At the corner of the dim, musty pub, the woman sits. She never drinks, never eats, just waits. She waits surrounded by her moth-eaten garments and the furs of long-passed animals draping her long-passed figure. There she waits every day.
Her expression never changes; it's always the same lost, stale look. Like a woman frozen in time, she waits. Her distant eyes project images of heartbreak, abandonment and a splinter of hope.
Hope that quickly fades as fast as a winter sun sets, each day she waits.
Wrinkles that seem etched into her skin are thin brush strokes that line her face, paints a picture of her past and covers up the blank void of her present.
Dull jewels and rusty rings that line her neck and fingers play as a second skin, her frail body weighed down by the collection of ancient metal.
All of her principle possessions smother her tiny frame and conceals the churning cascade beneath.
Her drained eyes watch the door. Hardly breathing, hardly blinking, she waits.
A light breeze lifts strands of her wispy white hair, making them land on her forehead like a dead petal falls to the ground.
There she waits every day.
Like the ruins of a grand castle broken down by men, she sits silently, forever living in the past.
She struggles to push her hair back into its routine hairstyle, and then lowers her limb back into its routine position.
She is still once more.
She looks down and examines her softly ticking watch.
At once sadness floods her face.
The only fragment of emotion quickly recedes back into the guarded walls of her heart.
Tear stained scars run from her pale eyes, and down to the corners of her thin, colourless lips.
That same trail marks the path of a broken, now crumbling soul. Head high and face masked, she prepares to leave.
The faint clicks of her old heels are a sad beat of a ballad, playing as she departs.
The over-powering scent of her aged perfume wafts around her as she walks away.
With no goodbyes, she steps out the door while a tiny tear falls from her empty eyes.
That tiny tear, now splattered on the dirty floor, is the only last reminder of the woman who waits.
• By Gypsy-Mae Harihona-Harrison, Year 11, St Kevin's College
