Marco placed his hand on Puck’s shoulder and steered him into a little cafe beside the train station. Puck was leading, even though he wasn’t in charge. He wasn’t even much sure what they were doing. Marco glanced back warily at the cab that they had just vacated. It was dutifully waiting for them, just as he had said to. Marco felt vaguely sorry for the driver, who would not be getting payed for the time that he spent sitting on the corner. Marco had only told him to wait for Puck’s benefit.

He sighed. It wouldn’t be easy on Puck, what he was about to do. 

Puck had been with him the longest of any other student-almost 18 months. He had found Puck living in an alley in premature homelessness. Puck had been only 13 then, but he looked smaller, though aged somehow-as if he had witnessed things beyond his time. It was probably due to the fact that he had been living off bread crusts, a reenacting of his old life.

They entered the cafe, squeezing through a crowd of people listening to a guitar player bang out a tune on his ragged guitar. Marco let Puck order. Once he had been rescued, Puck had adapted fairly well to modern life. He didn’t complain about the clothes, as the former students did, or try to run away after a failed attempt.

“Do you want anything?” Puck asked, poised with his hand half way to the cashier. He only asked out of courtesy.

Marco closed his eyes in mock impatience. “Just hurry up, Puck.” Puck shrugged and handed the cashier the money, hurrying to join Marco at a booth. He slid onto the sticky seat, clutching at a muffin. Without preamble, Marco began to talk. 

“I want you to be careful Puck,” he said seriously. 

Puck’s expectant face fell slightly, and a small crease formed between his eyebrows. “This is just another tracking thing, right?” he asked over his muffin. “Usual thing?”

Marco hesitated, searching Puck’s face for something that wasn’t there. Now was the moment. Now was the time to tell Puck what he was going to do; what he was going to try. But no… he wouldn’t upset him like that. He half smiled, one corner of his mouth jerking up as the other half lay dormant and unexpressive. He avoided the question. “Do you know how many years I’ve been here,Puck?” he asked.

Puck shrugged. “A lot?”

Marco looked him in the face. “I’ve been here ten years.” He paused. “And in that ten years I’ve learned a lot of things about this world that we once thought we knew, this world that we were once thought we were a part of. We don’t belong here Puck,” he continued, his voice urgent. “And ten years is a long time, but it’s the time it’s taken for me to learn that no matter what I do-no matter how many times I’ve done it-nothing is safe. Anything can go wrong.” He sighed, watching Puck picking at his muffin. “Just… just be careful Puck. That’s all I’m asking.”

Puck seemed to think that this was an adequate response to his question, for he fell silent and continued to consume his muffin. For a few minutes the pair sat in silence, Marco staring out into the street. It was strange that after all his efforts, this is what it came down to. This was it. Every failed attempt to get back home was for nothing because every failed attempt had led him closer and closer to this. Puck had been with him longer than any other student. All the others had been killed in their desperation to get back home. Strange that this time the apprentice would outlive the master. He sighed again, but not loudly enough to alert Puck to his distress. 

“How did you get here?” The question was completely unanticipated. Marco slowly turned to face Puck, coming out of his daze with great difficulty. 

“What?”

There was a slightly self-justifing note in his voice as he continued, “You know all about how I got here. Well, everything I know, but I…” he trailed off, looking scared, as if all the courage that had motivated him to ask the question had been snatched away in one fell swoop. “You don’t have to tell me,” he said in a small voice, “I just thought…”

Marco was silent for a moment. None of his students had asked him anything like that, but then again, he had never had an apprentice quite like Puck, whose face was steadily coloring with every passing second, He took a deep breath. “My father was a blacksmith,” he said simply. “I was to become a blacksmith. I wanted something more and, in a way, my dream came true, but…” he made a face, “I never wanted this.” Puck waited, his eyes wide. Marco took a deep breath. “I ran away the day my apprenticeship began with my father. I ran to a cave and I hid from my parents. I’d played there when I was young, and I wished I was still young then so the place seemed appropriate. When they came looking for me, I went deep into the darkness. I don’t remember much after that. I just know I blacked out and woke up here.” He stopped. His story had come to an end. 

Puck nodded, eyes narrowed as if he was seeing something behind Marco. “I understand,” he said.

“We’re meeting someone at the train station,” Marco said, abruptly changing the subject. “And then we can move on.”

Puck nodded slowly. “Is it one of us?” he asked, glancing around surreptitiously.

Marco nodded. “She’s been here for five years. Mid 1400s, I think.” 

Puck slowly slid out of the booth, and Marco mirrored him. Some unspoken communication had passed between them. It was time to leave. As they crossed the busy street, Puck thought that Marco seemed to tense, as if he was readying himself for something. It confused him, but not enough to mention it. He knew that Marco wouldn’t tell him any more than he had heard in the coffee shop. 

The train station was packed full of people with serious, plain faces. These people were meant to be in this world, Puck thought. Each and every one of them had a purpose. They entered this world with a fate that they could mold and shape with their actions and then they became something that benefited it in some tiny way, and then they left, their purpose fulfilled. It wasn’t like that with the Ancients. The Ancients had no reason for existence because they weren’t meant to exist-not in this time, anyway. 

