By: Ella Downs
“Are you hungry? What will you eat?”
I turned with a start, bewildered to see a girl standing in my office. “How did you get in here?” The parameters of my building are surrounded with guards, the nation’s best.
She shrugged and traced the edge of my desk with her finger. “It does not matter for you to know. But as for my question, what will you eat when it is all gone?”
“I don’t understand your question, “my mouth still agape. The girl had a soft glow about her, and I could not determine her age. The longer I stared, I realized I couldn’t actually determine anything about her. She had a haunting air about her. I must have had too many sleepless nights, too many meetings discussing the sharp decline of my country, and too many days planning how to escape.
“Look outside; tell me what you see.” She spoke in a soft yet commanding manner.
Out the window I saw my everyday scene. The lawn and its yellow hue, the trees with their naked branches reaching to the grayish, clouded sky, the high fences and rows of men that guard them. I listed
these things to her, confused.
She chuckled. “Do you know that the lawn out there wasn’t always that color? Do you know the sky was once a brilliant blue? The trees out there were full of life and beauty, the branches covered in leaves. You don’t remember, do you?”
I did not. How could I? This is what it had always looked like. The things she described only exist in fantasy books I read long ago. Fantasy books that my father had rightly banned. The ideas they produced only held progress back.
Without warning, the girl perched on the edge of my armchair. I flinched back, but she reached out and dug her fingers into my temples. Her touch stung my skin, and I felt that I was falling down…down…
I woke up. I was in a yard. The grass…it was green. The sky was a blinding and bright shade of blue. The air felt fresh; I didn’t choke on it.
Somewhere a child laughed. The child ran in front of me, then stopped to look at me. It sent a chill down my spine. Where were the child’s caregivers? Why were there no guards on this street? And the colors were wrong. They were bright, and the ground I laid on seemed alive.
I gasped and stood from my chair as if I’d woken from a bad dream. The girl was still with me, now crouched on my desk. Though I still couldn’t determine anything about her, everything about her was
deeply unsettling and familiar.
“What the hell was that? Who are you?” I demanded.
She hummed, dragging her hands across the desk. I gawked as small flowers sprouted up, leaves and vines slowly curling out of where she’d touched. “You don’t remember me at all, do you?” There was a hollowness in her voice. I stared at the desk, then at her, thinking I must’ve been slipped some kind of drug.
She grabbed my face again, pressing her fingers into my temples.
The same falling feeling from before took over me.
This time I stood on a cliffside, rapid winds and cool mist hitting my face. Waves crashed against the rocks below. For a moment my heart pounded, but I wasn’t scared. I was overcome with the beauty of the scene before me.
In the next instant, I was in a field of flowers, like the ones I’d only ever seen in paintings destroyed long ago. Colors I didn’t know existed, clouds that weren’t dark and gray, they hurt my eyes to look at first, but I continued to stare in awe. The sun felt warm against my skin and I hoped that the girl would let me stay a little longer.
Just as my eyes adjusted, the field was ripped away from me. I was surrounded by tall trees, a comforting green hanging from each branch. An animal emerged from the brush. A deer, I believe.
I stood and stared. I’d never seen anything so brilliant in all my life. Had something like this truly existed? Why had I never seen something this magnificent before now?
Then the deer opened its mouth.
“How dare you not remember me, when your bloodline is the one that killed me?” The girl’s voice echoed around me with the force of one-hundred voices, and my stomach turned icy cold. My surroundings
changed again, and again, a kaleidoscope of swirling flowers, water, animals, mountains. “How dare you use me, drill me, murder me, then say you do not remember? I have fed you, I have bathed you, I have
housed you. All that you have to live is because of me. And you have murdered me.”
The images were changing more rapidly. The fields of flowers were destroyed with large machines, the trees caught fire, the ocean beneath that cliffside turned black. I grabbed at my throat as the smoke
burned and filled my lungs. I couldn’t see clearly. The filthy air stung my eyes. I wanted to scream out in pain, yet I couldn’t make a single noise.
Just when I thought that surely, I would die, I was thrown back to my own reality. My office was still there. I was still there. And the girl…
She was leaning over on my desk, heaving for breath. She coughed. Black oily blood splattered on my desk.
She glared at me, her eyes brimming with betrayal. “You and your forefathers ensured that this would be my end. It is far too late for me now; every warning sign I ever gave was ignored. Every single second chance you were given, you pushed it aside. Now that I’ve finally been pushed to my end, I ask again: What will you eat? What will you eat when I am no longer?”
My throat tightened as more oily blood spilled from her lips. She trembled and began to stumble to the floor, and I found myself reaching out to catch her. She was only a child.
“Oh God…” my mind frantically raced to come up with some solution, some way to remedy this situation. My stomach twisted sharply as I realized there was no time. Her skin turned an ashy gray and flaked away. The color and glow left her body with every cough until she finally collapsed and crumbled away to mere ash in my arms.