The Last Red Strand

The knife stabbed so deep into her belly the blade protruded through the skin of her back. Blood poured from the wound before the weapon was yanked out of her guts. She tried to catch her entrails in her bloodied palms but they slipped through her fingers like oiled snakes. She tumbled to her knees, blood falling from her mouth as she cried from the pain, from the inevitability of death. It took six long, agonizing minutes for her to die.

The sun rose on her corpse, a southern breeze passed through the trees and the grass where her body lay stiff, still and silent. The sun baked her naked, decaying flesh, stray animals took a chunk of her thigh, arm, calf, breast. The skin that remained on her bones turned to leather and her blood soaked into the earth.

Her bones were picked clean and sunk into the dirt, picked at by the spring-tails and isopods, breaking down her molecular structure into detritus. Her hair, scattered in the wind, lands on the tongue of a man drinking his morning coffee with a newspaper in his hand. He pulls the offensive string from his wet mouth observing the red of it. He flicks it away and continues to sip at the dark liquid, the phantom feeling of hair haunting his taste buds.

He walks home, the stray hair stuck to his left shoe like gum, but he's none the wiser. He kisses his daughter as she greets him at the door and visits his wife in their shared bathroom. He looks down at his white, pristine socks as he shuffles through the house. A red strand striking against the clean white. He picks it up between his thumb and index, looking at how it curls. He tosses it behind him onto the floor, but it lands on the edge of the duvet, stuck to clinging fabric.

His wife is doing laundry, she's changing the sheets and as she strips the bed she sees the red, curling strand, refusing to be forgotten. No one that resides in their house possesses the color or curl and yet it clings like it belongs there. She leaves it to be washed away with the lint and debris or blown away on the clothesline. The white sheets that hang on the line flapping, ready to take flight, hindered by the clothespins clamping it in place.

A young girl, about the age of 14 comes to collect the hanging fabrics and redresses her bed; crisp, clean white sheets are neatly spread against the mattress, but something has caught her eye. There in the center of her bed, perfectly curled and perfectly red lies a strand of hair. A warning? A reminder? An omen? A promise?

She's still dead, returned to earth from whence she came, a pile of dirt in a field of flowers, no one knows her executioner, no one knows her last words, no one knows that the last of her still sleeps in the bed with her killer.