Ashes and Daydreams

Chapter 4: A Lack of Color

I collpased in the apartment on a bed of ash.

Anna started to cry.

"Darlena, we were so worried. Never do that again. You were gone for so long...we thought you wouldn't come back."

I couldn't see her, but the sound of her voice was reassuring. Until I realized....what if this was all in my head? What if everyone had died, and my mind was making these voices, trying to comfort me? Trying to make me get over the trauma of loosing everybody?

Now you're just making stuff up, I thought to myself.

"I saw a skeleton," I said. "It was lying right outside the building. Like it was trying to get in the building before the volcano erupted and the smoke, ash, and gasses reached us. But it didn't make it in time, and it was burned alive. What if everyone's dead? What if we're the only ones left in Milwaukee? Wisconsin? The world?"

"I'm sure we're not the only ones," Aunt Lindsey muttered, but it was hardly a comforting thought.

"What about Mom and Dad?" Anna asked. "Do you think they're safe, wherever they are?"

I was unprepared to tell Anna, just twelve, that they probably weren't safe. That they were probably burned alive.

"Well, maybe they were lucky and found someplace safe to stay. Maybe their flight was cancelled because they knew about the volcano, and they never left the airport."

I hadn't actually considered this before. Maybe their flight was cancelled. A wave of hope swept over me. Mom and Dad might be still alive. They might be safe somewhere.

but then Aunt Lindsey spoke up. "Unfortunately, I was there. I watched your parent's flight take off. We didn't know that the Yellowstone Supervolcano was going to erupt until it happened; it was all on very short notice. But perhaps they made an emergency landing."

It killed me inside, not knowing the whereabouts of my parents. Maybe they were still alive. Or maybe all these theories I contemplated were just theories, and they were incredibly far from the truth I couldn't face--my parents had died.

We sat in silence in the lack of color for hours--maybe days. The skies were always dark, so it's not like it even made a difference. Dark or night, they had lost all meaning to us.

Then one day, or one hour, we grew hungry and weary. I located some canned vegetables and, although the can was covered in ash, the vegetables inside were safe. We ate them with our ash covered fingers and wondered exactly what we were injesting.

We lived in a dark void, a world lacking color. Color was a thing of the past. We'd never see it again. It was only a figment of our imagination.

Perhaps color never even existed.

Eventually we realized we could not carry on like this--sitting, laying in the ash, becoming part of it. We began to tunnel through it.

One day, we were daring, and we opened a window and began to dump bucketfuls of ash from our apartment onto the street below.

And soon, there weren't piles of ash anymore, but everything was still gray. Our apartment wouldn't forget so easily.

"It might be safe to take off our oxygen masks now," Aunt Lindsey said. And then I watched in horror as she effortlessly slid it off of her face. And then her eyes opened really wide and she began to gasp and choke as the ash and smoke and poisonous gasses went straight to her lungs. Suffocating her.