OPEN | prompt one | RAIN

[wrens]

prompt one | R A I N I have been one acquainted with the night. I have walked out in rain - and back in rain. I have outwalked the furthest city light. I have looked down the saddest city lane.

 

Comments

[misdeeds]

[ She doesn't mean to give him hope, really. Perhaps if she knew that hope was what this was all about, she would abandon her needle and her thread and her insistance and simply leave Darren there with his opened up belly for the raiders or the animals or — worst of all — the insects to find. Judith understands how hope can be a poison in a place like this, how it can fill a person up only to let that person down, hard and fast. Not gentle like air being let out of a balloon but sharp and unforgiving, like a rock off a cliff. What's left of the world isn't meant for things like hope, or for expectations or for goodness or promises. And yet here Judith was, with her own promise hung round her neck.

(One life saved for every life you've taken, she'd sworn to herself. Only then are you allowed to die. And so her noose was set at the end of a very long and unrelenting rope.)

Judith startles when Darren finally gives lets go, having expected him to fight her tooth and nail til the last stitch was set. At first she wonders if maybe he's about to swoon and loose consciousness but then she sees his eyes and the way his head lolls slightly and she knows that it's not a fainting spell, it's resignation.

With a hand she presses down on his chest again, finding leverage for if the pain makes him squirm. Before pressing the needle to his skin, Judith leans down over him and says in a low whisper: ]

I will not let you die.