Lost

Lost

 

Roxanne didn’t know how long she’d been sat on the star-gazing rock. She has lost all sense of time. It felt like only a few minutes had passed, but it was probably more like a few hours. Emily had called her; summoning her home, probably. She’d ignored it. It was too perfect out on the moor: a vast sea of heather and gorse, a solitary tree - crippled by the elements - on the horizon. Emily hated the moor. She hated the bleak, lifeless expanse. She didn’t understand; so Roxanne ignored her.

 

Wind whispered through her auburn hair as she gazed up at a hawk wheeling in the sky. Sunlight spilled across her face in a sudden cloud burst, mirrored in her clear blue eyes, glinting off the locket at her throat. She lay back across the warm rock, heat caressing her closed eyelids.  She had brought a book, but it lay, forgotten, in her bag. Today was too good to waste time reading. She did that all the time anyway. She began to lose herself to unconsciousness, letting her mind drift further and further away from the present.

 

It wasn’t hard to reach, The Wall. Roxanne had done this so many times before that she didn’t even have to think about it. Almost as soon as she closed her eyes she was there. A great mental Wall �" like a black hole in consistency �" was blocking her from any memories of her childhood. Everything she could remember was from the past three years, nothing before. She’d woken up to bright flashing lights, tubes and syringes. Then the home; with the Silence and the hate. Finally Emily; simple, friendly, ditsy Emily.

 

The home was the worst. From the time she woke up, to the time she met Emily, she had not said a word. The Silence had kept her as an outsider, among a host of outsiders. Despite the Silence, Roxanne was not unintelligent. In fact, she was cleverer than most �" and the Wall did not block her knowledge. Strange as it was, she could recall all of the understanding from her past. She excelled at Music, English, History and Foreign Languages, as well as Maths and Science. It was disconcerting, she knew, for the others, that this person, made outcast by the Silence, was as intelligent as they were.

 

She wasn’t good with dates, but it must have been about six months since Emily had come. Gold tinted memories in a sea of grey; Technicolor in black and white. Her voice came back, croaking, stumbling through words like an infant, gathering momentum till they tumbled out in a flood. It wasn’t that Emily was like her �" in fact, they were in stark contrast �" it was that she wasn’t expected to be anyone. She wasn’t expected to do anything.

 

So her wanderings were not questioned by Emily. They just were part of everyday life. Emily knew about the Wall, but only that it had the capacity to induce amnesia. Roxanne’s lack of memory was never discussed; memories were never dredged up through conversation. In fact, the only time she could reach the Wall was up on the grey, flat rocks; it was easy then. She let her consciousness wander back to it, through the innumerable thoughts clustered in her brain.  When it reached the vast expanse, she let her thoughts meander over it, seeking cracks, weaknesses, holes. As it always was, there were none. No imperfections, just a solid mass.

 

Suddenly, a tendril of thought found a chink of light. She gathered her thoughts into the flaw, a coil of gold, filling the gap with its glow. The Wall began to pulse, and a force pushed back against the invading thoughts. It began to beat, a heartbeat pervading her head, numbing her senses. Roxanne fought, all of her consciousness focused on the point in the Wall.

 

The tension snapped.

Author's Note

This is the opening for a story, so it's not the whole piece :)

Reviews

[Marie]

Okay; it's a good opening. You do very well at phrasing: "Gold tinted memories in a sea of grey;Technicolour in black and white."...
The only mistake I found was in the first sentence:


Roxanne didn’t know how long she’d been sat(sitting) on the star-gazing rock.

[Samuel Dickens]

It's a very good, compelling opening, constructed with excellent phrases and descriptions. My only suggestion is that you could slim it down a wee bit and remove some of the passive "has, had's and was's". In the first sentence, for instance, you could remove the word "been" with no change in meaning.