There were days when I thought Cohen was right; that things would change, that we would get out of here. Other days, I was sure that this reality was all that there was left; trapped in a house with no way to escape, no way to fight back. Even if I had made enough clubs to outfit a small army.
We merely looked at each other as a million words passed between us; love, loss, loneliness. I let them flow through the air as our hands pressed against the window pane. Nothing other than air and glass between us, a ten foot gap of certain death keeping us apart.
“I miss you, too, Cohen,” I signed back slowly, trying to comfort him, to make up for stopping him.
His lips turned up in a small smile at my words, the overgrown scruff on his chin crinkling his face a bit.
“I started work on your birthday present,” he signed, his smile growing with each word.
It was weird how just seeing those words spelled out, hearing them in my head, made me all wiggly inside. I would be turning twenty in just a few months. Twenty and I still felt perpetually eighteen. I had been trapped in this house for over two years.
Two years that I tried not to think about.
“Yeah?” I signed, not sure if I wanted to hear more, yet unable to keep my morbid curiosity at bay.
He nodded once. “I found some paints.”
My eyes widened as he lifted up a small, cardboard container to eye level. The petite container was bursting with white, metal tubes. As I took in the sight, his grin only increased more, if that was possible.
I couldn’t help smiling right alongside him. It had been at least a year since he had found paints. He had been mixing old medication and gruel into a type of charcoal for quite a while. Cohen needed to paint like I needed the human contact with him. They both kept us sane.
“Can I see it?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“Not until your birthday,” he scolded, his face a playful jest of parental wisdom.
I smiled widely at the odd way the look contorted his face while covering my mouth in an attempt to keep the laugh inside.
Laughing was too loud, laughing was dangerous. The first time I had laughed after the blackness came, the sound of death had rung through the air in warning and the noise had caught in my chest. It was the last time I had laughed.
Do not make noise.
I knew it was all in an attempt to stifle joy, but I could find joy even without laughing. Although that joy did hurt sometimes.
“I wish I could hear your laugh again,” Cohen signed, a look of joy on his face that took my breath away.
I pressed my hand against the glass, my forehead resting on the cold pane as I looked at him, my eyes meeting his.
“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride,” I said, knowing he wouldn’t be able to hear me. He smiled as he read my lips, the old nursery rhyme ringing true yet again.
“I would ride right to you,” Cohen signed back as he winked at me. The small gesture sent my heart into a comfortable rhythm that I remembered all too well.
“I would let you.”
He smiled and pressed his forehead against his window, his eyes looking right into mine from across the gap.
We stared at each other for minutes, hours, days; who knew. Time had no meaning anymore. We merely looked; each lost in our own memories, our own fantasies.
Our own wishes.
It had been three days since I had used the last of the food and still they had not come. They had been late before, but not like this. Cohen still had some of the brown packets left, but there was no way for him to get them to me. So I had gotten weaker and weaker as my body resorted to eating itself. My already emaciated body didn’t offer much in the form of nourishment, though.
Everything inside of me hurt; my abdomen ached and throbbed. The dull pulse of hunger had moved into my joints and what remained of my muscle tissue the longer I went without food.
I moved aside another pile of trash, hoping to find something, anything, to eat. I had known it was hopeless before I even came down here. Anything that I would find would be two-years-old and, besides, anything that would have been left would have been carried away by the rats before they had moved on.
It was pointless, but I was desperate. The pain in my stomach grew and I winced, the air hissing through my teeth as I tried to cope with the pain.
I pushed through the trash pile that spilled its way out of the refrigerator, trying to ignore the occasional graduation announcements that were piled with the rubbish.
Bills, pictures, rubber bands, screwdrivers. Random things that were all useless to me. I pushed them aside, my vision fading as I searched, my head spinning with each movement.
I had searched each pile of rubbish one by one as I became more and more desperate for food, finding less and less. Now, I was at the last pile. At least, what I thought to be the last pile. I may have lost count, but I wasn’t going to start over.
It would be a miracle if I didn’t fall over right now.
I pushed another large pile of wrinkled invitations aside, letting my fingers trace the letters of my parents’ names for a moment before throwing it into the heap of junk I had already sorted through.
The invitation fell down amongst the others and I couldn’t help smiling at the memory of Cohen sitting at my counter. The touch of his lips. My smile grew as the memory came back strong, surprise filling me at how vivid it felt; as if it had only happened yesterday. It took the pain in my stomach away for only a moment, the swoop of joy replacing it.
“Cohen,” I whispered his name aloud, not knowing why. Was it a farewell? Was it a plea? A call to the memory?
His name was like warm honey on my lips, the flavor as foreign to me as he was in many ways. I saw him every day, yet it wasn’t the same. The touch and the taste of him was as distant as the sunlight now. At least his memories were stronger than the others.
I moved away from the pile, my body heavy and pained, to push my back against the kitchen island while hundreds of old spider webs fell around me as I collapsed against the wood paneling. I pushed the cobwebs out of the way, letting the sticky things fall over my clothing and attach themselves to my skin.
