NOTHING MORE | Not a speck of life left
𒐁 Darling, we are nothing more than a pair of walking skeletons.
In a world where two child soldiers are in a constant battle
between the monsters caught up in their heads and
the ones lurking beneath their b...
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TESS
In a world that gave us two choices; to live or to die trying, I was still caught in the works of trying. I did not remember a time before, I could not retrace my steps to the soft spots of my life, I only knew of the hole my brother and I had been caught in for an eternity now. One that would only dig itself a little deeper into the earth each time we tried to escape, one that would never let us go. Whatever had once been a reason to live, to have a life worth something, had been washed away in the flood, faded into a mere memory with the clock's time.
On bare fingertips, one single hand, I could count everything I had left to keep me grounded on the soil. To keep my parent's name alive, to continue shaking awake the little girl that still lived within me, and to care for my brother as he cared for me. Three acts, exhausting routines, things that were not simply wanted, but needed to continue on. I drank down each promise at the break of day and bled over them at the cut of night; I never gave in without a bit of sacrifice.
A world made up of chances, trying over and over, trying to get it right each time, brother and I were tired of trying. Let us rest, take a moment to breathe before the dead awake. Two souls left in an empty void, no direction worth the risk, the easy act of waking each morning had become strenuous. There had once been something worth returning to each day, a future to pine away towards, but the world had stripped even that from the boy and I. There was only the day ahead of us to worry over.
Nights went by where I laid awake, staring into the lines of my brother's face, wondering how many more would be etched in a week's time, forgetting how young the boy truly was under the skin he wore. It wasn't his flesh, but the flesh of the person the world twisted him into, layers of a warrior and a protector, and a monster all in one. There was no warning given in the switch of the universe, we were no longer the children that came into the world; we had changed. Like trees shifting colors and the horizon's hues changing, only him and I never grew back into the skin we once owned. The little girl and the young boy didn't walk along the same line anymore.
My brother carried the weight of the dead on his shoulders, the ones that lurked behind us and the ghosts that haunted his nightmares. I wished to carry some of the terror for him, to load some of it onto the grinding of my shoulder blades and ease the boy's travels. I wanted to bleed into the world as he had, to give all that he had sacrificed, but the boy kept it all to himself. To feed us, to shelter us, to protect what was left, it all lingered on his mind and hands day in and day out without a complaint fishing through his teeth.
There were days where he went without to provide for me. Food that left his palms and found a way into my belly without a word of doubt, warmth that sourced from the fire the boy tended to all night without a lick of sleep under his belt, safety that came at the cost of blood seeping to the nail beds of my brother. The boy was made up of nothing but skin and bones, but his heart was still there. It always would be. No matter the heave that the world piled along the boy, he always found a way out.
