Prompt by: @flashfictionfridayofficial
I looked out into the sea of reporters, and then to my mother beside me. Yes, I was here to recant my decision from my birthday. To say: instead of supporting the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, a group that can save lives and help us understand ourselves to our very core, I instead want to fund children and mothers. I'm a girl, after all, and apparently a girl in love.
One of the reporters, paid by my mother's company, gives me the prompt.
"Miss Lancaster, we've all seen the pictures of you and your fiance. Has your upcoming wedding influenced your plans for the future at all?"
I steel myself to tell him there is no greater future than a world rid of terminal diseases, but before I can betray my mother one more time, there's a ruckus in the crowd.
A homeless man with a very sharp knife has jumped on the stage. I instinctively step back, almost breaking a heel. He's mad, twitching and bug eyed. People lean away not only from his weapon but the deep scratches and lesions on his arms.
Before security can act, he has his arm around my mother and the knife to her throat.
"Monarch Designs are evil!" He screams into the cameras, which have dutifully continued rolling. "Kimimi Lancaster made a deal! With the devil! And her daughter!" He swings in my direction, swaying my mother with him. I get a good look at her face, and wish I hadn't. My cold, emotionless, CEO mother who never once showed an ounce of any emotion -- to anyone -- was afraid.
"Her daughter is supporting an organization that everyone KNOWS is funded by the CIA!"
There were rumors about SIHE, of course, but everything they supported was legitimate. Even if it was secretly a government organization, it was one that did good, not evil. The man glared at me.
"I will end it! I will save you all!" As he bellowed, causing feedback to screech through my mother's microphone, he swiped his knife across her neck.
Before I could see if she had somehow, miraculously, survived -- she was my mother after all, Rebekah had caught me and pulled me away.
"Don't look," she said, "and take those ridiculous shoes off!"
I let the heels slip off my feet and ran with her, following the wild bunch of curls that had sprung from her hair band. She pushed me into a waiting car and we sped off before I could even sit properly in a seat. I slammed into the opposite door as the car moved, still processing what had just happened.
"No--" I clawed at the stubbornly locked door as things started clicking together. "No!" My breath came in rapid, shallow breths as I willed my fingers to stop shaking just long enough to open this stupid locked door--
And then Rebekah was pulling me toward her, shushing me and murmuring. She pulled a shawl around my shoulders and held it tightly, which I'm sure was meant to be comforting but felt like yet another way to keep me restrained.
"Bekah--" My voice cracked and I coughed out a so to get the rest of my words out "Bekah, I have to help her. I have to-to do something. I have to recant! I--"
Rebekah stroked my face, from my forehead to the bottom of my nose three times like my mother had done when I was a child, fighting sleep. When she still loved me. And like it did when I was a kid, it served to calm me now. I became aware of the world again, slowly.
"Shh," she said softly. "Think of softer things. Think of petrichor."
All at once, the scared tension in my body dissipated. I felt slack, emotionless, a sad relative to calm. I let myself succumb to sudden exhaustion and fell asleep in Rebekah's arms. What had I been so worked up about, anyway?
