when dusk falls☽

07 | morning rays

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Her name was Eva. The girl's name was Eva.

            She was small, weak, fragile. Her body seemed to be made out of glass, so frail that even the tiniest touch would break her, would kill her until there was nothing left except miniscule particles. She was so bony, her ribs clearly visible and almost poking out of her fitted and torn shirt. Her hair was in dreads, long and un-brushed for who knows how many months, for who knows how many years. Eva was obviously lost, and it almost broke my bleak heart when she wouldn't let go of this small plush animal she held firmly in her right arm. It was a bunny, I had thought, almost filthier than she was, almost paler than she was. Her arms and legs were so feeble, they were just like newborn's. I thought that just one wrong step and her leg would snap in half, one wrong push and her arm would become dislocated and she would be in more excruciating pain than she is right now.

            Her stuffed bunny seemed to be the only thing that could keep the girl some company. It seemed years and years old, something she had obviously had long before the apocalypse. It seemed sentimental to her, like it was of some great importance. I had hoped it was, it seemed as if she had kept it from the start of it all, from the start of the crawling dead.

            I felt like the girl was a message, a simple one. A little speck of hope given to me, a small speck of prospect. It was definitely getting my mind of Miles for a while, but every hour or so I feel like I see him, not alive but as a dead, not breathing, but groaning. I get this familiar twinge that seems to pull at my heart like screaming violin strings, like the screaming chords that seem to reach their way into my ears, into my brain. Everything seemed to be happening so fast, as where before it was moving as slow as a dead turtle. I don't think I had really digested the loss of one of my closest friends yet, I don't think I have really accepted that he was gone.

            The sun was nearly out now, though it was already beating down on us like a drum. My sweat stained my clothes and trailed with dirt down my forehead. The humidity made it even harder to breathe, even harder to stay alive. The weather was choking me, squeezing my throat so tight and tying it into strained knots, like the ones someone would feel when trying to hold back the salty tears that threaten to escape from their sunken eye sockets, and vanish into the stale world. The shine of sweat sheened across my kneecaps and my back, like an invisible layer of broad glue. One wrong move and I would stick, be bolted to a tree that I knew I could not escape, be bolted to the past I know I cannot escape. They could come for me, the infected, and I could see John covering the small girl's eyes as my own guts are torn from me, as my own family is torn from me. The red of my flushed and overheated cheeks, dripping into the thick blood that travels miles through my veins. I was soaked in my own perspiration, soaked in my own family's blood. It was only morning, the sun just beginning to rise, but I felt like it was a desert summer's afternoon. The girl was shivering in her skin, trembling under her own touch.