August

Chapter 8

Anticipation of magic excites our lives. When there is none, we grow dull, and fade into nothing.

Klaudia wondered where her family was. She knew they were dead, but she wondered if that put them somewhere where she could reach them. Maybe dying just put you on another dimension? Like Urbanus, always moving and changing. If she traveled through that dimension, she would reach them, and her troubles would end. She would be happy.

Klaudia realized what she was thinking about. The only way to get to the land of the dead was to be dead. She was not ready to die and refused to consider the horrid option. Her family would want her to live her life. Her parents had always cared for her, and would be saddened to see Klaudia stepping away.

"Stepping away from what?" Klaudia asked herself. But she knew. She was stepping away from her own Christ centered world, her center of being, her purpose of life.

"But I don't need His center of the universe. I can do this on my own. It's his fault I'm in this situation in the first place!" Klaudia thought angrily.

She remembered her Mother bringing the family to church every Sunday. They would chat with their neighbors before the service began and then would listen to the pastor give his speech. When Klaudia was young she had stared off into the distance, thinking, not hearing the words of the man talking. But as she grew older and mature she had tried hard to concentrate on what message the speaker was trying to convey.

Over the years this proved very fruitful as her mind developed, answering questions that had just began to swim in her head. She grew a remarkable talent to understand the abstract, or at least to question it. God gave her a foundation. He answered every question that her thoughtful mind could conjure up. And this gave her peace, knowing that some people lived without the answers that she had acquired at such a young age. But then her Mother and Father died in their sleep as suddenly as a quiet lighting strike. They hadn't deserved it! It wasn't their time to go! Why did God take away her guidance, her north stars, her supports? She finally decided that if God was such a loving God that the preacher had claimed, that he wouldn't do such a thing to her. And if that was true, then he couldn't exist. With everything torn away from her, she did the only thing she could think of. She ran.

Klaudia took the burning flames of memories and quenched them with the watery thoughts of the day.

"I have six hours before work at 2," she mused, "what can a girl like me accomplish in that time?"

Her stomach rumbled hungrily, and she realized she hadn't eaten dinner last night.

"Well that answers that," she sighed.

She took out her only other set of clothes and pulled them on. Faded jeans and an Autumn colored sweater.

"At least I'm in the season," she mumbled to herself.

Standing in the small bathroom, she stared at herself in the mirror. She thought she would be paler or skinnier from all the grief she had been recently put through, but the only difference was her eyes. They were red rimmed, as if she had been crying, which she had been.

"I feel like I'm always crying. Not outwardly, but inside. I'm screaming inside, screaming for something that I know not of," Klaudia pondered this new raw emotion, but shrugged it off. She was being dramatic. A least that's what she told herself.

Pocketing her room keys, she trudged down the hall and down the stairs. Guests were talking in the breakfast room in rapid Urbanish. Klaudia only knew three words in Urbanish: Yes (Qola, pronounced Khol-la), No (Qoshow, pronounced Ko-shoh), and thank you (Maqola, pronounced Ma-khol-la). She would use her phone to translate, but it had been stolen on the train when she fell asleep with it on her lap. Now every time she heard Urbanish, she cursed herself for losing it.