Outside the window

There was only one window, but it could not be opened.

Her mother barely allowed her to carry out the lightest chore, but Jo insisted on helping to clean the window. Every morning, she would wipe away the dust from the inside, as carefully as one would dust a treasured porcelain figure, and her mother would scrub the grime off from the outside on Sundays. Every morning, Jo would attempt to wash the dishes or do the laundry; but she had to do it quietly and almost surreptitiously, as the smallest clatter would bring her mother to her side with a flood of anxious admonitions. Then, with the daily battle for work fought and done with, Jo would sit for hours by that single window, peering through the thick glass pane at the world outside.

She had never known a window that could be unlatched and pushed open, so that possibility never crossed her mind; but she had dreamed many times of hurling their heaviest chair – a furniture piece made of solid oak – against the glass, just to see the finest fissure running through that perfect crystal solidity like a delicate vein. Then she would rub her wasted arms and feel the outline of her own brittle bones.

Her father would come home just before dinner, but she was never allowed to see him walk through the door. Every evening, she listened for the opening of the front door from her room. Then there was a breathless, magical moment when the gateway was breached and the Outside came flooding in – the wild howling of the wind, the savage power of its voice – before the door closes again with a solid thump, and the deep, steady hum of her father’s voice fills the resulting silence. Every evening, she would wait until he has taken off his jacket, before wheeling herself out of the room and into his embrace. She would bury her face into his shirt and smell the sand or the soil or, on rare occasions, the sulphuric rain clinging to his skin. It never smelt fresh or cool, like the older books on her mother’s shelf would describe it, but it was a feral smell, a smell of something that could not be tamed or tied down.

She had only two memories of the Outside from when she was very small, recollections that have since become creased and faded from too much handling. In the first memory, she was barefoot, the baked earth warm beneath her soles, dry crumbles of dirt wedged between her toes. It was very bright, a sort of blinding brightness that never entered the house, for the window faced straight north. In the second memory, she was standing in the middle of a sandstorm. The wind was fierce, lashing her tender skin with coarse sand-grains; yet there was a wild exhilaration in the pain, in that sharp stinging reminder of nature’s absolute power. She had been too young to comprehend death, and so the passion of terror had become exultation instead.

Now the only fleeting tastes of the Outside came from her father, whenever he returned home from a long day of labour, and sometimes her mother, when she was forced by necessity to venture out and leave Jo alone. When they came back home, Jo would hug them and greedily breathe in the dust and the acid. There was never enough to sicken her body – her parents made sure of it – but the toxic temptation seeped into her mind, rousing a craving from the very marrow of her frail bones. The monster out there would devour her in an instant, but it was a better end than this slow, excruciating decline.

One night, she awoke suddenly. Nothing had startled her: her room was black and quiet as usual. But after a moment of blinking into the darkness, she heard her parents’ voices, low-pitched but agitated.

“The remaining crops are failing,” her father was saying. “We may run out of food before the end of this year.”

“Is there anything else we can get? Anyone –”

“Everyone needs food. There is nothing we can trade, nothing to be wanted around here except food.”

A beat of silence.

“I’m thinking of travelling beyond our fields,” her father said abruptly. “The fields of the last settlement may still bear some grains, even though there hasn’t been anyone tending to them for years.”

Her mother let out a low cry. “But who would work the field when you’re not here? There are barely enough hands as it is.”

“Could you do it?” Her father had never sounded so solemn before. “It will be hard, very hard, but I can’t think of an alternative. Tom’s wife will also be taking up his work.”

“But what about Jo?” And there it was, that shrill anxiety which Jo had heard for as long as she could remember. “Tom’s wife doesn’t have a child who needs her.”

“Jo can manage for herself. She is a sensible girl.”

“Being sensible won’t stop her from choking or collapsing. What if I come back to find her – No. You don’t even know if you’ll find food. We can’t take this risk.”

“If we don’t take this risk, there will be no more risks left to take.”

There was another pause, and then the conversation continued in lower, more urgent tones that Jo could not pick out from her bed.

The next morning, her father was still at home when Jo wheeled herself into the kitchen.

“Jo, darling.” He smiled warmly at her, but she could see the lines around his eyes, the tension at the corners of his mouth. She knew already what he was going to say, but she let him say it as if it was all news to her.

“That’s alright, Daddy,” she said when he was finished. She pushed herself forward and wrapped her arms around him. He caught her in his embrace, holding her carefully but firmly. “Stay safe.”

“I will, darling. And you take care of yourself too, alright?”

“Of course.” She snuggled up against his side, pretending to be five years old again. “I’ll be fine, inside here. You’re the one going out.”

She felt him press a kiss to the crown of her head. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“I know.”

Then the Outside took him away, and there was only Jo and her mother. Soon afterwards, from sunrise to sunset, there was only Jo.

She didn’t mind the silence and the solitude; at first, it was even a relief to be able to move around the house without the cloud of her mother’s constant concern hanging over her. She didn’t choke. She didn’t collapse. Her mother came back every evening to find her still breathing and bearing a smile. It continued for a month, then two, and still her mother worked every day. There was never any news from her father or from any of the men who had left with him. The harvest season ended, and still there was no news. The remaining people dwindled in health, and then in numbers. There had not been a healthy child for years, and now there were no more children left at all. Jo was the youngest by far.

Then one day, her mother left before the sun rose and never returned.

It was a hot day, which meant that it was hotter than normal, hotter than the perpetual heat. That was the first thing Jo noticed when she woke up. The second thing she noticed was that there was a swirling storm of dust gathering outside, turning the view from the window into an indeterminate reddish haze.

The third thing she noticed, hours later, was that the air smelt different.

Even through the filters, the air that reached her nostrils had a strange smoky edge to it, an acrid quality that flung her into a paroxysm of coughing. She felt her throat close up, her fragile, useless lungs doing their feeble best to expel the toxic particles; and finally, just as the coughing fit was dying down –

Thwack.

Jo had never heard anything so loud. Her first instinct was to look out of the window – but there was a crack in it.

It was not the delicate fissure that she had long dreamed of: instead, an ugly, jagged fracture ran from the top left corner all the way down to the base of the glass pane. And beyond that crack, through the glass and the dust and the raging winds, Jo could see that the world was ablaze. The Outside was waging war on their last barricades.

She glanced at the door. It was no use. Even if there was a hope of escaping to somewhere safer, she did not have the strength to pull open that heavy door. Her muscles have shrivelled away years ago, along with the memories of green, growing things. Her body had struggled for so long to flourish in a soil that could not nourish it. Give to the earth, and it will give back to you. But her predecessors have only taken and taken and taken; and in the end, the earth had to take it all back, with disease and famine and scorching heat, with the blind wrath of a goddess robbed of mercy. There was nothing Jo could do – and yet an echoing rage burned in her all the same. She would rather run straight into the arms of that terrible power than to surrender in slow degrees. She would trade all the remaining years of her life to be truly and gloriously alive, to be at one with the Outside, if only for a fraction of a moment.

But when all other choices have been taken away, there are no choices left to make.

So she wheeled herself to her usual position by the window, and silently took up her habitual vigil. Through the cracked pane, she watched the dust-storm rising outside, the roaring heat and the deep, rumbling fury of the earth; and waited for the glass to shatter at last.