Challenge #2 - Cause/Effect

This is a short one tonight. No real reason other than this is the length it came out in my head. I did, however, enjoy it. It's cliche and whatnot, but I'm just relishing writing again. There's no specific context to today's piece, it just is.

#2 - Cause/Effect

The room was only five feet square. She could barely lie down in it. The walls were cracked, but otherwise without anything she could focus on. There was no air vent like in the old room; but this time there was a window. It was low enough that she could look out from her bed. The sill was wide enough that she could perch on it, the cool plaster cracked yet sturdy beneath her light weight.

It was storming outside and the large, bruised-looking clouds were visible even through the slats of metal that hid the cold glass. She could hear the rain pounding, feel it vibrate deep within her soul. She hadn’t felt rain in so long - she had almost forgotten that it could feel like anything at all outside of this place.

Only months ago she would still have associated the rain with him. Not now. Not after this.

The storm raged so hard that she swore she could hear the trees bending outside. She was on the bottom floor; maybe. That was uncertain, since she couldn’t see the ground; only the purple sky and the yellowish clouds coming in from the west. The colours spread across her vision, and the walls of her cell, like a kaleidoscope image. They twisted with the wind, and when she closed her eyes they were tattooed across her eyelids.

She could try to write something about it - the feeling. That’s what the psychiatrist would recommend.

She didn’t want to.The pencil was blunt, and they wouldn’t give her a pen. The paper was the back of a receipt that the guard had given her several nights ago. He had thought she wanted something to read.

“You’ll have the library soon enough,” he had told her. “Then you can read all they got.”

“No,” she had said. She would not keep a book locked up with her; it was inhumane. She imagined a room like this, one filled from floor to ceiling with books. Perhaps that would be a paradise. This room was too small for books. If literature lined these walls, she thought, then she would certainly suffocate.

Instead she turned her face back to the window and imagined instead what the rain might feel like on her cheeks. It might blind her, might hide the tears. She might laugh through it.

Perhaps, like the storm, this room would only be temporary - and then, instead of thinking of him with the coming rain she would think of herself.

Now, that would be a novelty.

Words: 427.