The Lady and The Boy

"Inside the destitute stones lived the lost cries, the ancestral longings, the trapped memories, the hidden, the tired, the distant, and the starkly miraculous. Inside the disparate stones lived the story of the ruins…"

In came the harrowing sound through the dead building, which stood like a stupefied sentinel in the pallor of night. It echoed in the empty passageways where the denizens once shuffled their feet, conversed with the mangled beams, vituperated the coming of the loathed dawn. The sound emanated from a nocturnal beast of the feral and mangy sort that roamed the decimated streets like a hungry ghost in search of solace, sustenance. When the beast found nothing in the rubble of Man’s broken dynasty, it wandered off down the road, tired, flagrantly tired. The echoes faded. Silence strangled the air.

When dawn came and illuminated the rubble, the shattered windows, the murky streams, lazy rays of light filled the city with a strange glow. Nothing seemed alive, nothing fully dead. Things seemed to be suspended in motion; trapped in the sedated dream of some semiconscious god. The birds refused to sing about the glorious visions that spasmodically flooded their minds. Instead, like mourning widows analyzing the dust of their former lovers, they sat silently on branches and moped about the viscous soot that covered their bodies. Many dropped to the cracked concrete before noon arrived. They writhed, alone and teary-eyed.

Sophia woke up in the darkened hull of the building and coughed. Clasped in her right hand was a crimson fabric her mother gave her when she was just a toddler. After harvesting some meddling eye crust, she lazily inspected the gloomy surroundings that indifferently looked at her, inspected the crimson fabric, and swiveled her body so it faced the direction of the faintest sound. “Mother?” she said hoarsely to nothing but the darkness. “Sis?”

When she realized she was alone in the dark, Sophia tried to cast her mind back to the last moment of happiness, into the garden known as dream. After realizing that there was a difference between cherished memories and the actuality of the harrowing reality she found herself in, Sophia let loose a good morning cry from the depths of her hurt, yet powerful being. The sadness ascended in plumes of imperceptible wishes and longings. The atmosphere captured them and they precipitated as diamond-studded dewdrops.

Like the hull of the building, she too was hungry and already tired.

While clutching the crimson fabric with a taut fist, Sophia emerged from the short-lived hibernaculum by propelling herself up a muddy incline with just one arm. Because she cherished the fabric as though it was her only child, she made sure she never sullied it by dragging it in the rubble of Man’s broken dynasty. It stayed near her beating heart, always.

After climbing out of the haunted recesses of the building’s hollow body, and after brushing off soot and dirt, Sophia scanned the periphery for any signs of movement. Only the crumbled edifices and almost lifeless murmurings of the wind exposed themselves to her senses. When she saw that the coast was clear, Sophia walked lethargically in search of fodder.

The fodder came in the form of a limp, mottled-haired rabbit, which was sprawled out on a drainage grate in all its motionless glory. After removing a palatable part of the creature—a morsel of insipid flesh—Sophia placed it in a seamed pocket on her amethyst dress. The sticky meat stained the inner lining of the dress, but she realized a grease stain from some rabbit meat was the least of her worries. When it boiled down to it, building a fire took precedence.

She prayed: “May this meat sustain me for a couple of days.”

The fire’s wispy nature comforted her for awhile as she sat in a neatly constructed mound of debris. Rabbit sinew, fat, and soul coursed through her famished body. Based off of previous predictions concerning food and its scarcity, she knew she was going to be living on it for two days. The meat left a foul taste in her mouth. A puddle of ash-ridden rainwater killed the foulness and replaced it with another. After all, in a world half-alive, half-dead, nothing could fully obliterate the foul.

When the flames subsided and seemingly retreated into the pulsing embers like petrified soldiers, Sophia poked the fire with a shaved stick until the kindling surrendered to the will of the burning. Fragments of an underground pamphlet made by dissenters melted in the process. Various twigs and branches cried out to the dead sky. This was her fleeting home; the debris throne, the morning silence, and the dwindling flames all supplied her with solace in a world of refuse and pestilence.

