Another Sample of Writing (a teaser if you will)

Pool

She stared into the pool, her mind focused on the clear blue in front of her. The light from the porch was so dim that she could barely see her reflection. She bent over and touched the transparent mirror image of the moonlight water in front of her as it drifted through her fingers. She couldn’t help but feel connected with something else out there…something else in the water.
She closed her eyes and let herself fall into the water, drenched in her own sadness. She touched the tiles on the bottom of the pool and opened her eyes to the sight of the light blue water and the smooth, white tiles. She lifted her finger and felt the velvet-soft touch of the tiles. There was a crack in one of them that bothered her slightly, but she felt content in her surroundings.
She loved the feel of the water around her. All of her senses became entranced in a spell, one that only her lungs could curse. She smiled slightly to herself as she ascended up into the faint light and heard a voice.
“Who the hell are you?” A shrill voice was muffled under the waves of the water, but it still shook her eardrums.
She didn’t answer. She breathed in and went back down into the water. Her hair formed a myriad of branches that grew when nourished with water.
“Why are you here?” It was a man, shady but his dark eyes were just as intense without the help of light. His image pierced through the water like he was already inside her mind.
She stopped breathing and rushed to the top of the water. Her eyes were watering and pulled her hair back into a makeshift ponytail. She sniffled and stared up into the man’s shark eyes.
“Don’t ever come back again.” He stated and she ran. Her clothing and shoes were soaked, her vision hazy and her face flushed with terror. She ran back through the wooden fence with splinters all across the handles and jumped over the broken porch steps that creaked as she leaped onto the dirt path. The shack had been there for years but something had drawn her there that night. She thought that it would inspire something in her, but all she came back to the orphanage with was fear.


“Why are you soaked?” Mrs. Burges inquired as she felt the sleeve of Kathryn’s jacket. She held a candle up to her oval face. “It’s after midnight young lady. And before Sunday! Up to bed you go. We’ll talk about punishment later. Go to bed! Go!”
Kathryn walked up slowly, her pricked hands feeling the coolness of the stair railing and a surging rush of the bitter cold throughout her whole body. The orphanage couldn’t afford extra blankets so all Kathryn could do was put on her dry work clothes and sleep as tightly as she could under the striped sheet she washed twice a week. She was glad it wasn’t Tuesday or Friday or else she wouldn’t have anything to keep her the least bit warm.
As soon as Kathryn’s head it her pillow, she saw the man’s eyes. His red, evil face and the words “don’t come back again”. She couldn’t seem to block it out unless she thought of water, but he always seemed to be in the water, watching her. She shook her head furiously, but that only woke up the others in their cots.
The eyes of the cold-blooded man stayed in her head. She saw a woman being dropped, her blood splattered everywhere and eyes open. She wore rags and her eyes were bronze, so beautiful but so lifeless on her ghost-white face and pale lips. The bottoms of her feet and her back were torn as if she had to walk for a long time then dragged.
Kathryn woke up screaming, her back upright and her hands shaking. She was the only one who was in the room besides a little redheaded girl named Piper, who was getting dressed for church.
“Are you coming Kathryn?” She asked all smiles. “The Lord is waiting for you.”
Kathryn tried as fast as she could to compose herself for this happy-go-lucky five-year-old. Her gaze was averted elsewhere. Had this little girl heard her screaming?
“Come along, my friend.” Piper smiled with all of her face. Her seaweed-green eyes danced next to her freckles.
Kathryn was already wearing her work clothes, so she just followed Piper down the hall into the study where Mrs. Burges taught classes useful to girls. Her job was to be able to make ladies out of these social throwaways and have them get married. It was the least she could do. Her own husband had run off with his mistress as she told it, leaving her with no notice. The only way to survive was to get remarried or find a job. She was after a widower named Hudson Jones, a prominent banker in the community. His own wife had gone missing and was later found dead in the woods. The press announced she had been mulled by a wolf, cut marks all over body.
“She’s a liar.” A girl named Mariel told a late-night group. “The truth is that Mrs. Burges’s husband told her that he was never in love with her and wanted them to move to different towns to create themselves again and not be married anymore.” Mariel lit a cigarette and started to smoke. “She refused and told him that it would be an abomination to Christ and shit. Finally, he told her that he was in love with a woman he had loved ever since he could remember who had been promised to an English ambassador. He told her this for five fucking years. She didn’t give up on him. Rumor is she’s still a virgin. Well, that’s shit. He didn’t want children, didn’t want to deal with those kinds of responsibilities. She did, she drugged him up, took off his pants, and convinced him that he had gotten drunk and that they fucked. I bet she has a master somewhere that tried to impregnate her so she could have children.
“As for Hudson, he killed his wife. It’s that simple. She was cheating on him, that I know for sure. She was a dancer in a brewery, how could she not be? He said she was a disgrace. Told her to run and kill herself. She ran; he got his henchmen to beat her. Of course, they went too far and did some goddamn awful things to her, so they made it look like a wolf did it. They even shot one to prove their point.”
After everyone got over the shock of Mariel’s story, someone asked how she knew all this.
“Use your eyes people. They’re blinding you with God to distract you from the bad. People are dying and being tortured everyday; that explains this place, huh?” She blew out a puff of smoke.
There were some giggles but more coughs.