shorts {a collection of stories}

{a casement for death}

I thought I heard Papa say something, but the shapes of his words were garbled from the lack of air in the room. They never reached my ears. I felt squeezed, thrust into a contortionist's pose between my sister, father, mother, two brothers, and the door. I didn't realize it then, but I was lucky to get out alive.

We burst into the moonlit square, rancid and chemical-laden air wafting out with us. Death was nipping at our heels. My sister tripped, and gasped as she sprawled over the doorjamb; the dank air swept down upon her. With a shudder, she lay still. Papa forced me onwards even though I felt like running back to her. She was my twin, the other half of my soul. We couldn't leave her behind.

I saw her fall, but I was too young to understand what had happened to my playfellow.

On we ran in silence--past deathly quiet homes, down vacant streets, alongside the watchtower tall and grim as the Reaper himself. Papa and Mama, Toby and Rei and I, we ran until Rei began to fall behind. Mama wouldn't leave him. His last breath was a whispered, shuddering cough that sounded like,"Infidels!" before he went limp. 

Before Papa could stop her, Mama tried to revive him. The taste on his sweet lips was poison. She spat, and cried. When we passed nearest the river, the tumult of silt and dark water, Papa threw Rei to the current with a prayer.

Rei had also been my playfellow of late, for although he'd been doing far too much growing up he'd still liked to play the games my twin Mala and I invented. Toby was the eldest, and the kindest by far; he let Rei do all the mischief-making and left we girls to do the giggling. Papa had high hopes for Toby, said he'd become a scholar. If only he'd gone to school last autumn instead of staying and helping Papa...

'Course he said it was for the best--but if he'd gone, then he wouldn't have been there that night, when everyone in our village died. We lost our brother and sister, and then later Mama, when the poisons worked their way into her fragile system. Toby might have been safe, had he left.

Papa and I kept running at such a speed that it seemed as though our feet had the wings of great birds. Toby seemed to falter once or twice, and so I took his man-hand in my eight-year-old own and we ran on together.We noticed when Papa began to slow, but we kept running. I am most like Toby, and Toby is most like me. We were thinking the same thing that night: Papa wouldn't make it.

Miles from town, we stopped. Papa found us soon after, his breaths coming in harsh. The three of us must have made an odd sight to any passing spirit: three humans, afraid in the darkness, crouching in the Forest awaiting a dawn that may never come. Somehow, I fell asleep--I must whimpered in the night, because come dawn I woke to find Toby's arms secure around me. 

I missed Rei then, Mala, Mama, and I began to weep.

My tears seeped into the ground, and the ress rings began to bloom where they'd fallen. Mala had shown them to me twice before, once accidentally when she fell and broke her arm, and once on purpose, sort of, when she was crying over unrequited love and her tears met fertile soil. This ring next to me, with its iridescent blues and greens, only served to remind me further of the sister I'd lost, and more of them bloomed. Violets, indigos, deep sparkling blacks. These were the colors of grief, the earth answering my pain.

Toby woke to the sound of my tears. He checked on Papa, but I knew as soon as I took a deep breath that he, too, was gone. Uncaring, assuming the poisons had fled, I kissed his cracked, coal-stained hand and then Toby and I buried him in a clear place between the trees. 

Then, we walked away, far from the tomb that science and its chemicals had made of our village. 

We left our lives behind that day. No matter how long ago it was, I shall never forget it.