“Where is she?” Puck asked, watching the crowd closely. 

“She’ll be here,” Marco said. His voice was low, but Puck could hear it clearly over the babble of people getting where they were going. 

They waited by a small kiosk that sold pretzels. The doughy air wafting from the portable oven was warm and inviting. It reminded Marco of a time long ago-a time made longer still by the intervening centuries separating him from the time of his birth-when his mother would bake bread in the little stone oven.

The smell reminded Puck of the bakery that he would steel from when the baker was inattentive. 

A girl in Jeans and a hooded sweatshirt bought a pretzel. She asked for no salt, which was strange to Puck because he had learned that everyone in this time enjoyed and asked for food with salt-the more heavily incrusted in the white crystals, the better. She stepped to the side of the kiosk and stood a few feet from Marco. Puck looked into her face. She too had the telltale signs of an Ancient. 

Her eyes seemed to be tired and worn, as if they belonged to someone that had experienced much more than she herself had. They were the only visible change that took place when an ordinary person became an Ancient. She nodded to Marco, and some unspoken understanding seemed to flow between them. 

“Heidi,” she said, holding out her hand to Puck. Puck shook it warily, responding with his own name. Heidi had the voice of an Ancient, too. She was still young, and Puck estimated that she couldn’t be any more than seventeen. “You’re not the one I met last time,” she said slowly, eyes narrowed. She looked up at Marco. “What happened to Avery?” 

Marco’s lips tightened. “He was taken.”

Heidi seemed to understand. “Shame,” she said sadly. “They got Author a few months ago and Juliet before that,” she paused, laughing quietly to herself, but there was no joy in the sound. “It really has been a long time since we’ve seen each other, hasn’t it?”

Marco was silent, and it seemed to be a rhetorical question. Heidi turned to Puck. “Where did you come from?” she asked.

“England,” he said solemnly, “though I’m not sure exactly where in England, and I’m not sure exactly when. I was staying with an aunt because my parents died, but she wasn’t very concerned about me. She decided to give me to an orphanage when she got married and, well… I ran away. That was when I was nine. The next four years, I lived in gutters and stole and begged to get food.

“One day I was being chased by a pie maker or something like that, and I went into an alleyway. It was dark and I couldn’t see anything, but I was afraid to go out. And then I passed out and–” 

Puck stopped talking abruptly. Heidi’s eyes had flicked away from his face for the briefest moment, and he suddenly became aware that Marco was no longer behind him. “Where…” he began, and he felt Heidi’s fingers close around his arm, holding him to the spot.  

A train was coming toward the station, and he could hear it, but it hadn’t come into view yet. Everything seemed to move in slow motion as Puck spotted Marco 20 feet away, staring at the tracks. As if feeling his gaze, Marco turned and looked back at Puck, but his eyes were unresponsive. Puck opened his mouth to call out, but the cry died in his throat, and in that instant Puck knew exactly what was going to happen. He knew why they were meeting Heidi. They weren’t tracking another Ancient, as Puck had thought. Marco had brought Puck to a new tutor. This was another attempt. This was The Attempt-the final one. The realization washed over him with such abruptness that it temporarily knocked the breath out of him as if it was a solid thing. 

Puck knew he should scream. He knew he should fight Heidi off. He knew that he should run and stop Marco, but all he could do was stand limp in Heidi’s grasp. 

“No,” he whispered as Marco turned and sprinted toward the oncoming train.

One

Arrival

Ten Years Earlier

With respect to the whole world, every wish comes true at some point in time. Perhaps it doesn’t come to pass in your lifetime, but every wish has its chance to be granted. Marco could have wished to fly, but, based on the turn of events, he would have probably found himself being flung from the top of a cliff. In the split second before gravity came into effect, his wish would be granted. But Marco didn’t wish to fly. He wished to have a new life, and that changed everything. 

Fate has an odd sense of humor. When it tires of reuniting old friends or leading people to find gold, it pushes you into ponds and motivates cows to run away. The side of fate that Marco met with was not generous. It was the side that would cackle as it tore a child away from his family and flung him into a world several centuries into the future.

Marco fell, but there was no impact. He found that he simply was. It was as if he had fallen asleep but forgotten that he had done so. He would later learn that he was in a bathroom, but then it was merely the room that contained him. The porcelain that lined the walls meant nothing. The chipped wall paper meant nothing. The broken soap dispensers behind him meant nothing.

He was completely and utterly alone. 

This fact by itself was not so dreadful-he had been alone moments ago, walking into the cave as the voices of his family grew fainter with the ebbing light. No, it was the fact that he was alone with no way back to company that terrified him, and for a moment he let fear consume him like a beast. The feeling was like nothing he had ever felt. Surely this monster that now ripped at his stomach like so many carnivorous butterflies had not been born with him, created when he was. This feeling could not belong with mortals–it would tear them apart from the inside out. 

But then why was he still here, lying on the cold floor?

The light above him was long and rectangular, and it blinded him as he stared into it. It was like a tiny corner of the sun. Marco blinked and looked away, but a purple bar appeared in front of his eyes, shadowing everything he looked at. What was this place?

