13 comments

Drama

   That day Atleigh nearly squeezed her phone so hard it would’ve molded to her fist’s sweaty interior, the cemetery hills were unearthed by a trillion trillion trillion muddy hands picking off maggots like lint.


   Atleigh had a trillion one-word texts she never sent even though every previous time was easier once she stalled and recalled that instance side by side with the one at hand. By that point though, it was impossible to send anything once again. 


   Atleigh was stiff on the train, nose wrinkled at the way hi looked grumpy and irritated in the text box. If she sent it Isae would see it before she could squirm and hit delete. She gripped the phone like the sudden winks from the sun at the window would tell her what to do. Every breath whisked into her system told her no. 


   So okay. No


   Backspace. Turn it off. 


   Isae made it her credo to wait for everyone else to move first. To talk first. To begin to twist nothing into a so-so friendship. She stuck to it.


   Isae was as bold as charcoal and it took Atleigh five crushing months to be actual friends.


   Atleigh probably had to do it all over again, by sloppy word transmission. One text at a time.


   It was so easy to get it wrong. Words going out into the world by themselves with their own attitudes were unruly and nobody could control otherwise. Unless they took three lifetimes to unearth an emoji but at that point it would’ve made them childish and clingy. 


   Atleigh stepped over the train gap and squeezed one eye shut while stray snow flicked her face like she did something wrong. She probably did. It was May, why else would it be snowing?


   Atleigh needed a hunk of thinking time so she walked the rest of the way instead of taking a bus. The snow buried the lobby’s doormat and her fingertips screeched and itched as the blood thawed up in the elevator.


   It was at that point the graves had split their generous fissures, like envelopes received and torn, and their buried boxes were long unhinged. Grandpas, grandmas, great-aunts, great-uncles, old neighbours, old friends scratched their uneven skin. What was left of their noses wrinkling, clogged from dirt and splinters. 


   There was screaming at the memorial park, at the old brick church and the public library Atleigh took Isae to when they did every science fair together.


   The anxious dead sloshed like dirty bathwater, untamed by the dark and the wet and the earthworms in the soil. They left brown footprint halves in the snow, trampling most of them while they slumped and drooled because it was hard to be back in the sun, hard to be doing anything but lying down in a dark little box like a scratchy napkin. 


   There was screaming at the grocery store, shopping carts skidding like only cars with engines did in automobile ads. There was screaming at the elementary school, lockers turned inside out.



   But Atleigh didn’t hear much when she was thinking about what to say to Isae. 


   She turned the radiator on for a precious few minutes before switching it off. Electricity bills were shocking when she was the one paying for it. And it shocked her every month. 


  Atleigh set the phone down on the coffee table and held her head with dry knuckles at her temples. She recognized this stiff position a thousand times over and it made her hungry because novels made Atleigh call it hope. A stiff, tiring hope that made her nauseous. It consumed the most energy in the world. More than the radiator ever could for a whole lifetime. More than a cross country road trip just to see some dry lakes. More than it took to send a rocket nose-first into a star. 


   It wasn’t that Isae would be binge-watching with someone else who could talk and talk and talk more than Atleigh ever could. No one could do that. No one would do it. 


   Isae had her huge problems that were incredibly inconvenient. Like baby voids in an art project that demanded no blank space. It took Atleigh years to settle down with them. To like them. 


   She felt unweighted at the thought of sending a wrong text out of the blue, after time and distance had crunched into a blackhole that made her think it had been nearly twenty lifetimes all bestowed with longevity.


   The sun was clambering through the windowpane and it twisted its way through white-heavy foliage to find the roots. Atleigh lived too high up to see the ground but low enough to find bird nests on the balcony. The snow was already melting faster than she could think: a popsicle accepting its own quiet death on hot pavement. Nature’s peaceable tapestry wound up Atleigh’s trains of thought and her eyes burned as they pinpointed on the tree canopies, already green again.


  The villain was her toiling conscious and the protagonist: her instinct. Atleigh willed her eyes to go out of focus, scrutinized two sets of keyboards: barely there and overlapped like two kids screeching over each other out of excruciating exasperation. Atleigh typed out the letters while her back teeth ground together hard enough to reshape them.


   The zombies barrelled through the lobby, swam through each other up the stairs, licked peepholes outside the doors. 


   Atleigh jabbed send before she could turn off the phone and burrow her hands in a meatgrinder. 