Just as she was about to move the kindling around the fire again, she noticed movement in the distance. Something inside of her told her to run, but something else inside wanted to see who or what was coming. To play it safe, just like a true survivalist of the gloomy plains, she decided to hide under her debris throne and wait.

The movement got closer. Whoever or whatever it was was attracted to the small flames. The flames themselves probably reminded he, she, or it of better times; times of progress, times when an inner power shined forth from the very nature of things.

From underneath her debris pile she began to hear staggering footsteps. One foot distinctly made a sound that differed from the other, and thankfully the footsteps came from something that was discernibly human. Thankfully no quadruped was coming from great distances to devour her. When the footsteps came to a halt by the languishing fire, she carved a little hole in the debris and curiously looked out at the enigmatic form.

It was a boy. His pale flesh was coated in grime and cold sweat. Clumps of hair hung loosely from his dry scalp. His eyes were sinking into his skull. Lusterless jewels they were—two things seemingly devoid of life. His teeth resembled an assemblage of lifeless maggots. He was wearing a one-piece suit made out of plastic. It was armor that protected his soul from the greedy wind, which periodically blew through the ruined city in search of something innocent and incorruptible.

“Sis,” the boy said, quietly. “I found something for you.”

Sophia carved out a bigger hole in the debris. She wanted to know what the grotesque boy was doing with her fire. Then she heard a newborn cry. Piercing and shrill screams emanated from her diseased mouth.

“Oh my,” Sophia thought. “The boy is going to kill her!”

The sister wasn’t much of anything—three months old, legless, armless, as daft as driftwood, as pretty as a mule. Her eyelids were purplish welts and her stomach was distended. It was most likely filled with a terrible fluid, the elixir of death. Even her spinal column seemed to be fucked up. Sophia placed the crimson fabric over her eyes in anticipation of even greater cries of agony.

Before the boy tossed her into the greeting flames of the fire, he murmured something and kissed the child’s sordid forehead. Then she went in headfirst. After about thirty seconds or so, the piercing screams subsided and the distended belly popped. A black, viscous fluid poured out in thick pools. When the boy thought enough time had elapsed, he walked away down the ruinous road while whistling an unrefined tune of mourning. One foot still made a sound that differed from the other, and he never looked back.

Sophia emerged from the debris and nearly choked to death on the fumes. It was time for her to move along as well.

Sophia moved down the bruised and battered streets with one stealthy foot following the other. She had mastered the art of “pacing her steps,” and her ears carefully scrutinized the creaks, cries, and whimpers of unknown animals, derelicts, and buildings. She often wondered if she was clairaudient, because some of the sounds seemed to disseminate from the other side. Other times she was able to hear the chattering of decaying teeth or the snapping of bones from miles away. Sometimes she even heard the sad melodies that fell from the moon.

When she came across an intersection that seemed to quiver in the presence of sunlight, Sophia bent over and inspected rock shards and refuse that littered the streets. Based off of certain rock formations or litter patterns, she could tell where other people went in search of food and shelter. In those directions she dare not tread, because disease even followed the smallest of greedy vagabond convents. As a true survivalist, she had to go where other feared to stumble, stagger, and perish. She had to go to the edges of the ruins and her spirit.

As she inspected the chaotic formations and noticed the direction of the relatively fresh footprints, clouds passed over the heart of the sun and obscured its lazy light. By the time she looked up at the lethargic sky, a sick form was looming over her with a thousand longings peppered on its shadow. She just knew it was the boy.

“I saw you underneath that dirt pile, lady,” said the boy. “But I didn’t want to scare you. You’ve probably been scared enough.”

Sophia turned around and addressed the boy.

“I left because of the smelly fumes.”
“Flesh smells like that.”
“Not the flesh I’ve been hunting and cooking.”
“Well, she was sick. She was turning black.”
“Fair enough. What did you whisper in her ear?”
“That’s private.”
“It was my fire.”

The boy peered into his own shadow on the ground behind her, and then scratched a dry tuft of hair on his aching head.

