Anna died on a Sunday. When the trees outside were losing leaves, when the sun didn´t stay in the sky for long, when the cold was creeping in.
A goddamn Sunday, that´s God´s day, what a joke!
How could anyone have picked a more pathetic day to die?
Anna never believed in God, either way, and who would blame her, after everything that had been happening?
Damn it, instead of God´s holy Sunday, she should rather have chosen a Monday to leave her life. A Tuesday, a Wednesday, maybe a Thursday, every day would have been more appropiate. Even a Friday or Saturday, because coming into the weekend, dying doesn´t finish early, and it absolutely never has a Saturday off.
Unfortunatey, Anna had no choice. The decision that she had to stop living that Sunday wasn´t made by her, it was made for her. Not by God, or a higher power, and not by another person, either, but by the course that her life had taken the last 8 of the 38 years that she had spent in it.
All at once, there was no way around dying anymore. It was what had to happen, and so it did. When, if not the day you die, will you meet a new beginning?
To be clear, it wasn´t like her heart stopped beating, and she didn´t draw her last breath, either. She was still a living, breathing human being, but from that Sunday on, she wasn´t Anna anymore.
It started on the 3rd of September, a beautiful, bright autumn day. The day the Murphy family was taken. Anna was the first to know that they were gone. She didn´t see it, but she heard it. Not second-hand from someone else, and not through gossiping neighbours. She found out about it first, because for more than two months prior to it she had been living in their basement.
All the sounds from upstairs - the excited tapping of children´s feet, the clirring cuttlery everry morning or at six o´clock for dinner, and Mrs. Murphy´s angel-like voice at eleven p.m. as she would sing her children to sleep - were all at once gone. Dead quiet up there. All of a sudden, the sounds died down, and on the first day Anna noticed, but didn´t think much of it.
They might be visiting relatives or friends. They will probably return during the night or in three days, by the end of the weekend. On the fourth day, though, the sounds from upstairs still hadn´t returned. They might be gone on a holiday abroad, Anna thought on day eight to chase away her unease, but even though she tried hard to think so, she didn´t fully believe it.
Without the upstairs sounds and correlating routines of the Murphys that gave her an idea of how many days had passed, Anna really couldn´t even tell for sure how long they had been gone for before she realized that, in fact, they were gone. She couldn´t have acutally known, but it took 22 days, 13 hours and 26 minutes until she dared to go upstairs. Cautiously, she was sneaking, as if she were afraid that someone would hear her. Only as she reached the top of the stairs, opened the creaking basement door, and was peaking into the deserted living room from the dark hallway, she knew there really was no one there.