#dpkida

Trish hung up her phone and stared at the easel in front of her. She had woken up with waves of inspiration flowing off of her, a clear image in her mind. Once the phone rang, suddenly everything changed. The doctors had finally managed to find the ID of the girl who’d called 911, they found her emergency contacts and made a phone call. Trish was calm on the phone, her words coming out with a practiced grace from years of concealing her feelings from anyone who didn’t matter. There was no reason for the man on the phone to hear her react, she didn’t know him – he was merely a conduit of knowledge passing a few facts along. The information she was told, however, was more important than he’d ever know and as he continued on in his day he probably wouldn’t even remember it.

She sat silently, just looking at the relatively sparse work on the easel. It hadn’t been worked on enough to become a picture of anything recognizable but it was clearly on its way to being something nice. Something relaxed and beautiful. Something that evoked feelings of contentment. It made her angry. Kida made her angry. With a sudden and violent motion, she stood from the stool she’d been sitting on and sent it clattering to the ground. Her hands grabbed the canvas in front of her and wrenched it down towards her knee – the loud crack of the wooden frame becoming the most satisfying sound of the moment. Every frustration, every annoyance, everything she’d been bottling up since Kida’s first slip-up had come swiftly to the surface. She’d watched the girl – no, not watched, kept the girl from drowning in her own stupidity once before. Trish held the blonde’s hair back as she practically turned herself inside out as her body was taken over by the trembling withdrawals. As her mind processed the new information, the information that had Kida lying unconscious in a hospital bed, she tore at the canvas – effectively shredding it and leaving any remnant of art unrecognizable.

Dropping the remains to the floor, she managed to catch her breath and steady herself. Her hands wiped at her forehead and smoothed down the curls that had gone astray. Outwardly, she was back to the picture of perfection though she was boiling beneath the surface. For the sake of her own dignity, and to keep herself from smothering Kida in her hospital bed, that’s the way it would need to stay. Contained.

Adam Ross is the criminal.