Broken Rays of a Dying Sun: A Collection of Short Stories

Falling

Ferret-Bird made this amazing cover! 

When I look outside my window, I see a cemetery. My father works as a mortician for the church, Saint Michael’s Church, and they let us live in the small four room house by the parlor. All I see, when I look outside, is the dead. I’ve taken to wondering what might happen if they buried a live man by mistake beneath ten feet of dirt. I suppose that when one is buried so far down he can do nothing but die. Then I’d be looking out at a field of the dead and the dying. But I shouldn’t worry about that. My father would never make such a mistake.

I pulled myself away from the window. It is Monday and if I don’t hurry I’ll be late to school. I live in a small town, uphill to keep the cemetery from flooding, and the school is not too far away. Some days I find blisters on the soles of my feet, but they hardly bother me.

My morning is relatively mundane. I wake up to looking at a chipping grey ceiling. The house has been here for almost a hundred years. All of the paint is chipping. I step unto the wood floor, where a washed out square of morning sunlight falls. It makes my room grey and light in the summer, and dark and desaturated in the winter.

I pull on a pair of socks, some jeans, perhaps a tee shirt, or sweater if I have to, and my shoes (if I wait until I go down stairs I’m sure to find a splinter or loose nail between my toes). Today I wear a thick white sweater clinging to my shoulders and heavy shoes which make the floor creak. I grab my pack. The books shift to and fro as I turn away from my twin-sized bed with the faded comforter and continue down the stairs. I end up at the front door, behind me is a sitting room and the kitchen. Next to my room is my father’s. I can hear him snoring, even at the bottom of the steps.

I forget to grab my coat as I sling my key over my neck—it’s a necklace with my mother’s old silver cord slung through a hole at the top of the key. Stepping outside, the door swinging shut as though the wind were harsh enough to force it closed, the smell of the sea caresses my face. The shore is not a mile off, and sometimes, when I know my father has a lot of work, I take the bus there; I stay until the sun almost sets. I know by then he must have noticed my absence. I lie and tell him I was in the library studying for a big test the next day. He never asks about the failing grades I still manage to get once in awhile.

It takes fifteen minutes to reach the brick front of my school. A small establishment in a small town in a world which notices neither. I hurry through the doors and immediately I am lost.

What grade am I in? Last year, I was a sophomore. Next, a senior. I’m a junior, yes, that sounds right. I roll the word off my tongue, followed by my name—Lucia, Lucia Winters. It all sounded right, so right even that something was slightly off, so much so that it teases my mind like the stray string on my sweater. Nothing was quite right, quite perfect, and I see those little flaws and wonder who else might.

I think I must be easy to understand were someone to try, but I don’t think they do. Should I try to understand those not-quite-perfect beings which surround me, I would surely fail. I envy them for the ease at which they communicate—the way they slouch their shoulders in laugh, and how music may descend from their lips, the distinct, delicate parry-and-lunge of conversation which came like instinct to them but has always abandoned me like the leaves from the trees.

I spend a moment, similar to the last, remembering my first class—English, that’s right. I brush past several other students, watching them intently, their loud chattering like half begotten whispers at my ears. I must be an inch shorter than each other student, even the tallest, even the shortest, for each is looking down upon me if they look at me at all. I stand in their shadows, the dark slung over my shoulders like a knit shawl. Perhaps it would be nice should I have been bullied in my youth, and it continued even until now. Perhaps then I would seem important enough to be knocked over again and again, but they do not see me as something to be knocked over. I have already fallen, my legs kicked out from under me, cut off and taken away so that I might never stand again.