Two years of confinement in this house, of trying to find a way to fight back, of being trapped, and this is how it was going to end? Starving to death in my own kitchen.
The irony was not lost on me.
I suppose it was better this way than turned to ash. It was still a victory over them. The thought brought a smile to my lips, the need to laugh coming on strong. I wanted to let one good guffaw out, one last laugh. To say, at least once, that they didn’t have control over me.
I smiled and let the chuckle escape, throwing my head back against the paneling of the kitchen island as the rippling happiness swept over me. The feeling leaving quickly as my vision dimmed to black.
I shook my head, trying to wake myself up. My eyes opened to the kitchen and my mother’s face swam before my eyes.
My eyes widened at seeing her there, surprise rocking through me. I sat up, but her face faded at my movement, her smiling face fading into the grey. Great, I was hallucinating. As if I needed more of a reminder about what was coming for me.
“You come to get me, Mom?” I laughed as my vision faded, only to return with another faded memory of my mother. Her, looking out the window, scolding me not to hide in shadows. If only she knew how true her words were and how little there was that I could do about it.
I was stuck in the shadows.
I looked away from my hallucination, my eyes scanning the darkness almost waiting for the rest of my brothers to appear.
“I guess this is it, Frances,” I whispered as I turned my head toward her web that occupied the now bare shelf. “I told you, you should have taken the chandelier.”
I wanted to imagine her looking at me, her laughing and saying something wise.
I should have named her Charlotte.
I grinned at the memory of my mother reading that story to me
after my brother, Travis, was born and I was feeling exceptionally alone. She would do all the voices and she was terrible at it, which was probably better. I laughed more when she read that book rather than cried. Charlotte’s Web was a comedy to me. I was in Junior High before I realized that the spider actually died.
My vision faded in and out as I watched her web; as my face burned and my body ached.
“I’m sorry, Cohen,” I said, wishing I could at least make it up the stairs to see him one last time. I would just have to make do with ghost mom.
I had barely gotten his name out before I saw it. My eyes focused beyond Frances’s web to the brown packet she had enclosed in her web.
Food.
My body jumped in a mad dash to get at it, arms flailing and legs moving, only to collapse right back to the ground as my legs forgot how to support me. I scuttled across the floor as I brought myself back up, ready to try again. This time I hoisted myself up, my arms clinging to the counter as I pulled myself up in a desperate attempt to get to the food.
I didn’t even watch where I was reaching. I simply plunged my hand through the web, ripping it apart as my fingers curled around the brown packet of gruel.
My body collapsed to the ground the second I gripped it in my fingers. I sunk against the piles of trash on the floor, bringing the packet to my lips and ripping it open with my teeth. I didn’t look for a bowl. I just pressed my lips to the small opening and squeezed, sighing as the disgusting material hit my tongue.
It tasted like vomit and smelled like sewage. It was probably a few months old, however I didn’t care. It was food. I sucked and squeezed until every last drop was gone and then I ripped the packet open to lick the slimy contents off the silver lined paper.
I licked and, with each lick, I sighed while letting the grit hit my tongue to slide down my throat. I licked until the paper was clean and the ache in my stomach wasn’t as bad. I felt the residual twinge rumble through me as I looked at the packet; the brown paper of other packets littered the floor below it.
An overlooked plethora of nourishment had been around me this entire time, hidden in the linings of the discarded food packets that I had merely thrown on the floor over the years. I grabbed them without caring how old they were and ripped them open; my fingers shaking as I reveled in the dried bits of gruel.
I licked every packet I could find, letting as much food into my body as I could possibly allow. I don’t know why I didn’t think about this before, but it didn’t matter. It was in my stomach now while my belly was distending further and further the more I put into it.
Even though it wasn’t that much, I was already starting to hurt from overeating.
I didn’t care about saving more for later. The thought didn’t even cross my mind before I was surrounded by empty packets; each one licked clean and still no prospect of food for tomorrow.
Although, I wouldn’t think about that now. It wasn’t worth it to worry about tomorrow; today I had found food and that’s what mattered.
Right now I would focus on the uncomfortable pain from having eaten so much, the way my stomach stood out comically from my rib cage. It felt good to have food inside of me. I could already feel my body responding to it; not with energy, more just in comfort. I could sit and smile like a happy, fat man all day; except I wasn’t a happy fat man, I was an emaciated twenty-year-old. Either way, I was still comfortable and that’s really all that mattered.
I smiled and licked my lips, wishing I was tasting something besides the moldy gruel, yet savoring the last little bit that hit my stomach anyway.
I looked around me, partially wanting to search for more empty packets to lick, however I knew that, at the very least, I needed to save something for tomorrow. As much as I didn’t want to. Who knew, maybe they would come soon. Maybe then it wouldn’t matter.
I slowly pushed myself to standing, surprised at how quickly my body had regained strength. Granted, I wasn’t going to be running a mile or lifting weights anytime soon, but supporting my own weight was a start. At least now my body felt normal, well as normal as I could feel when eating moldy food in the dark.
