The Journal of Confession

[The Tattler]

Point Thornridge.

There is an odd book in small town of Point Thornridge, if the right room is rented for a night. Most came to Thornridge on their way to somewhere else, but the traffic of strangers was no so great that a new face wouldn't be noticed. In the room is a book that every tenant has left behind for the next one to read and follow. It is a book that smell like anxious hands.

Upon opening the brown and aged cover, it is clear that the pages are old but not falling out of the binding. The handwriting varies greatly, indicating that different hands had made their entries on the pages. No answer was avaialble for why the book had been created, only that every resident of the room previous had taken the lead from the other entries and made their own.

It had become a book of confession where, inexplicably, other tenants had detailed some crime of their past. Some of the entries provoked a certain melancholy from the reader while others made the author vile and unforgivable. There were entries that sounded benign in nature, which prompted the reader to wonder just how many events in that person's life made them feel guilty.

...

When my best friend was stood up at the alter it was because I told his fiance not to marry him. I was selfish and I thought that if he married and had children that I wouldn't have him in my life anymore. He's been drinking himself to death and I still can't tell him.

...

My husband doesn't know I lied to him about not being able to have kids. I just don't want to be a mother.

...

I was the one that took the money from the charity eight years ago.

...

Perhaps it was because of the previous tenant's raw confession... perhaps it was because there was no one that could comfortably be confessed to... for whatever reason your character had rented that room and now, put their penmenship to work for the next entry.

[Shane Michael]

He hadn't been meaning to stop by the town. It was just one of those places that was on his way to somewhere else. He had been comissioned to make an expensive wedding dress and as pay offs go, it was a big one. Well worth while for him.

Shane was a lanky guy, it was what most people noticed about him. He was the sort of man who ate and ate and stayed so trim people still felt inclined to feed him. His smile was quick and his dimples deep. In a crowd, he was the one that liked to entertain in the limelight and it didn't take him long to make a whole new batch of friends wherever he went. People tended to regard him as the mischevious big brother and in a way, strangers felt he was familiar pretty instantly because of it.

From his neck dangled a necklace and on that necklace a wedding band. It was the male equivalent of an engagement ring, how he announced that soon it would be him sewing up the cloth for his lady's dress as opposed to breaking his back for someone else's. That was the thing about women, though, when they knew you made clothes you became their personal designer. Most of the time it flattered him a great deal that she enjoyed his clothes enough to want to wear him. He supposed it would have hurt his feelings more if it were the other way around and she just told him everything he made was "nice" and never wore a shred of it. However, there was something to be said for picking a shirt up at another store and taking the night off.

After renting the room he tossed his jacket on the bed and then dropped on the bed himself like a coat rack. When he saw the book he figured it to be only an ordinary ledger. Despite not having much of an expectation for it, he pulled it off his nightstand and opened it anyway. When the entries started hitting him he knew it wasn't what he was expecting.

At first he thought... someone's journal was left behind but the handwriting in it was so varied it couldn't have been one person. As he read on through what people were writing it occured to him the nature of the book and upon the most recent entry, he paused in thought.

"Whoa..." he exhaled, set the book down and went to sleep.

In the morning, he found his thoughts returning to the thing on his nightstand. One hand scratched the back of his neck. Already his belongings were gathered up, ready for the road ahead and yet there he was, sitting on the edge of his bed looking at the book. He wondered if everyone else fell victim to its pages just as he was about to. He gave a long stretch, the bones of his spine cracking as he grabbed the book and scribbled in it. His handwriting was atrocious, mostly ledgible to him and anyone who decided to really educate themself on it. Like a man fleeing a crime, he shut the book and hushed out the door, continuing on his way.

It was best to think about delivering the dress.

In the book of confession was a new entry.

I used Maria's sickness as an excuse to leave Ireland.

[Kaylen]

Is it possible to be lost if you don't even know where you are in the first place? One minute, Kaylen was in the familiar surroundings of the concrete jungle that is New York City, the next she was in an odd place with strange faces and strange races with a name she didn't know. Lost. After roaming the area for weeks, does the destination of arrival still count as lost? and every place after as well?