He scrambled to his feet, blinking rapidly and trying to rid himself of the vision. As the ghost of the light began to fade, Marco made his way toward the door. The handle was unlike anything he had ever seen, and he drew back his hand, surprised. 

It was made of smooth metal shaped neatly into a ball. It was shiny and polished, reflecting Marco’s face back at him. His features were oddly distorted, and he wondered if the trip had turned him into a monster. He touched his nose, which was bulbous and huge in his reflection, and his hand appeared stretched as well as he continued to gaze. Marco stared down at the fingers. They were unchanged. This strange mirror reflected him as a monster. He wondered if it was some type of crystal ball that portrayed his soul. Well, he thought, it wouldn’t be too far off if it was a crystal ball. He had just betrayed his whole family’s expectations, hadn’t he?

The door flew open, and Marco staggered back. A tall man entered, then paused, looking at him, eyes slightly unfocused. 

“Hey, sorry, kid,” he drawled. He had a strange accent that fell oddly on Marco’s ears. “Be careful now, ya don’t wanna get hurt or somthin’ standin’ behind the door like…” he seemed to loose interest in his own sentence and teetered past.

Marco squeezed through the closing door out into a cramped foyer. Sound issued from every side, each voice with the same strange accent, and there was another more eminent sound covering each of the conversations. It was a heavy, grating noise that filled the room. He walked through the crowd, the grating sound getting louder and louder. It went right through him like an endless scream. Was that his heart thumping erratically against his ribs, or was it part of the sound? Marco stopped in front of a wide door and saw the shadows of people moving together in a dark room in a sort of rhythm. After a moment, he realized they were dancing, but it wasn’t a dance that he had ever seen. A group of people stood on a stage with strange instruments, producing the sound that he had come to believe could only be music. The figures were mere silhouettes, for bright lights spun behind them like huge multicolored stars.

Marco spun around, hurrying back through the meandering crowd. He needed to be somewhere where he could think. Somewhere quiet and remote. He could only think of one place to be right now, but that place resided several hundred years in the past. The cave was probably sand by now. He walked toward the exit, passing a hairy and fairly huge man sitting with a large bucket of tickets at his feet.

“Ya know there’s no reentry after you leave, kid?” he called halfheartedly after him as Marco sped away. “Do yer parents know where yer going?”  

He didn’t look back. He only looked forward at the sidewalk stretching out ahead of him.

He made it as far as the intersection, where he was stopped by the strangest carriages he had ever seen. They too were made of an odd, reflective metal. There were no horses, only strange wheels that turned of their own accord. Marco skidded to a halt as one of the carriages blared at him like an angry animal. Marco staggered backward, startled and confused. He turned and dashed in the opposite direction. 

Marco stopped running only when his lungs burned and feet ached. The soft leather shoes were little protection from the rough cement. People were starting to stare at his cotton shirt and britches. Any passersby steered a wide birth around the grubby little boy in the strange clothes, but Marco ignored them, and kept walking, chest heaving. He was tired, but he was afraid to sleep. It was like being a child again, terrified that the darkness might morph into something solid and as equally terrifying as the possibilities that it suggested. He was terrified, but some underlying instinct told him that walking was the best thing to do.

The sky was dark and silent, and there were barely any stars. It was as if they were intimidated by the lights on the ground that kept the darkness at bay. Whenever he had wanted to leave the candle on at night, Marco’s father had always said that night was when the earth healed itself, and when it wasn’t dark, it couldn’t.

He stared around at the silent trees. The night had been warm, but a slight chill was creeping into the air like a promise of something foreboding that had yet to come. The roads were narrower now and unpopulated. A lake sat serenely in front of him, and ducks nestled beside it making comforting noises to each other. There were no more people jostling to get back to their carriages and oblivious to the world around them.

Marco sank onto a chipped green bench that sat near one of the paths. He hadn’t noticed until that moment just how tired he was. He closed his eyes, willing himself not to sleep. He needed to think. He needed to get home…

The darkness pressed down on his eyelids. He was suddenly so tired it was as if a spell had been cast upon him. He was falling down… down into the blackness that lay behind his eyes…

“Is he one of us?”

“I can’t tell. It certainly seems that way.”

“The poor thing, he must have been so confused when it happened…”

“Where did you find him?”

“In the park, of all places, sleeping on a bench. He didn’t wake up when I brought him here”

Voices swirled around him like water intent on dragging him down. He could tell that he was no longer on the bench, but he didn’t open his eyes. Marco didn’t want to see more of this world. He didn’t want to see where fate had brought him next and what horrors it chose to inflict upon him. 

Marco squeezed his eyes shut to keep out the faces that the voices were counterpart to. He could feel their eyes on his face, and he didn’t like them staring at him like he was some kind of monster. He teetered between acting like he was still asleep and opening his eyes for a while before soft hands shook him slightly. 

“Wake up,” a voice said quietly. “The others are gone now, and all I want to do is talk.”

Marco opened his eyes warily, waiting for an attack or a confrontation with a vicious beast.

