Tell Me I'm Worthless by Alison Rumfitt

Author:Alison Rumfitt
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: tell me im worthless;alison rumfitt;cipher press
Publisher: Cipher Press
Published: 2021-10-13T17:47:15+00:00

The sun is too bright for Alice, who sits on the bench she arranged to meet Ila at. It is a winter sun that blinds but doesn’t warm anything at all. There’s a chill wind blowing at her, nipping at her exposed skin. She’s smoking her second cigarette within ten minutes and looking at two pigeons fight over a single crumb when Ila appears, ten minutes late almost exactly. They nod to each other, and Ila sits on the bench next to her, but at the furthest end, as far as she can get whilst still being on the same bench. This is the first time she’s seen Alice outside of a picture or a video in three years. Alice has put on weight. Her jawline is less defined now. She looks less hot than she used to, Ila thinks, and smirks, but just as she entertains the cruel idea Alice speaks.

“How’s the cancellation going?”

“I haven’t been online since last night. I don’t know.”

“Ah, well, that TV writer is defending you, so that’s something.” Alice blows smoke out into the cold air.

The park they are sitting in is haunted. Specifically, there is a tree which some people call the dead tree. The strange thing about the dead tree is that it isn’t actually dead at all. They can both see it from where they’re sitting, it’s directly opposite the bench, on the other side of a green expanse. People call it the dead tree because it looks dead, at first. It rarely produces any foliage, and yet it is still, by all accounts, a living tree. The park rangers considered cutting it down, but there was no real reason they could find to actually do that, so the tree stayed. That was lucky. If they had felled it, they would have had some sort of curse placed upon them for doing so. They would all have died in their beds, with sticks shoved deep down their throats to choke them.

A drunk died beneath the tree one night when he tried to sleep there. He was tired and a long way from home, so he settled beneath its branches, not realising where he was. Thinking himself to be safe. He awoke in the cool dark night to see something terrible in the shape of a woman framed against the moon. At first he thought it was truly a woman, and called out to it, hey love, what’re you doing, or something along those lines. The thing was entirely silent, though. It shuffled towards him, getting closer and closer, blocking out the black sky and the few visible stars not blotted out with light pollution. He couldn’t move, he was too drunk still, too sick and desperate. The thing that wasn’t a woman was close enough to touch him, and then it did. It touched him, and it touched him hard. So hard that he died. It isn’t clear how anybody knows about what the man saw. He died without telling anybody. He was completely alone in the park when the incident occurred.

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