Drabbles 3

1.

If there had ever been a day where the sun shone so beautifully, Isaac had never seen it. He would remember a day like this, it would be imprinted in his mind until he drew his dying breath. Slowly, he drew his hand across the lush grass, bringing his hand up until it brushed the long tendrils of auburn hair. He glanced to his side, taking in the profile of the young woman lying beside him. Her eyes were closed against the onslaught of the sun's rays, her lips slightly parted as she breathed in the fresh air.

"Come with me." She had spoken so quietly that Isaac had nearly missed it. A whisper into the wind. He wondered if she had even intended to say it aloud.

"Sam," he sighed into the deep blue sky, his eyes closed as he drew a deep breath.

"Come with me," she repeated, slowly as if afraid he would miss a single word.

"Sam," as he spoke it, Isaac realised he hardly knew what he had intended.

"I can't stand it here and I know you can't either. I need to leave, Isaac." Isaac rolled to stare into the deep blue of her eyes, so alit with a passionate fire that he felt himself cringing away. "What's holding you back?" Isaac closed his eyes. "What good are we even doing here, Isaac?"

"My mother," he whispered.

"She's not even there anymore. I don't know what's left, but it's not her. She doesn't…" Sam paused as though searching for the right words to phrase something that should never be said. "She doesn't even know when you're in the room." She paused again and leaned forwards. "And your father? He's too drunk to even notice when you're in the house."

"I know."

"So," she breathed, bringing her hand up to curl around his. "Why not?"

"School." He paused, opening his eyes once again to stare into that great, open sky. "Graduation is in two months."

"I don't want to wait. I want to get out. I want to see the world."

"Sam, please." Please, save me. Please, take me away from here. Please, please, leave me alone. "Why me?"

"I need you." He grasped her hand with his own. She wanted a friend.

And that was all.


***
2.

The room smelled of rot and death. There had never been a smell like it before and yet it was a smell that he could not help but place. He knew what it was from the moment he had smelled it. From the moment he woke to find himself blind. The darkness only made his other senses so much stronger. The thick smell permeated every time he breathed in. He had tried to breathe through his mouth hoping that it would lessen the smell, but instead he tasted it. He had choked and gagged on how wrong and awful the taste had been.

He had never been a man of God, but as he lay on that cot, his eyes unseeing, he prayed. He prayed that he could leave, that it would end even if it meant through his own death. In that moment, he wished he could die.

There came moments of wakefulness, spread out and scarce among a sea of nothing. He hated those moments. The moments when he was aware were the worst. He could never see anything, though there was nothing covering his eyes. He wondered where they had gone.

Sometimes he thought he was a small child, he cried for his mother, weeping until his lungs could take no more and his throat stopped making noise at all. He wept and screamed and cried until that awful soft hand slapped him soundly across the face. Sometimes he remembered who he was and sometimes he just kept on crying until a heavy blow came to his head and he stopped thinking at all. That was his favourite.

In his most wakeful moments, he wondered how many others there had been. How long had their bodies lain in this awful, awful room? He could smell them. He could smell the blood that he was sure caked the floors. He could taste their flesh decomposing with every breath he took.

She was inventive with his torture. She almost never did the same thing twice. Sometimes she cut him until he was sure there was no more skin to be flayed.

Sometimes she let him heal, going as far as to douse his skin in salves, and sometimes she poured salt into the wounds, petting his head as she did. The worst was when she resorted to electrical shock. He knew it was coming when he felt buckets of water poured across his skin. She clamped the fingers of each hand in the vice of what he was sure had to be a car battery, leaned down and kissed his forehead promising that she would make it all go away. And then she would turn the battery on and he would scream and beg for it to stop. He screamed and wept until his voice was raw and he could make no more noises. He struggled until his body would no longer move. Sometimes it went on for what must have been hours and sometimes he blacked out straight away. She let him sleep sometimes, but not often. She reached up with her gloved hands and slapped his face and pulled his hair until he woke. She whispered sweet nothings into his ear and then she started all over again.

He wished he could sleep.

He wished he could die.

She told him that he had been a bad man, that she wanted to make him better and that she wanted to help. He never understood, though. He never paid his taxes on time and he sometimes stole pens from the bank, but he had never intentionally hurt a person. He tried to tell her that he was a good man, but whenever he did, she cried and screamed and flayed the skin of his chest. In those moments, he didn't care that he was a good man; he would be anything she wanted as long as it made her stop.

