The Paper Girl and the Stilt-Walker

The Chocolatier's Daughter

Alumina awoke after a sleepless night of dreams, swirling thoughts, and hunger pains.

A mechanical person named Monk had said that the city was supposed to have died. That no living people were left, but there were others. What did that all mean?

She groaned. It was still only four in the morning. Her bed was a rumpled heap of old blankets and sacks which barely kept out the biting cold of the oncoming winter. At least now she had more food; her shelf was full of canned foods, as well as some more Twizzlers and a bag of chocolate chips. Everything else had rotted away, or had been eaten by rats.

The darkness filling the clock was cold and echoing. She looked up at the tall rafters, where shadows obscured the ceiling so that it looked like an endless abyss. The clockwork girls hung, lifeless, strung up by their necks. Sometimes Alumina would look at them at night and shudder; what if they stirred on their own, moved by a restless spirit from the city? What if the clockwork girls held ghosts? Every time she thought of this, she would hide under the blankets until morning came.

But tonight, she stayed awake. She kept having that nightmare again. She'd had it ever since everyone died, stretched over the years. She had that dream around autumn every year, when it happened. Then autumn would bleed into winter and then die, and the world would be frozen and bleak, silent. Then the dreams would end in a whisper. She wouldn't have them again until next year.

Alumina sat up, pressing the heel of her hand into her forehead, going over the contents of the dream. In her mind's eye, she saw flickers and snips of the horrible event...a flash of blood, a scream, a cracked window. Her uncle stood over her with a wrench in one hand and a fistful of her hair in the other. And she just kept screaming. The violent red splashes of blood and the screams pulsed through her mind, sweat dripped from her temples. She closed her eyes again. She breathed. The dream slowly faded away.

When the images in her mind were blunt and no longer hurt, she opened her eyes and sighed. She hated that dream. She had put the memory of her uncle far behind her, buried back in her mind underneath all the other junk like in an old attic, but somehow it always managed to resurface with a vengeance. "It must be autumn, then," she thought. Outside, the change of seasons didn't affect the scenery much, except that when winter came, the trees turned black and the haze became more bleak and watery, unlike the brown haze in the summer.

She decided that she couldn't sleep anymore. Her body was stiff and creaking, rusty-feeling, as she heaved herself up and brushed all the dust from her front. Outside was dark, like a yawning pit. Alumina never looked outside at night. She was afraid of seeing shadows or ghosts. Not once since the others all died had she peered outside the clock face once the sun had set. But tonight she was restless. And she remembered the metal-armed spider person who lived on Lierre Street, in that pitch black house. So she decided to look out the big window and see the streets while she thought about going down.

All of the lamps were lit.

Alumina's eyes widened. All the street lamps, bent and crooked like dead trees, were glowing palely, a ghostly orange like the light in a jack-o-lantern. She wondered who had lit them. "Monk doesn't have arms, so it probably wasn't him," she decided. Then another thought struck her. "Was it those other people he was talking about?" She wondered silently as she reached out to touch the pane of glass. It was freezing cold.

Without thinking it over, she grabbed her crocheted bag and ran down the steps.

This time, instead of a wrench, Alumina took out a plastic fairy wand that had once belonged to a Halloween costume years ago. It would help her see better, she hoped. The wand in her hand glowed as bright as the lamps, the dim yellow color of an old light bulb. She didn't wear her goggles because the crows were all roosting, but she kept them on her head anyway. It was so quiet at night, but a different kind of quiet than in the daytime. It was a deep, rolling quiet, filled with cold and ice. The lamps craned their necks over her as she walked briskly down Noisetier Avenue, past old and familiar houses that didn't look so familiar anymore. She saw her friend Camille's car, the white Honda Civic parked in front of her house, which had collapsed. Alumina's dark blue eyes glittered in the lamplight strangely, watching the darkness for any sign of a shadow or a person.