What's The Worst... Epilogue

Dorothy sat next to Ira as she often did in the evenings. It was a comfort to feel the warmth of another. It helped to calm her, to ease her troubled mind but nothing ever helped to erase the memories or the what-ifs?

The dark haired girl, she later learned was called Trisha, had opened her eyes by the time Dorothy finally managed to struggle up and through the crowd of onlookers. Dorothy had immediately recognised that Trisha wasn’t seeing anything through those eyes. Dorothy had recognised that the vast pool of blood around Trisha’s prone frame meant that some palliative comfort was the best that could be offered; she reached out and grasped the girl’s hand, cradling it in her own, gently stroking the back with her other.

Of the dark stranger no trace was ever found; in the ensuing chaos he had simply melted into the ether... Some days later an angry and bitter telephone call to a local police station registered a missing persons report for a 21 year old good for nothing slacker who’d run off and left his disabled mum to fend for herself without so much as a word. The report was processed, filed and joined the ever expanding list of similar reports generated every day.

Ira had taken to dispensing with newspapers altogether, they never seemed to carry good news any more and there’d been more than enough bad news on their doorstep for his liking.