Through Glass (11 page)

If I focused hard enough I could almost feel the breeze against my skin as well as the warmth of the sun. I could maybe even hear the beautiful twitter of birds as they sang to the clouds. Clouds. I could almost remember the way they looked in the sky. I could get lost in the memories that filtered through some long forgotten piece of my mind. I could smell lilac in the air, I could feel grass on my fingertips.

But I couldn’t.

Not really.

It had been so long since I had seen those things that my memories were broken and exactly how sunlight felt had become a mystery.

Although I could remember the last day I saw them, the last day my window was open. The last day I wasn’t alone.

Everyone could. It was the memory they held closest to them. At least that is what I liked to believe. I liked to trust that there were hundreds of others out there. I liked to pretend I wasn’t alone. For the first year that we had been trapped, I had looked through the window at Cohen day after day while those who were left in the houses around us were turned to ash; our ears full of their screams as they left us. Until, a year after it had all began, the screams had stopped. Until Cohen and I were the last one’s left. We couldn’t be the last ones, though, there had to be others out there.

Maybe they even got to leave their houses and smell the air. Maybe somewhere there was still a sun.

It’s what I told myself anyway. It’s the hope that I clung to.

I said it over and over. It made it easier to understand why Cohen and I were left alive. Without it, it didn’t make any sense.

I rolled over on my bed toward my nightstand, the surface littered with odds and ends that I had used in my attempt to get my flashlight working. I had tried in the beginning anyway. It didn’t seem to matter anymore.

I looked past the forgotten clutter to the small pillow I covered the wind up clock with—the only thing I had been able to get working—only to find the hands stopped.

“Not again,” I growled and pulled the thing toward me. The heavy clock cold against my skin.

I had found this clock weeks after the attack and had been using it to track the brief times I was able to see Cohen ever since. At first, it worked perfectly, however now it seemed to be giving out more and more. I would wake up to it slowing down or, more often than not, to it having stopped completely.

I reached under my pillow and pulled out the small wrist watch I had found in the laundry room a while ago. The band was ripped off and the face was cracked, but somehow it still worked. It wasn’t good for much, only setting the alarm, but at least it worked consistently. After all, I needed something to help me keep track of how much sanity I had left.

2:30

Only an hour left.

Of course, I had no way of knowing if it was the middle of the night or the afternoon. It was always the same grey light that filtered over us, the absence of the sun putting us in an endless night; everything as dark as the inky black sky.

Light was mostly non-existent. Not like I hadn’t tried to create it, the flashlight graveyard was enough proof of that, my hope of using it as some form of a weapon was dashed as life after life around me was taken for the same reason. The Ulama kept their promises. If you broke the rules, they would kill you.

I reminded myself of that every day.

I moved the pillow back over the now functioning clock before they would hear the ticking and then I slowly stood. My pants were loose again and almost slid off my hips before I caught them and tightened the braided fabric belt I had made when all of mine had gotten too big. I tied the ribbon quickly and made my way out of my room. My stomach already tightening in want of food.

I had left everything in the house the same as it was the first day. I wouldn’t touch it because there wasn’t any point. They would just come and ransack my house again.

They did it every month; the screech of the Ulama would fill the air and the door to my house would open. The monsters would make their way through my house, tearing it to bits in search of who knows what, and when they left, only one thing would be unchanged. The large, white box would sit in the same place, the surface dull in the darkness.

It would sit in the middle of the kitchen floor, taunting me. I couldn’t ignore it, not unless I wanted to starve. All the food and supplies I would need for a month were inside.

At least, that’s what the monsters thought. My clothes were now only bags on my emaciated body and the tasteless gruel I was provided with only got moldier and moldier. Yet at least it was something.

I skirted around my parents’ door that still lay in the middle of the hallway and made my way down the dusty stairs toward the kitchen. My bare feet slipped on the heavy layer of dirt and dust as I walked, the gritty texture uncomfortable against my bare skin.

I don’t know how dust accumulated in a world without wind. Every morning when I woke up, there always seemed to be a fresh layer. It covered everything, making the already dark world even darker.

I tip-toed through the now familiar trail of garbage as I made my way through the kitchen, my stomach growling both in expectation and dread for what I was about to do.

I didn’t let my eyes focus on anything as I grabbed the dirty bowl off the counter, the surface as dust covered as everything else. I had started storing it upside down to keep the dust out, but it always seemed that some would seep inside anyway.

I cleaned off as much of the dust as I could and reached up to grab one of the remaining brown packets that lined the last usable shelves.

The food was almost gone. They would come again any day now.

Part of me begged to ration what was left, to make it last in case they didn’t come, but they always came. As much as I didn’t want them to.

“Good morning, Frances,” I mumbled under my breath as the large, brown spider looked at me from her perch.

I could barely make out her glistening eyes as she looked at me, the frustration at my having, once again, invaded her space evident on her itty bitty face.

“Don’t give me that look, Frances. I told you when you started building your web there that it was a bad place, that the chandelier would have been better, but you didn’t listen.” I smiled at her as I pulled the packet down, my hands moving to rip the top off in one swoop.

I knew it was borderline crazy to talk to a spider, however, I didn’t have much of a choice. It was either talk to a spider or forget how to speak. After almost having done the latter, I think I would rather talk to the spider.

At first, I had been creeped out by the mass amount of spiders that had suddenly tried to take refuge in my house from the blackness outside. I stomped and swatted and cringed as I attempted to keep them away.

However one escaped my purge and built a web in the filthy bathroom at the top of the stairs and, in one day, the flies were gone from the room.

So I stopped battling them and, before too long, the maggots, flies, wasps and gnats that had been plaguing me were gone, left to be someone else’s dinner. So the spiders stayed.