Instead he was looking into the pale face of a girl not much older than himself. He recoiled slightly, slinking into the middle of the bed as if she held a burning poker instead of a plate of food. 

“I’m Juliet,” she said calmly, holding out the plate as if baiting an animal.

“Marco,” Marco said grudgingly.

“A pleasure,” she smiled and placed the food in front of him. “I just want to know a few things, and then I’ll leave you alone if you want to be alone, or you can come and meet the others.”

Marco didn’t answer, he just eyed the bread and meat on the plate. Juliet picked up a clipboard from the bedside table.

“How old are you, Marco?”

It took him a moment to remember. “Thirteen,” he answered after a silence.

She recorded it on the paper.

“Do you know where you lived?”

“England. I was going to be a blacksmith.” Marco surprised himself with his willingness to tell the girl about himself.

The interview did not last long, and he was soon alone again with the plate. Cautiously, he ate the bread and meat, staring around the little room. The bed was wide and soft, an almost comical improvement from the straw mattresses that he had spent his life on. The walls were white and smooth like the ones in the room he had found himself in the night before. 

The perfection was a little disconcerting. It was as if they were challenging him in an odd sort of way. There was a painting of the sea on the wall across from him, it’s frozen waves frosted with white foam paint and a red boat tossing it an immobile wind.

There were no windows, and Marco was glad because he did not want to look out at the strange world.

The floor was wooden and bare, and for this Marco was grateful because it reminded him of his parent’s cottage and seeing it was like peeking beneath a locked door into a corner of a world that he could visualize but not quite reach. It was the one corner that kept his soul anchored to his body, his memories attached to his mind. 

——————————————————-

Fall

~ Chapter One ~

Sky

The last time I saw the sky in its entirety was in November. The days prior to that, I took it for granted, as so many of us do, and didn’t notice the little things about it that make it complete; the little things that you only notice once they’re gone. Like the wispy little clouds that look awkward against a bright blue backdrop, and the way it seems lighter in the center than at the edges some days. 

I saw all this for the first time as I left, and it made me sad that these little details which had eluded me for my whole life now lay bare before me. Maybe it takes a loss for you to realize all you have. Or maybe I wasn’t really looking until that moment.

The sky was perfect that day: clear and bright, but not so bright that I couldn’t look up at it. Fleetingly, I thought how nice it was that it had put on this last performance for me because I knew even then that I would never see it again.

Then it rained.

I sat it the living room with my parents and my doctor as the rain pounded against the window. I could see a little bit of the sky through it-the portion that wasn’t masked by billowing trees was a mottled grayish color. It matched the doctor’s suit. It was the same color as thunder and a bad mood.

Normally, I liked thunder storms. I watched them from the porch late at night. I watched how the night sky was consumed by the clouds, like dark velvet being washed away by a shadowy sea. The wind tossed the ocean up and down, and little portions of the velvet fought to the surface now and then. I noticed how there were never any stars beneath the clouds in those little patches of calm. It was as if they had fled from the sky altogether. 

That day, the storm seemed like an omen-something hinting at a misfortune that was close at hand. I thought of the gypsies that sometimes passed our town in their caravans and makeshift tents. They filled heads with fortune telling and adventures in far off lands. Even after they themselves left, their ideas remained for months after like a strange smell or the voice of someone just out of reach. 

The doctor was talking in a grave yet somehow kindly voice; as if he knew it was a lost cause to make what he was saying sound better than it was. My mother was pale under the makeup on her cheeks. She was nodding, brow furrowed. In that moment she looked so delicate and fragile, almost like a young girl. My father looked the same as always: unruffled and sanctimonious with his dark hair and brown suit. 

I was wearing my light green sundress as a silent lament-a good bye to the sky and the outdoors. It would probably be thrown away, as I had no further use for something so earthy when refined to the house. It made me sad. The dress was, no matter how small, a part of me and loosing it would make the whole thing absolute and confirmed. But maybe just the knowledge of all this had already made it so.

The conversation continued, but I couldn’t listen. I knew what they were talking about, anyway; it was the sickness. It always came back to the sickness. The endless talk was an infestation in itself: talk of new cases, possible cures, vaccinations and, most of all, deaths filled out living room like a presence on visits such as these. It was as if the very thought of the sickness brought a fragment of its ghost into the house.

The doctor came to our house almost twice a week now, always full of news. My father loved to hear his tales. Sometimes it seemed like he thought this sickness-this epidemic that was real and was really happening to people-was a novel or story in the news paper about a far away land. I think that he truly believed that the four walls that surrounded our family and the money piled up in the bank protected him. However, as news of the spread drew closer and closer to out town, we had become more and more secluded. There were to more trips to the country and the visits down into the market had ceased.

It was as if the whole population was being herded into their houses or away altogether like an immense sheepdog running in slow motion along the country side.

The doctor stood to leave, but my father held up his hand in protest. “What do you suggest we do, sir?” he said. His voice was hard, as if he was angry, but I couldn’t see why. 

