thegirland

The Girl and the People of J'S Diner

The girl had wandered for days, only followed by the great ball of fire, the scorching sphere to whom we once prayed. Nothing left to drink but a mixture of oil and polluted rainwater. “Drink from the cracks and crevices of the asphalt if you will”.

She walks through the unending landscape of concrete and metal. She feels small midst the threatening monoliths of times that were. Her half bald head rocking from side to side as she drags her blistered legs after. Ball licking her back. She is moving with her mind. Her once proud body bent to 60º. She can only see with her left eye. Ball stole the other one.

Some lengths in front of her the girl can see a bucket standing near one of the many stalls that inhabit the streets. All ebony monoliths shrink to nothing. A blue tower is erected. With eye fixed she races forward to that blue beacon which contains her life and when the girl reach it, she do the thing she remembers as “smiling”. At least she does the best she can.

Hands form a cup and drown in the water. As she hold her arms over her head and release it, she feels like a child again. Long-lost memories of times when mum and dad would ready the ice cream while she herself was jumping through the sprinkler comes pouring with the water. Brother had been there too. A true smile now.

The dirty water stings where it forms it's facial rivers. As she drinks what is left of her taste buds writhe, but somehow her mind clears.

As the bucket empties the dark prying monoliths rise again, as if to compensate for the lost water. Again they are towering great distances above her. This time less threatening. She puts the bottles she filled in her backpack and pick up the pace. Overhead a sign says “City Exit 5 miles”. She follows the arrow with hope rebuilt. Hope of finding someone else.

She can feel the sun going down. Less burning on her back. It's hard to see because it never gets dark. The hue only changes to a peculiar violet.

Now she is a good two miles past the sign that said “You Are Now Exiting Kroweny – Hope To See You Soon” (she had rolled her eye on the latter part) and she is atop of a slope. Turning around she can see the ruins she fled from. The monoliths not threatening anymore. From distance she reckoned that they looked more like industrial idols of human ignorance. Shining where they stood, gilded by the last specks of sun. “I greet thee humanity”, the girl said as she turned away from the city of Kroweny for the last time.

After two days with non-stop walking her head spins, her eye blur and she falls to her knees. The electric sign of a small building stands out against the skyline in the distance like coffee on paper. Here electricity is functional. The maths was simple enough. Functional glowing sign equals other humans. Others like the one who thought she was the last spot on the prom dress that just wouldn't wash away. For some time she just sat there, trying to comprehend what had happened.

Years alone hadn't made her stupid. How would she make herself known to the inhabitants of the settlement? She had tried to approach some animals in the past, something which had resulted in cuts and bruises. The girl was tired. Very tired. For now she slid inside the thin mouth in the heap of rocks which she had collapsed next to.

The dreams in that sleep had been many. Some of them filled with wonders. Dreams where children would gather around the elders and listen to stories about days before The Turning. About days before everything changed. All with full stomachs. The sequences were filled with the forgotten marvel, the necessity, which is human intimacy. Other dreams had been nightmares. Fathomless abstract wastelands where every person she patted on the back would turn only to reveal a face looking like that of a melted doll. No eyes had been there to contain a soul. No mouth had been there to speak in the absence of the eyes, only a crater so deep that the sun would shine through the thin layer of remaining skull.

“We will devour you”, they said. “We will swallow your memories”.

Dreams so deep, so lost on those endless plains that her mind couldn't wake her body. For a while she lay on her back kissing the rough rock, eye staring at the wild wires of sun forming it's web upon her roof.

What woke her that day was voices and feet. Voices murmuring things she couldn't hear, but the feet, oh how she could hear them, the wonderful shuffling feet. Pebbles and dust being kicked around in separate vortexes. Small twigs breaking. She would have grabbed one of them by the ankle, but the faceless people told her to wait, told her to observe them first, find out if the strangers were related to her or to them. A silent sigh. She closed her eye and bit her tongue with the teeth that still hadn't left her. As the people passed she opened her eye and let go of her tongue. Again a smile shifted the terrain of her face.

