Strangers

one

You could say that it was Fate who separated us, a simple instruction written in the universe ordering our casual passing—

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There is nothing crueler in this world than the randomness upon which it is constructed.

The casual deliverance of suffering, hunger, pain—if there is one thing in common with every one of these demons that those millennia ago believe escaped from Pandora's Box, it isn't a karmic cycle that ensures we get what we deserve, it isn't a cruel God who looks upon us like experiments in a glass case, it is the way that those demons are sprinkled upon us without care or regard.

Sometimes it is tragedy we cannot avoid. Sometimes it is poverty, warfare, a set of skin and bones that puts us into a social order actively working against us.

And sometimes it is just loneliness that we are stamped with, branded with the fate at birth and sent out with the demon huffing down our shoulder at every turn, leading us away from salvation with a shaking head and a low, throaty chuckle.

So it starts at a crossroads.

Bee is moving into the neighborhood, barely taller than her father's knee and speaking with a lisp after losing her first tooth. Despite the warmth of summer bearing down on the concrete pavement, this new place feels like an ill-fitting shirt. Every inch is saturated with the soft colours that make up the rooftops of suburbia; every moment is complemented with a chirping cricket or the hum of a lawnmower in the distance.

Bee imagines the dirty glass of the car window to be misted over with ice. Her mind hasn't yet managed to grasp the science of the seasons passing, so she closes her eyes and wishes for winter, wishes for the trees to freeze over and shed all their strange greenery until their cold, bare limbs resemble the only state she knows: barren and unkind.

"Are we there yet?" she asks, interrupting the conversation in the front seats of the car. She picks at a loose thread on her dress, dropping a peach-colored strand on her mother's shoulder.

"Nearly," her mother replies, oblivious to what Bee is doing. "A few more minutes."

Once the door opens, Bee cannot continue believing the other side is simply a movie screen, another ninety-minute foreign animated feature that she sits down to watch in the mornings. Once the door opens, there will be no more Nana cooking eggs in the morning and bringing them into Bee's room on a tray every Sunday, when everything—everything is quiet.

The rapidly approaching traffic lights turn red and her father eases the car into a brake. Her mother tells him to watch the roads, despite the wide, smooth paving of the cement, despite there being no other vehicles in sight. It is a habit unshakable after decades spent in a labyrinth of a life. Their little family unit has only even known a cramped apartment in a city teeming with tired people. Bee could trace every leaky line of the rotting four walls that enclosed all she was, but those walls were kind, and sometimes those walls would talk with the voices of the neighbours, those walls would laugh about whatever strong aroma was drifting up from the kitchen of the apartment below.

This new country is large but it does not care to make space. It welcomes your body but not your mind; it salivates at your skill but sneers at everything else you are constructed of, until you can wish for nothing more than to crush yourself into the mold of a perfect newcomer.

But this new country has given them a second chance. For that, they are grateful.

"Oh, dear," Bee's father remarks now.

The sunshine has disappeared suddenly. It has been scooped up and bagged away, making space for rain to fall from the sky instead, first as one initial smack against the pavement, then as a steady downpour upon the earth. Bee scrambles to press her face to the window, thinking she has been heard in her wish, but as her father turns on the windshield wipers and the interior of the car glows with the hazy, muddled red of the traffic light, she sees that the neighborhood is wrapped with warmth even in storm.

Everything is still.

Except for the little boy who stands beside his mailbox, Matty.

"Hello," Bee mouths, fogging up the glass in her language, not his, though it doesn't matter, because he has not seen her.

What he has seen is the flash of white-hot lightning in the distance, and he tilts his head curiously. He is a peculiar study of a boy: he moves slow like the Tin-man, like his joints need oiling, but he is also as graceful as a wraith, slipping in and out of the little corners before one has even thought to look.

Matty has not known the ache of hunger eating at the lining of his stomach, but he knows of a coldness growing around the membrane of his heart, a frozen layer that, day by day, slows his pulse to a crawl until it can barely beat past the space in the ice.

Bee realises sadly that Matty has no umbrella, but it seems that he still came prepared. Tiny red gumboots sit on his feet, and as the rain pours down, a smile spreads along his chubby cheeks. He's being soaked: the water rivulets are running in streams down the lines of his iron-pressed, color co-ordinated clothing, but in the storm, he's spinning, spinning, spinning, until all the tips of the evergreen trees merge together and become spiral whirlpools. 

On his fifth spin, he sees Bee.

He immediately finds her wide-eyed stare funny, and holds back a small laugh at the sight of her flat, squashed nose against the glass. His fingers are lifting to wave, but then he remembers his mother's warning about not interacting with strangers. In that indecisive moment, the little boy's hand is frozen in time and frozen in movement, caught between the infinitesimal second which lifetimes are built upon.

The traffic light turns green. Matty doesn't wave. Bee doesn't wave. They stare at one another and then the car drives on, pulling Bee away. Come evening, as Matty is lifted onto his high chair and left to eat alone, as Bee settles into her new space under a cavernous roof too high to see, they will have long forgotten about the other.