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One day, many years ago, she walks with him in the oncoming dusk, watching the streets glow gold in the wake of the setting sun. He runs ahead, a blur of dark green in the half-light.
She calls to him to wait, crouching to the pavement. There's a smudge on the ground, a faded shadow of an insect that twitches helplessly before stilling. She takes the remnants into her palm, crushed chitin and broken antennae, and sobs.
He follows her as she skips ahead, one year his elder and already seeming so much older. She talks about herself sometimes, about how she wishes her brother would stop crying so much, how she wishes her parents would care a little more. He listens closely, because it's all he can do.
She stops him again, at the same junction.
There's a ladybird here, the shell cracked, the dots in disarray. He watches her scoop it into her hand, and he watches in awe as the exoskeleton knits itself back together, legs twitching in her palm. Her smile is as bright as the setting sun.
There's a sudden noise, a cough, perhaps, or a gust of wind, and her concentration wavers, her hand jolting. The ladybird falls apart.
-
She grows with the seasons, ever taller like the green saplings of the springtime, her hair the colour of wheat stalks in the summertime. Several years later she thinks back on that moment with the ladybird, of the anger that built inside her chest until her hands clenched and her eyes burned with tears, the cruelty of the world close enough to touch. She wonders if this is the only way she can change life, to make it a bit kinder.
She finds a cat the next day. She carries it home despite the buzz of flies, flitting around the torn flesh, around its mangled torso. The bones click in her hands as they slot together, the skin tightening over torn muscles, fibres knitting themselves back into formation. She reaches deep into the chest cavity, feeling blood and bone and flesh, pulling out gravel and dirt until there is nothing left. The incision is sewed up, her hands are washed, soap suds clogging her sink. The cat looks at her from the countertop, its eyes unblinking.
She wakes up to the sound of purring.
She names him Clementine, carving out a space for him in her life, where she spends idle days and long nights in the one-bedroom apartment she calls home. When the buzz of the city hums from her window she curls up next to him and waits for sleep to come.
-
He moves to the edges of the city, starting over with ambition in his heart and a smile on his face. Neon signs buzz in the half darkness when he first arrives, beacons of light in the darkness with their lurid colours splashed across puddles and reflected in closed windows. There's so much empty space between each pocket of land, he feels the absence pull at him, feeling the longing echoing from empty tenements, towards the crowded skyline.
He sees his neighbours on early mornings, separated by inches of concrete that seem like miles. Washed out eyes and crumpled clothing, they live their days in an endless repetition, out the door then into work, then returning when the sun peeks from the horizon. Round and round they go, a spinning top gone haywire.
He finds himself wanting. The intangible dream of something more, something greater than this empty house with its echoing rooms, where he spends days and nights wondering if this is it, this is all he will ever amount to. The streetlights flicker when the wind blows in from the country and he lies in the unbroken dark, listening to the silence.
-
She hears the impact, the dull thud of rock hitting flesh, it jolts her from a half remembered dream. There's a a sound of pain somewhere outside. The patter of adolescent footsteps, and it's over, it's finished, she steps outside and sees nothing but a scattering of pebbles. Her first instinct is to cry, the way she did when she first realised the cruelty in this world. She steps closer, enough to see the animal that crumples to a heap in the alleyway, blood and bones and flesh. A marmalade cat, with four white socks.
There is laughter drifting on the wind, harsh and brutal, it tears at her thoughts and scatters them to the wind. She wipes it from her mind and concentrates on the cat in front of her, remembering the fateful afternoon when she first found him mangled beneath the wheel of a car, his insides spilled across the tarmac. She focuses on her anger, distilling it into a fine point, until her hands tremble and her eyes burn from the inside out.
Her chest aches when she wakes up, to the familiar sound of purring.
He brings her gifts, magpies with snapped necks and sparrows with their hearts torn out, leaving red trails on her doorstep. She takes each life into her hands and cherishes it for a moment. There are no more miracles, and there is no more anger, just the soft passing of summer into autumn. He comes to life slowly, his fur smoothing out and the scars on his skin slowly fading away, torn claws regrowing in the span of a few weeks. He lives for a second time.
One day, he leaves and doesn't return. She pastes posters to lampposts, plastering his face on every street corner, but she knows from the hollowness inside her that he won't be coming back. She dreams of holding him in a field of wildflowers, feeling the breeze on her face and his fur in her hands, but it always ends with her kneeling by the roadside, seeing his blood drip into the cracks in the road, feeling the white-hot anger build between her eyes. She wakes up to the sound of tyres screeching on tarmac, feeling blood and bone underneath her fingers.
-
It all falls apart so quickly.
The city winds down, with the sound of idle chatter and the whisper of the trees. He watches from his kitchen as the sky paints itself in purples and reds, an overripe fruit bursting at the seams, spilling its yellow insides across the clouds. The sun falls across the street one last time, the barest hint of a shadow silhouetted against the brilliance.
There's something out there, waiting for him.
He opens the door, feeling fear constrict his throat. The streetlights are flickering, on, off, on, off, the wind pushing him backwards, back into the darkness, back to the mundanity of his life, back to everything he knows and everything he understands. There's a cat standing in the middle of the road, its orange fur glowing gold in the waning light. It blinks, slowly, and then -
There's a metallic screech and a dull thud, and he catches a glimpse of the driver as the car speeds away, kicking up a trail of silver dust. He runs over but it's too late, he's always too late.
-
There is so much hatred in this world, it burns her up from the inside, until she is nothing but a shadow of a person, barely alive.
