The Paper Girl and the Stilt-Walker

Chapter 1: The Paper Girl and the Crows

The girl in the clock was not dead. No, not like the others.

The clock stood tall like a plinth of stone, ticking as if it had its own heartbeat, overlooking nothing. Elegy was a wasteland of concrete and twisted black iron, the remains of a once great city, now a brittle corpse at the mercy of the crows. But Alumina never went down to the city. It was frightening, such an empty place filled with lonely old buildings and rapacious skeletal birds. Their supply of bodies was gone. Now they pecked around at the rotting flowers (God knows they hadn't seen sunshine in years), hunting for scraps of life to devour.

But the clock was not broken, not lifeless, not yet. It was kept alive by Alumina and her deft knowledge of the clock handed down to her by her own uncle, who had died years ago, just like the rest of them. Alumina knew how to keep the clock running, how to make it ring its bells at every hour. Looming high above the city, glowing bright, chiming a great echo across the broken streets, it was like a last beacon of light to guard the city from complete death. A lone guardian angel.

Alumina had lived up in the clock for so long that she'd become thin, pale, fragile. Like paper.

The clockwork girls were strung up in the rafters by their arms, their necks, to be taken down whenever work needed to be done. Alumina's uncle had built them to help her keep the clock functional, and at the very least they made her less lonely. But their eyes were blank, and they didn't speak. And Alumina preferred not to be around them.

Every day, Alumina wound up the clockwork girls and lifted them from the ceiling to start work. Then she would find whatever work she could, whether it was sweeping, or polishing, or sewing her clothes. Work made her less afraid. Sometimes she was tempted to sing or whistle or hum, to fill up the empty space with cheerful sound. But the thought made her shiver. "What if the crows hear me, and come to eat me too?" she thought, watching them from out of the clock face.

She liked to sit by the huge number 8, with her knees drawn up to her chest, watching the city beneath the constant lurid haze. Sometimes she imagined that the whole city belonged to her now. It was like her canvas, sprawled beneath her, so empty. With a little marker, she drew on the clock face all of the things she would like to have in her city. She drew big gardens over where the cemetery was, the headstones covered in crows so that it looked like a big black lake. She drew a candy shop and a movie theater, a park and a Vietnamese restaurant. But at the end of the day she'd have to wipe her drawings away; the clock had to be clean, after all.

One day, after all the work had been done and the day wasn't over yet, Alumina noticed with a pang of anxiety that her food supply was running short. On a shelf at the corner of the room, there were maybe five cans left. Fear paralyzed for a moment, and she imagined all the starving crows down below who would pick her clean in a second. But she couldn't let herself die, not when there might still be food someplace in the city.

Standing up, she shook the dust from her short red hair and clambered down the metal steps. She wore a striped beige tank top, a pair of shorts with long black leggings, a bulky pair of black work boots, and a long jacket. She decided that the less skin she exposed, the better chances of the crows leaving her alone. For the final touch, she snapped on a pair of thick goggles so that she could see through all the haze.

And then she paused. She would need something to fight off the crows with, if she needed to. Digging inside the crocheted bag slung over her shoulder, she pulled out a large and rusty wrench. Finally satisfied, Alumina took a deep breath and left the clock tower.

The silence was deep and echoing. Flutters of black wings broke the quiet air and stirred the haze. Alumina breathed in the stale, abandoned air, looking around warily for crows. So far, they didn't seem to notice her. In tiny steps, she inched her way along the broken concrete sidewalks. Above her, crooked black streetlamps gleamed in the bleak haze, like bent trees in the dead of winter. She looked up at them warily. Alumina had never left her clock tower since the others died. Seeing the city like this was so surreal, it made her imagine all of her nightmares. It was all coming true, all the horrible things she'd imagined, they were all here in the street with her. Everyone really was dead. The crows had replaced them all.