Everything And Nothing All At Once

•|Chapter Three|•

     We lay on our side. We stare at the wall. We stare at the new holes with blood. We are shaking. We were crying.

     Not anymore.

     We hurt. We are sure that at least some bruises have formed. We hold our ribcage and wait for the pain to go away.

     Won't be any time soon.

     We are so tired, we have not had any sleep since Sir left. We are afraid of rolling onto our stomach and further hurting ourselves. We are afraid of pain.

     Sir wrapped white cloth around or torso before he left. He said, "it'll help with your ribs." When I asked him how I received no answer.

     We are not in any mood to sing or imagine stories. We stay still. We keep our mind as blank as possible. We softly rub our sides, feeling a rib or two poke out from the rest.

     Painting. The painting calms us.

     We slowly stand. We see nothing but white for a few seconds. Once our vision cleared we stepped painfully off to the room with the stove, with the painting.

     We stop at the table, we lean against it and take deep breaths. We rub our ribs, the poking ones scared us.

     We see the painting from where we were. We payed attention to the sun only.

     I remember, it was a cloudy day. There was no sun. No brightness.

     We pinch our arm. "Don't make up stories."

     Our stomach rumbles. We ignore it. "It wasn't a story I remembered it." I close my eyes and try to find the memory again.

     "You're not telling the truth," we murmur. We steal a glance of the window and quickly turn away towards the painting. The painting's red looked like blood.

     I opened my mouth to argue but realize that I forgot what we were arguing about. Our stomach rumbles again. Fine, we'll eat.

     We slide our feet against the tile floor to get to the shelf. We take out two pieces of bread and bring them to the table. We bite into one.

     Our hand itched. We look down and see many black dots crawling across it.

     Our breath catches and we drop the bread, realizing it was the source of the insects. We wipe our hand with the other and stand, momentarily forgetting the pain.

     We shook our shirt to make sure the insects were not on us anymore. We think of the fact that we may have consumed some of them.

     We are disgusted.

     We watch the tiny dots crawl across the table. We ate those. Some of them.

     We crush the dots with our index finger. We make sure to get every one. We remove the slices of bread and throw them away.

     We rush to the room with the toilet. We run the water and stick our hands in it. The water was cold. We keep our hands under the flow until our hands grew numb from the coldness of it.

     We are no longer hungry.

     We go back to the room with the bed and lie down. We slowly cover ourselves with the sheet, now dry. We close our eyes, sigh, and drift away.

     The sky was cloudy, and the wind blowed fiercely. I never liked this kind of weather, I preferred the sun being out. My mother always told me stories of when I was a baby, running around naked in the yard during the summer on sunny days.

     I smile at the thought of her. She would have made those cookies by now. I'll probably have some when I get home.

     I walk around the park, discovering a team of  kids older than I playing soccer. They were shouting at each other, some kids purposefully kicking other's shins.

Two adults were supervising. They stood off to the side and watched the kids with a careful eye.

     I had no supervision.

    

     We grab the brushes and the color. We have decided to paint the walls. The walls are all so white and emotionless. They need some color.

     We grab a cup and fill it with water and gather the rest of the supplies. I decide to start with the wall that had the metal door. I study the wall, thinking of what color I want to start with.

     I pick the color I was fondest of today. I think of the trees that were described to us in the books. Green.

     We use the brush we did before and begin to color the wall. We decide to make a tree. We make a green circle as high as we can reach. We wash the brush and begin with brown.

     We made the bottom part with the brown. We stood back and admired our work. Trees.

     We decide to make more. We make a forest. The wall is covered in brown and green. Trees.

     We are proud of what we did. We are also glad of what we did. We were very close to crying again and we didn't like that. We didn't like that at all.

     We turn to a new wall, this one was one side of the room with the stove. We decide to create a sky, finished with a sun. We clean the brush and dip it into the blue.

     We cover as much as we can of the wall before we ran out of blue. We only managed to do about a fourth of it. Our heart beats quickly in a good way as we stare. The sky is so beautiful.

     We use a different brush and cover it with yellow paint. We create a large circle, a large sun.

     "It's a sunny day today," we murmur.

     "It's my favorite kind off day," I add.

     We stop for a moment. The sun halfway painted in. We grit our teeth and clench the brush between our fingers.

     After a few moments we calm down and continue what we were doing previously. Once the circle was filled in we plunged a brush into the black and made a face.

     We make the sun smile.

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