It had always been normal for Stalyn Grey to feel subpar.
There was just something about the way her mind had been created that it could only function mediocrely if not at all, something with the way her self-esteem had lowered itself to appease the clamour of her mind. It was almost a curse, like liquid toxic slowly crawling its way onto her skin and into the pores of it until she could feel it nipping away at the recesses of what used to be her able heart.
But.
But there was something about her room—that
which was fraught with clandestine posters plastered against her walls and
threadbare cotton serving her feet and most important of all, the lonesome bed,
the only furniture in her room that seemed to have always called her to sleep—that
made her feel oddly secured, locking away her insecurities and inhibitions.
Or perhaps this was the real world, where
she could be whoever she wanted to be.
The comfort that her room brought upon her was
like a security blanket that glowed ethereally. It covered her day and night
and got her through the different stages in her life, be it an enemy from the
playground, a fit, all the same mean, crush in high school, or a colleague
whose only mentality was to bring her down if she wasn’t already so rock bottom
it was even plausible to bring her deeper down the earth’s crust.
People had commented about the oddness that
was Stalyn Grey and her apparent lack of social skills even at home but who
would have even imagined that she was alone, properly alone, for her family had
died three and a half years, twenty-seven days, eleven hours, thirty-four
minutes and twenty-one seconds ago?
Nobody would have noticed, not even the
aunt that took her in, the sadness that had filled the voids in her heart which
she was certain she would’ve preferred if it remained devoid of anything rather
than the cracks of agony crisp and cruel punching the life out of her. She had
always hidden herself from the world with her sweater high up her scalp and a
necropolis of other clothing properly entitling herself as the oddest girl in
the province of Connacht.
Not once had she cared about what other
people thought of her—to her what mattered was the own beating of her heart and
the safeness of her room.
Sometimes, however, when the dark light became
too incandescent it blinded her from anything else, she took comfort from the
posters on her wall. They were all slathered with golden ribbons tied across
each end as what appeared to be a mark of Stalyn Grey and Stalyn Grey only. The
posters weren’t what a normal twenty-two year old woman in the twenty-seventh
century would have been expected to have harboured—instead, they were actual
photographs and captured moments of what used to be her life three and a half
years, twenty-seven days, eleven hours, thirty-nine minutes and forty-three
seconds ago. There were pictures of her family everywhere—the light silver in
her mother’s hair that had had several men looking twice, revelling in the
oddness and beauty of it, the thick plucked eyebrows of her father that had
made numerous people laugh whenever he used them as an object of his own
abysmal jokes, and the fiery look in her younger sister’s cerulean eyes,
looking straight at the photographer as if she were sending a message to the
person who would look at the developed photograph later.
It was a message that she admitted she would
not have presumed nor known had it not been for the utter demise of her family
all in a duration of one breath-taking nanosecond before her very own in after.
Little did she know, this terrible Stalyn Grey, that the look on her sister’s
eyes was not of her usual playful one, not one which said she knew more than a
normal middle schooler would have, that she was far more intelligent than you
would have ever expected.
The fire in her sister’s eyes was a warning
of what was to come—she had realised, far earlier than anyone else, that a
second after the photographer lifted their finger to capture that moment where
they were all smiling was the second of their irreversible deaths.
A nuclear bomb exploded from miles away, a
blast of poison and radiation far greater than which was used several centuries
ago in the rural areas of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that required no full second
to tear apart one’s skin, eradicate the pounding heart of a human being, and
kill the living daylights out of any breathing creature in the whole province
of Connacht. From an awful top view one could see the eyes of the people who
had planned a lovely day at the park falling out of their sacks, the powerful layering
in their bodies deteriorating as blood poured out, and the thick crisp
skeletons making no sound as they fell to the attacked ground. This was far
worse than a battlefield—this was a demon’s lair.
All this, Stalyn Grey knew as she felt cold
tears stream down her hollow cheeks. She could feel her eyes turning sublimely
out of shape as she clutched the smiling photograph in a desperate manner, as
if her entire life had depended on it.
All this, Stalyn Grey knew because she was
there when that transpired. She was there as she felt the crisp autumn air nip
away at her exposed cheeks as she held the camera close to her eye, feeling a
smile creep onto her lips at the sight of her family smiling, relishing the
unbeknownst to everyone last day of their lives.
She was there when the moment of her life
fell away from her grasp faster than she could press down the camera and
capture the very last photograph of herself that she could ever wish to have.
Copyright © 2023 by Mykaella Karganilla
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