The Soul Painter [completed]

-Chapter Twenty-Three-

Location: Central

My mind is insanity. 

I blink wearily, the cement of the shop floor cold against my skin as I lie on my side, staring at Femi's unfinished hummingbird. 

So tired. Hurting.

Turning my head against the stiffness in my neck, I groan. She's gone. Has been for four days, or has it been five? Maybe six? 

I can't remember.

My stomach is so hollow that I'm not even hungry anymore. I got over that feeling yesterday. Now I'm just weak, and I feel sick. I don't think that the sickness is all from hunger, either.

The gasoline in the air makes me dizzy, so I don't even try to get up. It's cold in here, and she took my hoodie with her. She didn't leave it with me like I thought she would.

I can almost see her hold the collar of it to her nose, breathing it in. 

Because it smells like you.

My back aches with the cold and every tiny movement of my shoulders. My heart aches with the agony of remembering.

Her paintbrush bobs in the bottle of paint beside the wall where the hummingbird is, exactly the way she left it.

I haven't touched anything. It's all exactly the way it was before she disappeared. 

It feels like she left me.

I blinked, and she was gone, like a puff of steam in the cold of winter. 

"Femi. Love me."

It burns like acid in the cracks of my cold, wind-chapped soul. 

My nightmares have come back. Even though I may not have slept much, the one time I did, I watched her disappear again. I woke up shaking and choking on the two syllables of her name.

My hip hurts. The concrete has bruised it because I haven't moved much. 

There's a knock on the door.

I hope they'll go away, whoever they are. Give me some peace. Let me stay by myself, exactly the way I want to be, until my mind finally accepts that she is never coming back, and until I don't have it in me to cry anymore.

I can tell myself that over and over, but it doesn't make me hope any less, deeper down, that maybe she will come back to me someday, somehow. Sweet Femi. My eyes burn.

Gone. 

The knocking continues, unrelenting.

Please, don't keep on. Let me die here within sight of her last project. Or just let me die. I've come too far to let anyone try to heal me now. 

"Hey! If you're in there, come to the door! Chana sent me to get you!"

It's Spero, the boy from the tailor shop. The boy named "hope." The thought strikes me with how painfully ironic it is. I'm hopeless. 

"Mechanic, mechanic!"

Something about hearing that warms me a little inside. Mechanic, mechanic. The guy who fixes cars and any other machine that's broken. Not Paris, the man who loves Femi. Not Pary, the boy who has a brother as a "dad." Just the mechanic. It's so impersonal that it's like salve on my soul. 

"Mechanic! Are you in there? Please say something! Chana will kill me if I come back without you!"

"Go away, little Spero. I'm in the process of dying and you're being a horrible distraction and interruption," I try to shout it, but my voice makes itself heard as a screech, like a door squeaking. "I don't want to be helped."