UNMARKED GRAVES, armin arlert

1. we're all small and stupid

Content Warnings: Mention/Description of Chronic Illness

✶

          IN THE MESSY MOSAIC of broken bricks and cracked cement of the claustrophobic city of Trost, consciousness poured into you like a paper cup. In this brief genesis of nothingness; where time did not have an expression, and the world had yet to calcify into concrete facts and figures, you held your identity in your palms with a plain face. This was you, (your name) (last name)-nothing more, nothing less, and you could only blink at the sharp immensity of reality that stuttered Trost to life.

The morning birds refilled the cavity this city became whenever night lifted. It was Monday, and it was morning. A hallway away, the draft of herbs, flour, and baker's delight passed underneath your door. But blissfulness in simple existence was always fleeting; your mind fluttered in flocks of forgotten responsibilities you had slept on the night prior. With a sigh, you sloughed yourself off your bed and out the door.

Like how all mornings began, the duties that came with it perched on your shoulder like an annoying green bird and lavished your bottomless philosophies with a gauze for an array of quick fixes to the eroding foundations in your life. Momentarily, the world would go right and you held a precious thing in your palms, a purpose. Purpose led you to this familiar sight framed by the exit. Winding down the flight of stairs that widened into a humble bakery washed-out by morning light, and a lady dressed blue in nebulous motion. She wasn't looking at you, but the sight was not offensive because you were not in it. You were not in this scene, and it was peaceful.

Magdalene Blau is a forty-something-year-old woman who had kneaded a life out of wheat, yeast, and an oven, one may consider it alchemy. Everyone in Trost knew about her because she knew about everyone in Trost. Alternatively: she is a baker from a long ancestry of baker's, and she harboured her family tradition of giving love a definitive form. Two years ago, you were exposed to this definitive form of love when Wall Maria fell to the titans when Magdalene had found you starving in the streets detached from the rest of the refugees. She took you in like her own blood, fostering you alongside her daughter, Mary. In a matter of months, slowly but surely, you become comfortably full with work and rest, the way things should be, the way they would have been. But it was an inescapable fact that you were a burden for them; a fallacy you accepted as the Blaus slotted you into their lives out of their pure goodwill. Because even if you were given this normalcy in a silver platter, you were still tarnished by the phantom-static of Shiganshina and of your parents, of irretrievable memories other than certain flashing images of many things, miniscule things that have crumbled from any meaning.

The story of The Fall of Wall Maria always told like an ancient tale whenever you retraced the sequence of events. The descriptions from trauma survivors always varied like poor puzzle pieces. You've tried reciting it with your own tongue to breathe it into life; the carnage, the metallic stench of blood, with so many clunks of it you'd think it rained raspberries. But it always fell flat like an oversung nursery rhyme, a half-winged melody with no flight. Shiganshina still shimmered underneath that halcyon light, a life not used to the blemished bone enough to be considered completely gone. Instead, it felt like an open door and a heapful of hyacinths that stretched all the way to the horizon. Somewhere in that horizon, your parents were there, beckoning you home.

Upon the soft sound of your shoes, Magdalene turned towards you with gentle glee. "Oh, good you're awake," she sighed. "You need to deliver this-Mary is already covering an order for me. Jonas is already out, he's preparing to deliver a table."

You took a piece of bread and shove it in your mouth, muffling around your quick quipped, "Where?"

"The Gottschalk's-could consider it as killing two birds with one stone." Magdalene hurried to the delivery cabinet. "You need to confirm your plans for tomorrow, as you had told me..."