She wakes the next morning with dew sticking to her skin. Somehow she lost her clothes and found her way to the grass outside of her room. The early morning sun and the song of the birds woke her.

The coffee could not be strong enough. Her eyelids are heavy. The steam rising from the cup mesmerizes her for the moment. She sees her own body moving according to the rhythms of the steam. Instinctively she dances to no music.

She spills some of the warm coffee onto the floor. It pulls her back.

Then wave crashes over her.

She is dead.

She takes a sip and burns her lips. The pain soothes her broken soul for a brief moment but it quickly fades. The previous night's bottle is in a thousand little pieces on the floor. More memories flood over her as the coffee wakes her mind.

A new day, new misery, new questions.

***

You cannot let it get to your head.

But I am not.

Just don't. You never know what will happen.

But the world is a dark place as well Ashley.

Who even questioned that part?

No one, I am just saying.

But why? Always this bloody blabbering.

That is rude.

No, it was not. The truth only hurts when you feed the wrong wolf.

What do you even mean by that?

Has he already started drinking this early?

I am not drunk!

I mean you smell of the stuff, who are you trying to convince otherwise?

What do you mean?

Just shut up.

The glass shatters on the tiles. Everyone goes quiet. Maya stares at her family squabbling over who knows what. The disembodied voices filled the air noisily. The shattering of the glass stopped everyone in their tracks. She did not say a word, yet, everyone looked at her as if it was she who broke the glass. Why are you looking at me? she wondered but said nothing. The tension in the room, for no apparent reason, seemed to build up around her.

"Seriously, what the fuck," Maya gets up and walks out of the room, careful not to walk over the glass that decorates the floor.

The people inside the kitchen are her blood family. Her sister is dead. The only link, the only link to those in the kitchen. Now, that link is broken, and the rope is cut. They are blood family but they are nothing to her, mere acquaintances. Strange figures that inhabit a cold dark place. Her memories try to go back to her youth as she and her sister sat in the kitchen. She desperately searches for a happy memory that she shared with her sister, to cling to a sanity of sorts, but nothing rose to the top. Nothing seemed to remind her of a youth she could happily remember. All the memories she thought she had is all gone.

Her hand trembles as she needs to open a bottle. The sun tries to creep under her skin. Can she dare go back into the cold dark place inhabited by those strange blood relatives? Can she dare open a drink with her dad that early in the morning? He had already drunk something, everyone smelled it. Can she join the man who beat her in his drunken stupors? Can she join the man that probably caused all the shit in her life?

She walked through the kitchen door. Her mother was on the floor cleaning the glass pieces that shattered everywhere. She found him in the reading room with a glass of something. Without exchanging a word, she took a glass and filled it. Way too much by the look of it. She sat across from the man she could not look in the eyes for so many years. But this morning she dared to look him in the eyes and confront him with his own doing.

She took the first sip and did not break eye contact.

Postscriptum, or The Beginning of the End

This is kind of the second or third installment of the new series which I now dubbed: "Turbulence of Revelations". It will either be a novella or a short book. I think I am 2000 odd words in, so let's say I am about 35 000 words short of something tangible.

There is much more to the story in my mind. I have been "fermenting" many ideas now and I love that I can actually sit down and write them for a change. But these ideas also have a life of their own. I merely let the keyboard type as the ideas take shape in their own way.

In any case, the story is my own creation, the words my own musings. The photographs are also my own, taken with my Nikon D300. Happy writing, stay well!