I still had rats to deal with, but they mostly kept to themselves and there was nothing I could do about that.

It had taken me some time to get used to the cobwebs and the wispy nets that they would build in the most inconvenient of places. You couldn’t see them with so little light to reflect off the shimmering surface. More than once I walked into a bug covered trap, yet I was no longer pestered by so many other bugs and so the spiders would stay.

Webs and all.

I smiled at Frances again as she went back to her hunt, my mind back to the stink that was protruding from the packet I had emptied into my already filthy bowl.

The smell of rot reached my nose and I cringed, hating the idea of even putting a spoonful of the vile tasting sludge into my mouth.

The gruel was as black as everything else. The taste as bitter as it looked.

At first I had refused to eat it, convinced it was poison or something worse. However, after a week of starvation, Cohen had begged me to eat, promising to show me one of his pieces if I so much as took a bite, so I did.

It was as gross and gritty as I had expected, but the painting made up for it. The first real piece of Cohen’s art that I would see through the darkness across the gap.

It was me, sitting in my window sill and wearing green. He had been painting me that day, but I didn’t look like a leprechaun. I looked beautiful. That one painting still sat right by the window where I could see it every day if I wanted. A memory of that last perfect week.

I shook my head, willing the memory out and took another bite of mush. My face screwing up at the disgusting taste.

I tried to ignore the flavor, willing it to be something better. Waffles with strawberries, that’s what I was really eating. Fluffy bread, the too sweet berries… I could almost remember how it used to taste. I could almost trick myself into believing that was what I was really putting in my mouth. Almost.

The gruel was all I had and I ate it, day after day. The bitter taste and the texture of dirt were almost nothing to me now.

“Sometimes, I think you are onto something, Frances,” I mumbled as I cleared the bowl, setting the once white china upside down on the counter, wishing there was a way to wash it.

“Maybe bugs are the way to go.”

I trudged back up the stairs, wondering if it was Tuesday and I could take a shower, but I hadn’t heard the bell this morning. My water wouldn’t be turned on for another few days, so I had to be content to go and spend the rest of the day in my bedroom, one of the only rooms that the Ulama hadn’t really touched.

They had ransacked everything. Everything except my room and my brothers. I had searched through the house in the beginning; looking for food, weapons, or anything to make light, but they had taken almost everything.

They had taken the light up toys from my brothers’ room and smashed every battery operated object they could find. They had taken the food, smashed every light bulb. I had searched for weeks, yet found nothing useful.

I think that’s when I knew that nothing was going to change. I still held onto the little glimmer of hope, but overall, no. Nothing would change. I had closed the doors and vowed never to return to the bedrooms. They were sacred ground now.

I walked into my room and looked around, grateful that this room had been mostly untouched. The bed was still in one piece, the sheets so dirty from lack of washing you could see the perfect imprint of my body. My desk still stood under the window, the dark curtain pulled over the glass so as to keep me hidden as well as to keep the noise dampened.

Almost everything was the same. Except for one thing.

I had covered my walls with my life. What was once painted a sunny yellow was now covered with every picture of my family I had been able to scavenge out of my destroyed house.

From every inch of my wall my family smiled down at me; my mother, my father, all four of my brothers and scattered amongst them were pictures of Cohen and I through the years. I had pulled the pictures from frames, from albums and every other place I had found them in an attempt to fill my walls. I had ripped faces out of other pictures; the jagged edge of the pictures the only white that remained in my world.

I could lay down in my bed in the small sanctuary I had built, look at the smiles and pretend I wasn’t alone. I had only placed the smiling pictures on the wall, not the ones of angry brothers or scowling mothers.

Only the smiles.

I fell down onto my bed, my body protesting the exertion of the small amount of energy I had saved up by going down for breakfast. I kept the groan inside my throat as I turned to face the picture of Cohen and I that I had placed right at eye level. The picture was one from his high school graduation. He was smiling at the camera as he held me against him, both of our grins wide and cheesy.

I raised my hand to touch the photo, my fingers hovering above it as I pretended to touch his face. I kept them there, away from the surface, not letting my gritty skin come in contact with the precious picture. As much as I wanted to hold the picture, to press it against my chest and run my fingers over the surface, I didn’t want to ruin it. I didn’t want to lose the memory.

Everything tightened inside of me as I looked at it. Cohen’s hand was against my arm, his other wrapped around my shoulder. We both grinned widely as someone—my mom, I think—took the picture.

Touch.

Sometimes I would go to sleep trying to remember what touch felt like. What
his
touch had felt like.

I reached my hand underneath my flattened pillow and pulled out the black ink pen I had found in the old office during my scavenge last week. I pressed the tip against the dirty skin of my wrist, the ink dragging onto my skin as I pushed the point down, tracing over the lines that Cohen had put there all those years ago.

I followed the swoop of the lines, my fingers having done it so many times I no longer needed to watch; I knew where the pen needed to go.

I let the ink cover my wrist, making the drawing I had been left with darker than it was before. I had gotten really good at keeping my left hand steady as I drew on my wrist. As I traced, I let my memory flow back to that night; to the way his fingers felt against mine, the taste of his kiss…

My revelry was cut short by the deep buzzing that sounded through my room. The low sound was as loud as a fog horn in my ears and I jumped up, hitting the pillow that housed the old wind up alarm clock in a quick attempt to turn it off. The buzzing stopped automatically and I tensed, my body waiting for one minute, waiting for the screech that would herald my death, but it never came.

My shoulders relaxed and I slid off my bed. My tired body pulling itself onto the large desk before I opened the heavy curtain that covered the window.

Cohen was already there, waiting for me. His eyes shining through the darkness that we were both surrounded by. His lips twitched in a smile when he saw me and his hand moved to press against the glass.