kh_drabble | challenge 209.

Challenge [209]: Off-Kilter
Title: Lenore
Wordcount: 287
Notes: I've been wanting to post this for a while. Based on 'Sympathy for Lady Vengeance', a Korean film.

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She's wearing a polka-dot dress when they take her down, cuff her, drag her away, pink high heels snapping and sliding off her feet. Her heels are bloodied, toes blistered, when they toss her into the cell. Her eyes, though fearful, hold a determined spark still.

She curls in the corner, fingers lacing through auburn strings, yarn poked through the fabric scalp of a rag doll. She doesn't deserve it. She doesn't deserve this punishment. She is not insane, and Edgar Allan Poe's telltale heart is not beating beneath her floorboards.

She has a single cellmate. The girl is blonde, eyes like the sky instead of lilac hedge, but they could be twins.

The days wear on.

There must be rhyme and reason to the system, she thinks one day, coiled in her corner, movement spurred only by physical need and not by emotional want. They must have had something to prove it.

Must have, but then, nothing's fair, says a singsong voice in another part of her mind.

The years wear on.

When they release her, she is no longer wearing heels. Flats, now, not because she likes them but because her favorite heels are ruined, years prior. She has gone from healthy to brittle, strong to breakable in less than six years.

She wears a polka-dot dress, but there is no fear to be found -- in the glow of the cigarette at her rosy-red, wet-paint lips is only determination. Crayon-pink eyelids shade something violet but also vile.

It's wrong, off-balance, but it's hers. She's not the weak little girl she was, delicate as she is.

The past and the present depend on each other, after all -- no matter how far the scale tips.