Chapter 1 of "Sculpture of Our World", a novel in the works.
Synopsis: The World goes silent. The parents stop telling you to go to bed early, the alarms stop ringing in the morning and the news stations don't report anything anymore. Emese and Virág travel through this silence and take care for each other.
I had never driven a car before. And I never had to break a door lock and take car keys from someone’s back pockets either. But she was shivering and I had no choice, so after twenty minutes of sitting in the heating car, we were finally fine.
I gathered all my courage to put it into second and slowly drove onto the road. She was still whimpering in the back seat, but I tried my best to ignore it.
“You took me from them.” she said. “I hate you.”
I remember I used to only hear busy noises and only see pretty colors. It was summer and I was wearing my laced yellow dress that had white spots on it. My feet and my hands felt cold in contact with the grass, but who really cares about such things when they are children. The colors of the flowers were bursting, swung back and forth by the soft wind. I joined and let myself sway too.
“Don’t you dare pick them. Taking it is destroying it, destroying nature. In nature, everything has its place, cannot be pestered with, cannot be broken, cannot be bothered.” I was told.
But well, it can be broken. And it is broken, from day to day, we break it and we get broken ourselves. I think what they meant to say was that it shouldn’t be broken. That is a different thing.
And Virág did the same thing herself. Once we stopped for me to break another lock and get us some food, she was sitting in a silent protest in the grass, picking the flowers. I could never tell her to stop doing so.
The gas station food at highways was only good for so much. I made sure to get her one of those coloring books and Barbie magazines too.
“How old do you think I am?” she asked me.
“I could get you a tabloid. Doubt it would spark any interest, seeing that there is no point in them anymore.”
She groaned “Oh shut up.”
The drives were silent for hours long. The picture that the empty gray roads created eerily soaked into my brain, leaving me to keep seeing them in my dreams. However, they were better than anything else that my brain could produce considering the disastrous past months.
Later in the night, once we stopped for sleep, I felt a hand on my shoulder. We had locked the car doors, but the darkness creeped in. There was no streetlamp, no house with its lights on, and even the Moon seemed to have escaped us. I looked up to find Virág's silhouette hovering over my seat. She was sniffing and crying.
“What happened to the dogs?”
“What?” I asked, trying to grasp what she was talking about.
“Emese.” she started “All the dogs, and all the cats. All the fish, all the hamsters and all the parrots.”
I finally understood. I shrugged and so she cried louder.
“I need you to hold me.”
I climbed to the backseat area and let her lean and cry on my shoulder. It was a lot to take in, a lot to think about and definitely too much for her to carry alone.
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