Falling Isn’t As Easy At It Looks

The single slit-like window was high up and out of harm’s way. A window from which the outside world could not be glimpsed, flowers could not be viewed, and clouds could not be seen.

But moonlight did manage to find its way in, falling on Amanda’s unflickering eyelids and changing her otherwise pallid complexion lunar blue.

She sat there in silence gently rocking. An intangible silence growing ever more deadly since the departure of the last visitor.

No one visited any more.

* * *

Ripples of contacts once encircled her, just as they do all of us. Acquaintances in the outermost rings described Amanda as bright and breezy. But stripping away the layers to the much smaller circles of friends and a very different woman was described; aloof, austere and introverted.

Scratching deeper still, there was only one really close friend. With the emphasis on ‘was.’

Marisa just disappeared one day. Local rumours fuelled tabloid stories about pig farms and sausage factories.

“Sausages?” Amanda blithely dismissed the gossip, “As if you’d dispose of anyone so poisonous in food!”

The police left few stones unturned. But in turning them they covered all the tracks they would have preferred to have found. Almost as if some perverted genius had planned it that way.

Marisa certainly had existed, but detectives found precious little evidence of the fact.

* * *

Preceding Marisa’s disappearance there were a number of ‘incidents’ in Amanda’s family which were never adequately explained. In reality, they were rather more than incidents, and included the untimely demise of her mother no less.

Although Amanda was the linchpin, the connection between a lot of suspicious happenings, the police could find neither evidence nor motive. She might still be able to help with their enquiries though.

At precisely the same time as the sirens were switched on, Amanda slipped and fell.

A raised floorboard, a lumpy carpet, a loose shoe . . . it was a complicated series of events, but then falling isn’t as easy as it looks.

By the time the wailing had subsided, Amanda was in the foetal position on the bathroom floor with a fractured skull.

The police took the decision to move her to a psychiatric secure unit and monitor her condition. There she sat, like a living ghost. A freezing atmosphere surrounded her that you could almost touch.

Interrupted only by doctors opening her eyelids and shining lights into her black, distant eyes. Far beyond interviews and lie detectors now.

Moonlight may still get into Amanda’s cell, but no one and no thing could penetrate her any more. She’d escaped. And with her, she’d taken secrets from the world; was she the perpetrator or a victim?

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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