First and Last Chapter
Julia’s skin tight yoga pants exposed every muscle and bone of her gaunt frame as she leaned over the ancient balcony railing, wing-like arms arching gracefully into empty air. Julia tilted her head backward in a sanguine movement that pulled cloth over hardened nipples until they were exposed, naked and pointing defiantly at the moon. Behind and far below hovered the blurred vastness of a skyscraper cityscape. Life was good.
“You stupid, skinny, self-obsessed bitch” yelled Regina, lurching to clench Julia’s waist in a vice-like grip. The momentum of her movement carried them both over the railing. Their entwined forms hesitating, momentarily balanced on Julia’s tightly clenched buttocks that clasped impossibly at iron lacework that threatened to collapse on the whim of a molecular coin-toss.
Time stopped. The coin was tossed.
Julia’s ballet slippers slipped on dirty tiles as both women passed the point of no return, screaming a single primeval scream of free-fall horror.
Each wept to internal reviews of a life wasted in unfulfilled ambitions. Reviews punctuated by the staccato cracks of release as iron bolts tore loose from their concrete footings. Julia gazed horrified at the ancient Muse Lachesis’ carefully measuring those wrenching final moments, watching helplessly as Atropos wielded her abhorrent shears in an act of impending, inexorable Fate.
Yet the shears never closed, and Julia’s thread unraveled from Regina’s. Imponderable Lachesis’ withered palm meted out precious threads of extra time.
Regina awoke to agonizing pain in her legs. So much pain that it seemed she must have died on that balcony. She laid her head back but in doing so could not establish whether she’d moved her head or moved at all? Blurred vision and the nauseating sensation of falling... or was it floating? In the deeper recesses of her mind, a recognition was forming of who and what - but not why. Voices floated ephemerally through her consciousness. “Just rest. Rest and wait and sleep a little”.
“I will” she responded to those voices.
“Just hush”, she signaled. And they did.
It was three months before Julia could make out any coherence in Regina’s frowning visage. Three months of daily hospital visits, exorbitant taxi fares, lonely train platforms and the prickly stench of hospital antiseptic that stuck like glue - no matter how often she washed or scrubbed or deodorised.
They hadn’t even liked each other really - but what do you do when a non-friend cripples themselves in a vain attempt to rescue you from a random act of foolishness?
You pay up, that’s what you do.
It’s what Julia’s father had continually demanded, working himself into paroxysms while filling his children with his own unshakable sense of ‘right’. Do right - even if it hurts, even if it seems foolish or impossible and goes unrewarded.
And since Vince and Peter had passed away, it was Julia’s job to make sure her father’s words found meaning. Only Julia had gained neither meaning nor satisfaction from her father’s principles.
She’d had enough, and she knew what needed to be done.