The doctor sighted. “Stay inside,” he said, and his voice was heavy, as if saying it brought him some unfathomable discomfort. “Stay inside, all of you, and perhaps you will be safe. Pray that there is a cure,” and walked briskly to the sliding door, where he paused, as if struck with an additional suggestion, but he remained silent, and I wondered if he had really intended to say anything at all, or was simply waiting to see if my father would stand to see him out. But my father remained in his seat, as if punishing the doctor for bringing him this news, clutching my mother’s hand, and eyes narrowed in thought. The doctor reached the door by himself, and I heard it open and a few seconds later shut again-shuting him out.

Shutting us in.

I stared after him, watching the curtain on the front door flutter into stillness. Slowly, I raised my eyes to my mother’s face. She was still pale and white, staring at the place where the doctor had sat as if he was still there, telling her more bad news. I wished I could slip away to another time or else sleep until it was all over. The knowledge of the disease’s existence was like a constantly nagging fly buzzing around the room. Suddenly, inexplicably, I felt immeasurably small. I felt as if the world was expanding before my eyes, and as it grew, I shrank into smaller and smaller proportion. And there were so many people pressing in on each side. I was sinking-down, down, down, down.

And then it was over.

The illusion faded as quickly as it had appeared to me, and I found myself clutching at the edges of my chair as if it was a life boat and the one thing tethering me to life in the middle of the wide deep ocean.

My father stood up, and my mother and I watched him. “There are things to attend to,” he told us, and he left the room. I could hear his footsteps gradually fading as he walked down the hall like a drum whose echo was dwindling into silence.  

The parlor was quiet. It was a relatively small room filled with frilly little sofas and chairs grouped around the table at the center. My mother liked to have company over, and they would all sit around the wide table like large and extravagant pieces of candy in their corsets and pedi-coats. It was painted a soft pink, which was the color I always associated with my mother; weather it was because she was so often in this room or because she herself was so soft and pink, I will never fully know.

I’ve always felt that my mother was somehow younger than me. Her quiet and tremulous manor suggests that of a little girl, and she was scarcely more than that when she married my father. She was 17 and my father was 21, but marriages such as that were not so unheard of back then. 

Now, a boy is only considered a man when he has a good job and a little bit of money behind him, and a girl is not considered a woman until her parents deem it necessary that she should be married. In other words, maturity all comes down to parents, who have very different tastes than their children. The parents themselves were married in completely different times and, in most cases, in completely different circumstances. Many did not marry for love and most only learned that they were to be married when their parents told them so. Arranged marriages were often apparent when my mother and father were in their youth, almost as common as they are in India, which my friends and I hear about in lessons and whisper about in awe when other topics of conversation are running low. 

I have been told that my parents were in love, but my mother was to marry someone else. They ran away together, warranting a temporary estrangement from both sets of grandparents. Apparently the appeal of a well known family name and a respectable spouse overcame that of general happiness and love. However, my father’s inheritance from a rich uncle coupled with the slow passing of time led my grandparents to forgive their children and their new children in law.  

Occasionally a grandmother would come to call on the pretense of visiting her only grandchild and make off with a few new dresses and hats from the sewing room . You could usually count on them showing up every time the fashions changed.

“He has to prepare the house,” my mother said in a small voice, a tiny explanation. “There is so much to do.”

“I can help,” I offered, but my mother shook her head.

“It is not a woman’s place to help with such things,” she said maddeningly in her fragile and composed voice. “You would do better to go and be fit for the new dress.” She took a deep breath. “You cannot go traipsing around in last year’s fashion.”  

I ran my hand over my face hard as if to iron out any doubt that may show in it. My mother could seem so simple at times, and sometimes I envied her for her  ability to blindly accept anything that came and deflect it with a bland and ladylike response. I could not imagine that she could ever have the nerves to run away with anyone, true love or otherwise, let alone disobey her parents’ orders. 

She smoothed out her dress with her small, delicate, ladylike hands. The folds of fabric rustled like dead leaves scraping across the ground, like some quiet noise in the night that put all of your senses on edge. I watched her face. I wanted to see some sign of what had happened behind her eyes. I wanted to see real fear instead of the composed anxiety that she allowed to show. I wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her.

I would have acted on the impulse, but for the fear that she might break.

“Mother,” I said hesitantly, “what happened? What really happened?” I knew she would tell me. My mother didn’t like secrets. 

“Your father didn’t want you to know,” she said, turning to look me directly in the eye. “Not yet.”

“I’m almost sixteen,” I said, fighting to keep the whine that was threatening to become my tone out of my voice. This wasn’t exactly true. I would be sixteen in just over six months, but I persevered. “I deserve to know.”

She sighed, looking away. Addressing the painting on the far wall, she began to speak. 

“The illness is spreading far quicker than we could have ever imagined.” She paused as if steeling herself to do something against her better judgement. “Lydia is dead.”

Words can’t describe what you feel when you hear of a death. Truly, words can’t describe any feeling. You can get close to knowing what exactly your emotions are, but the only way to know for sure is to be there yourself for them. Its like looking at a painting or a photograph of something that it sitting very still and you can tell that it is only an image, but you don’t know how. There is some sense inside us that can tell if the world around us is real or not.

