let down.

for: @illfates

It was nothingness that Shaw found in the cabin and nothingness that had stayed. Its rooms had been cleared out long ago though not quite bereft of life, either. A dining table fit for six, the empty frame of a television screen with shards of glass lying carelessly on the vinyl flooring, walls that held onto lopsided picture frames of a family whose fates were now unknown. So, life had passed here, but it was weeks, months perhaps, when these four walls last had a visitor. Days were hard to surmise without a watch, and as months passed, it was only more complicated by the passing of the seasons. On the off-chance a clock would remain hung on the wall the minute and second hands were just as lifeless as the space it occupied. Walking wordlessly to the living room floor, Shaw glanced up and found a clock beating still. 

Half past six. Outside, the sun had long since sunk. Winter had come. 

Shaw took the next few steps toward the flight of stairs. Wood. They swallowed. To have survived this long required guts and deft thinking—but even they could not predict the way in which the wood would croak, if it would protest with the doctor’s disruption. But they had come so far already to find a place to rest, and anyway, what was a few more steps? And if it had croaked, what did it matter? Let the monsters come perhaps. The day was too long already. They had already lost too many. What’s another life for the monsters to take? Let it be theirs. It should be their time already. 

With bated breath, they took one step, and another, and another. The steps remained stubbornly quiet. Shaw did too. It would not be such an easy death for them, no; perhaps somewhere what gods were left were laughing. 

The floor revealed two bedrooms, with doors both open to their hinges. No signs of life here—not even fruit flies on rotten fruit or ants beneath floorboards—even as the bedrooms contained some vestiges of it. The smaller room of dinosaur wallpaper, a desk table brimming with paper and playthings; the larger room for the parents where a large mattress blessedly remained. With minimal force they dusted off the right side of the bed and allowed themselves to lie in it. Here, in a stranger’s bed, in an abandoned riverfront house, in the dark hour of winter, Shaw would at last rest. 

The final stir was involuntary, near silent yet known, still—the low rumble of an empty stomach. Jude hungered as the dark did for her.

The cabin may not have been undiscovered, not far from where she ever dared go, but it had not been remembered. There were many of them: the looted bones of long-ago homes. Stripped of life and memory, until there was only sustenance, itself soon picked apart or left to decay. To dust. It remained, slumped against moonlight like some beacon. Jude knew better than to hope. It was unlikely that anything stayed; her hunger unsated. It was her body, weary, that could be kept. Wood panels that would offer some refuge from the night. The continued approach was soft, light like the ravenous watch of a predator. Held breath, the wait for an answer. The possible seconds between noise and betrayal. Finally, she eased inside, an entrance with little mercy.

Jude sniffed. Rot, a memory of life, disturbed. The hum of it lingered. Not possible to know when or by whom, but it had become instinct to detect even a stolen speck of dust. Like the cold sting of a shotgun against her back or the fist rarely unclenched—survival remained an art of noticing, of waiting. Cabinets open, bare, nothing or nothing that could be made out in the dark. She continued to nowhere.

The boot on the stairs was treacherous. A body could not be contained to its lightness, to air squeezed under the ribcage. Age came with creek, with groan—demanded that every moment passed be considered. Quiet, still. A release of breath. She remembered many not-quite-homes that sweltered with something just the same. Corroded with the brutality of days, the stickiness of liquor, air that choked and suffocated. Final thoughts of heaviness were abandoned with the grace of the landing underfoot. Some long, resigned creak. She paused at the top of the stairs. Nothing.