Fragments [Original Fiction]
Fourteen years ago, the people vanished.
I went to sleep in a city, and woke up in a mausoleum.
I don’t know what happened. I don’t know why. I don’t know how. But as far as I can tell, I’m the only person left in the world.
I wandered the city, at first. I thought I’d find somebody. For about two years, I walked around, going in houses and peering over walls. Nothing. Everyone was gone, or dead, or something.
But they’re not really gone. I mean, really. Everywhere I go, across the world, I see fragments of people.
I don’t mean fragments of humans, fragments of bodies, like a foot or an arm or a skull. I mean fragments of people. Parts of their soul, if you will. A child’s hat on a railing, a photograph on a windowsill, a drawing on a desk.
Like, once I went into a house just outside the city. I went upstairs. There was a bedroom, first on the left. I thought maybe a teenage girl’s; lavender walls, plastered with posters and drawings. A mirror, makeup, TV, computer…she was quite messy, this girl, her clothes were scattered across the floor. And on her bookshelf, with the magazines and the manga books and the fantasy novels, there was a fluffy toy owl. It wasn’t much bigger than my hand, this owl, and it was coated in a fine layer of dust. I picked it up of the shelf, held it close, inhaled. It smelt of years and dust and abandonment, but under that it smelt of people. I held it to my nose for about half an hour, sitting on the unmade bed, just breathing it in.
And then I put it back on the dusty shelf and left. I always put things back. The owners could come back at any time, and I’d hate to think someone had been messing with my stuff. I thought about coming back; I wanted to play the girl’s CDs, flip through her books, feel for a moment like everything was normal and I was just a normal girl. So I’d come back later.
I didn’t.
I never do.
Because I have to keep on walking. I take what I need from the empty houses (it gets harder as time goes by, and I live from tins now) and I sleep on strangers’ sofas. They’re not there, they don’t mind. And I keep on going. I’ve found places I never knew existed. I borrowed a car from the dead roads (always borrow, never steal, I’ll return the things when the owners get back) and I drove away from the empty city. And I search. I search for people like me, still alone.
Maybe they’re searching too.
Sometimes in the night I wake up screaming. I dream that there are a thousand of us out there, alone, stranded, left behind, and we’re just walking and walking and we always just miss each other. I dream that we’re alone until the day we die, and on the other side of the town there’s another lone walker, dying by inches even as the life slips out of my heart. I dream that I come too late, that I find a festering corpse. And I dream of endless emptiness.
I don’t know what happened to the people.
Perhaps they all died.
Perhaps I did.