I was torn between being tired and being bored. Part of me wanted to head up those stairs and take a long nap, while the other part wanted to read one of the same twenty books again for the eightieth time.
The book would have to win out, as much as my body felt like it needed to sleep, I didn’t think it was time yet. I don’t know what determined it as being time to sleep, but my body always seemed to know. As tired as I felt right now, I was pretty sure it just wasn’t time.
I had made it up about half the staircase when a small dinging hit my ears, the sound small and foreign like the bell of a small child’s bike, but growing to a high pitched shriek before it once again faded to nothing.
My shoulders relaxed at the noise, my whole body swirling with excitement. A shower. I had been waiting for so long to take a shower. At first the bell for water had rung every week, but slowly it’s been farther and farther apart, which was becoming a problem.
Not only did I stink, but water was just as vital to life as food.
I waited for the bell to stop before I continued my quest up the stairs. The loud banging and hissing echoing through the house as water began to fill the pipes.
I walked as quickly as I could into my bedroom and grabbed the two small laundry baskets I kept by the door; one full of dirty clothes, the other full of empty water bottles. I grabbed them firmly by the filthy rims and turned right around to drag them to the musty bathroom at the top of the stairs.
I left the door to the bathroom open, hoping to let some light into the already dark space, even though there wasn’t any light to filter in. It didn’t matter, I had become so used to the dark I could practically see through it now anyway. I was like those fish that lived in caves. For all I knew, my skin had turned translucent as well.
I pulled the laundry baskets into the bathroom before turning on the water all the way. The old, mildewed shower head groaned and gasped as the water made its way up the pipes. The clatter jolted through me and I jumped; it was the loudest sound I had heard in a while and it sounded like a firecracker in my ears.
My heart struck wildly in my chest at the noise, my pulse quickening in fear. I knew they wouldn’t come, but I wasn’t going to take any chances. I waited, wasting precious minutes with the water, until I knew I was safe.
I stripped down to my underwear quickly and threw my clothes into the bathtub, flinging the ones in the laundry basket in after them before I stepped in, my hands moving to unweave the dirty braid I always kept my red hair in. Even though, thanks to the dark and the gross soap, I don’t think my hair was red anymore; more like a dark auburn. Anne Shirley would be proud. Of course, she didn’t have to live in post-apocalyptic hell for hers to darken.
I cringed as the water hit my bare back, hating the frigid temperature, though loving the feel of water against my skin and the clean that would come after. When I first started having to bathe this way, it always made me think of that “Forefathers” stuff they throw at you in school.
Pioneers trekking across plains, paying for water, hunting, wars over liberty and freedom. That’s what I thought it would be at first. Wars until everything got better. People standing up to the monsters.
Yet, even when people had stood up against them, they were squashed down quickly. I had listened to the first battle in the dark and for almost a year after that I would watch from my window as others would try again.
Old men, lonely and crazed, would rush out of their house while wielding handmade weapons and screaming for freedom. Depressed mothers, trying to get their children to a safety that no one knew existed. Small armies wandering through the streets only to be picked off one by one as the car they traveled in was torn to shreds.
I still held out hope that someone was still trying, somewhere, but with only primitive weapons and instant death waiting, there was nothing I could do. I wasn’t dumb en
ough to run out into the street and expect to defeat them. At the very least, I would like a little hot water, however.
I grabbed the bright yellow bar of soap and ran it over my skin and through my hair as I jumped and hissed at the ice water that ran over me. One quick run over with soap and I moved to my clothes lathering and squeezing and wringing in an attempt to get them at least partially clean.
I wasn’t sure I had gotten them all, but it was better than nothing. The water continued to hit my skin as I grabbed the water bottles, filling them one after another before the water could shut off. It had already been at least ten minutes, most of that wasted waiting for a screech and I didn’t have much time. The water would shut off any minute and then I wouldn’t have enough water for drinking.
I had learned that lesson the hard way. Taking a twenty minute cold shower wasn’t the best idea and having no water was even sillier. Filling water bottle was now a priority. I hadn’t gotten to the point of filling water bottles at first the way Cohen did; I wanted to feel clean at least a little bit. Even if I was eating mold I still wanted a shower and clean clothes, probably more so after the mold thing.
I reached for the last three bottles and began filling them, my pace increasing as I heard the bell in the distance. My time was gone. Even though I had more than ten filled, I would need every last one. I set two down and focused on the bottle in my hand, my pulse increasing as I moved faster with my desperation to get the last of them before the water would shut off.
“Come on, come on, come on,” I hissed and shook the water bottle underneath the shower of water, as if the movement would help them to fill faster.
The last bottle was almost full when the strength in my hand gave out and the water bottle slipped from my grasp, shooting itself through the air and toward the toilet. I flailed as it sped away from me; my arm shooting out to grab it, swinging through the air. I had almost caught the bottle when my feet got tangled in the clothes piled at my feet. They held me in place and I lost my balance, falling sideways out of the shower as gravity pulled me down.
Through Glass Page 8
