Anticlimax

[04.12.01] » by Kamarile

None of them remembers. They never saw a soldier, never saw a reactor, never saw the deadly red burning the sky. The green children don't know what it means when I look outside, stand outside my door, counting the pointy stars that sit up there. She's crazy, they say, and the children gently stray their own children from me, very gently.

Gently, gently, everything is gentle now. The trees sway more readily, the grass rustles more sweetly, the mountains have lost their angry peaks.

Gently they took my colored baubles, saying I wouldn't want them; I would hurt myself they said. They had had names but I have forgotten them, forgotten what they did, forgotten what they meant, remembering only that I wanted them, needed them. They had to pry more than gently the red one from my hand, the one with the serpent I wouldn't let go of, the one I recalled but couldn't remember either.

Why did I need those shiny things? Why do I still care? There are no soldiers to fight, no reactors to destroy, nothing to stop from hurting me. There is only the sun every morning, only the stars every night. The sun that I open my windows to when I wake up, the stars that I fall asleep outside counting, where they carry me inside and lay me soothingly in bed, as if I could be soothed. They don't remember, they only know this happy green parody of a world. They don't understand that I look at the sun every morning hoping that it might not be there, that there might be something to do again, something more to save. They don't understand that I count the stars every night because one might come falling down now any day, any day now.

If I told them, they'd laugh because I am just a crazy old woman, just a withered skinny crazy old woman with her glowing colored baubles and her old, dull rusted shuiriken. My story was over years and years ago, and it wasn't even my story. What could I ever do? Why would I ever need to do it?

Tonight, I stay inside to sleep, but I count the stars as always. Maybe the world will never stay this gentle, this peaceful, this green, but it will not be me who saves it. Maybe it will be another little girl, a hundred hundred years from now, looking out her window and holding a little red ball in her hand. Maybe it will be her story someday, like it was never truly mine. But until then, I will watch the sky. Let a crazy old woman have her fantasy, that nothing is ever quite so final.

-The End-

(Questions, opinions, comments, etc., are quite welcome. Please send all your replies to Kamarile at kiss_my_trolloc@hotmail.com)