The Waif

No one told The Waif that the end of the world would be so boring. Well, The Voices had warned her, they had said it would be boring and pretty quick. The Day of Doom certainly started off quick.

The Waif had been minding her own business in the group room, in the hospital. The Voices said, “here we go”. Then, all of a sudden, The Waif saw, actually, she felt, The Bright beyond bright, all through her body. She nearly fainted but at the last minute grabbed the orange plastic table and kept her eyes closed. Through The Bright, she heard thumps that sounded like bodies dropping to the floor, and screaming from the Phrenics (but that was nothing special).

Slowly, she opened her eyes. Everyone was lying down. The usually loud Crazies were mostly whimpering, but The Staffs were not moving or making any noises. The Waif walked to one of The Staffs that she liked, Doctor Dorothy, and knelt down. Doctor Dorothy was breathing, but she couldn’t be woken up, no matter how much she was shook. Seemed to be the same for all The Staffs. The telly and the fans and the lights were all off.

The Waif had been wanting to get outside for a while now. She missed the ice cream shop and park in her town. So, she thought, as long as The Staffs were ok, she may as well go for a walk. The Crazies were starting to make noise again, angry noises, so she got a wriggle on. When she got near the front door, the Voices reminded her of her Amulet. She went to Her Room.

All the lights were out, the corridor to Her Room was dark, but The Waif didn’t mind, she was friends with the dark and spooky. In Her Room, she went to the right drawer, opened it, rummaged around, and there it was. A little silver necklace with a big heart shaped locket that had a mirror in it when you opened it up. Her mum had given it to her before she got dead, a few years before she had started to hear The Voices and ended up here. She took the necklace and put it on, then walked out the front door, not looking back at the screams of the Phrenics she could hear starting up. Everything else was quiet.

*

So, she started off down the road with the nice pine trees that led from the town to the hospital. She always thought it made sense that the town kept The Crazies a bit away from the town. The Waif never really felt like one of The Crazies- the ones who would never get out. All that was wrong with her was that sometimes she got so full of power that she ran round and talked too fast, and the lights and sounds were too much, and the Voices were too loud, and it was all just Too Much. Then sometimes she couldn’t move. She didn’t really get sad, like the Doctors said she must be, she just couldn’t do anything and had to lie down all the time. She kind of liked it, except when she realised she looked like the Phrenics, who would just stare at nothing when they weren’t gibbering, or trying to hurt The Staffs.

The Waif had been in hospital because she had the Bipoley (Doctor Dorothy said it was called Bipolar Disorder but she liked Bipoley better). The Too Much stuff was called Psychosis because of her Mania; and the, Can’t Move stuff was called Depression. She didn’t like any of those words. The Doctors said that Psychosis was bad because it made people believe things that weren’t true (like The Spark, her friend, who always said the world was about to end) and hear voices that weren’t real (the voices always giggled at that) (so did The Waif).

Some of The Crazies (she knew she shouldn’t call them that), had what Dr Dorothy called Schizophrenia. The Waif didn’t like that word either, so she called them The Phrenics. They had the same Psychosis as she got but they also went Catatonic, where they would just sit and stare and no one could talk to them. The Waif loved playing with words, so she thought it sounded like helping a sick cat: “get the cat-a-tonic”. Little things made her happy and giggly inside.

*

As she turned the last corner and could finally see her town and her heart sang, the Waif saw a person lying down, just like all The Staffs had been.

She wasn’t scared, she liked lying down too. She got a kind of cat-a-tonic when she couldn’t move, but she had to lie down when it happened. The Phrenics could do it sitting up, or even walking.

She got closer and could see the man had jogging clothes on. She never understood exercise. Why not just go for a long walk or help some old people lifting boxes or mowing lawns? She was a few steps away when the man opened his eyes. She still wasn’t scared because she knew the look he had. It was the same look the Phrenics got when they were cat-a-tonic. She knew he wouldn’t be able to move much, so she walked past him. She wanted to see the town close-up. The Jogger sat up just after she passed. The Waif turned when she’d gone on a bit and saw the man standing: just standing, looking lost. Then he started walking round real slow, still looking lost. She kept walking. The town was near. She could see more people lying down but some were already standing like The Jogger, wandering around, looking lost. She wasn’t scared, it was just that it wasn’t as busy as she had hoped. It all looked a bit boring really.