   There was something scratching her door like a landlord’s cat but she couldn’t hear it. 


   The text was a minute old.


   Atleigh bit the flesh of her mouth so hard she could taste its brand new saline crescents. She’d asked if she’d been missed, trying not to sound whiney, and waited for Isae halfway across the world to ideally say yea


   Her eyes burned while she watched the trees drip snow off their round foliage cheeks.


   The wifi went out and the door peeled apart like an onion: stubborn but knew at the bottom of its sticky heart it was inevitable. 


   Atleigh was eventually beginning to feel how cold the apartment had gotten and right there past the radiator at the sabotaged door, she finally saw it. Atleigh swallowed a lump of spit like glass. 


   Isae’s grotesque compostable face was the byproduct of at least five years under the dirt. 

April 22, 2021 18:48

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13 comments

Frances Reine
18:49 Apr 22, 2021

So it's not pretty but I figured I should take a break from breaking. Thanks for everybody who still wait for me :)

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Kristin Neubauer
14:49 Apr 25, 2021

Yikes! This really was an intense story - super-strong descriptions. That last sentence had quite an impact. I didn't see it coming. I wasn't expecting an zombie apocalypse story when it opened....lots of points for originality. Even though it was sort of a bleak/horror story, I still thought it was lots of fun (if that makes any sense) and I was caught up in it from beginning to end. Great work!

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Frances Reine
14:56 Apr 25, 2021

I'm glad it was fun! And unexpected at some point too--that's so awesome to hear. Thanks so much, Kristin!

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Claire Lindsey
16:10 Apr 23, 2021

Quite different from the other stories of yours I’ve read, but I enjoyed it! I liked that, in the middle of an apocalypse, Atleigh was more worried about sending that text than the fact that the world was falling apart. And I loved the contrast of the nature imagery with the decaying zombies, it was very effective. A couple things to consider tweaking: “There was screaming at the memorial park, at the old brick church and the public library Atleigh took Isae to when we did every science fair together.” -Change we to they “The wifi went o...

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Frances Reine
21:36 Apr 23, 2021

Aw, thank you, Claire :) My brother told me the apocalypse was too dramatic and cringe, haha. Thanks for the reassurance. The POV slip especially--thanks so much for catching it so I could fix it right away. I always value your critique, Claire, thanks so much :)

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14:29 Apr 23, 2021

Woah. That was intense...in a good way! I'm so glad you took a break from breaking, but this is such an amazing story, Frances! ( You might get confused by my name change, but I used to be Chaotic Spirals) Anyways, I loved how you described Alteigh's thoughts revolving around sending a text and how the words had to be just right. As always, your writing paints a beautiful picture in my head and the metaphors are just perfect. That last line sent shivers up my spine, but that's what you get when you don't respond to a text :P I get her anxi...

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Frances Reine
21:32 Apr 23, 2021

I actually did recognize it was you, haha. I think it's the star at the end--who'd that be? Karina, duh. Thanks so much for reading and I'm so glad you could relate. Always thrilled when you comment. :)

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21:30 Apr 26, 2021

Haha, yes! The star is now my signature mark! No problem Frances, I always love reading your stories.

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Radhika Diksha
08:41 Apr 23, 2021

Hey, I was waiting for one of your stories. Nice work, it was confusing in some places, that's all. You grabbed a nice narration and the plot is vivid. Keep writing.

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Frances Reine
21:37 Apr 23, 2021

Thank you, Radhika. Thrilled to see your feedback!

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H L McQuaid
08:14 Apr 23, 2021

This was dark and hollow and threaded with crumbling yearning. Great imagery and metaphors (like, "Atleigh swallowed a lump of spit like glass."). Also, it's so nice to 'read' you back. :) One small thing, wondering if 'we' ought to be 'they' here: "... to when we did every science fair together." As the story is told in third person POV. The message I took away from this was, don't wait to send those texts, you never know when the zombie apocalypse will hit. ;)

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Frances Reine
21:31 Apr 23, 2021

Aw, thanks so much, Heather. I love this comment :) Totally annoyed I didn't catch that POV change. I actually had this whole thing in first person and then changed it. I'm so grateful for you catching that slip. Thank you again!

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Benji Bobo ©
18:03 Jul 26, 2021

BrUhHhhhHh I honestly got lost the second sentence, I think this is to deep for me, I better keep on reading dr seuss

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