• Riley felt the wisps of wind caressing her thick billowing hair and the tiny bits of gravel pushing into her bare feet as her toes curled around the edge of the building, and thought "Oh, how horrible my life is. Why were our souls brought to earth to dwell in the bodies of humans?". She thought about the pain she suffered every day of her life, the blood in her body spilling onto the white carpet of her room, and the uncaring glare of her malaicious, sick, vile father. Answering her own rhetorical question Riley whispered aloud "To suffer...We are here to suffer". Riley closed her tear sodden eyelashes and let the thick fog of depression wash over her and overcome all senses of happiness, pain, love and hatered. She forgot, and she remembered, and her life was veiled by the deep depresion she had sunken into many times before. Never had the depression lasted so long though, (this time it gad been haunting her for months) and been so difficult to deny and hide from others, she had gouged cuts into her arms and legs delicatly lacing her pale white arms with a spiderweb of a life of pain and hatred, the color of her pain so different from her skin you could spot it from a mile away. But did she truly want to escape her life so quickly, before she had even had the chance to live? These sencond thought frightened Riley, she would open her eyes and look down the building, if there were people down at the foot of the building trying to coax her down, she turn around...and walk down the stairs back home. This negotiation was bound not to work, it was two in the morning, which was why she was scared silly to open her eyes. "Fear is a part of life," she thought, "and I loathe life." She opened her eyes a crack and peered over the precipice of the building with hope in her heart that there some someone there to catch her when if she fell. There was only a brown tabby cat, intently staring up at her from 10 stories down below with wide eyes. She sucked in a rattling breath through her bared teeth...did a cat count as someone to catch me? Out of her jean pocket she pulled out a piece of note-book paper that had been unfolded and refolded many times. She opened it up and reread the note again:
    If you find this note whole, then I have killed myself. If it's shredded into tiny pieces, then I am still alive and the pieces represent my shattered soul that longs to be freed from my body. I don't have many belongings so give them all to a charity--or I don't know. I'm doing this for purely selfish reasons, but it all comes down to four words: I hate my life.
    So I'm deciding to get rid of it. I know no one (espesially my father) will feel any remorse about how they treated me and that I am gone for ever. I will take my secrets to the grave with me.
    I Hate You All,
    R.I.P. (Riley Isabella Porclina)
    p.s. I always considered it ironic that my initials were the same as the letters they put on gravestones. I guess not.
    With freah sobs tearing through her body, Riley tore her suicide note to peices and let it be carried away by the wind down to the brown tabby cat waiting for her at the foot of the building. She was going to take the stairs down, pick up the stray tabby cat, bring her home and remember this day forever as the day she refused to die...even when she had the chance. As Riley waslowering herself down the egde of the building back to safety, she heard a strangled, desperate cry for help, she whipped her head round and saw that a drunk had picked up the cat, her cat, and was shoving her in a sack, Riley could do nothing more than stare as the man took away her only reason to live and smashed the bag against the walls of the surrounding buildings and telephone polls. Then she watched as the man took the bloody, broken cat out of the sack along with a large, sharpened butcher knife and dimembered her poor kitty. His laughter reached her ears as he tortured the cat mercilessly. These were the kind of peoplee she was trying to escape from in this world, the sick perverts who liked to watch other living things suffer, human or not. Forgetting about the fact she was still on the edge of a fairly high building, she tried to step forward to save the poor little kitten in the sack. Her foot slipped and she felt her heart fly up into her throat. She realized she was falling with a gut-wrenching terror, she didn't have much time to think about the fact that she was falling though. "She hit the pavement with a sickening crunch of bones being pulverized to bits." the drunk later said to the investigative police. "I didn't even realize she was there until she fell and muttered somethin' 'bout a cat in a sack", "I was just mindin' my own buiesness picking up trash fer community service," he added, just to be safe. When Riley's father arrived at the scene, he looked at his daughter's dead, mangled body with revulsion, and wanted nothing to be said about the suicide in the newspaper, daily news, magazine articles, not even in her funeral (that of which he did not attend). Riley's mother had died five years previously... the same building, the same desicion, the same accident and the same look of disgust now cast upon her fathers scrutinizing features was cast upon her as well.