You’ve been locked behind drywall so long you’ve forgotten what sunlight feels like.
However, you know human voices. This building was a car repair shop when you were entombed, but since then it’s been converted into a daycare center. Beyond the thin drywall there is the chirp of children bounding and shrieking with limitless energy. There is one girl who thumps away at your wall as if it were an instrument, and another that taps out little melodies that she brags is Morse code. You were an intellectual once, but your expertise was more sociological, so you are never sure if her claims are true.
You hope they don’t renovate, or that some roughhousing boy won’t crash through the walls. You will frighten them, a poor soul trapped inside crawlspace and gnawed on by rats. You’ll never hear the children again.
Their names, their stories, you know them all. The workers often murmur amongst themselves about them, mourning a single mother’s poverty or a father’s quick temper, repeating over and over again that it’s such a shame some child or another is being injusticed by the life they had been born into.
Perhaps they would say the same of you if you were on the news. You had many friends. You cared for them so much, and they returned the sentiment. Perhaps one of these children is theirs.
Could that be possible? How many years has it been? It just feels like a long time. The only dates you can catch are loose interpretations such as “last week” or “next year.”
The Morse code girl could be Xena’s. She’s proud and strong and boisterous. She would be so much like her mother, if she were indeed hers.
Perhaps if you could whisper you would ask the girl, but you are wrapped in decaying rags and wasting away. You can’t move. All there is is to bask in the harsh glow of continued sentience and wonder half-crazed things.
What color is the sunlight? Has it turned purple since you’ve been gone? Where is the moon? Has the man inside noticed your absence and begun to frown? And the gods? All the little crushed gods of eras past, do they sympathize with your plight? Is slumbering Gaia underneath your feet wishing you a good afterlife?
How many years has it been? Are your killers alive? Has Tyler been beheaded? Has Kyle been pushed off a cliff? Or have they gone the same way you had? Someone took a knife and skinned them alive.
You hope no one finds them. They’ll scare the children.