VIRID
a short story
THEN
The past would only ever come to her in flashes, or not at all.
One moment, she opened her eyes, and the leaves whispered reassurances to her—their voices so low they dissipated into a murmur that crumbled like ashes into the urn when she crushed them in the palm of her hand. Their virid-tinted ashes drifted away with the wind like a floating daydream.
*
NOW
Eyes snap open.
She sucks in a breath of life, but instead tastes the stagnant scent of dust. It feels like this: inhaling death and exhaling a brief flicker of life.
Everything is quiet.
Somehow, she feels the presence of the peculiar ghost-like silence before she even hears it. It lingers. Behind her. Above her. Enveloping her thin, ghastly, form.
She grips the edge of the table and hoists herself up. Rows of desolated desks and chairs stretch out before her—sitting and waiting. She doesn't remember how she got here but the office feels like it has been suspended in a vacuum of time the way a tightrope walker freezes at the precipice. Time hangs in the air.
She feels like a reanimated corpse as she limps through aisles of workspaces. Without the people, the building seems like a nest with no parasite. She tiptoes silently, afraid to disrupt the static air.
Hulking metal skeletons glisten in the afternoon sun as she exits the front door of the office.
It is so quiet.
What is left of the city surrenders itself to the cycle of decomposition—pillars retreat into their foundations, plaster crumbles from the walls, and there's the treacherous metallic groan of the silent decay of infrastructure. The world stopped when the clocks did.
She watches the dead silence in dead silence.
*
THEN
She only saw the living in flashes.
Yes! She saw it. The roots of plants. Like a spider's tangled web, fingers intertwining and interlocking, unfurling and furling hesitantly in an endless cycle. They burrowed into rock, into gravel, into sand to emerge on the other side of this earthen grave. The numbness of a rainstorm and the petrichor that soaks through the pores of your skin and into your bloody veins as you inhale the rain and exhale life. Saplings crept quietly out because they wanted to unclench their tensed leaves and release the trepidation slithering through their arteries towards the chambers of their hearts. As if they've been tranced by hearing the lulling call of the sun, willing them to live.
*
NOW
She feels her muscles clench so tightly she might explode.
The scarlet is so prominent she finds her legs guiding her towards it before she can stop herself. Bending down, she sees the slick liquid oozing out of a figure—limbs bent and crooked as easily as melded metal. Skin pulled taut over snapped bones and naked joints jut out at acute angles. She presses a finger to his temple, but there's no pulse. His skin is frigid and stale. He is not a man—simply a tangle of limbs.
She recoils back in horror.
But as she does, she begins to notice more of the red staining the landscape—as if she sees the world through new rose-tined glasses. It splatters upon every straight sidewalk, every stunted alleyway, every concrete castle. She also sees a few hands and legs and arms spewed out of the monster's mouth. It feels like humanity is a painter desperately trying to make his mark on the world through body art and bloody art. But it is so quiet she can hear her fickle heartbeat tapping against the cage of her chest—there is no one here to watch its artistic display. No one here but one pair of eyes, the wind, and the sun.
She closes her eyes.
*
THEN
She only saw the truth in flashes.
This is how it started—they clawed their eyes out of their rigid heads and they snapped their resolute bones as if they realised how linear they'd become. The realisation ate them from the inside out, from the upside down. It made their pull their skin taut and tight to free themselves from their synthetic structures.
The disease made them sick, and reminded them that they wanted to be free.
One by one, they dropped like flies.
*
NOW
She opens her eyes. She remembers. She runs.
She bounds towards the edge of the silent city, past hollow hotels and scintillating structures and twisted forms of people she never knew and will never know. She bounds over the disease-mutilated skulls and hears the wind picking away at the remains of metal skeletons of the buildings—the predator already housing its prey in captivity.
That was the thing about humanity—they were so linear. They lived lives in such stiff, rigid compounds and structured their lives according to plans and agendas and knew their timings by the next day, the next week, the next century. They were bursting at the seams with pride and politics and purgatory. And quite fittingly, they forgot that if they wanted to play the game, they had to know the rules.
The girl runs till' she forgets herself, till' her brittle frame is nothing but a bunch of well-strung atoms, till' she is so far from the city that she is just one girl gazing at the hulk of a rapidly degenerating corpse.
Now, nature and time bends this rotting city at the power of its own will—and the girl refuses to stay and watch. Nature will brush the cities back into the state of decay and deconstruction, but also eventually renewal will spring from its roots. But that's the thing that the humans forgot that nature thrived on—that everything was meant to be caught in a loop of an endless cycle. Birth and death. Light and dark. Love and loss.
Nature was the professional, humanity was the egotistic amateur.
Eyes snap shut.
YOU ARE READING
Stagnant
General Fiction[ collection of things that never really fit, short stories, poems, whatevers ] Things that could be so much more, and yet churned to a stop.
