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You've all been lovely to me.
2064 words
Fiel
Fiel
I once led a simple, but relaxed lifestyle before the accident. Since then, life was a series of funerals. I dug the holes myself. Just got down on my hands and knees, and cried and cried until the job was done. I was helpless in protecting them. What could a little eleven- year-old do in a war of men? A little girl could only tremble for her mother. For her father. They were long gone, and so was the little girl who gave up her childhood to bury them.
I buried my mother's stiff, cold body first. She was once so lively and warm. I remembered laying my head in her lap and falling asleep to the sound of her voice, as melodic as silver wind chimes in a summer's breeze. Now, sleep evaded me, blown away in the cloudy, haunted nightmares.
Everything reminded me of her: baked pies, late-night comedies, wind-sailing. Since her death, the start of every Spring broke my heart. She always used to order me around to clean and tidy up a year's worth of her messes. I ached then because of the work, but now I ached to see her lovely face again.
She loved hummingbirds and would scold me whenever I forgot to refill the feeder. She would always tell me that no matter how far ahead technology gets, we can never reach the level of the real flying pioneers. She made them out to be tiny adventurers. Brave knights sporting their kingdom's colors, fencing off the others with their lances. Hours and hours she'd spend just watching them with me.
“Look at them go!” she said. An apple green bird had whizzed just past her reach. Their wings can rotate, allowing them to fly in all directions: backwards, forwards, even hover in midair. She'd never let me forget her lessons, quizzing me constantly about how they've traveled here from lands of up to five hundred miles away, without taking even a single stop to rest.
“They're pretty, Mami,” I said, marveling at all the bright colors hovering in the air. I used to think of them as fairies with their magic wands.
“They're also very smart and strong,” she said, and I laughed at her.
“But they're tiny!” I held up my forefinger and thumb to indicate a miniscule size.
“Yes, Mija,” she said, kissing me on the forehead, “but sometimes, real strength comes in the smallest of packages.”
Never again did I forget to refill the feeder. So long as it was filled, the birds would always come to visit Willsboro from their faraway land. And in them, I'd see my mother. Smart and strong and beautiful, with hair the color of molasses and the same syrupy, sweet scent. Whenever she laughed, her eyes always lit up, as bright and as wide as freshly polished copper coins. How much it pained me walking through town to get a carton of milk. You look just like your mother, they would say. Beautiful, just like your mother.
But I was more like my father.
I buried him next, dug a hole right next to hers. I didn't dare look at his face. He was the doctor, and I was the doctor's daughter. It was a phrase so familiar to my ears. His friends usually uttered it as praise, as if I were some great thing being the doctor's daughter. The words tumbled out of their lips like: duh, duh, duh, duh.
From my father, the words held a note of criticism. I could never look him in the eye. Emotionally, mentally, I just couldn't reach him like I could my mother. He and I were separated by some imagined wall from since I could walk or talk. Where we were, there was only silence from our repressed speech. Emotions were silly things not meant for talk. Whereas, with my mother, all it took was a purse from her lips and the tears would come, and the emotions would flow out of me like a river to its basin. With my father, that river was dammed up somehow, controlled, because I couldn't stand it if I swelled too out of my channel and somehow ruined everything he had worked hard for.
I wanted to be him. I yearned for his approval. I clumsily followed in his footsteps, his long strides no match for my short hobble. And where I had wandered from his straight path, exploring ideas of my own, there the dams were built. Our decisions resolute. I would keep pushing, he would keep building, and eventually it all collapsed. It no longer mattered.I do not remember the last time I said I admired him. I do not recall the last time I told him I was proud of him. I didn't even get the chance to tell him that I loved him. I wondered why. Why was all this coming forth right now? So cruel was the world.
After the grave-markers were set in place, there were no longer anymore tears to be shed. If, ten years down the line, I were to come back to this spot and cry again, it would be tears of joy. That was my promise to them. I left that grave as an adult.
Six years later, I came back as a child again. Next to my parents' graves was my grandfather's. That was all it took for me to revert back to that little girl. The little girl who broke her promise. I would've thought that I was accustomed to death by then. What could be worse than the death of one's parents? Those were what constituted as hopeful thoughts to my eleven-year-old self. In those young years, I moved quickly, a buzzing mosquito thirsting for life, trying to fill some void inside of me. Knowledge, grandfather. Teach me everything.
And we would spend it, student and mentor, from dawn to dusk by the groggy lake. My little legs dangled from the pier, where I sat chewing on a stalk of wheat. I recited the names of all the species of bugs in the Willsboro countryside; all the animals gone to extinction; all the medicinal plants and their uses; all the elements and their properties; all the genes in the human genome; all the bones in the human body; all the catastrophic wars in the history of mankind; all the Great Cities and their royal Emperors; all religious groups and their persecutions; all the constellations and their story of origin; all the galaxies in the universe; and all the novels of dead writers, art of dead artists, philosophies of dead philosophers.