Lydia had been my nanny when I was a baby. She was the first face I remember seeing. She wiped my tears and fed me and made me laugh. She was like a second mother, only more coarse and solid: more like an actual being than a wisp of smoke. 

I sat very still for a long time. I could tell my mother wanted to get on with what had to be done, and she was shifting restlessly and coughing from time to time, tiny hints that I was to get up, say that it was very tragic indeed, but there were things to attend to. Then I would sweep off to be fit for that dress and then perhaps sew a little and make small talk with whomever may be in the room at the time. 

That didn’t happen.

I sat and gazed at nothing as my heart pounded inside of me and my breath congealed into a solid thing, trapped beneath my ribs. It took me a very long time to realize that I couldn’t breath. Suddenly, it struck me that I hadn’t taken a breath in a long time. When my lungs didn’t inflate, I half rose from my chair, hand flying to my throat.

Then I did the most ladylike thing my mother could have asked for, and fainted. 

~Chapter Two~

Wishes

I have made many wishes in my short existence. Sometimes I think that we are made of wishes, or else they are the things that keep us glued together and glued to each other. I think that if the world were empty of wishes, it would fall into despair and then break into a million tear drops because if there is nothing to wish for, then why do we exist?

In the days that followed the fateful meeting in the sitting room, there were many wishes. I wished that I was somewhere else and that I could go outside and that my father would look me in the eyes and that I wasn’t a girl. I wished that I could do more to help with preparing the house for quarantine. I wished that I understood. And I wished that the sickness would go away. 

I don’t know what anyone else wished for, but everyone had the same look in their eyes that said that they were all wishing the same thing. 

Three days after the meeting and announcement of the quarantine it rained again. I was in my room, watching from the window as the drops of water lashed against the glass. This storm was heavier than the first, and it lasted the whole day. I rested my head against the window and soon my tears mixed with the condensation that formed beneath my touch.

My room was on the very top story of our house. It was covered in light green wallpaper with spiraling designs that curled and splashed themselves in every direction. When I was younger I used to try to copy the patterns. Even now the wallpaper enthralled me, and I stared at it in a stupor, letting my vision blur. Sometimes it seemed like a frozen ocean, and I imagined my room was in the crest of a giant wave that had frosted over just as it reached its peak. Someday, I expected it to come crashing down and engulf me and everything I knew.

The rain was still pounding on the window. If I closed my eyes or gazed at nothing but a patch of the green wall, I could imagine that I was on a tiny little boat in the middle of the sea. I tried to trick my mind into thinking that I was swaying back and forth in time with the swishing of the rain, trapped in the monotonous and eternal rhythm of the waves. 

Perhaps I wavered between sleep and conciseness, or maybe I simply lost track of time, but it was dark when I looked up next, and I realized that I had spent the whole day by my window, staring out into the sodden grey world that I had once been allowed out into. For some reason, this fact made me sad, and for the first time in my life it occurred to me that my days were numbered and that I would not always have time to waste and I would not always have wishes to throw away on petty things like rain and closed doors. There would be a time when I would be wishing for one more breath to fill my lungs or one last chance to glance up through a haze of despair and see the sky one last time and know that I would soon have a home there. 

For the first time in my life, I truly understood the future as a whole. I saw it in its entirety that stretched out across a vast expanse of time, and I knew that my existence meant nothing compared to everything that had yet to come. Soon the epidemic would end and it would slip into text books and stories and memory and soon the possessors of that memory would be lost and then there would only be the written word to remind us of what had once happened all those years ago. This thought that would depress some strengthened me because I knew that there was an end to everything and everything must end. 

The next morning I awoke sharply. It was one if those times when the only indication that you have been asleep at all is the abrupt jerk back to your room. Lying there in the watery sunlight, I felt that there was something hideously monotonous about each morning and the time that I spent inert on my back wondering whether to get up or simply to stare out the window at the treetops. It was as if the rain had awoken something inside me that finally saw the truth about my life and how was sadly yet inescapably an enormous pattern that repeated itself each day. The only times memories were made was when something unexpected happened to that pattern. 

It’s the same like the world and how history is made. If the sickness had not sprung up and engulfed the countryside with an irrepressible fear and dread, then this generation would be labeled much like the others and each and every person would slowly become more and more irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Strange how the unpleasant things are the ones that live on through the years and how the happy memories die and fade.

There was a soft tap on the door, and I jumped, instinctively drawing the covers closer around me and shrinking into the shadows that adorned the head of my bed. “Come in,” I called, and the door swung open. 

My mother stepped in looking much the same as usual. Her hair was drawn away from her face in a loose bun, and thin tendrils of her light brown hair fell in soft spirals around her face. She had on a plain dress of a soft creamy color somewhere between white and pink. In the morning light from my window, it was hard to tell which shade it was closest to. 

“You,” she said, tone hard and unforgiving as a sudden blast of cold water, “have done quite enough sulking for quite some time.” She crossed the room to the oak wardrobe that stood against the wall and threw it open like one might a window in a room that has not been graced with natural light for some time.

