My Short Stories

Our Different Walks of Life

At first, I did not have "no tears left to cry" - many of us men don't and never did. There is a reservoir underneath our eyelids, waiting for the eyes to pump out water to send out tears, but it's handle has withered away and it's pipes have tightened, and so my reservoirs remain filled, waiting...

The mind prepares for the worst, considering events impossible, improbable, or unforseeable, but of them all so traumatizing that the reservoirs would erupt into a humiliating geyser outside the eyelids. When the worst is preemptively imagined, the reservoir truly dries up, leaving a black hooded stain on the eyelids, a cue for everyone around us that there are no wishes for the best for you. No hope for our observed, planned, and uncertain futures of our own. No tears left to cry.

—/—

One evening, clouds of orange and blood-red colors stained the eastern sky. To my left, the road faced northwest through an intersecting street up ahead, facing directly east and west while this road continued northward. Tonight, I would go up this road and take a right along the street to head west, but first I would cross to the other side of the road in front of my house.

When I stepped outside I could feel the unlocked sense of freedom brushing against me in the evening breeze. It felt liberating to exit this house, walking up the street against that westerly gust, away from the sight of those blood-red clouds off to the east. Cars seldomly drove down this road, so I crossed with ease onto the right side of the road.

Back down this road heading southwest, there is a stretch of houses lined up by each other. In one of the houses, it's television was always turned on, broadcasting to an ignorant audience sleeping through it all anyways. The front porch was empty and dark - the house's owners always seemed to forget to turn it on - and it's grass had grown to roughly two inches tall.

I continued my trek northwest along this road, and soon I found myself walking with unease. Several meters ahead, under a quickly dimming evening sky, a little girl was sitting along this side of the road in my same direction. She had stopped and turned to her right to face the eastern sky, with a bright wide-open smile fading alongside the colors of the clouds. The sun was setting, and the clouds' coloring was being undone in real time. She knew this, so she stood there and treasured every moment of those blood-red clouds.

It was far too late for anyone her age to be wandering around this late near the busy street just up ahead. Maybe she belonged to the lifeless house back down the street? I wanted to ask her, but had I been seen by the wrong person walking with her, I may not see or be seen on this road again. I could feel the gazes of millions of men upon me, their reputations and job opportunities all on the line. They knew the consequences of choosing to abandon your place in society, and so did I.

"Do not watch her", they ordered. "Do not be seen with her." I listened, and so I crossed the road back to the left, doing only so much as to keep an eye on her.

I continued up onto the street ahead and noticed she also stopped at the street light. I felt comfortable knowing she was familiar with streets, but she turned to face me with what I wanted to interpret as a worried face. I wanted to believe she needed something, that she needed help, that she was lost, that maybe she wasn't familiar with the streets. But the road that stood between us was the one less traveled along, and I could take comfort in her ability to reach me. So many cars were driving along both east and west, and yet by comparison, as the street light switched to yellow, only one distant car could be seen approaching this way.

I watched the little girl as the light switched red, waiting for the the street crossing signals to be given. Soon I could confirm the suspicions of my visions and see if her worried face was a figment of my concerned imagination. My suspicions were confirmed, sooner than expected, as I saw her face grow and her body chasing after me, forming a clearer picture to me. There was fear written all over it, made evident by the brightening light shining on the side of her face. My focus was interrupted by the screeching sound of a car's emergency break as her face and body were quickly launched into the darkness to my right down the road.

—/—

The colored clouds that evening were fighting a fight of their own, fighting to maintain their blood-red colors against a fading sun. The battle was over, and as the sky approached a pitch-black darkness, the blood-red in the sky was gone, as it sank down to the ground in front of the little girl's bloody, lifeless corpse standing just a few meters in front of me.

It has been an hour since I learned she was not familiar with the street, as forewarned by the brewing anxieties stowed away and buried deep within me. The gazes of those millions of men had since turned away from me, their voices suddenly silent. It was a uniquely liberating feeling of justice despite the manslaughter that had unfolded in front of my dry, hooded eyes. In the pitch-black night, my eyelids were two empty pockets of the universe where nothing existed. There were no tears left to cry from my eyelid's reservoir, as my anxieties had already planned such a tragedy in my mind a mere minute before it unfolded. So a deep sadness filled inside me, one that nobody could see without seeing the lifelessness of my face, a face that I chose to hide anyways.

I made my way back home, thinking about the situation, about the people around me taking care of her body, about those now-vanished millions of gazes, wondering how things would have turned out had I made the choice to risk their reputations and livelihoods. There was no justification for the choice I made, and yet there was, one which I would refuse to accept under any circumstance.

I could only live with one conclusion: this world had doomed us both.