The feet grew faint. The voices were lost. In her head she could still hear them. With that on her mind she crawled from under the rock and once again into the burning rays of the great ball of fire.

She had fallen in love with the people of the diner. The people of J (she had dubbed the diner J because it was the only letter that was lit). The children were running around trying to catch each other. She cried when she saw them. The butterflies in her chest so violent, so many, that it felt as though it would burst any second.

The adults never let their eyes of the small ones. She wouldn't dare to approach the elders. In so many ways she was still a child herself. A child that has broken her mother's favourite vase and know that she will get in trouble.

She had been lying next to her rocky abode all the time trying to observe, trying to learn the ways of the inhabitants of the diner. From what she had collected up to this point it seemed like they were related to her and not to the faceless people. She wriggled around and lay on her back, forehead in line with her heaving chest. She had made up her mind about what to do next.

Now that Ball was on it's way down and the elders of the diner had rounded up the youngsters and brought them inside, she would sneak down to the well she had seen them use and fill up her bottles and maybe, just maybe, she would take a peek inside one of the windows.

The sun was gone and the eerie light of what was night covered the withered landscape. She packed her sack and crawled down the slight slope which led from her crack to what hopefully would become her new home, a glistening château upon a writhing wasteland.

Another one of those forgotten functions of the human body snuck over her.

Nervous sweat.

She was no more than twenty feet from the diners wall and she could feel her heart gallop at an incredible pace.

“Mouse”, she thought. “I'm nothing more than a mouse”.

Her racing heart reached into her mind and grabbed some knowledge from elementary school. This calmed her and her heart switched to trot. “Mouse”, she whispered as she continued towards the well.

Five feet now. She could hear a low humming noise from a machine, “drom-drom-drom-drom” as she passed it. At last she hit the brick cylinder that sprouted out of the ground. The girl stood up on her feet and lowered the bucket, yanking in time with the “drom-drom-drom”. The rope eased and she waited for a minute for the rope to tighten, then started using the crank in the same fashion. When the bucket arrived at the top, she had to look twice. She had almost begun to lower it again when she saw that it was full. “No dirt in the water? No oil?” laughing as she whispered. She filled her bottles, careful to spill as little as possible. Now the long road home was her next chore.

On her way back to the crack she thought of the people that lay inside the building. The structure gilded by the electrical sign that said “J”. Halfway back she stopped. She had to take a little peek inside. She turned around and started for the diner. The girl moved with slug-speed, examining every bit of ground for twigs or any other potential noise makers. She stopped at the edge of the violet shadow of the building, listening intently for any movement.

Nothing.

She stepped inside the diner's duplicate, crawling for the wall, making her invisible from window-view. Her forehead brushed the wooden panel, the most overpowering emotional event since the death of her loved ones. Hulking, silent grief yanked her guts. An impossible task. Could she raise to her feet and look inside the window?

The girl did it all. She got to her feet, moved the cloth blocking out the weird light and snuck her eye inside.

Seven people lay within the walls. Each sleeping in different places and on separate makeshift beds. Two older people, maybe twenty years older than herself, shared a bed. Every last one of them looked like her, except they were all beautiful. No cracked skin, mangled limbs or withered scalps. All were peaceful in their sleep, as if unaware of the world around them.

Directly under the window lay the youngest of all the inhabitants of J. A boy. Curly. Five or six, by her judging. Beautiful. She slid her hand into her pocket for her rusty multi-purpose tool and reached inside for the boys head.

Careful not to wake him, she caught the tip of one of the boy's locks between her fingertips. Greed fell upon her when feeling the incredible softness of the youngsters hair and his warm, damp breath. She bent over the windowsill halfway in, legs hanging in the air and twirled a good two inches more of the boy's hair around her fingers. She reached inside with the multi-purpose tool that in one quick move transformed to a knife.

