Fragmented
That’s not right either.
The blonde girl swings her legs over the worn leather saddle. She has tied daisies everywhere; they are wedged in her boots and peak out, a crown dances around the rim of her cherry cowboy hat. They hang from the saddle horn over the pommel, she is careful not to press her feet over the petals that lie on the stirrups.
She rides like the wind, leaving her house behind, she loses control of her horse, falling backwards like-
No, it doesn’t happen like that.
The blonde girl lies dead on the floor, a detective shakes his head after failing to find a pulse, to then remove her sunglasses to close her eyes and cover her in a cherry-red blanket dotted with hand-painted daisies. Who could have done this? The police move onto suspects: her boyfriend, rumour says he had been cheating on her, and when she found out, she wanted to break up. The next is her best friend, forever jealous of her, then we have her sister, who is now the sole inheritor of their family home.
Wrong again.
The… red-haired girl? Smiles for her mugshot, you can see blonde roots peeking through by her scalp, still dotted in lines of red, a makeshift braid of new and old. A triple homicide, they say, girlfriend, best friend, and younger sister, she’s known as the daisy killer. Months later, she’s lying on a table, restrained, and from her peripheral vision, she can see a doctor preparing a needle-
No. No, no, no, it’s all wrong-
Her younger sister in the audience. The girl prepares to dive, the last one for today’s competition, cherry red swimsuit, she is sponsored by Coca-Cola, written in lilac bold letters. She looks onto the water, where other female divers have already sealed their fate for today’s meet, where her boyfriend awaits her triumph, among the waves, in the rare case she would need to be rescued. Braided hair, a daisy embroidered on her hip for good luck, she leaps into the water, but miscalculates. She plummets towards the water, the wind and perhaps the audience’s screams roaring in her ears as she falls-
Stop, Stop. What is happening?
A million reflections of the same girl.
She braces herself as the plane crashes, holding a boy’s hand.
She shields her sister in the middle of a shooting.
She has an allergic reaction to peanuts in a restaurant, collapsing as someone calls an ambulance and her girlfriend cradles her, begging her to stay with him.
A car crashes and she is barely recognisable.
It’s her death, over and over, the same details appearing, these puzzle pieces, fitting together in any combination, but making the overall picture more and more muddled.
This has never happened before.
What do we do?
I don’t know, the guide doesn’t mention any possibility of this happening.
She is jumping out of a building to save herself from burning alive.
We cannot allow her to die time and time again for eternity.
Can she even feel these deaths? Is she aware?
Does it matter? It is our duty to respect time and order.
She battles a sickness in a tiny hospital room. A bouquet of withering daisies by her bedside, the room is bathed in red. Her only visitor was a girl with an impassive face, sunglasses perennially sported on her visage.
Unplug it?
What?
I said unplug it! End this now.
She is in a calm sea, perched on a reef, awaiting. A ship passes her, a man at the helm, she sings, he turns towards her. The crash is magnificent, exactly how she wanted it, but it takes her too.
We might not be able to recover her-
We don’t have a choice, do it!
The girl is-
Gone.