The Room

The room was dry, although no care had been taken to protect it from the damp. Maybe it was a secret charm put on it by the innocent games played here, but other than a bit of dust and cobwebs, the late afternoon sunshine coming through the boards over the window revealed very few signs of age. In all, it had been nearly fifteen years since anyone played here. On one wall, ancient wallpaper of the kind with tiny floral bits printed all over was relatively intact, only a few strips peeled and hanging in the stillness. Two of the other walls were bare and painted, the colors still distinguishable from the day they left. The blue wall, with its large, faded painted clouds, still had a few push pins in it. Some of these held up tilted crayon and pen drawings of various sizes and levels of expertise. The wall in which the window opened was painted with a wide range of colors, seemingly slapdash and showing the white base underneath. On the paint were scribbled masterpieces of childhood, mostly blue and red crayon people. Most of the toys that had lived here were gone, taken when the room was left unused, but a small bin of wooden blocks was still tipped over in a corner, and there was a large rocking horse that looked worn.

The wooden floorboards were very dry and shrunken away from each other, leaving cavernous gaps to lose game pieces in. There were a few pieces of paper lying on the floor, one shredded into small fluttering pieces. There was a small desk against the wallpapered wall, on which sat a pot with dry earth and leaves in it and a cup filled with crayons and pencils. Numerous ink blots marred the wooden surface of the desk, and a cobwebbed light bulb hung by a thin cord overhead. There was no chair to sit at, however, and there was nothing else in the room. The sunshine was very orange, leaving buttered slices along the floor, and it was silent.

Outside, the long grasses of the open fields waved slowly, though there was no breeze. The sky was ceramic, the wisps of clouds drifting in all directions as though they had forgotten their purpose. All around the room, things were laid about or stuck up in the air. Sometimes they also forgot; where they had been placed, what colors they were supposed to be. It was not eerily silent, just a pause - one that never ended.

Fiyel pulled himself up onto the floor of the room and got to his feet. He was a slight young man in his twenties, the look in his pale eyes far older. The floor creaked with a comfortable sound, as though it recognized his footsteps. He went to the cloud wall and pulled a paper off it, looking down quietly at the small ink drawing of a ship steered by an octopus through a sea of clouds. There was a scribble in the corner in spidery handwriting. There’s a space in the clouds where the two of us can hide, it read. The push pin fell out of the corner of it and skittered across the floor.

He went to the window and gazed out, trying to match the view to the one he remembered from almost fifteen years ago. There were still rolling hay fields, but the sky was somehow different, and he knew there were no houses beyond the rise anymore. Although the difference between his memory and the things that were here now might have been unsettling, he merely sighed and turned back to the desk. He sat on it and pulled a pen out of the cup. As he waited, he clicked it against his knee absently, staring around the room. It really hasn’t changed much, he thought. There was a sound of someone else clambering up to the room. Fiyel waited patiently, watching the end of the floor where it broke off abruptly, the fourth wall that had had a door in it sliced away perfectly as the rest of the house had faded out of existence. Two hands flew up and grasped the edge, then a swing and a “huh!” and another young man was kneeling in front of him. His curly brown hair was darker than Fiyel’s, but his eyes and the shape of his nose were only a little sharper. He looked up at Fiyel and quirked a slight grin. His gaze swept the room, his eyebrows raising at its state.

"This is pretty well preserved," he remarked, not bothering to introduce himself.

Fiyel twirled the pen and watched him casually. “Been a while,” he said.

“Yep.” The other put his hands on his hips and contemplated the golden light coming through the window.

“How long, Vaiyef? Nine years?” asked Fiyel.

“Just about. What have you been up to?” the other asked, moving to the rocking horse and nudging it with a toe. Creak.

“Nothing much. Not since the world froze.” Fiyel said it with the faintest hint of sarcasm. He eyed the large wooden beam in the air outside the room with little interest, just watching it drift ever so slowly away from them.

“Right. Funny how things move so fast when external time freezes.” Vaiyef turned a half smile to his friend.

“What have you been up to?” Fiyell stuck the pen back into the cup and slid off the desk.

“Same thing as you, I expect.”

“Everybody’s doing the same thing, I guess," Fiyel shrugged.

“Wandering," said Vaiyef. "Remembering things. Looking for old things and piecing together what they find.”

“Not like we have anything else to do.”

“True. It’s easy to forget stuff now, though, you know? Nothing’s happening and it all blends together.”

“I guess. But you remembered this place, at least,” Fiyel said. They both stared out of the gaping side of the room. Fiyel tried to remember the short hall that would have led to the stairs, and the dingy kitchen downstairs, and the rest of the rooms. But they held no meaning, and just as he couldn't really remember, they had faded with the memories. It was all tied together inexplicably, and the two knew that better minds than they had attempted to understand it.

“Yeah, I remembered. And you.” Vaiyef nodded.

“It's just how I remember it... but somehow not quite the same.” Vaiyef nodded again, and they sat at the edge in companionable silence, dangling their boots off the end. The makeshift pile of junk they built to get up twenty feet of open air to the room shifted slowly, since the things floating in the air had nothing to anchor them.

“Only this room stayed, out of the whole house,” Fiyel’s companion pondered.

“The rest wasn’t important, anyway.” Fiyel paused. “Vaiyef,” he said it experimentally. “I haven’t called you that since…”

“Since The Freezing.”

“Right.”

“I thought of this place, then. Right after, I mean,” Vaiyef lifted one foot long enough to push a piece of drywall away. It drifted straight out, turning, and they watched it until it disappeared over the hill.

"I did too, especially during the aftereffects, when people were panicking." said Fiyel. "I guess because it was already frozen, in a sense. We spent so much time here that didn’t seem to pass.” They let that statement sink in, remembering.

“How’d you get here?” Fiyel finally asked.

“Walked, like you did.” There weren't directions anymore, so Fiyel had to be content with that. You just walked, and sometimes you got somewhere that meant something.

“I heard that someone found a way to get a car to work, in spite of it being frozen.”

“I heard that too.”

“I wonder if we could try with that reddish one back on the road.”

“It’s at least three feet off the ground.”

“Makes it easier to push. We could try.” They sat in silence, looking at the nearest floating objects. There was a trashcan about ten feet away, tilted, with a car tire beside it, and below them there was a scattering of smaller objects at various heights off the ground. A bucket, some planks, a rusty pipe with a faucet attached.

Fiyel finally shifted his weight. “You want to go look at the car?”

“Sure.” Neither moved to get down from their perch. “You know,” said Vaiyef, “I’m just wondering: I came here later than you. What if I had been several days late? We might never have seen each other.”

“I knew you must be coming at some point,” said Fiyel. There was no denying that, so Vaiyef turned and slipped down to the first foothold, the floating objects beneath him bobbing with his weight.

“But it was still a matter of probability,” he said

“That’s all anything is now,” Fiyel pointed out, moving to follow

“Just memories and miracles.

When both reached the bottom, they walked away over the fields, neither looking back at the faint room, where an ink drawing was slowly fading.