The End of Eden Introduction

Along with The Flower Girl, I was also working on another manuscript called The End of Eden. I have mentioned it in previous posts and I am now going to post a little prologue to the story. Please let me know what you think of it.

Prologue
THE END
.~.

The last thing Eden Rose Cross saw before she died was not what she was expecting. She had heard the stories about the white light people saw or their entire lives played at an impossibly quick speed in front of their eyes before they died. But Eden saw none of this. Instead, what she saw was him kneeling above her, his eyes staring down into hers, his face completely blank as his hands tightened around her throat. She gasped, her fingers digging into the carpet, trying desperately to move away but she couldn’t. Her head was feeling light. Her eyes were closing. She couldn’t keep them open. Her mouth was parted, gasping for desperate air, but it wasn’t nearly enough. His hands only tightened their grip around her.

For those who knew her, they never would have thought that this would be the end she would meet. Everyone had such high hopes for her, such faith that she was one day going to change the world. But at twenty-three years old, Eden never got the chance to live up to everyone’s expectations of her. She did become something of a celebrity in the city though it was not in the way she had once envisioned for herself and once a more gripping headline surpassed the story of the slain ballerina, Eden was forgotten by those outside of her friends and family.

Though she saw no white light or flipbook of her life in front of her eyes, as the oxygen slowly escaped her and she felt herself slip into the black world of unconsciousness, she did have thoughts of her two younger sisters. Eden knew that she was dying and yet, she was able to think of her two sisters and a ghost of a smile crossed her lips. His hands faltered for just a moment as he saw the smile on her face but then he gained in strength again and his grip tightened further around her throat. She knew as the darkness descended around her that there was no escaping. She knew that she was going to die on the living room floor in between the television set and the coffee table.

And the last thing Eden Rose Cross saw before she died was him killing her.

.~.

He sat in the interrogation room of the police station, his eyes swollen and bloodshot from having cried most of the evening and his hands shaking from going several hours without using. Detective Cruise Wilder sat across from him, sipping at a Styrofoam cup of lukewarm coffee and writing down on a yellow legal pad of paper. It wasn’t every night that his job was this easy. Most people didn’t walk into police stations confessing to murder.

Cruise was the only detective on duty that night and when the strung-out junkie sniveled out that he had killed his girlfriend to the desk sergeant, he was almost sent away, most of the officers thinking that he was just high and didn’t know what he was talking about. But then he began talking of how she had come home from dance practice and he had strangled her. He described how she had tried to get away, how she had clawed at him – the fingernail scratches on his arms backing his claims up. Cruise had taken him back into interrogation room three and had sat with him as patiently as possible as he rambled on, at times barely coherent. He broke down in the middle of his confession and it had taken him nearly forty-five minutes to start talking again.

His girlfriend’s name was Eden Cross, a twenty-three year old ballet dancer for the Milwaukee Ballet.

And he had killed her.

.~.

If someone came up to her and asked her how the funeral had gone, Eve Martha Cross wouldn’t know how to answer for there was nothing about that day that she remembered.