Silence, part II of VI

After school, Tabatha met Jimmy for the walk home. Their Friday debriefing was all too short, in her opinion, for she had to go home and make it through yet another miserable night with her father. Stepping over the threshold into her apartment, Tabatha paused to listen to an odd noise. A high-pitched humming filled the room, a sound like a chorus of bumblebees. She had heard it often in her dreams, but it was strange to hear it in real life.

Tabatha set her blue-grey backpack down and walked toward the source of the noise. It was coming from down the hall, in her bedroom. She opened her door slowly. When she walked into the room, her jaw dropped: a clear blue orb hovered, pulsating, moving closer to her.

The magnetic effect that pulled her to it in her dreams worked here, too, and she wondered whether or not this was, in fact, just a dream. Her left hand floated up to the electric spectre, and as she touched it a calming effect rippled trough her delicate body. Memories of her early childhood flashed back to her.

There was her mother, laughing at Tabatha's birthday party... but it wasn't hers, only, for her twin sister was still alive then, too, identically dressed, with an identical face and an identical grin. The involuntary reminiscing brought tears to Tabatha's eyes, and as she crumpled to the floor the blue presence left her.

Tabatha lay prone, rocking and grasping her silver locket, oblivious to the noise of her father's entrance into the apartment. She was still out of sorts even as his heavy work boot connected with her thigh, once, twice. She gradually became aware of his gruff voice, and scrambled to her feet and instinctively to the door with head down and hands covering her face.

"I come in here to find you blubbering on the floor! Who in the hell do you think you are?" Karl bellowed. Tabatha stood shaking, her eyes issuing salty tears, on their second wind due to his provocation.

"I'm your youngest daughter!" Tabatha shouted back, in marked contrast to her usual silence. She immediately regretted her decision to shout; she was still not herself.

Karl stared at her, eyes wide, face paling to nearly Tabatha's color from its previous anger-induced beet red. "Don't ever bring that up again," he muttered darkly before stomping out of the room, the slamming the door marking the end of his beating.

Tabatha couldn't believe the ease with which it had ended. Only her thigh was beginning to bruise. Usually her father would come home drunk, beat her around if she wasn't prepared with her door locked, and then leave to console himself with the television and more beer. When he did hit, she rarely got off with a single bruise, especially one so concealable.

Tabatha got her journal out from beneath her mattress, chronicling the incident while it was fresh. Afterward, she reread the long-winded entry to piece together what had happened.

Two questions sprang immediately to mind. First, she wondered, what was that strange blue presence? She absentmindedly fingered her locket as she thought. The action induced memories of her lost twin and her mother... all she knew about her twin, Kylie, and her mother, Sharon, was that the two died of carbon monoxide poisoning when the twins were just three years old. That brought up the strange reaction her father had when she mentioned her sister. He was always so evasive when it came to the past. Sure, she had her sad moments: after all, she lost her mother and twin. But Karl was even more closed off than Tabatha, and they hadn't ever spoken about it. Her eyelids grew heavy as she thought, and she drifted off to sleep with the events of the evening spinning through her mind.