DUSK

For Amara

Heaven couldn’t wait.

Paulo Coelho wrote; “the most important part of the language that everyone on earth spoke- the language that everyone on earth was capable of understanding in their heart. It was love. Something older than humanity, something older than the desert…”

With love one knows. No one will tell you how they knew but they’ll tell you that they just did, they just knew. And that is the magic and the curse of love.

Chapter 1

“Is she breathing?” Mel asked and the night seemed to get just a little cooler with the words, the tension was too tout. Looks exchanged between the three friends were those of uncertainty and fear. Fear of being caught, being discovered.

​“She isn’t” Mel’s voice cut the tension in half, “he really isn’t” this time with a little more relief in her voice, although her heart was bleeding in pain, she was almost happy, it was so …surreal. They knew that somehow a dead body was much easier to deal with than one that could get them arrested or worse. She could not think of what could be worse than jail, but whatever it was, it was not going to be good for either of them. They’d found their friend in the state, they could’ve called the police, in fact, Sphe had suggested it a thousand times but all the evidence pointed to them. The fingerprints on the murder knife had been of each of the girls when they had tried to pry the knife off their best friend’s chest. Blood had gotten onto the car they were using and panic had helped them drive twenty kilometres away from the scene, which truly suggests that they were in one way or another involved in the murder. The police were not an option not unless they fancied going to jail.

​A bright light suddenly shone on the far end of the street, and the tension suddenly built again this time tighter and mixed with heart-stopping fear. The car seemed to be at an accelerated speed and the faster it approached the faster the trio lost their cool. Panic filled the space, the three friends knew that something had to be done and fast, the car was almost a kilometre or two away and it was approaching fast.

​

They had two options; two or more bodies or jail time, and neither one of the options was good for them. Therefore, they had to come up with a safer way to deal with the situation, but the planner was the cause of this desperate need for a plan. With every paralyzing meter, the car moved towards them, the paralysing desire to get out of the situation intensified. Even with the trio aware of their collective circumstance, none of them tried to better the situation. The longer they stood there, the closer the car got. It was almost too devastating for them to-even-think, the night was becoming longer with every second.

​“Tomorrow is Monday; I don’t need this” Andy awkwardly smiled hoping to reduce the tension. She knew that this was not the time but her timing was never good, she could tell by the look she got from her friend who just stood there with an Expressionless look on her face. It had been hard enough with everything that had been happening and no one needed the extra push to insanity. Mel never had the patience for Andy’s twisted sense of humour but she loved her dark unconventional jokes although her timing needed some work, maybe a lot of work. Her jokes could be funnier if she could time them right at situations that actually needed some laughter and not like on one occasion when they went to a funeral when her friend’s father died. During one of the memorial speeches, she had awkwardly mentioned that he remarried someone his daughter’s age and that the sex could have been the cause of his heart attack. That was not something one just spits out in the middle of a grieving ceremony, but she just could not help it somehow.

​The car got closer and as it did, they knew that they had some answers to produce, answers that were good enough to explain why a woman in a wedding dress and her bridesmaids were standing over a dead body on the side of the road. Their worst nightmare was coming to life. The car slowed down and came to a complete stop just a few meters away from them; Mel began to feel her mouth went dry. She knew that one of the two things she was afraid of was about to happen, it was either she was going to lose her bodily fluids or her mind, and it was too late for her mind, what she had left was the sour fluid she felt creep up the back of her throat.

​She looked at Andy who in her opinion looked very calm. A shadowy figure got out of the car and Sphe could not help but smile with fear. The only thing that scared them more than the shadowy figure was the dead body they were standing over; he handled the door with much caution as if afraid to unhinge the machinery from its sockets. It was incredible to see. After a few agonising seconds, of what seemed to be a slow-motion entrance. The figure finally made it out of the car, and because the car headlights shone on the back of the man, they could not recognise him beyond what his gender was. ‘He has a weird vibe’ Andy thought and just as she was about to make an awkward comment about it… she, for the first time, knew that it was not the time, and that might have saved her life at that time.

Mr. Shadow, as Andy decided to name him, was yet again walking with ease, with such grace ‘he could be a prince’ Andy thought and he could as well carry the title of ‘the murder’ with the advantage of the three petrified girls in classy wedding themed dresses and heels couldn’t outrun him, even if they tried. With Andy’s gorgeous black mermaid cut spaghetti strap dress, the at least six-inch-tall black red bottom heels she had picked out by her boyfriend, Sphe’s dress had been a designer one by one of the best ones in the country, what was his name again? David something, a pink masterpiece with pale pink shoes to complement the R5 000 worth of a dress. Mel’s gorgeous princess cut strapless peach wedding dress, with beautiful rhinestones where her breasts made two beautiful arches of perfect breast size (though she often complained about how big they were) and her just as fancy Pink-beige and glittery six-inch pumps, of course, they were red bottoms. She had gone over this outfit with Andy over six months before the wedding. She had finally gotten married to the man she had loved for what felt like a thousand years. The man that dated her through all her crazy days and sleepless nights and worst of all her mood swings.

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It was almost depressing how they had planned a perfect wedding night for a year. Six months of the twelve spent convincing Andy to actually look like a girl, it was the biggest party Andy had been to, she would always have an excuse not to go to the other ones, invited or otherwise.

​He stood right in front of them and took a little bow as if mocking the way, the girls were dressed. “Good evening, ladies. Do you need any help?” he asked, his voice surprising the girls, he had an undeniable elegance when he spoke, his voice sounded just right, it was not too deep and neither was it too high, it had a coarseness that sounded like someone who just swallowed a glass of whiskey. The way that his lips moved when he spoke made him look even classier than he did when he was not speaking. The girls looked at him as if expecting something else to happen and to no surprise, their breaths taken away by the heavenly smell of him, his scent hit them quick and hard almost knocking them back.

​Andy could not help but notice how taken Sphe was; of course, she did not say a word. The look she wore when she looked at him was one that Andy had seen only once. During their four-year-long friendship, she had worn that look once and that was with KP, Andy never bothered to ask what his full name was, or rather never got the chance to, with the whole ‘two minutes’ relationship’ and all. Sphe never liked talking about him, she said “he is a good guy with some bad habits and fucked up motives” if you call cheating a ‘bad habit’ then sure, at least that is what Andy and Mel had decided the cause of the break up to have been.