Kent Kelly - The Cage

And then, out loud, the voice deciding her fate with the trembling cadence of its own insurmountable conviction:

“No, Sophie. You are not that little girl. This is now.” The child-Sophie sang its fear, and yet did not deny this. “You are going to do this. Think of Lacie.” A deep breath, the clutch of the pallid blanket around her shoulders. “Live for Lacie.”

She hugged the damp blanket tighter around her naked body, and marched across the room to the shower stall before the horror could build its walls inside her any higher.

Her right palm slicked away the fog of the shower door, and there (down inside, where dead Sophie should be) there were only glo-lites and streaks of filth and a bloody fingerprint, and nothing more.

There is no one in there.

And so it became true.

She turned her back on the shower, on everything that threatened to drive her out from the in-spiral prison of her own psyche. She sat cross-legged upon the floor, staring at the great room’s own drain, the pipes down the reclamator wall, over to the four metal tubs whose purpose she still did not understand. Were they to wash irradiated tools and clothing? Or something to do with food? Purification? She fought to chase and comprehend these fleeting bits of rational thought, desperate to force away the horrors that were rising again all around her. She needed to breathe, to see, and to clutch onto the meaningless, the mundane, the real.

It’s April. April fourth. It is two thousand fourteen. I lived in the valley behind Black Hawk. Now I am under Fairburn, Fairburn Mountain.

She crawled forward a little, careful to avoid the elusive glass shrapnel from the shattered light tubes. To the center, Go to the center of the floor. The center of your world, the new world where you shall be reborn.

There.

Become. See.

The drain of the great room, a real thing. She could see bits of feces clogging its grill, a shred of teal silk with a little button attached. One of her shoes that had been blown off in the explosion was sitting next to the drain, with little streaks of mud and vomit on its heel. A garden hose was attached to a wall socket by the work table, and it was dripping. Someone — It was me, there is only me — had sprayed the floor down. Sophie’s drenched and stinking clothes were piled on top of a paint can near the shower door.

Focus.

She needed to find her daughter, to know whether Mitch and Lacie had survived. Who in Black Hawk would be able to help her? Or perhaps there would be Jolynn, in Centennial? Surely there would be someone.

No. Jolynn is dead. Mother is dead. Tom, Tom is…

A new revelation came to her, as she wrapped the blanket closer around her and felt the tickling water droplets falling from her hair onto the floor. It did not matter yet if Lacie was alive, that was a thing for tomorrow. For the moment, the now, even if Lacie was dead — And she is, she must be, how can she not be, no don’t think it or you’ll make it real, don’t — Sophie needed to pretend, to insist that Lacie was still alive. Or else, alone forever, there truly would be nothing. No reason to live at all.

I love her with all my heart. Therefore, she is alive. Because she must be.

With that resolved, she needed to take care of herself. The shelter would become the entirety of cosmos and so her home, the only home. Womb. A child, she needed to learn everything all over again. She needed to relearn how to survive in a world of immolation, a world that had followed its own principles to destruction.

And how?

The doubts welled up as quickly as she dismissed them. A cold, utterly practical side of her asked a simple question: Sophie, slow down. Think about this again. Can you kill yourself?

No. The girl-Sophie sang again, a cadence of wistful sadness.

And why not?

For Lacie. We said so.

And if she is dead? What is there in this burning world that is left for us, if Lacie is not alive?

But she is.

Is she?

You said so.

“I did. I did.”

The cold slice, the ice-white reflection of her own promise for survival, the dead self left in the shower stall just out of sight, had no reply.

Not yet. The dead Sophie skin would walk, it would hunt her into nightmare. It would wait for her, for sleep and dreams.

She stared at the goose-bumps upon her forearms, the strangely indented veins where her adrenaline-shocked muscles had given her the strength to lift four hundred pounds of metal and boxes off her body. Her torn muscles pulsed with weary, faltering surges in time with her every heartbeat.

Need water.

Sophie crossed to the hose socket, thought of drinking the water there. Surely it was connected to the same water tanks as the shower was. But the head of the hose was resting on a piece of blouse-silk by the drain, and the filth she had washed from herself was still swirling there.

She turned the hose off and looked around.

She was shivering, the air conditioning and venting were fighting with the incredible heat that had coiled inside the shelter, and the cold was beginning to win. She believed that this was good.

She smeared the back of her hand across her face. At some point, she had stopped crying. Another breath, this one steady and at peace.

And that was all. Life would no longer be a series of inconveniences and annoyances interspersed with brief intervals of joy; life had constricted into a dual-dimensional existence, only the moment, rigid lines of sense and the senses’ disintegration. Each moment, every breath would die and the next born from its ashes, each cascading after and filling the previous dying, a pointless and tiny miracle of persistent vitality. The one moment and its death, convergent unity. The next, the next. Without the sun, without hope, tomorrow became so infinitely far away that it did not exist.

The future was nothing, an infinite chain of fractured revelations, each mote of time larger than the one before, knowing the implications of itself but nothing more.

As Sophie’s body slowly began to heal, she busied herself with simplistic things, crafting ornate weaves of complexity from the most clear-cut of actions. She found the standard-metric wrench that had fallen to the floor, calibrated its hook jaw to precisely half an inch and then two centimeters and back again. She not only pulled out many of the binders from the wreckage of the shelves, she stood them on end upon the floor and then she alphabetized them. She took up the rediscovered flashlight, scuffed off the piece of plastic that had splintered off from its broken tail cap, and strung it upon a hook that was bolted into the wall. The wrist strap had broken during the blasts, and the flashlight must have flown from her wrist and rolled off across the floor. Blessedly, it was still on, and therefore operational. She clicked it off to save the precious batteries.

The dark. The dark is coming.

“Sophie. Don’t think about that.” She shook her head, as if to clear it from the unsettling shadows which were layering her thoughts with other people’s voices once again.

There was a challenge as she struggled to remember which order she had done things in, which things still required a ritual of initiation and which were fated to be redone a second time. She knew that if she did not keep moving nonstop until she collapsed, in perfect order of destined motion, she would stop everything — stop thinking, stop hoping, stop breathing and that would be the end of her.

The work table, there’s panels behind it, she thought. You know this. You need to get on the radio. The phone. The computer. Something. Mitch, the others, you need to reach out and to learn what is left of the world, you —