Espresso Love (A Dystopian Japan Novel) #Wattys2014

The Start of All Things

- The Start of All Things -

At that time, beyond the door, down a long decaying corridor, there's some light. It's in the shape of a round hole of kinds. It seems to grow bigger and smaller, ever changing its shape. The path towards the hole isn't at all easy. There are piles of trash, bags of them, black bags, clear bags, pink bags, and they look like they've been there for years and years. Some of the garbage is spilled out, including rotting apple cores, fish bones and unidentified substance slathered across the ground. Like slimy creatures with their guts exposed climbing out of their ill fated confinements. To say the least, it isn't a pretty sight. The closer to the hole, older things would appear. There are even abandoned chairs and vintage couches, a black and white television, tattered newspapers, some melted car tires and splintered wood, like traveling back in time.

The further, the worse it smells and the walls begin to crawl with vines. In places, they've already worked into the bricks and concrete, sending cracks through the surfaces and chunks falling to the floor. Gradually, these walls disappear and become entirely green. But vines continue to creep along, grasping onto debris as if they are in the middle of digesting it all. The only thing turning out for the better is the darkness rotting and losing its hold to the light.

It takes a while of standing in this harsh light, hand over my forehead, other hand still supporting her who almost falls over, for my eyes to adjust.

Then I realize we are back where I had started.

I recognize the entire scene. I had been here before or some place similar in any case.

"Oh," I say.

The same great oaks skyrocketing upwards, the same smell of fresh damp leafy growth. Even though we aren't exactly near the cabin, I could sense it, just past the thicket of trees, so tight we would have to squeeze through.

"Can you make it through?"

She nods.

It takes a lot of effort to help her along. She stumbles a few times, scraping her shin against bark. She is weak - frail, like paper - legs that can barely support her own weight, as light as she had become. Of course, I'm not faring much better but I had entered the facility much later than her, so I am likely in a better position.

It took a long time for any kind of memories to return. For my seventeen year old self to return. That day, in the house, on the twelfth floor, packing away trash from each room, tossing out everything with any sort of intrigue, I had lost all lingering traces of myself. I had no idea why I was there, and had no other alternative than to clean up these floors of their garbage bags. I was wearing a black suit and a white shirt and a black tie and black dress pants, only my shoes remained Converse. So I was waiting to come across dress shoes and change them. Instead, in one of the rooms, there was a boy in a black suit and he held a gun. He was smiling and I wasn't. I still remember the smile. Then, the ground trembled and the building started to collapse. Not in a way buildings fell apart. The wood didn't come off its nails nor did beams topple over, staircases collapsing. No, it was like dust, it became fine sand, a tiny grain that drifted through my fingers and past my body. It was almost magical, aside from the shaking. Everything just wasted away. And all that had been left was the porcelain cup, like an out of place artifact of a different era in an archaeological dig sitting on sand. The last stoic remaining thought that had evaded demise, silently waiting until the right time. Perhaps it was because of its unassuming extraneous posture. But the contents of the cup had nearly run out.

I don't know how I had torn off the electrodes and straps, removed the needles in my body, and gotten off the white chair in the white room, made it down the halls without lights or electricity, surging with black suits and gunfire, found Shizuka and managed to limp out. I have no recollection of it, nor does Shizuka. At any moment we could have died without a thought in the world, empty and cold. But I do remember desperately clutching onto that cup in my mind knowing it was necessary, like a breathing apparatus, an oxygen mask for a patient in an emergency room. It wasn't until we reached the Seven Eleven when we realized we had made it out.