Crush

The city is dark as she runs. Occasionally the glowing cinders of an abandoned drum fire hint at the presence of other stragglers, but there are no other signs of life. What could survive so many assaults, one after another? The air has a chalky brightness from all the concrete dust, smoke, tear gas, antiseptic spray. The sharp burn in her lungs has become her most constant favorite friend, a dependable voice at every turn.

It’s been hours right at the edge of combustion. Her legs are strong and don’t complain, so she leans into the thin scream of fire in her chest, pushing faster if it doesn’t hurt enough, loosening up when it threatens to explode.

The rhythmic soft thumping against her collarbone is her quieter constant friend. The locket takes flight and lands with every step, clunky and awkward, but comforting. Her bones vibrate with each beat, and she imagines she hears a little exhale with every impact, alert to whatever the voices will have her do next.

The voices aren’t as consistent, but they’ve been with her the longest - since before the first bomb but after the last lockdowns. No one else is left. Pick them up, they said, when her sister had fallen and the chunky ceramic beads of her bracelet had scattered on the pavement. Their whispers had whooshed over the shouting of police in the street, the shots after curfew, the wailing of mothers when they found their children bleeding out in the morning. The voices guided her away from the surveillance of street cameras, into abandoned construction projects, through hastily evacuated apartments, past one destroyed memorial after another - candles burned out, flowers dry and lifeless.

Get to the green, Cross the city, Stay in the shadows. If anyone had been around, they would have seen a solitary girl dressed in all black only slightly darker than her skin, natural hair tied back, slipping between deserted buildings. But she’d never been alone. She’d had the voices and sometimes their quick movements on the edges of her vision. She’d had the tasks they’d given her, collecting flexible copper wire and knitting it into a clumsy three-dimensional lump, lining it with air filtration material from someone’s forgotten vacuum robot, fastening it all shut with the biggest red bead from her sister’s bracelet.

A locket shaped like a living heart, she’d thought with a smile as she tied it around her neck, all bulbous and multi-chambered and grotesque. The voices ensconced themselves inside and she clicked the latch closed. She had felt that click in her bones, her newly sensitive bones. The whispers kissed her bones, she could feel their light touch along her ribs, scapulae, femurs.

Hide here, climb deeper, they had caressed her through the drone strikes, the sweeps with hulking figures in hazmat suits.

Run, they said now. Turn here, Turn here, Stay in the shadows. They always knew which way to avoid the patrols. They lifted her, made her light. Maybe her bones are hollower now?

And now it’s her and the voices and her runner’s legs and her aerodynamic bones and the soft thumping of the locket and the scalding hot whine of pain in her lungs. The green! It’s green! and they’re getting excited and it’s true, the air is a little cleaner and cooler as they approach the boundary between city and forest, so she runs faster to find the burn. This one, straight ahead, and she locks eyes with a boy who could be her brother, could be on her track team in another universe. He’s manning the checkpoint in full riot armor, sees her, dips his chin once, moves back toward the forest. Someone yells at her to stop, shouts at him to hold the line. She runs faster, hears alarms clamoring, registers the pain flickering from a fine, high-pitched resistance to a roaring inferno in her chest, the locket thumping quicker with every step, flying and landing, flying and landing. Greeeeeeeeen!!!

The boy shifts his weapon, the girl flies at him, the butt of his rifle meets her collarbone in a single crushing impact. Her body crumples as the locket unlatches, bead pulverized. The cricket springs out first, all black and gone in a blink. The moth follows, delicate satin wings fluttering into the trees.