My grandfather was now among them all. He wasn't just my blood; he was my teacher. My mind. My soul. His death was my final lesson. My theory amended since childhood. Of course there are worse things than the death of one's parents, and I could no longer face the world alone anymore. I couldn't bury him alone.
Lucas and Mona held my hand. Captain Vinn dug the grave. The Captain was the only relative I had left and now he was—
I woke up screaming.
I was in a strange room, small and dark, like a shack, yet cool and comfortable. The walls were made entirely of fabric. A medic's tent.
Suddenly, the events of last night came rushing to my head. I covered my face with my hands as I remembered one catastrophic event after another. Digging my hand into my pocket, I clutched at the time-watch my grandfather had given me. It calmed my nerves. I concentrated on the cool, hard surface that was now ticking gently in my fist, tracing the etched pattern with my fingernail. Deep breath. That was when it suddenly dawned on me: my arm was fine. Then, dread filled me. Just how long was I in here?
“Looks like the lady from sector 9 is awake today,” a female voice said. I jerked my head towards the sound, when all at once, the tent lit up.
I looked around the room and saw sleeping bodies, and the one who must have spoken.
She was tall and lean, exaggeratedly so. Her complexion was caramel brown as my own, but inked of tattoos. She had spiky black hair and wild eyes. Cat-like with yellow contacts and all. She looked odd in her outfit. A white, doctor's robe. It looked like they allowed anybody to be a doctor nowadays.
“It's about time you wake up. It's been three months already,” she said. She made a note on her tablet, before bringing up a plate of steamed food. Had she read my mind? She apparently had read my stomach too. The food was unfamiliar to me, but I sat up and ate it anyway. I could feel her gaze on me as I chewed. I must have looked out of my mind. Had I been asleep for that long?
My chewing slowed, I felt awkward. The room was silent, except for my own hasty swallowing and the clanking of silverware against the plate.
“Where—”
“Northern Bridge. Just past the crossroads,” the doctor said. She had been staring at me for quite some time, as if waiting for me to ask questions. Her response surprised me. If I were by the crossroads, that meant I had somehow crossed over the mountains. Miraculously, I was closer to Aster City.
“How did I get here?” It scared me a little to think that I couldn't remember a thing after that night.
“We brought you here. And them,” she said, nodding her head in the direction of the slumbering patients. “You're a little crybaby, aren't you? We had to sedate you a few times. You just wouldn't stop fighting us. Kept shrieking. Crying over some Captain.” I looked down at my hands drawing them into fists. My knuckles turned razor sharp, bone white.
“Take it easy on yourself, you're alive after all.” She took away my food, eating the rest of it for herself.
“What did they do to his...” I couldn't say it.
“Body? Carried it off to be cremated, I suppose. I'm not sure where. There were about forty or fifty dead.”
I gasped, I couldn't believe it. This was not happening.
“What do they want with us?” I said, clenching my teeth. “What do they think, using us as their pawns? Taking bodies away without—” It was difficult to hold my composure, yet the doctor looked completely unperturbed, as if this happened everyday. Maybe it did, here on the crossroads, I imagined the doctors were used to violence. All I could think about was how close I was to my goal.
“Careful not to be too outspoken around these parts, girlie.” The doctor glared at me, wide-eyed, her pupils contracting in a pool of yellow. Her nostrils, downturn and narrow, were flaring. I didn't care anymore about what was right to say, what wasn't right to say. It was all very obvious to me.
“I don't care who hears me,” I said. “It's all because of the insurgents! Their chaos. Their careless disregard for peoples' lives! Everything, everything has to happen to me because of them!”
The doctor shook her head, strands of black hair falling out of their spiky arrangement.
“Listen girlie, no one knows who or what was behind those riots that night. Whoever it was, the tinners are looking into it. There's no need to point fingers all righteously. How are you so sure, anyway? Didn't you just wake up?”
“I heard gunshots that night.” I saw the image of the Captain's body falling so helplessly. His blood splattering. That loud, barbaric pow.
The doctor cocked her head. “You heard...? That's impossible! Guns don't—”
“I heard it all before.” I saw my parents laying in their own pools of blood. “That's why I'm certain of it. Only the insurgents resort to using ancient weapons.” As I said the words, I realized what I was saying was a grave mistake.
“I think you know a little too much, girlie.”
I saw as the doctor inched her hands towards her coat pocket. It dawned on me she had one too many tattoos and no official badge on her coat. No name, no signature. Who was this woman?
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