The World's Aftermath [ON MAJOR EDIT]

Chapter 19 [Cleo]

Hours hasn't gone by fast enough to let me know what it all needed was perhaps, the simple act of closing my eyes and let the rest take care. From the exhaustion of thoughts, it really never mattered, I've always reminded myself this day conquered the longest sleep. Or the sorest back.

Winds float by occasionally, never once did the whole world felt like it's spinning from dawn till midnight, but not one thing can never stay still. Plates clattered as if interfering in a ghost possession, curtains swept like those capes of the superheroes. I've wished to stay in the comfort of my bed, but realize that the reality--this real fantasy of ours--isn't leaving.

The other fantasy--cornered every now and then in my sleep--has turned from screams to running and never looking back. It all sets. Certainly, there are voices of my own breath, louder as footsteps boom into the echo of empty rooms. Dark and mystifying. And pure horror, just as every nightmare goes.

In the last moment, I would find myself on the sheet of mom's bed. Sometimes, I think I've run all the way here just from the depth of my own dreams. Oddly, her snores keeps it safe. It's always close enough to be louder than the whooshes outside our walls and the echoes inside my mind. Safe, I call it. The sound part makes it safe, doesn't it?

She knows me well. It isn't like the door of her room creaks open in the middle of the night from the winds, it's always been me, shivering in the silhouette of darkness. Perhaps she's gotten the darkest fantasy and dreams too, and maybe that's why she's always let me in. Isn't everyone scared of something? She'd nod to me--in the middle of the night, before the continuation of her sleep and let the morning rise come next for both of us.

Someday, she had said, she would have enough to afford the lights that dimmed brighter and have the walls thickened to wrap ourselves with.

Someday.

It felt like a fantasy too, just saying the word. Imagining its letters align together and float, with a slow realization that time and its own procrastination had begun to tear every one of those letters apart, letting it disappear against the current.

— • —

I count all the stars, impossibly but surely. The night has finally come. This night when the thick clouds have cleared up for the dark spread of the sky to spread out, twinkling ever so slowly, stars chasing after one another. I can't see them doing that, but I imagine so, there are so many in the moment my eyes stay for the whole world that had waited.

Sadly, the moon hasn't been a crescent forever. Like all the sorts of nature and the specks of dust, it's gone and away. I know it's there, but I can't find the good excuse that it is. It just doesn't feel like it's there. A shiver runs down my shoulder, calm but unsure now.

Where did it go?

Listening back to the silence, that doesn't do well either. There's the creaking of my bed from every movement I give to it, as I reach over for The Book, thick and heavy, yet again. It has gone less dusty, however. Austin, I figure, has spent much of his quality time strumming and knocking over his head on this book, obsessively. That boy. A mystery, he is still, wandering with this book and for what reason? Curiosity? Secrets? The right that he simply has it?

I'll get the answer once I have to. But for now, it's all for Mrs. Brown. For Diana and everyone else like her, as worse as it sounds.

I slip my fingers in, this time starting from page one.

Blank.

Page two. Blank.

All that it screamed: nothing, nothing, and nothing.