Another departure from the fantastic, mostly. It is vaguely set in the future and explores a woman approaching her twilight. How small things we hold on to affect our final days.
Thanks for reading.
Artwork by Swang
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/8egg3R
DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.
The Story
The building was white and flat and clean, and Grace hated it. But it was home now. It was bad luck to hate your home before you entered it. Someone must have said that once. The sight of it even made the box in her arms heavier, though it was only full of flowers.
“The first step is the worst step,” Grace said, her sunglasses doing nothing to block the bleached concrete.
Cole weaved in front of her, without rubbing against her leg, sat, yellow eyes boring through her. He never looked at her.
“I know,” she said.
“Well isn’t he a darling–or she, my instinct in that regard faded ever since Maeve was born. What do you call that magnificient feline?” A woman shuffled onto the synthetic grass with a miniature parasol shading her swoop of a nose.
“Cole,” Grace said.
“So cute. You must have been a bad girl. Coal and a box of dead flowers for Christmas.” The woman’s face pinched into a cone. “Let me take care of those for you.”
Grace looked into the box of wilted lack of color. The ride hadn’t been long. Had it? The heat on the bus, her seat in direct sunlight, because no one respected their elders anymore.
Grace shook her head, disagreeing with herself about the first step being the worst as she made her way inside.
The walls were white and flat and clean. She cried, surrounded by a lack of color.
Cole glided his way to the window, hopped onto the sill and did as cats do.
“You don’t care, do you?” Grace said.
Cole looked at her. He never looked at her.
Grace made the best of things in the place where she would die. The flowers were an sign. And this apartment was the size of a tomb.
The next day, Cole was gone. The last thing to lose. She’d told him she couldn’t live without him, and that’s why she specifically bought him when she had. He hadn’t seemed to listen.
Grace went to the patio with two pairs of sunglasses to fend off the morning. A little warmer out there, but no furniture, so she had to stand. Touching the antiseptic building was the last thing she wanted to do, but her rickety legs never gave her much of what she wanted anymore.
She took comfort in the less-ugly horizon, with its highs and lows, much like her garden. No matter how much she planned the planting of those flowers, the rascals never seemed to harmonize. A painful memory, trapped in a tomb without a grain of soil for miles. A dog walked by on the sidewalk below, considered the synthetic grass, then decided it wasn’t good enough for his urine.
Grace snorted a laugh, which brought more tears than joy. Sweat gluing her arms to her sides, and her thighs feeling like a battlefield, she returned inside. There, in a patch of four squares of light, was Cole, an orange flower in his mouth.
“Where’d you get that?” she said. Her heart fluttered like the butterflies in her garden.
Cole didn’t answer, just dropped it at his feet like a dead mouse. Her cane was no good, just pushing it around, so she braved squatting. A chair for support would have been a good idea, but hindsight is always twenty-twenty, as if she had ever known what that looked like. On her back, body a sea of spasms, the ceiling was an unfocusable nothing. If there had only been something to concentrate on, maybe it would have dulled the pain.
The flower’s scent made it to her. She closed her eyes and used that. Time was meaningless, but she supposed it had been hours. Hours were what she needed.
The flower kept the pain at bay. She couldn’t reach it, but she pretended she could, delicately gripping the stem before give it a respectful sniff. Then Cole snatched it away and pranced to somewhere she couldn’t see. She rattled off all the curses she’d bottled since the swear jar that she fucking got rid of first before coming to this cell.
Sometimes anger was what you needed. The thought came to her as she got to her feet, hunched like an invalid, which she was. She limped to the door, where Cole continued to taunt her, holding the flower all wrong. Two of the petals were missing already. How could he do this to her?
The door opened by a sensor, with a hiss, and Cole darted outside. She gave an encore of curses to the stupid, dead, robotic room, and hauled her flesh fire after him.
The path to the road was hot coals. The kind the lady thought her worthless cat was named after. Cole had dropped the flower as he crossed the street, just in time for a car to flatten it before she got there. Someone shouted behind her. She didn’t care.
At least she had remembered her cane. Her mind may be going, but she still had that. The cane propelled her after Cole, and she hoped it was picking up all kind of filth, because she would bop him on the head with it when she finally caught him. She tracked him to a tunnel, which she entered with fervor, this dead place finally have some use.
After an eternity of darkness, she was reborn again into light, and felt like screaming like a newborn. Doubly so when she saw Cole in a slant of light, the back of his head to her, like back home.
She followed his gaze up to a wall, not lacking color at all, arcing like a crashing wave. She separated from her body, the planet-size pain left behind in another solar system.
The flowers grew with enough irregularity to make her smile, to make her cry.
“Thank you,” she said to Cole.
Cole flicked a ear, his back to her, and she wouldn’t have had it any other way.
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