Affiliate Marketing Secrets

7:36pm
49b West St, Bristol
A dark soul doesn’t make a dark person, but a dark mind. The words of a father who had raised a daughter to accommodate a niche in his life, a sense of unaccomplished purpose, that he’d given the world nothing to remember him by and a child that took his name would fill this gap. And while her mother would take her on picnics alongside her grandmother, he’d read her Dante and encourage her to break away from the traditional. This early symbolism had a profound effect on the girl, raging against normality and the trials of an ordinary life. Maths Textbook ’86, knee length skirts, mum and the pressure from all of those she knew to kiss a boy. Not father, he understood that she was different. It troubled him but he ‘got it’ as she told him emotionally on her fifteenth birthday before introducing him to her first love Liz Sale the next week. She had such belief in her father being the only person alive that understood her being ‘virtually alone’, that when he died only months later she attempted to take her own life, for the first time.
As she stood inhaling the fumes of her own act, back pressed against the rapidly burning timber of her front door, this tortured soul laughed out loud at what she’d done. For the one bed roomed, top floor flat behind her held the memories of her past life, ones which were now smouldering in the depths of an inferno, started many years previously in the caves of her mind.
The blisters forming on her upper back meant little to her, no pain could shatter the absolute beauty of a new start, however difficult that fresh ‘life’ may prove to be. For, unconscious, on a brass built double bed next to an ashen pile of summer shirts and four empty bottles of value vodka, was a woman she’d met three years previously and first kissed two months later. A woman that believed they were in love and that had booked a two night romantic trip to Bruges for the 24th of that month. Now slowly burning to death on her own bed, Turned upon by a psychopathic depressive with access to alcohol and a cigarette lighter.
True, she’d loved the heart and mind and body of her ‘Astrid’ (so she called her for her resemblance to the photographer Astrid Kirchherr), yet in the end the darkness of her mind had led her to the atrocious act. Like an infected sore inside her brain that had inflamed, mutated her father’s words into thoughts of brutal murder. To burn her lover to death on a warm summer’s evening, to take advantage of the flat they rented together was not only to murder ‘Astrid’ but rid herself of the infection. At that, slumped against the far wall, tears of laughter rolling down her face – she was free.
The skin of ‘Astrid’s’ right arm began to peel, dying away at the intense heat of a room falling to wreck itself, the bedroom that she’d spent nights of passion, fatigue and rest within was now giving up its memory to the acrid smoke and curling flames that engulfed it. She gave one last forceful shunt to the door, collapsing to the ground as it gave way, already weakened by the heat. An unbearable surge of flame forced its way through the air as ‘Astrid’ collapsed. Hitting the floor her mind turned to what had happened, the electric kettle to the face. ‘Astrid’ wept, she’d thought she could change her, how wrong she’d been.
Smoke, black, pursed its way through the gap between the door and threshold, finding the ceiling seconds later. Yet all she could do was watch, laughing as her own death drew slowly nearer. The crackle of the fire attacking the wood scared her little, she’d lost her respectability, her intrigue in life, her love, her future and she was glad of it, for now she was soothed by the inevitability of death’s sweet release. Suicide was nothing new to her, three times had she attempted the plunge from Clifton suspension bridge into the Avon Gorge in her youth, only coerced out of the matter by shallow promises of change. Although she’d never succeeded, every time she did so a little piece of her had died, her eyes becoming colder. It was time.
Wood splintered and the air seemed to rip in two as the first shot ricocheted through her shoulder, the second found the upper arm. Into the smouldering heat that now enveloped her body she let out a blood boiling scream as all memories of her dark, tortured life were lost to the fire and the crimson blood that rolled down her right arm. The bullets now embedded in the wall of the corridor had come not from the far end of the hall but the other side of the door caught up in the blaze within. Her head hit the floor, body sliding down the wall, smearing it in her blood. She blinked for a final time before the blackness embraced her. Seeing the two splintered holes at the bottom of the door, just above the letter box made her smile. In her final act she had failed to destroy her own memories, it had been them that had destroyed her.