I know. I’m treading familiar territory. But with this one I’ve taken a different angle. One that may be more or less satisfying to you, depending on your perspective. While the first time I explored someone concocting a story for herself, this time I explored someone concoting a story for someone else. These are things we rarely see in post apocalyptic fiction: someone trying to create hope for the sake of creating hope. After air, water, and food, I imagine that is somewhere next on the list, but I’ll let you decide.
Thanks for reading.
Artwork by Anshuman Kashyap
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/rALX1a
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
He stood in the shadowed entryway beause it allowed him to make sure the story was right.
Christmas lights sagged across the ceiling. A little ambience never hurt anyone, and she liked to dance from time to time, dreaming of those times when electricity was something that just happened, as if by magic. He hadn’t found a generator to seed that idea, but emotions were rarely driven by logic. No ladder to be found, dragging that old desk across the room to reach the beams had been back-breaking work. He rubbed the sore spot that told him it had been worthwhile.
On that desk, a mess of papers, Post-It notes and general disarray left by a man who worked too much. The chair skewed enough for a clean exit to retrieve seconds of the half-eaten meal that made his stomach growl though it had gone cold long ago.
The floor he’d left littered with enough debris to give it that lived-in feeling, a reminder that everything could come down at any time, like the world had, and to never get too comfortable. The coffee table looked better by the window, a stack of architectural and art books. He liked painting and she liked design, however a children’s book he’d put on top because it got more use than the others, from the boy. The boom box he wasn’t sure of, but the boy was an old soul, preferring the hiss of tape to digital perfection. The mug, perhaps too clean, but the man devoured more art than coffee with those smudged glasses.
The guitar, strung but out of tune, because he was no musician, held up a slumped note with broad strokes that read MUSIC IS FOOD FOR THE SOUL, which made him cringe, but the teenage girl was a terrible poet. Maybe her mother had battled those words with pillows and wall art that read LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE, though there had been no evidence. All he’d found were old magazines, whose innards now served as family portraits. Lucky for him, a lot of the photos had been free of copy, so they served their purpose. Besides, they were dreamers, the people who’d lived here, layering the walls with people they’d never met to go along with their own memories, because surely they’d have been friends.
Standing here, observing the pictures arrayed together as if they’d always belonged, he had to agree. He just wished their smiles were contagious beyond the bounds of the frames.
What he felt most were the words he’d written in soot on the wardrobe’s door. This couldn’t be a paradise full of only happy memories. That would make the newcomers feel too safe, too comfortable and forget the way things were. The peeling walls and ivy dripping through the ceiling wouldn’t be enough. Those things had become too commmonplace. But to counterbalance those words, he’d taped some photos, real photos, at eye level, so at least it would be the first thing they’d see before finding what had become of at least one of the original dwellers, whose whereabouts didn’t even exist in his mind.
More books were boxed at his feet, as if someone were moving in or out. But they’d been too big for the road, where backpack real estate was better served for the biggest ratio of the hierarchy of needs. The upright spines told of history, adventure, and dogs, because who doesn’t love dogs? This family surely had, as much as the art they admired and created, demonstrated by the ones just right of the entrance, tastefully distrubuted with the best photos he’d been able to find. Weddings. Beaches. People smiling in all manner of places.
A family. He hadn’t been able to construct one fully to discerning eyes, but as he knew, emotions were rarely driven by logic. This was good enough. Maybe if he repeated it aloud, it would feel better. Speaking alone didn’t seem right. He had his sanity, along with his rifle, good pair of boots, relatively clean clothes, a pack lighter than he’d like but enough to get him on for a few days, and an axe made for chopping wood but not used as such.
Not much else, really. The upstairs was mostly bare now, much of its contents had been repurposed down here. And, anyway, few people dared halls with closed doors, choosing rather to hide in the open because at least a chance of escape was more likely.
He thought about taking one more walk through to check other possible angles, but decided against it, because it might make it hard to leave, his story so convincing. Or was it? When you know all the answers, nothing was, he supposed.
After spreading the curtains just a bit more, he returned to his spot in shadow, having stirred up a flock of dust on the rug he’d used to conceal blood stains.
It looked damn beautiful, all of it. In another life, he might have been an interior designer. He sure as hell did better than the ones who staged model homes. Finally, the smiles in the photos were contagious. He was infected.
The view out the door, into where he had to go, cured him. Maybe he’d catch it again, out there on the road, when he saw the stars that could have been Christmas lights, when he’d hear the songs of birds that could have been the strum of guitar strings, when he’d see teeth that might have smiled once, for a picture, perhaps, on a happier day.
He closed the windowless door, because that’s what you did, took to the grass off the path, because he was a ghost. He’d never been here. A family had lived here. A father who liked to read but not drink coffee. A mother who liked to dance beneath Christmas lights. A teenage daughter who played guitar and wrote bad poetry. A son who loved dogs and music on cassette tapes.
The story was right.
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