à la folie

Walls were such pretty colours when they were old. Green plants gathered on the edges, crumbling away the solid material. The walls themselves had lost a lot of colour and smoothness, like humans, wrinkles had appeared and their paint was fading to grey.

Everything dies.

No matter how pretty walls were, they weren’t comfortable. They dug into the bones of my legs like cold knifes, even my flesh couldn’t stop the freeze creeping in. I wanted to be cold, though, right?

A clink of a bottle in the distance. I closed my eyes, allowing air to escape my mouth. Jack, my foster dad, had been yelling at me. So I left. Yelling made my head ache, and my vision blur, I felt like I had been about to faint. Angelica didn’t want me to go though, she told me to stay. But he would have kept on yelling and yelling, and glaring and snarling.

I rubbed my forehead, trying to dim the burn building there.

“Hey-y, y-you!” My eyes flickered open and I turned my head to the side, catching the speaker in my eye line. A dark haired boy with a stagger in his step was coming towards me, a broken bottle left a few steps behind him, his eyes were fixed solely on me, but not my face.

I wasn’t sure what to do, he was drunk, but I seemed to know him. So I watched him as he came closer, almost falling over as he leant heavily on the wall next to me.

“How...h...How much?” He panted out, pushing himself from the wall and swaying slightly on his own two feet, his eyes held expectation.

“What?” My voice sounded weird, I hadn’t heard it in so long. The wall was digging into me.

“For a-a fuck” I closed my eyes and bent my head down rubbing it with the ends of my fingers. He thought I was a prostitute, I think. I’m not sure. I don’t know how other people thought.

I frowned; he was making the burn worse. Lifting my head, I went to get up from the wall and find somewhere else to spend the night, but he took my hand in a un-co-ordinated grip and started to walk off, dragging my easily influenced body behind him.

All I could think about was how much my hand burned. I followed his heavy footsteps and staggering path without a question. I knew I couldn’t get my hand free, I knew I wouldn’t be able to talk.

I knew the burn would consume me.