Evan remembered his old man holding an axe whenever Anaya played her silent tune on overcast windy afternoons. Alec was with them. Or more precisely, Alec was with Anaya, and Evan sat on a remote bench. They were studying. In the three-person classroom, Evan acted to be following scoffed notebook pages but drifted off frequently to the rustling of trees that shouted autumn in late September, negligible. Still, you could spot yellow leaves in them. They were, as said, silent behind the glass slabs. Evan was ever so slightly cold.
It’s been sixteen days since Evan met Anaya’s mother. She was as gay as her. Perhaps a little less timid. An angelic-faced creature. They met before school when Evan approached them. Anaya had a smile and her eyes looked like she was thinking of someone else; like she was waiting for someone else. That day was bright, their talk was mostly dialogues written on a classic novelette. But one of them—she studies all day—though said in the gay tone they possess, could penetrate his skull like the exceptional sun rays. She too is a dreamer, Evan’s face was lit with the salty ocean shimmer. A dreamer sentenced between the four walls of a room. Stuck in there until the day the dreams start fading. A sexless creature that’s considered human for the sole reason it was one, in a house where life flourishes in its liveliest form, perhaps through her mother’s angelic face. Someone who deems people demonic…
Has she lost the future too? A whispered bliss asked Evan. A place that true humans cling onto, albeit an imaginary one, a future not in the common sense of passed time but with material distinguishers from the present—a change in place, people, or even the weather, or a change in agony’s intensity. Anaya. Anaya, are you like me? Evan’s monologue’s voice was distinct, distinct from the others like his mother’s on unusual days of the three people in his old house.
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At 1:20, Alec walked out. Evan’s eyes were that of an assault victim, tracking him—a blue-eyed, long-haired, scattered-beard man—through the desks to the door. He got up as the door closed, still looking at it, then changing direction to Anaya. She was lost in the pages. Her red dress, on a blue bench, in front of the white wall, swallowed her face. She was a clove in a fur of hair and light. She looked down further hiding her face. Evan sat a little further, would she respond if he spoke? He thought of splashing paint on her to make a silhouette on the canvas behind them. Evan managed to speak on the third try, after two stutters that were surreally nauseating, forcing air vomit that pushed mucus out his nose.
“Where did that bitch go?”
She glimpsed the other way for a second. She spoke, and Evan realised the light was from the window. “Who?”
“That bitch,” Evan sighed in a rather dissonant nervousness, “A—Alec.”
Anaya continued to stare at Evan. He returned the same gaze, but his eyes had already teared up. “A—Alec,” he repeated.
“He went to get some water.”
Evan might have muttered something that turned out as a crippling skeleton. His hair covered his forehead, he looked appalled. An invisible hand, as real as air, thumped his chest. It had bulk and authority. It was of his father who used to push his every word down with that hand on his forehead. His long bowl hair then had the impression of growing longer and engulfing his whole body at the command of his father. Just a glimmer of light he would see—his mother silently watching him transform into a cacoon. And he’d fall back in the cradle at the room’s corner—showcased as a memory of his dead sister. The bed was kept made. The wood was infested with termites. On the day his father held an axe to kill himself, his mother held his father’s hand. The axe was thrown, shy of his mother’s neck, and broke the memories and the cradle. The termites bled in a deep red for the decomposed wood to absorb.
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“Why do you call him a bitch?”
Her voice, that of a seventeen-year-old, could put shapes in one’s head. An intricate art, one could admire. Higher than usual pitch though made effortless by the excess air she exhaled. It was familiar the way two women cried on Evan’s right ear with agony greater than that of a mother who lost her child. The voices would evoke a picture of the younger of the two women leaning on the other’s chest. They rubbed their tears often to see each other’s melting faces—black from their eyes, pastel pink from their lips flowing down their necks to the lower crevices. Those tears wettened their clothes. Their cry was awkward. Ever so slightly like Evan’s voice.
“Alec?” Anaya didn’t take notice of Evan’s cry. Evan was hunched, his neck hump visible up his shirt collar. He spoke again, “You know what he says to me.”
“What does he say?”
“He calls me a hamster.”
The strings that connected Evan’s and Anaya’s eyes were broken the moment she fiddled with her pen, putting marks on the paper. The classroom door was opened. She was emotionless, the edges of her lips slightly lower than the centre. Evan stood up when Anaya looked back down at her notebook. She muttered softly, “You both shouldn’t call each other that.”
Evan and Alec crossed each other, Alec not speaking a word. He sat beside Anaya. She held him a pen—in a gestured silence, so loud one could tell through the windows. Evan went to his bench and acted to be following scoffed notebook pages but drifted off frequently, only that there were no trees outside.
THE END