arahyacinth
The earbuds hurt. Sarah tugged them out and laid them on the table by her chair, sighing. She'd been listening to music for hours but she didn't feel any calmer than when she'd started.
Maybe some things couldn't be fixed, she thought. Maybe it was better just to leave it alone.
She hugs her backpack like a teddy bear and stares through the rain at the train tracks below. Her heart hurts, but not sharply enough to bring tears. No one has come to see her off. Is it going to be like this forever? she wonders.
Daniel drank deep and handed the canteen over to the next man in line. They had been walking for two days straight now, and between the sun and the sand, they were all filthy and exhausted. They were also almost out of water. He wondered how long the liquid in the canteen, their last water until the next oasis, would last.
The entire room was lit up by torchlight. Rem suppressed a shiver as she walked slowly across it, hearing the echo of her own footsteps and the beating of her heart. This was the sort of place kids shouldn't play, she thought. But if she went back now, the others would laugh at her for the rest of her life.
The inside of the telephone booth was grimy, the glass streaked with fingerprints and dirt. Reilly held the phone between the tips of his fingers, wondering what other grunge could be on it. He listened to the familiar 'beep, beep, beep' on the other end and sighed.
The pretzels the man was selling at the little booth were the big, soft kind, covered in coarse salt. Ayumi bought a few for herself and her sister, and they walked the length of the fairgrounds together, eating them out of oil-stained paper wrappers.
The little scene was more domestic than Henry had anticipated. His sister and her new baby were wrapped up in a veritable sea of blankets, and the look on her face was one of such bliss, such motherly love, that he felt suddenly shy. Who was this person? he asked himself.
There was a mole in the center of her left cheek. I traced it with the tip of my forefinger, pressing into the skin. Rigor mortis had long since set in.
"She's been dead a while," I said to the policemen behind me.
At the beginning of the day, I was tempted to go to the other end of the little world I'd discovered and see what was there. The island I had landed upon was like nothing I'd ever seen before, and as I stood there on my side of it, it occurred to me that there might be things-- creatures-- there that had arrived before me. Maybe, I thought, I didn't want to go there after all.