbeat in her ears, the past and the present streaming simultaneously in vividity consequently each overlapping the other because even after all this time everything was still the same.
The clock struck sharply at quarter to 1 a.m. It was pitch black with nothing but the whistling of trees and the gushing of wind, furiously creaking into the window panes and the empty space that was her sound but silent apartment. Squinting her eyes, careful not to let the sweet call of slumber fly away, she decides to switch her bedside lamp on, turning a bright luminescent shade of white light that fills her room, and leaves the roaches of the night scampering to safety.