“I said ‘Come back as a butterfly.’”
“Why a butterfly?”
“Because the butterfly is a pretty creature.”
“And your dead sister?”
“My singed sister was born a diseased soul.”
Where are your parents?”
They were devoured by wandering animals.”
“Animals?”
“Wolves.”

Then they were both silent. The boy, wild-eyed and as pale as a polished piece of chalk, studied his odd-shaped hands. Sophia went back to her investigations of the chaotic waste formations. After a few moments she mentioned something about her own sense of loss, heartache, and grief.

“My sister and mother abandoned me.”
“Why?”
“I can’t remember. I was too young.”
“Maybe they just lost you.”
“Lost, abandoned…same thing.”
“How long have you been on your own for?”
“Calendars no longer exist. I don’t know.”
“Does it feel like a long time?”
“Yes.”
“But you don’t look that old.”
“Old. Young. These are the words of the past.”
“What are the words of the present?”
“In the absolute order of the ruins, words are relics.”

The cryptic slant to her words confused the sullen boy. He reflexively nodded in agreement with the mysterious sentiment, but Sophia could tell the boy was stumped when it came to what the words actually meant. She wanted to tell him that words were “artifacts”—things unearthed from the dialectical layers of time (in other words, things from the past). In the present, or the “absolute order of the ruins,” or the harsh reality Sophia and the boy faced on a daily basis, the words contrived from the various dialects of history no longer applied, unless they explained a memory—a virtual artifact of the mind. Sophia was implying that history itself no longer existed, because everything historical had collapsed on itself, and everything trapped in the “absolute order of the ruins” had flourished.

“You could be right, lady,” said the boy. “But I don’t like these ruins. This is a terrible place. Do you suppose the entire world looks like this?”

Sophia attempted to divert the boy’s attention away from the bleak magnitude of such a question by saying, “Maybe we just live in a snowglobe of wastelands, and on the outside there are greener pastures,” but she realized the boy was already thinking about the greater picture: the total extinction of mankind. After all, it crossed her mind from time to time. She couldn’t hide from it. It was something in the marrow, something that prowled in the shadows of her thoughts like a grinning beast, something that brought an immense sorrow to her heart. It was the inevitability of death, plain and simple nothingness. Nonbeing. Oblivion. Something she couldn’t stand to think about for too long.

“I like snowglobes, or at least the memories I have of them” said the boy. “They’re charming.”

Soon after the boy had finished speaking, the sun emerged from a tiny egress in the sea of gray, characterless clouds, and coated the earth with the buttery light of its omnipresent thoughts.

The sun continued to beat on the ruinous city with merciless rays well into the early evening. The choking dust that secretly adorned the air was illuminated, and with the illumination came the unveiling of the dust’s most prized secrets (thoughts on the quietude and nimbleness of space). Trees, or the wooden objects that used to climb and clamber to the sky like nothing else, absorbed the merciless rays in a melancholic daze. The rubble stoically gazed into an impossible future that never fully arrived but always threatened the trembling present. The road yawned. Litter coitus continued to go with much unabashed ferocity. Death continued to linger.

The boy and Sophia, Sophia and the boy, walked towards the evening sun in silence, and yet they still managed to communicate through the rhythmic nuances of their respective footsteps. It went on this way for quite some time. In fact, the footstep discourse escalated in intensity when they stepped through refuse dunes. After about ten blocks the boy motioned for her to stop. “My leg hurts,” he said. “We should start a fire, and then we should think about finding shelter.” Sophia’s weary mind agreed. She immediately started to collect kindling from Nature’s fire pit, the abundant rubble of the city’s dead dream.

As she wearily looked for some kindling—a stray piece of wood or a cluster of paper that didn’t want to turn to ashes too soon—she heard the boy moan in agony. She heard the rustling of plastic. She heard him playing with a festering wound, some kind of malignant contusion. The agony was great and mighty and upsetting and unnerving. Sophia wondered if the boy was going to able to stay with her for much longer. His pain would hold her back; it would be the anchor that held her empathic mind with him, like a stick in the thick swamp of his loneliness. She didn’t want to be held back. She had to survive. Survival was her modus operandi.