Whether lost or found, she made her way to the little town with the inn to rent a room for a night or two. As was her habit when checking into a hotel, motel or otherwise, first the bed is checked for clean sheets, the bathroom checked for odd smells and then the drawers are pulled out to look for the usual phone book, bible and pizza flyer. Instead there was a different kind of reading material. One which seemed forgotten by another traveler perhaps. Her hand rubbed along the worn cover, tempted by something new to read. Oh but it seemed wrong to snoop just because the book had been accidentally left behind! Those dark eyes even lifted to the door as if expecting the owner to barge in searching for it.

Hours passed, the lights now turned off with the thought that sleep would soon come, instead the fraternal, tattoo twins were wide awake pestering each other and her. Heff by curling up her neck to whisper in her right ear. "Read it..read it you little bookworm. No one will know." The dragon was always the little devil tempting her to do naughty things. But Jade would counter on the left side. The panther's long tail swishing back and forth, dark black lines flicking behind her ear then dropping back down to curl behind her neck. "It's not yours to know. Don't read it." They would bicker back and forth until Kaylen firmly spoke one word. "Depart!" Sending both gliding from her body to form ink stains on the floor which soon burst to life as a living, breathing komodo dragon and panther. The change didn't stop them from fighting. Only now it was in the form of snarls and hissing.

Kaylen pinched the bridge of her nose in aggravation as the siblings carried on in their snippy ways until she'd simply had enough. "Heff..closet! Jade..bathroom! Not another peep." Heff was about to start his usual retort about how a snort, cough, laugh, beep, or other noise was not a peep and technically were allowed under the current rule. She quickly shut the loop hole. "No sounds at all!" With tails tucked both retreated behind closed doors.

Alone now the fight was with only her conscience, she soon surrendered to curiosity, gingerly opening the cover to peruse the pages within. The words scrawled across page after page were hardly what she expected to find. She'd read right up to the blank page. One begging to filled with words.

Her words.

Dare she put her feelings down in black and white?

"While I love my parents dearly and I love my charges, I wish I'd been smart enough to choose only one or none at all. I'm too young to be their guardian. I'm too young to be a parent. I don't even know who I am yet, how can I teach someone else who are they are to be? I don't think I can do this by myself. "

[FadedVelvet]

Madison had sat on the edge of the bed staring at the ledger of confessions. It was something the judge at the pearly gates would love a glimpse of, and she was nearly certain that the weight of the book flat on her knees was not for the hard cover. Regret, shame, guilt, hadn't she run around with them for years, had them weighing on her spine, pulling her into the ground.

We begin again, it is what we do.

So she had thought that disconnecting herself from her husband, from Lofton, from the gun, would ease her troubles. That if she stopped using any of them as points of reference, she could charter a new life. She turned a page, stared at the most recent entries. Was her feeling any worse or any better than these? Madison figured she could fill a few pages with what had been on her mind.


But the one thing that kept coming back, coming up and slapping her in the face, was the one thing she had never managed to speak out loud. Not even with Elijah was standing over her, his palms flat on the table, demanding it from her. She'd blamed Karras for a while, then herself, blamed Eli's leaving, blamed the loss of Charlie. When it came to why their marriage wasn't working, she used every other excuse in her own personal book of confessions. Every one except the right one. She still hadn't told him what was tugging at her heart. Something in her wouldn't relinquish that truth. It seemed like everything was too dirty and dent between them for any more burden to overwhelm it.


She swings the cover so it shuts the book. Why should she tell the world her anonymous horror. Why was it that a few words seemed fatal. Why was it that those words afflicted her conscious than all the men she'd killed for the sheriff.


It was because it was the single truth that could never be reconciled.


She tore the pen hanging from the corner of her mouth and snapped wide the book. The page screamed with space. Her hand fell, words spilled.


Remember when you asked why I let you leave the house? I let you go Elijah because I lied. Because when I said it was all those other things, I was lying. I don't love you anymore. I stopped loving you a long time ago. I felt bad about it because I thought you dead, because being your wife meant more than us, it was about your duties, about your kingdom, about our land, about our work together, about all you protected. But it was all for you, my life stopped. Everything stopped for you. And when I stopped loving you, I didn't know what to do. You left, and I had a new life to make.

I don't love you is the hardest thing I've written. But I say it now to set us both free.


M