She finds so many dead things, animals and people and dreams, cluttering the city with their corpses. She can't save them all but she tries, she picks them up and brings them home and she tries to perform miracles, all alone in the empty twilight with blood on her hands. She wakes up the next morning to nothing but silence. She sees blood in the alleyways and she dreams of it running through her fingers, dripping into the cracks in the pavement, a river of red. She wants to feel something else. She wants to feel something better.
She sits by the riverside on lazy afternoons, watching the circling dragonflies, the flash of iridescent wings over the water. A low wall is all that holds the water back. There's moss growing here, faint reminders of a civilisation lost to time, the only remnants of those that came before, so long gone that only their shadows echo in narrow streets, their names lost to time and decay.
A sound jolts her from her memories. A familiar face, a familiar laugh. There is a fire behind her eyes now, it burns red hot and she watches as he turns towards her, the flash of recognition, the (laughter in the alleyway, the brutal sound of rock striking flesh) fear in his eyes, so very poignant, so very familiar.
She asks him to walk forwards, watching his feet cross the wall, watching him drop like a lead weight into the murky water. She watches the bubbles rise up until they stop, and then she walks home. She dreams of a marmalade cat with four white socks.
-
It comes over him in tides, this frustration, it ebbs and flows with the papers piling up on his desk, a never ending supply of audits, transcripts, letters. He drafts documents, redrafts, until his hand aches and his vision is blurred. This is all there is to his life, this endless chase to catch up with an invisible ideal, the golden idol of efficiency. He watches the numbers tick by, the hours on the clock and the statistics drawn in black ink and he wonders how much he will need to sacrifice to finally feel fulfilled.
He feels consumed by the mediocrity, until he's drowning in the carbon copy of a perfect life, a mass-produced dream of wealth.
He returns home to his empty house and wonders where his life went wrong.
-
There's a church across the street, a cross propped up in the upper window, the fluorescent tube lights flickering. Confess your sins, the banner outside reads, sun-bleached tarpaulin fluttering in the night wind. It reminds her of something, so achingly familiar. An echo of a memory, she grasps it for a second and then lets go.
When she turns away, she sees him.
It seems like the years catch up with her in an instant and she suddenly sees how old they both are, how time has hardened the shine in his eyes, how it has dulled the smile on his face. She tucks hair behind her ears, wondering where the boy in dark green has gone, the one that always ran ahead so fearlessly.
He wants to tell her about the life he's lived, about the house on the cul-de-sac, the flickering neon lights of the city almost close enough to touch. He wants to pour out his heart in that instant and make her understand the terrible emptiness that keeps him awake at night, the absence of meaning that he finds in his days spent working and living and eating. He asks her how she's been. He wonders if she feels the same way.
She tells him about the riverside and the water, about the way the moss grows in cracks in the concrete and how it reminds her of something (hidden so deep that she can hardly reach it) she once knew, someone she once cared about. She talks and listens and she thinks that this could've been so different. She knows he feels it, the strings of fate being cut and rebraided, never to return to how they once were.
He wants to ask her if she still remembers the way they stayed up until the sunset bled into the darkness, if she remembers summer days spent lounging in the shade, winter evenings huddled by the fireplace, watching the flames die down. He wants to ask her if she remembers the crushed bug and the way she cried as she held it so carefully, her hands trembling. "I'll get going then," he says eventually, watching the sun glint gold in her hair.
She stays with him until they reach the bus stop, the city waking up around them with the blaring of horns and the shouts of the late morning commuters, perpetually falling out of step. There's something that she's forgotten to say, but the flickering screens and the cracked asphalt are not the audience that she's looking for. It's only when he's long gone that she remembers.
-
One day, several years ago, she draws idly on his arm as they watch the clouds sweep across the sky.
She wears his jacket tied around her waist and flowers tucked behind her ear, and she is so much younger and so much happier.
"I love you," she says, and in that moment she knows that she's telling the truth. She loves him like this, with the wind and sky around him and the soft grass underneath her feet. She loves him when he reminds her of all the beautiful things in the world, all of the life and love that exists.
She loves him the way she loves the autumn chill and the hazy spring air and the little marmalade cat with four white socks.
She tears down all of her posters the next day. Tape clings to the metal, yellowing with age, and she looks one last time upon the washed out photographs bunched into her hands (hands that held him, one day in the summer several years ago).
She expects to feel something, anything, but there is nothing left except a hollowness in her chest and the faintest memory of warmth. She wonders if he was always meant to leave her, as transient as the changing seasons, swept out with the autumn leaves.
-
It's been ten years since they last met, the years flitting by too fast to catch, all the sounds and smells of the past swallowed up by beige carpet and black plastic until all he has left is the faintest memory of a happier time, of a girl with golden hair. He wonders if he loved her.
The next day he rents a car and follows the trail of memories, to a half-forgotten town. There's nothing left for him in the colossal wreck of the city that he's left behind, only the static loneliness of lit windows against the dark and the shadows of people that he'll never meet again. It's fitting, to be alone at the end.
The taste of steel is sour on his tongue, the skies swirling with stars, an overfed mass of constellations that loom large in the darkness. It ends this way, it always does, with the bitterness in his throat and the fire in his eyes, widening for one last look at the world he leaves behind.
Sometimes he wonders if this could have ended differently, if he stayed with her, if he never left, if the world was just a bit kinder.
-
She meets him and falls in love and watches him leave her, over and over again. Winter follows on the heels of autumn, freezing over the dreams she's kept locked up in her heart, putting to rest the face that she can't quite remember. She dreams of murky water and bubbles on the river's surface and she sees him in the depths, she sees the hollowness of his eyes.
It'll be ten years before she meets him again, standing in a field of wildflowers in a half-forgotten town. She looks at him, at the crushed bone and flesh, and wonders why she feels nothing.