Rooftops At Sunrise

8

Aoi awoke the first morning of summer with a fervent desire to cancel her plans with Damian.

The air was hot, and thick with cricket-song. Every breath she took was heavier than the last. The seasons had passed; her parents were still fighting, though.

She rose to her feet and found that her legs felt like lead.

Aoi could not wait for the day to be over, even though it had only just begun.

The young woman blinked. She took her pills. Took a piss. Took another one of those drinks that kept her alive, which the people around her kept on calling fake food, and this annoyed her very much. If it is enough to feed me, she thought, then, what right do you have to say on whether or not it is real? Would you prefer I swallow nothing and starve instead?—despite her anger, she would stay silent on the matter. A world in which they could not eat was unimaginable to the regular citizen of this town. The young woman had understood this very well from day one. After all, she had once been one of them, too.

Her doctors had mentioned they would attempt to add more doses and different pills next week; this strange testing period, as the young woman would come to consider it, had been going on for quite some time now—at least, her entourage seemed to think so.

Aoi does not find six months to be long, however, when she has already gone through the experience of waiting for more than ten years to be diagnosed. That isn't to say she has any hopes of getting better—the medicine is merely a temporary fix to a problem her local hospital still cannot solve.

Someone turns the TV on in the living room. Aoi goes back into the bathroom again to brush her teeth with water, and only that. The shirt she wore today gave her pins and needles, itches she could not scratch, across her arms. Her parents have changed their laundry detergent; the one they'd been using is out of stock in their local convenience store, it will only be back next week, and Aoi does not know how to break it to them, that they will have to buy another one, and maybe another after that with the little money they have, to keep Aoi's reactions at bay.

Aoi decides she will hide the redness of her skin for the day; she keeps her fingers crossed, and hopes, that the itches will not get worse.

Soon, her home's front door is slammed shut. The television does not emit another sound. Aoi thinks this is a joke—a mean spirited farce from the universe, who woke up one day and suddenly decided to taunt her. Until this day, she still finds this theory to be a plausible cause—after all, she had just turned eight: she was perfectly healthy, and was stuffing her face with a massive rainbow cake. Then, she took a nap, and her life took a detour it never recovered from when she awoke with stomach cramps that she could only describe as the worst of the worst.

Her parents dragged her to the hospital. She was in tears. They did not know what was wrong with her. A doctor sent her back when it stopped and called it a stomach bug.

But of course, that would have been much too simple. The young woman wishes it could have been a microbe.

She pushes the thought away. She grabs her backpack, and doesn't bother saying goodbye to an empty house that reminds her of how much her parents must work in order to merely keep her alive.

Barely anyone recognizes her condition; the ones who do certainly aren't the people responsible for whether she will have permission to obtain a disability pension. Aoi hates this. She wishes she could disappear, and then, she wishes she had the guts to wish on her demise for real.

In truth, the young woman does not want to leave in the slightest. She definitely wants to stay alive. Here. Breathing, and able to hear the sounds of water running down her rooftop when it rains. The laughter of her peers. The postman that curses every morning when he messes up and puts the mail in the wrong, little steel box.