Oct 18th task

Second Setting

The Bedroom-Scene of the First Murder



Hazy shafts of light sneak through the slats of the tightly fastened shutters.  It is the first time, the neighbors will later report, that they have ever been closed.  The room behind the shutters is still and stuffy.  It is so still, in fact, that the only sound that might have been heard was the tick-tocking of the grandfather’s clock in the parlor below.



Dreary wallpaper, yellowed from age, edges curling away from the wall in places have a bit more pattern and color this morning.  Crimson splatters now enhance the faded bunches of primroses. 



The dark, Victorian furniture, overly-large and heavy, shows no signs of the horrific events that occurred earlier.  But the pillow slips, her very reason for being in the bedroom, freshly laundered, starched and ironed, snowy white are now decorated with drops of ruby-red blood, their edges drying rusty in the heat.  And in a tousled heap on the center of the coverlet is a hair-switch, crusted in blood.



On the far side of the bed, between it and the bureau, lies the lifeless body of Abby Borden, skull spilling her brains like seeds cascading from an over-ripe melon.  The Brussells’s carpet lays beneath her, dark and tarry from her congealing blood.  It fills the air so with its coppery stench, that it leaves a metallic coating on your tongue.  Already the body has begun the purtrification process.  The room has the look and smell of what it has become—an abattoir.