Nicole Comes Home

Tossing her keys in the bowl by the door, Nicole walked into the house. Her parents were away, that she knew, but she expected that she'd see her brother, Jon, sometime that day. It was an unplanned visit, so she expected no welcome wagon. Sometimes a girl just had to come home from college to see her family.

...and to use the laundry.

She dropped the heavy duffel bag, the smell of sweat escaping the zipper as it hit the ground, and took off her coat. She'd put off washing her clothes too long, and now she was without any. Any that didn't smell, that was. The scheduled volleyball practices had been more intense than she'd planned for the past week, as had her boyfriend's needs. With both Mark and her coach breathing down her neck, she thought it was a miracle that she got any schoolwork done at all.

But she'd made it home. Jon would be surprised, which would be great. The pair had always gotten along, each playing their roles in the relationship. Jon was the little brother, but tried to act tough, even getting into a couple fights back when they were in school to defend her honour. Nicole, one year older than her brother, but never really felt comfortable as 'big sister'. She just didn't have it in her to be the boss. When she pictured herself, she saw a girly-girl, fulfilling far too many stereotypes of unhealthy expressions of womanhood. A shiver ran down her spine as she thought to her Women and Gender Studies class, and what would happen if she opened her mouth about how she wanted to live her life. She'd be dead before midterm!

Mark, her boyfriend, didn't mind one bit.

"If you don't want to work outside the home," he told her one night after she'd given him a banger of a blowie, "that's fine. With your volleyball scholarship, you'll finish school without student loans, so if you want to just stay home and have my babies, I'm okay with that."

It wasn't exactly a proposal for marriage, but it was close enough that Nicole had felt incredibly loved. He wanted her, and he'd take care of her. She knew that the love she felt for Mark couldn't fade. It was too deep. Too profound.

Grabbing her duffel bag, she walked to the laundry room and loaded up the machine, dropped in some soap, and turned it on. She selected "Extra Soiled". Some of the shirts she'd had to wear a few times, and her workout clothes were particularly nasty. Not to mention that blouse that Mark had made on mess of the previous night as they parked outside her dorm...

Laundry started, she padded in socked feet to the living room and flopped on the couch.

That's when she saw it.

The scroll.

It was something that definitely did not belong in their house. The scroll looked ancient. Picking it up, Nicole felt its paper, which had a strange, leathery texture. On the scroll was one sentence written in red ink.

"I wish that I understood women more."

That was it. Nicole recognized the handwriting as her brother's, but why would he feel the need to write on a scroll like this? What was the story behind her discover? And why did she have the uneasy feeling that that wasn't red ink, but rather that someone had opened a vein in order to scribe the wish.

And why did she have the funny feeling that she was being watched?