Bending over, balancing on her stomach. The strange hue crept into the room, flickered as she wriggled in the window.

“Hnnnn...” One of the people rolled over to the other side. Frightened, so afraid of being caught, she lost her balance.

The knife cut through the air and into the arm of the young boy. The child awoke and their eyes met. Screams of pain then crying for his mother. The girl fell backwards and out of the window, pulling a fist of hair from the head of the little boy. The other inhabitants jumped up. A multitude of voices mixed into a single torrent of surprise and fear. The girl ran away with clenched fists. Ran like she never had and escaped into the crack where solitude and safety reigned. Behind she could hear screams and curses.

And a crying boy.

The sounds from the diner grew distant. She fell asleep with a fistful of hair in one hand and a bloody multi-purpose tool in the other.

The dreams she had were terrifying. The faceless people had been there, except this time she had been one of them. She had seen her own face fall apart in a pool of rainbow water. Then her eye had fallen, making everything black and for that she had been grateful. She woke from the sleep by the sound of laughing children. She looked out of the crack.

Everything was as it had been the days before. The adults sitting on some chairs, the children running around trying to catch one another. The boy with the curls laughed. A bandage on his left arm. Everything about the night before was as if forgotten, for them and for her. She smiled. Inhaled the hair that she still held. Happy now, she closed her eye and tied the hair around her middle finger like a ring, a bond between them and her that couldn't be broken.

The beautiful children played on, running around in wild circles and eights like butterflies. She watched them. Every move recorded by her eye and stored in her mind. They came closer to her rock. Smiling. Dancing. Jumping. When almost at the crack someone, one of the elders, shouted.

“Food! Gather up children!”

Happy cries came in response. The children turned away and moved towards the diner in the same not-a-care-in-the-world manner. The laughs grew weaker until they finally died out. “Food”, she thought. She would now take a chance again. The girl crawled out of the crack and sat down on top of the slope.

She closed her eye and smelled the air. Sweet. A sweet delicious odour crept up her nostrils. Her guts writhed. She exhaled and opened her eye.

A shadow was leaning over her. A human shadow. Paralysed by fear, she couldn't move. The figure circled her and stopped in front, blocking out the sun. Like one of the monoliths of the city the shape towered over her.

“Hi!” The figure said. The curly boy. The boy she had cut. She looked up, made no reply. “Are you mute or something?”

Pause.

“You look weird”. The girl smiled and rose to her feet. Tried to speak, but couldn't. “My name is Bill. What's your name?” She clenched her teeth and swallowed.

“I don't know”. A thousandfold every feeling she could remember. Her chest swollen, her whole body drenched in sweat. She was speaking to another human being.

“You don't have a name? I'm sure my father can make you one”, Bill replied.

His father? She was going to get a new home after all. She was going to be a part of a family, a inhabitant of J's diner. The boy, Bill, cut off her thoughts.

“Are you a man or a lady?” Of course it was difficult to assign a gender to her for the little boy. He was beautiful. They all were.

“I'm a lady”, the girl answered. She shivered all over. Her time to say something first. “Are we going to your home, Bill?” The curly boy's eyes met hers just like they had the night before.

“Yes, I want you to meet my family. We are having dinner now.”

They walked down the slope and were now about fifty feet from the diner. She tried to start again.

“It looks like you and your family have lots of fun here. I've been watching you play the last couple of days”. Smile. The boy looked up again.

“I know”.

“You know? How do you kno-” The boy cut her off again.

“Dad! The monster! The monster is here!” Come out now!”

Out of the door there came running three or four people armed with a variety of tools. Behind her the rest came from boulders where they had waited for the signal. She was surrounded. She fell to her knees. The people of J blocked out the sun and again the monoliths had risen to crush not only her spirit, but her body as well.

As she cried from her one eye and they bludgeoned her feet, she clenched the makeshift ring. Happy she left this world for good, knowing that the people of J's diner would go to sleep without having to worry about monsters.