VIOLET SKY
W Bradley
Copyright 2012 by W Bradley
CHAPTER 1
Freya’s Life
Freya was a woman with an extraordinary power of will; she had persevered through her 47 years of life despite feeling trapped in an uroburos of frustration.
Her husband had “anterograde amnesia” which was, Freya suspected, the most difficult form of amnesia for a wife to deal with. Put simply, her husband did not have the capability of remembering something which had happened only minutes earlier. This meant he needed constant care and recently the painful amount of care had been exceeding Freya’s ability to cope.
She felt tired of merely waiting for the inevitably sad end to his life and almost angry at the lack of help she could provide for him.
Although she had such willpower, Freya did not seem to direct any of it at keeping herself in shape. Her natural look, although still radiating in a certain beauty, had once been indescribably stunning. She had had a divine figure, long, shining, dark brown hair and perfect, astonishingly bright, blue eyes.
Perhaps it was because she no longer cared about appearance or her own health or maybe it was due to the lack of time she had to do anything about it. Whatever the reasons, she no longer wore any kind of make-up and completely refused to dress in anything fashionable. Currently, Freya wore a tight fitting, plain white t-shirt and a pair of dark denim jeans; she had not yet put socks on, so she stood barefoot on the cold tiles of the kitchen floor.
As with any other day she heard the post hit the welcome mat from the place in the kitchen where she was currently managing her husband’s medication. She bit into the dry piece of toast which she held in her hand as she slowly moved her way into the hall, passing post-it notes carefully arranged on every cupboard door, each describing its contents. Every morning her husband would enquire as to when this idea had been formulated and who had come up with it, to which she would give no response; a constantly used sign telling him to be quiet. She rarely spoke with him recently, there was little point. He would usually reply but with a distinct lack of enthusiasm for any topic Freya decided upon. She had long ago learned that it was easier to simply keep quiet. Freya sighed as she bent over to pick up the mail, sighing more loudly with more painful tones as she rose. ‘Another day in paradise’ she thought sarcastically. Her sarcasm seemed to be the only thing keeping her sane recently.
As Freya made her return to the kitchen, she flung her hand out, grabbing a fly from the air. She felt a slight pang of guilt as she opened her hand to see she had extinguished its small, defenceless life. She muttered an apology to the insignificantly small carcass while she wiped her hand softly across her hip.
During the past week Freya had been feeling lower and more depressed than she ever had before, but something told her to keep going, to continue doing as she was. Eventually, something would have to change, but change was usually a negative issue in Freya’s life; she had always hated it with a certain passion. From her experience nothing good was ever born from change and not just within her own life; the whole world continually seemed to be altering in very much a negative way.
Freya, although she did not deny the possibility, did not herself believe in any religion, but she did get the feeling she and the whole planet’s population of human beings were being tested by somebody. Perhaps there really was some all powerful being watching over, making or allowing her life to transpire into her own personal hell.
‘Why did I let them force me on leave?’ She questioned herself as she took a second large bite from the dry piece of toast and began chewing slowly. It was already the second time that day she had probed herself for an answer to this continually unanswered question.
Just before the accident leading to her husband’s condition, Freya had for a few years worked in her dream job, helping with conservation work, travelling to a range of exotic countries. Now what was her purpose? To look after a man who only had an idea of how long ago he ate by how hungry he was at the time? There was nothing she could do about it now though, if she ever could. This was her fate. A fate she accepted long ago, but acceptance did not make it even slightly easier.
Lifting the cold toast to her lips again, Freya considered her options. She could stay doing as she was, not an appealing option, or maybe she could run away; spend the rest of her life waiting for her death on a beautiful island somewhere. ‘Who am I trying to deceive? I couldn’t make such an awful decision.’ She argued with herself. However, the fantasy of her perfect unending vacation still flooded through her mind.
After some time being a little too involved in her own imagination, Freya turned to the bin and threw in the remaining piece of crust from the delicacy she had been struggling with all morning. She then proceeded to open the first of her letters; a gas bill. Then the second; a phone bill. Surely her luck could not get much worse. Freya could have sworn that her bills should not have come for another month at least. Apparently not.
Before she could recover from the shock even a little, there was a loud rasping knock on the door. She walked back to the porch, placing the bills on the kitchen work surface as she turned. The wonder of who the guest could be crossed her mind very briefly, quickly suppressed by almost everything within her realizing she could not care less. As she turned the handle everything became very still. An eerie silence followed. This feeling always overcame Freya prior to something dire happening. Almost like her own natural warning signal, to prepare her for whatever would ensue. The door seemed heavy as she pulled it towards herself. Finally, the door was wide enough for her to see the pavement outside her semi-detached house. Only the pavement. Nobody excluded the view. Her bad feeling was wrong.
Eventually, Freya decided to give up staring blankly at the road outside her house, instead she walked, confused, back to the cold floored kitchen. She found herself feeling tentative as it quickly dawned on her that she should have been more concerned with the reason nobody had been at the door when she answered the knock. Maybe there had been no knock at all. Maybe she was finally going insane.
Suddenly the phone burst into life causing Freya to react equally as suddenly, jerking her entire body, “God damn it!” She shouted in anger and embarrassment, despite the fact no one could hear except her husband who would have forgotten within a few minutes anyway.
“Hello?” She questioned as the receiver collided with her ear. She felt skeptical. Few people called besides her husband’s doctor and he had phoned the previous night to check on his condition.
“Yes, hi. This will be hard to explain and harder to comprehend,” Spoke a man on the other end. Freya could not help but notice the obvious sound of tension and fear which wavered in the man’s voice. The accent she could not pinpoint, only that it was not of English origin. “Listen carefully; I don’t have time to repeat myself. I need your help. I’ll explain more when-” Without warning, his voice was silenced by an ear-piercingly loud, high frequency noise screaming down the earpiece into Freya’s ear. Understandably, she shouted out in pain and held the phone far from her face. The side of her head throbbed from the sudden noise but her curiosity flared up inside her. What had just happened? Her violently pounding brain told her it was far too loud to have been a malfunction of the receiver; it must have been something more.
Building up the courage to listen again, she slowly moved the receiver closer to her head where a line of blood had seeped from her ear. Dead silence. No dial tone. No voice.
CHAPTER 2
Freya’s Escape