Exposed

‘DEATH may tell the darkest tales, but they are never false.’

Those words stared at me from the luminous screen for what felt like an eternity. I slammed the laptop shut.

“Who am I kidding?” The sharpness of the brooding hopelessness encapsulating my whisper sliced my tongue. My voice bled defeat. “They w-won’t read this...Nobody cares. They never do.”

The reality behind the last statement was as obvious as the fate of a stillborn child. Hell had already engraved my name in their logs.

Even if it is my last cry for help...

To the world, this was just another invidious thought from my growing collection of unpopular opinions. The very kind that was always swallowed up in this cavernous, trend-driven society’s black hole of unacceptability. I was Stawford’s ‘mad hatter’ after all.

However, they needed to know the truth. The untold truth that dragged me to the window sill and stare down on the mourning congregation.

In the centre of the pain was the town’s fair and aged seamstress, Mrs Clarice, dressed in all-black and a matching mascara-stained face. She wailed over her husband’s coffin while holding onto a taller, youthful version of herself.

“But of course, Shelly-Anne Clarice’s makeup doesn’t have a single blemish.”

She was the golden seed from the rotting tree as many would put it, being the youngest of five children not behind bars, awaiting trial or already six feet under — and the only one fortunate enough to not be a victim of the sealed paternal sexual abuse record locked in her father’s dresser. The same dresser where his commendable Chief badge, all polished and well-kept after thirty years of service, stood with the 1993 family portrait at its side.

No, not even the ‘It’ girl took notice of what laid at the edge of the car park, watching the gathering from a distance in the secondhand Mini Cooper, with a positive pregnancy strip in a shaky grip. Or the fact that that woman was seconds from the decision of making her way to the nearest abortion clinic to erase Chief Clarice’s last imprint of infidelity.

All this information from a few sittings from the roof of the bell tower watching over the cemetery brought me to this conclusion:

You’d be surprised what the deceased leave behind, and what you find. Apart from their lifeless bodies obviously.

However, just like any good story with all its unbelievable discoveries, perilous adventures, and few gratifying rewards; there are still some things that really shouldn’t be told.

For there were demons I had revived and new ones I had exposed.

Each I would take to my grave...with my own bloody hands, a ‘borrowed’ laptop and the deceased Chief’s rifle tucked away in the boot of the ugliest pink beetle convertible in existence.

Temperatures dropped. My body shivered in sync with a passing breeze, and I lifted my head to an incoming storm.