She scrutinized the dresses that hung inside like multicolored ghosts for a few moments, a contemplative finger resting on her chin. My mother herself had vast quantities of garments which greatly dwarfed my meager selection. She accumulated dresses like they accumulated dust. 

She gently took a light green dress by its hem and examined it in the small patch of light that fell like a shimmering amber cat on the carpet at her feet. She compared it to a powder blue garment that hung beside it, rubbing her finger on the fabric and squinting down at the sewing. 

“Wear this one,” she said, swiftly yet carefully removing it from the hanger and placing it on the back of a chair. “When you are presentable, you are to come down stairs and join your father and I for breakfast.” She turned on her heal and swept from the room, leaving the closet doors wide open and a cloud of her perfume hanging in the air.

My mother had a stiff and yet somehow very childlike way of saying and doing things. It was like a girl at her first party trying to be mature and detached, while she was really quite bored and uninterested in the gossip and tea-drinking. She could have quite easily been my sister, and she looked like a child with her soft, pretty face and wide grey eyes. Despite this, there were times when she would abruptly and quite often disconcertingly sharpen to a point and snap at a stray hair or lose thread. 

Fifteen minutes later, I entered the dining room. It was a rectangular chamber with a heavy wooden table in the middle. The table was surrounded by a dozen chairs, but I had never seen all of them filled. My parents were huddled at one corner, my father at the head of the table and my mother to his right. His chair was pushed sideways toward her, and they were talking in low muted voices that I couldn’t hear. As if sensing my presence, they abruptly ceased their conversation, and my father stood. 

“Sophia,” he said curtly, and motioned to the chair on his left. As he sat, he shifted his chair back so he was directly between both of us. He cleared his throat and pushed a bowl of fruit and a stack of toast toward me. I wasn’t hungry; a heavy dread had settled in my stomach, and I knew that this meeting would not bring good news. We never ate breakfast together unless there was something drastically eminent blocking all of our horizons. 

“Did you sleep well?” he asked as my mother sighed through her nose. 

“Yes, thank-you,” I said softly.

I have often been under the impression that my parents thing I am terribly dull, and perhaps all it takes is for someone to have that simple thought for you to be classified as immeasurably boring. There is really no way out of such labels because if I were to speak my mind, my parents would proclaim that I was to speak when spoken to.  For a moment I saw myself as others saw me, and it was strange to think that perhaps everyone is the same as you and just doesn’t choose to show what they’re hiding and keep their innermost thoughts to themselves. 

Maybe you have no real way of knowing if you are interesting or not until you have lived long enough to look back at your life from an educated perspective and see how far you have come from your moment of birth. Or maybe someone needs to look at it for you. 

Or maybe it is one of the insolvable mysteries of life that no one is meant to answer.  

“The doctor was here yesterday,” my father said as if this should warrant no end of fascination. My mother and I, now bored from the endless references to the doctor’s noble practice, payed this comment little attention and continued to eat in silence. Unabashed by this less-than-intrigued response, he continued to talk. “Apparently, there have been some rumors flying around in the town.” 

He waited. 

“Like what, father?” I asked grudgingly.

“I’m glad your interested, Sophia,” he said approvingly, even though he knew I wasn’t. “Some people have been claiming that they have a cure to the sickness. You know-people willing to take advantage of the desperation of others.” 

“And,” I asked hopefully, “have any of them worked?” 

“They most certainly have not,” my father said disapprovingly. “They’re horrid things that you wouldn’t even consider touching if you hadn’t been utterly hopeless. Things like pickled toadstools and fish scales soaked in vinegar. I hear it’s been quite and ordeal for Doctor Fenian what with tending to people foolhardy enough to try the remedies on top of all the new cases that have been cropping up.” He paused and scooped a forkful of egg into his mouth. “If that’s not worrying enough, a village has been quarantined not ten miles from here.” 

My mother and I looked up sharply at my father serenely eating a piece of toast. Quite unexpectedly, I felt anger rear within me like flames licking the inside of my stomach. It was as if a dam inside me had broken and all the pent-up emotions that I hadn’t let fully form over the past days had suddenly returned with renewed vigor, intent on spewing like lava across my mind and repenting their fury on anything that stood in their way. 

This feeling scared me. It felt as if every restraint that I relied upon to keep me sane had snapped or was weakened my an unseen force. It made everything seem fragile and breakable and I was suddenly acutely aware of how very delicate the world was. It could be torn apart by one person’s words or shattered by a ripple of uncertainty. 

My mother looked up, worry showing on her face as plainly as if it had been painted there. “Is it still spreading?” she asked, voice frail. 

My father half smiled and shook his head. “It’s all smoothed over now. The village has been evacuated, except the infected of course, and everything will-”

“But what about the people?” I interrupted, ignoring my mother’s sharp glance.

“I beg your pardon, Sophia?” my father replied looking genuinely bewildered.

“What’s going to happen to the people in the village? The infected people. Are they going to be treated somehow, or will they just…” I trailed off, the end of my sentence far too morbid to bare. 

“I thought it was rather obvious what-” he stopped short, unsure of how to go on. “What I mean to say is…They… Those people are, well, dying.”

