An Excerpt from a WIP: "Blood on White Roses"

This one is heavily influenced by a series of paintings by Rene Magritte. Not sure what's happening here and not sure where it's going, but I'm pretty sure that's why I love it as much as I do. The potential is mad high from this moment on.

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'If you were to ask, I’m not sure I’d know the answer. I can’t remember anything before the night I came to in the back of a panel van, legs tied together, arms bound behind my back. I could feel every bump of the road as the old suspension found each tiny crack or pothole. The metal floor smelled of rust, but the brief illumination from the streetlights we’d pass kept the floor mostly drowned in darkness.

A woman knelt beside me, keeping her hand on a part of my body to steady me during transit. She wore a brown, knee-length pencil skirt, a white blouse, and a tattered cloth fabric wrapped around the entirety of her head and face, appearing as if she’d just stepped out of a Magritte painting. The strangeness of the situation coupled with her outfit made my head swim. The questions came too fast; the answers not at all.

The van was moving quickly along the roadway. The woman kept her hidden face pointed toward me, as if she could see through the fabric. One hand gripped the back of the driver’s headrest and the other was splayed out on the floor of the van, keeping her steady as the driver pushed the engine to its limits.

“He’s awake,” she shouted. “Get us off the road.” Her voice didn’t match the one I imagined in my head. It was not soft, or lilting. There was an authority to it that took me by surprise.

“Dammit. We’re not close enough yet!”

I looked up and found that he wore a similar tattered cloth fabric wrapped around his face as he drove. He, too, wore a white shirt and slacks the same color brown as the woman’s skirt. He white-knuckled the steering wheel and kept looking at the rear-view mirror as if we were being chased.

Had I been kidnapped?

“Hold on!” the driver yelled, turning left hard enough to send me into the wall of the van while the woman lost her hold on the seat and fell into me, elbowing me in the back.'

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