Eli's Hannah

This isn't going to be superb-- after all, it's point was to be twisted and unearthly. It may be extended, or maybe even edited, but for now I just wanted someplace to keep it where others could possibly look at it if they wished.

         Hannah was enigmatic, a child of today and tomorrow, with soft, almost crystalline blue eyes and a melodic voice that crossed her thin lips with the same doey-quality that her changeling stare possessed. To be sure, those bambi eyes were indeed lined with the same sharp black as the other girls, and she wore the same exact cloths and toted around the same exact “fashionable accessories.” But she didn’t clutch to them. The two hundred dollar bag was held loosely by her wispy, delicate fingers, as if it would slip and she wouldn’t care; the slight blunder of her fingers would be enough for her to forget that the purse had been hers, and she would leave it upon the ground.
         And though this never happened, for some reason Eli was quite assured that it would. And that’s exactly how it would pan out: Hannah would leave her Gucci bag sitting on the linoleum tiling of the cafeteria, and wouldn’t look back to check on its welfare as other people stepped over it on their way to class.
         He was one of “them”: a grungy young man shrouded from public eye by a wall of ill-repute and his shameless self-carriage. In one hand, no matter the time or place, he typically clutched the worn leather handle of an old guitar’s case. While he would walk along, this hand’s twin would typically have in its grasp a small notebook with a pen haphazardly shoved down the spiral binding.
         Eli knew Hannah; her soft embrace, unearthly kisses, and the doe-like quality she managed to retain throughout the years of jaded change were all familiar. She hadn’t lost it as she drifted from the joint to the pipe to the needle, and soon after followed her needles out of her warm apartment to a street corner, which promised it could pay. Even as she laid in a bundle of tattered blankets, her face falling into its bony concaves and her body shaking with the chill of a New York winter, she still looked innocent. The world had done this to her—Hannah was the victim. She had been perfect, had a perfect life, but this existence didn’t give her the adventure she needed to thrive. The drugs had coaxed her, called to her, persuaded her that it would be all right if it were just one hit… Even those had lied to her, as she placed the papers beneath her tongue, breathed in the powders and smokes, and even jabbed the needles into her arm. This fate wasn’t her fault. The fact that the snow was falling upon her, burying her body with its crisp, white, cleanness, wasn’t her fault. Life should have been fairer to her, you see. For once she had been Hannah, and to die buried by angels in a graveyard of unsubmerged coffins, padded by the covering of snowflakes and frost wasn’t to be her fate. Eli was sure of it.
         She hadn’t been on that corner—Hannah hadn’t died. Life hadn’t been fair to her, so she must have deserved a second chance. It must have been that, the angels’ guilt, because Eli saw her everywhere. Even at the funeral as the oak deathbed was lowered into the frozen dirt, on that bright Saturday morning, he saw her sneak past the oak trees where they used to smoke together before she’d drifted. She still came to class, although her name wasn’t read off the attendance roster—the teachers must have known they didn’t need to, since she was there every day after that liar’s Saturday. What’s more was she’d cleaned up her act; again, she looked like all of the other girls with full cheeks and a well-loved body. And so every day, in the cafeteria, she would sit and talk, though nobody else seemed to hear her, and Eli would sit alone and watch, waiting to see if she would glance in his direction, or hopefully drop her Gucci bag from her loose grasp, onto the linoleum floor.