*

The Waif walked straight to the main street. All the shops were open: the ice cream shop; the post office; and all the rest but there was no one coming and going. Some people were still lying down where they must’ve fallen, like The Staffs. Some in the middle of the road. There was a car crash in the middle of town with three cars. All the drivers were asleep. She saw one car that had hit a pole and the driver was just getting out, with that same cat-a-tonic look on his face. In the nice park she loved, people and dogs were lying down, and an old man sat staring into nothing, sitting on the bench.

The Waif loved Mysteries. Ever since Dr Dorothy had told her about Science and got her reading about Sherlock Holmes and Watson. She read everything in the Hospital library. As she stood outside the ice cream shop, she started thinking about the puzzle in front of her. She decided, seeing as how everything she thought was going to be fun, seemed just as boring as the hospital, that she might try to solve the puzzle of what was going on. That was when The Angry Crazies showed up.

*

When the Waif had been in the Hospital, the Phrenics used to say some really nasty things, when their medicine wasn’t working or when they just got Angry. The Spark and some of the others weren’t like that. The Spark just talked about how his Voices had said that the World was about to End and about the Wonky Sun, he called it. The others though, would yell bad things. They said they’d rip out The Staffs’ eyeballs and eat their guts. That they wanted to cook the Doctors like pigs on a fire. That they would kill each other if they could. It looked to The Waif like they had got their chance.

When she saw one of them cut into one of The Wanderers with an axe, she decided to hide. She walked to the bench where the old man was still staring at nothing and sat down next to him. She had taken off her necklace and held her Amulet as she went to her Can’t Move place and stared into the Amulet’s mirror at herself, head bowed. She could still see The Angry Crazies. The one with the axe was eating The Wanderer’s guts, which were all over the road. Another one was pulling a woman’s eyes out on their strings- the woman didn’t scream or do anything to stop him. Then another one came round the corner with a gun he must have found. He shot two Wanderers, then the two other Angry Crazies, then yelled a scared animal yell and shot himself dead. The Waif closed her eyes.

*

While The Waif had been sitting there, she had tried figuring out the Mystery. The first clue was the last thing she’d heard on the TV in the group room before the power had gone out and the woman’s voice had stopped. The bit she could remember went: “…anomaly with the Sun’s surface…massive Solar Flare heading towards the Earth…seek shelter and await further inst…”. So, something to do with the Sun. One of the books Dr Dorothy had brought to her from the library was about the Solar System. She thought about Solar Flares and remembered that they could do a thing where they messed around with electricity, which must be why the power went out after the Bright Light. Then the Voices said, “Brains”, to her.

*

The Waif remembered that brains also use electricity. If the Solar Flare hit all the electricity, maybe that was why all the people had fallen-down then looked cat-a-tonic. Dr Dorothy had once said that one of her brain’s problems was that it got too excited. She guessed that meant that it had too much electricity in it. Maybe that was why the other Crazies and her (she knew now she really was one of the Crazies) were ok. Maybe their Too Much Electricity had just gone down a little bit. It seemed like The Spark and his Voices were right about the Wonky Sun. But it didn’t seem like the End of the World. She wondered what life was going to be like if all the people stayed as Wanderers and the only people left doing things were the nice Phrenics like The Spark and like her. And the Angry Crazies.

*

Once she figured all that out, The Waif felt like an ice cream. She walked across the road to the ice cream shop and, because the owner was a Wanderer, she helped herself to a vanilla one. She sat at the table near the window and opened her hand which still had her Amulet and started staring at the mirror in the little heart shaped locket. Then she notices her yummy ice cream starting to melt too quick.

She didn’t really like Summer. She liked being wrapped in a blanket, reading one of Dr Dorothy’s books more. She thought that if everyone was going to be Wanderers and it would be too hot to eat ice cream, that would be really boring.

She looked out the window at the Sun. It looked weird. Like it had tentacles and was pointing an angry finger at her. It got hotter. She noticed some fires and looked down from the sun to see all The Wanderers burning and cars exploding.

Her ice cream had melted. She looked down at her Amulet. Her hands were blistered and sore. The last thing The Waif saw in the Amulet’s mirror, before her hand melted, and her eyeballs exploded, was the skin of her face sagging and that she could see the bones of her face and teeth, smiling.

“Now, that’s not boring”, thought The Waif.

And She and The Voices laughed.