I was shocked. Even though I had known this, I had never heard it put so baldly and with such insensitivity. “But aren’t they going to be treated at all? Isn’t the doctor going to do something?”

He leaned forward, and uncharacteristically fatherly expression on his face. “Sophia,” he began hesitantly, “there is nothing the doctor can do. There’s nothing anyone can do but…”

“But what?” I burst out. “Anything would be better than just watching people die! There are people with lives and hopes and families just being left alone in a village without any medicine or–”

“I think that’s quite enough, Sophia,” my mother quipped. “This has been a… well… enlightening breakfast.” She stood up, and my father followed suit. 

Perhaps she would have told me what was expected of me during the day, but I had already turned at swept from the room leaving them with nothing but one last disgusted look. 

Once, when I was eight, I went to a carnival with Lydia. On the trip to town, I we passed a farm, and there were horses scattered across the fields, grazing and tossing their manes. I had wanted a horse since before I could remember, and I found myself wishing that I lived in that little rundown house on the outskirts of the town. When I expressed this desire to Lydia, she laughed and said that they probably wished they lived in our house. 

I couldn’t understand this comment at all. 

“Why would they want that?” I had asked.

Lydia smiled wearily down at me. “Let’s be getting to the fare, pet,” she said, walking on.

Ever since that day I had often thought about the horses and the little house in the middle of the vast green field like a tiny life boat in the center of a vast green ocean. I wondered if I would be any happier if I had been born on that farm than in this grand yet somehow empty house. For all I knew, those people could be dead, considering how quickly the illness spread. Perhaps boredom was the price of my existence, and my birth i nto it would ultimately save my life. 

Or maybe we would emerge from this house alone, like the sole survivors of a terrible fire that had destroyed everything but us and it would, in fact, be better to have died with them compared to the loneliness. 

I felt tears sting my eyes, and I half wiped them away, partially wanting to let them fall. I staggered blindly up a flight of stairs and back to my bedroom, but I didn’t stay. There was something harsh about the familiarity of the mess that made life seem depressingly and frustratingly predictable. I turned and walked back to the stairs. 

I sat down hard on the top step as the clock down stairs struck ten in the morning, and then the tears came-real ones this time-that welled up and spilled down my face like tiny boiling waterfalls and I tried to make a wish, but nothing came to mind because there was nothing in my life worth crying for or hoping for or waiting for. There was nothing in my life but this house and these tears and all the wishes that I had yet to make and would never come true.

~Chapter Three~

Pretense 

At one point in my life I attempted to keep a journal-an attempt that ended poorly. The contents of the pages fell to a sort of monotony that repeated itself throughout the little book. What’s more, I found painstakingly recounting my day to the blank pages somehow depressing, especially when I had already lived through them once before. What I found even more depressing, however, was the drastic decrease in length of each entry.

The first entry was a five page long shpeel on the minute details of my day right down to the gentle changing of the leaves outside my window. The last entries, before I gave up the practice, were, at most, a few disjoined sentences summarizing the goings on in the house or my dread of going to Finishing School which, had the illness not spread so rapidly and aggressively, I would be attending at that moment. 

Perhaps it takes a certain type of person to  be able to recount their thoughts and feelings just as they occurred, and I found myself altering them and editing out certain things that may in fact had been worth recording. I was lying to myself as if to try and erase things that I would always remember just because I tried to obliterate them. 

I found myself doing this now. I pretended things were not how they were and were how they weren’t and telling myself that nothing out of the ordinary meant anything. I pretended that things were how they had always been and that this, like everything else, would pass.

We had fruits delivered every week. Crates with apples and berries and other such things appeared on our door step every Monday morning like clockwork.They were shipped from farther and farther away as the sickness spread, bearing labels from Africa and France.

I suppose it is because of the crates that it began.

Or maybe that’s just what I would like to think, and it really is all because of me.

When I finally left my room that Monday after tiring of reading and sulking, it was approaching noon. It was the kind of day that seems to drag by in great dollops. Like the stars fading one by one in the sky until the moon is its soul and lonely inhabitant, the minutes dragged by, each shining in the instant before in melded into the next. 

I wandered down the stairs to the parlor where my mother was knitting a handkerchief that would, like all the others, be agonized over then tossed into a drawer never to be seen or heard for again. I ignored her and she ignored me. 

A stony silence had formed between us ever since my outburst. She was enraged that I would ever dare to do something so unladylike in front of her. In her book, I might as well have shaved my head and come prancing down the stairs in breeches. 

She scowled down at the embroidery as I passed. It made me think of a rose that had just spotted a caterpillar dangerously close to its glossy green leaves.

Patches of light spilled in from the windows and dotted the floor like yellow rugs along the length of the hall. As I passed, their shining surfaces were interrupted by my passing profile, but I didn’t look at the floor. I watched the trees and sky and clouds pass behind me as I walked, silently inviting me to leap out the window and dash off toward the horizon without a backward glance. 

They chided me at my compliance with my parent’s requests and their branches, dipping lightly in the breeze, beckoned me toward them like many fingered hands. 

This is where I post my stories so people can read them…

I know I’m a copyer Granada, but o well.