In the dark of the room, he felt as though he were floating in a sea of rot and black. He ceased to exist in the sea of nothing; he had no name and no history. He was everything and he was nothing. In the scarce moments of consciousness, he was sure he was a small child. Somehow, somewhere, in that sea of nothing, he had been reborn. The man he had been was gone; his slate wiped clean leaving only a small child, no older than five. She was happiest then. She stroked his hair and planted kisses on his forehead and spoke in such a sweet lilting voice. She told him how much she loved him, how proud she was of him and what a sweet man he would grow to be. She wept and spoke of the awful man he had been, of how he had never once looked at her, at how she had sat outside his apartment and wished that just once he would look her way. His heart broke and he wept with her.

He hoped that he would grow to be the type of man she would love.

She only spoke to him in soft voices after he had been reborn. She hardly ever hurt him anymore and for that he was grateful. She said that he didn't need to be hurt anymore because he was a good man now. Good men didn't need to be hurt.

She came to him one day and stroked his head, her fingernails scraping his scalp delightfully. She leaned down until he could feel her breath brushing against his ear, her voice so quiet and filled with love. She told him that he had become such a good man that she would make sure he stayed that way forever, that he would never return to what he had been.

"I love you," she said, her beautiful voice like the sweetest of songs. "I love you," she wept into his hair as she stroked his face, the sound of her tears broke his heart and he smiled into her shoulder. She loved him and nothing would ever keep them apart. He felt the needle slip into his neck as she sobbed and smiled into his hair, her voice breaking with tears and so much heartbreaking love.

"I love you," she said as she kissed his eyelids. As he closed his eyes and sunk down into that blissful darkness, he knew it was true. No one would ever love him as she had.

***
3.

The Great Market of Obchod sells just about anything a person could ever want. Thousands of rows of goods and treasures line the streets, the winding isles carving an organic path through the neon lights of the central city. It was there that I found this data disk. The moment I saw it, sitting in a pile of abandoned circuits, I knew that I had to have it. Dad always said that when things weighed heavily on your shoulders, you should get it all out.

I've been wondering lately what will happen when I die. Will my people's history die with me? Will the very memory of my planet, now hardly more than a few great space-rocks drifting about in what was once a great galaxy, be wiped from memory? It terrifies me to think that. I hope that one day, someone will hear this and they'll know who I was, who my people were and I hope that they'll grieve. They'll grieve for Earth, her inhabitants and for all of the purged worlds and all of the people who are forgotten and will never be remembered.

Dad could probably tell this story a lot better than I ever could, but he died years ago. A shell struck him one day while climbing out of the fallout shelter. I didn't grieve as much as I should have; after Mom died, he just gave up. He stopped living long before he was killed. I miss him every day.

My name is Avery Payton and I am one of the survivors of Earth's purge. For five years after the purge, I lived in a dingy little refuge created by North American survivors. We called it The Capital.

***
4.

There was a short rap on the door and looking at the clock, it could really be only two people. Either Jake needed to borrow milk as he did nearly every evening, or Bailey had just gotten off of the early night shift at the local strip joint.


Sure enough, the door opened and the curvy red headed woman poked her head around the corner.

"You're going to get robbed one night, you know, leaving your door unlocked like this. I'm going to have to get Jake to check in on you every night if you keep going on like this."

I turned back to the book I was reading and shrugged my shoulders. I had nothing worth stealing. Anything of value had been left behind in Edmonton. I had no cash to speak of and nothing even worth pawning. The TV didn't work properly, its screen flitting between lights and darks, its speakers emitting an odd static noise.

"With you coming by every evening, I don't really see a point in it." Bailey closed the door behind her and grinned that cheshire cat grin of hers.

"That almost sounded like thinly veiled insult, doll. Am I correct to assume so?"

"Maybe. There's coffee in the cupboard, by the way, I know that's what you're here for."

Bailey's grin, if possible, grew even larger at the mention of caffeine. She glided across the linoleum floor, a task I could never hope to achieve. Bailey didn't necessarily walk, not in the conventional sense of the word at least. She didn't skip, or dance across the floor, she simply glided. It was something I would never cease to envy her for.

"My, my, do you know my intentions well, yes you do-- Left cupboard, right?"

"Uh-huh. Somewhere up there, I think." I was fairly sure that it was in that cupboard, but I trusted that Bailey knew me well enough to know that my confirmation meant that it was somewhere in that general area.

"So, what's stolen your attention tonight? You're pretty wrapped up in that one."

"Um, As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. I went and got it from the Library this morning."

"Never heard of it. Is it any good?"

"I haven't decided yet. It's interesting, but I don't really know what's going on..." I lay the book face down on my lap and looked up at Bailey. "Have you found the coffee yet?"