When she came back to the boy with a collection of flammable junk, the boy was rocking back and forth with his teeth clenching his lower lip. “My leg hurts,” he cried. “Please, is there anything you can do?” Sophia stood there for a minute, dazed, shocked, wrapped up in the bondage of the immanent. “I…I…I will see what I can do,” she said. “Here, let me inspect the wound.” She got closer to the boy, but she moved carefully. She didn’t want to contract anything. When she was only about five feet away from the wound, she noticed that the dying light of the day was casting a subtle glow onto a thick tree branch, which she noticed was inserted into a fleshy nub once known as the boy’s leg. Where the branch and flesh met lived a white paste, an oozing substance that kind of sizzled and kind of reeked of twenty-year-old cottage cheese. “It hurts,” he once again cried. “The pain seems to be getting worse.”

Before she could do anything with the wound, Sophia felt the presence of rabbit flesh in the abode of her mouth. She felt it slither up her dry tongue, exit her mouth, and saw it fall into a crack in the concrete. In all honesty, she felt like running and never saying a word to the boy again, but the clinging vines of her empathy embraced the wall of his sorrow. She couldn’t explain how her compassion had choked her better judgment. She was with him, inextricably linked.

Without thinking too much, with some stomach bile running down her lips, Sophia pulled the thick tree branch out of the flesh nub as though it was a knife that punctured the heart of Mother Earth. The white paste exploded from the open wound and began dripping onto the world like congealed paint. The boy passed out. The last ray of sunlight said goodbye to the world. Sophia was in the dark.

It took her some time to get used to the darkness as she scrambled for some kind of impossible cure for the boy. Unfortunately there was nothing but the lusterless detritus of the urban scrap yard to choose from. She was either going to heal the boy in another life—when the karmic influences that sutured strangers together worked their magic once more—or she was going to have to work with the boy’s festering wound in the unholy abode of night. After assessing the situation for a few moments, she searched a little more for the impossible cure, and then she did something she never would have expected to do: she grabbed the infected nub and attempted to squeeze out all of the curdled pus. She squeezed, passionately squeezed, and out came the infernal substance in coarse clumps. She squeezed until she thought nothing was left, until the open wound itself told her to put an end to her valiant efforts and move on. A couple seconds later, she heard furtive footsteps moving towards her in the intensity of that darkness. Then she heard an animal snort. A beast, some hirsute reprobate, was closing in on their whereabouts.

She made sure she made very little sound as the animal encroached upon the two of them from the north. Her heart even slowed down to a rhythm that emulated a drugged snail’s crawl. Her breath became practically non-existent. She even grabbed the crimson fabric for the sake of feeling safe, for the sake of feeling an object that was like a religious icon for her. As the animal came closer, as that malodorous breath irradiated from its mouth like an evil heat, she gripped the fabric with even more force and prayed silently for her safety and the boy’s.

Then the boy started to moan. Quite clearly the endless throbbing was too much for him to take; it was a ceaseless sting, a constant quake in his dying limb. Sophia heard incomprehensible sounds coming from his mouth, but she could ask no questions or supply no calming words. Stillness had to be the only thing she heeded to. The boy continued with his moaning until the beast dashed towards his prone body, inserted its jaws into his supple flesh, whipped him around, and dragged him off into the night in order to feast on his strange form. The plastic dress he wore sounded like a ghost’s whispers as it scrapped against the concrete, and his cries for help abated when the beast finally put an end to his life with one stern chomp.

She remained still and silent until dawn came and revealed the path of the beast’s manifested desire.

(Some say it was her crimson fabric that kept her alive in those intense and brooding moments of darkness and fear. Others say it was faith, her devotion to silence, and the ways of fate. Some say the deeper truth fell somewhere between. I, for one, will never be sure.)

"Inside the destitute stones lived the lost cries, the ancestral longings, the trapped memories, the hidden, the tired, the distant, and the starkly miraculous. Inside the disparate stones lived the story of the ruins…"