**Mind the profanity....
sweatdrop **
Crystal Shards
“Damn right I’m not happy…!” After yelling a few more profanities at him, she jumps and stabs a hand into his chest. Reaching deeper, she feels the point and grabs it whole. She propels off the man, flips back, and lands with her back to his fallen body.
The girl, about teenage, about the same age as the other, holds up a bloodied hand with a glowing crystal. “This is perfect.” She runs home with a gem of life cupped in both hands.
At home, after washing her hands, she goes straight to her room. Doors and curtains closed, the crystal drops steadily into a glass jar and the lid screws over it immediately.
“It was his fault to begin with,” she mutters. On the corner of her desk, to the left, is the jar with the glittering crystal. She eyes the crystal as if the jar doesn’t exist. She continues, “Serves him right.” She picks up the jar to rest it directly in front of her sight and gazes down at it with her chin propped up in her hand. “I wonder what they’ll do with his body. Maybe…it would’ve been nice…to talk with him first.”
She pets the glass with a finger as if it’s the crystal and remembers the good times. The walks in the parks, the comfort, holding hands, just smiling and then laughing.
Was it usually just those?She holds the jar like a cup and presses it against her face. It’s warm.
I bet [she thinks]
if I open this jar…it’ll smell just like him, too.She tries to smile, but it’s too hard right now. “That…idiot.”
Holding up the jar with both hands in front of her face, she wonders more. There are people who know how to implant a heart if it’s not too late. Many people sign up to donate their crystals. “Is it too late to give this one back? I think I hurt him enough, too.”
There’s a knock on the front door.
The girl looks around to her room’s door slowly. “Did mother forget her keys again?”
Downstairs, still carrying the jar, the girl opens the door. A blindfold whips around her face. She cries out, feeling the jar drop and shatter. Pulling madly at the knot behind her head, the girl’s only thought is on the crystal. Glass shards are dangerous. They could pierce the crystal in any which direction, finally taking out whatever life it had left. Such a delicate heart can’t take so much....
The blindfold comes off. She throws it onto the floor where the crystal isn’t. The one thing, and the one person, she loved is gone.
She glares out the door into the night. “That b*****d doesn’t know....” She grabs a kitchen knife and pursuits the heart-thief in the distance.
Kega is completely worn out. He pauses in the woods, not hearing anyone behind him, and holds the crystal in his hands. He studies the heart, surprised by its condition, and sighs. “I’m so glad.”
“Give me that crystal!” The girl caught up with Kega.
“Is this yours?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “This heart belongs to someone I know. He wants it back, but-”
“Like you'd know,” she mutters. “Friend of a dead man!”
He turns around, not mad, but not yet peaceful. “No, I’m not dead.”
“My god....” She curses at him and adds, “You’re dead!”
He holds the crystal in both hands as if showing it to her. “I still can’t believe you stole my heart. It really hurt.” He smiles forgiveness. “Please, don’t do that again.”
She covers her ears and shuts her eyes. “Shut up-Shut up! You’re supposed to be dead!”
“I’m sorry.” He reaches out a hand to her, but she grips the kitchen knife and cuts through his wrist. Kega raises the bleeding end to his face. “I really don’t understand why you want to hurt me so much.” His expression lightens to a thought. “Oh, I see. It’s that other girl, isn’t it?”
The girl with him now kicks up, sending Kega falling back at a distance. The crystal descends into her open palm.
“You shouldn’t steal things like that,” he comments from the ground.
After a pause, she hisses, “You’re dead.”
He gets up with the support of his other hand and comes face to face with the girl, arm bleeding into the ground. He opens his mouth, the mouth of beautiful kisses and hateful words. The girl switches the position of the knife and stabs it into his chest wherein lies a heart of someone else.
“Stay dead.”
She barely hears him ask, “Do you really want that?”
She bites her bottom lip. “I killed you.”
Kega closes his eyes. He reaches in and carefully removes the other crystal. “This wasn’t originally mine,” he explains. “I wanted to give you that one you have, for that February day, but....” He holds out a cracked, but still glittering, crystal in a shaking hand. “If you want me to go, that’s fine.”
She stares at his face made angelic by the weak glow of a broken crystal. “She…she was a donator…?”
He almost smiles, but instead drops his hand, shattering the crystal, and slumps back to the dead body he was.
The knife clatters, creating more crystal shards.
The hand that held the knife shudders over the girl’s mouth. Her trembling shakes the crystal off her other hand. She cries out “No” for the second time.
