Working title: White canvas from her shoe that night remains on the wire below my window. (Ignore this, it will change.)
PART I
She crept up, surprised me, and a smile crept onto my worried, often lonely face. My lips grazed her forehead as I pulled her weak and struggling frame over the worn windowsill.
“They didn’t see you?” I asked, nervously glancing at the craters in the black sand below.
“Either way,” she replied. “You’ve got to experience freedom.”
Before I knew it, her wet lips were on mine, her strong arms were around me, and her ripped shoe was discarded like a used tissue. As we lay on my thin, damp, creaking mattress, the mist from the sea floated into the room as if pixies were sprinkling us with saline love potions. From the bed, where we lay twisted in each other, I heard the dampening footsteps of the monsters, free to roam in order to inhibit our autonomy.
As the tide rose, we wiped the sleep from our eyes. With the darkness tainted by silent moonlight, she reached for my only blanket, one worn and tattered by sleepless nights. I glanced at her skin, dark with sun, scarred and broken, and she quickly kissed my eyelids while covering herself.
“There is nothing to worry about in your cage, Noah,” she mockingly assured me. “It’s only liberation you must worry about.”
Sitting up, eyes down, I huddled up to myself, shivering and rubbing my soft, white arms, in the moist heat of the night. I just wanted to throw myself out the window, Carley in my white arms, and escape. Instead, Carley surrounded me, comforted me, told me about the wonders of the place without walls, and let the blanket slip off of her shoulders.
As the sun rose, we sunk into the bed, exhausted from a long night. We didn’t see each other much those days; it was too dangerous with the monsters on patrol. Outside, the sand coiled up and spun in the wind, whipping the ankles of the skittish prisoners of our once beautiful island, racing to their destinations.
When the conquerors came years before, we had greeted them in awe of their strange charm. Soon, though, their monsters became our prison guards, and they left us with them. I don’t know if the men intended to enslave us, but Carley insists this.
That morning she said, “Noah, do not be afraid of the monsters, it’s the fear that traps you here in your cell, nothing more.” She dragged herself up from the bed, pulling my hand and kissing my fair forehead. “Leap with me!”
Something held me back, the part of my heart that couldn’t trust her, with her scarred skin and brown hands. “I will see you soon. I love you,” I whispered into her ear as I stood. She pulled on her clothes and the torn shoes, exasperated with my fear.
Sliding out the window, she turned back and smiled with a smile that could cure blindness. With that, she was gone. I stood back from the window, watching her scamper from the fence below to one broken down edifice to the next, stopping at a bath house for a few minutes, and leaving clean. She looked back up at my window while she was running to her home, maybe a mile away, around the fallen trees and debris, but I guiltily drew into the darkness, jealously longing to feel sand between my toes.
My room is the same as that night, maybe more worn. The books I loved still sit in the corner, with the pages more dog-eared. After Carley left that morning, I sat beneath the window reading books in the sunlight, listening for the thunder of monsters’ footsteps, when I heard children’s laughter for the first time in years. Putting the book down and dusting myself off, I looked outside to see children tossing stones around, while their mothers nervously looked out for the guards and warned their kids to keep hush. I saw two young men creeping around broken buildings, squinting in the bright sun’s reflection from the sea. Probably sneaking into their girls’ rooms, I supposed. I was older than those boys, but I knew the days of security in my youth. I knew what was to fear, having known it’s opposite. A man of twenty-five-odd years, and I was too afraid to leave my own cell in the prison of the island. I did go downstairs each evening as the monsters fed noisily on the other side of the beach to bathe in the nearest bath house, never leaving through the loud metal doors, only slipping from the window silently.
A few nights later, Carley slipped into my window unexpectedly. She silently woke me, and with her finger to her lips, mouthed, Follow me. Without speaking, I shook my head violently and my knuckles turned white in fists. “You are always safe with me. For one moment, please be free with me,” she whispered in my ear and motioned out the window, showing that the coast was clear. Sitting her hips onto the windowsill, she slid down the wall to the fence below, and begged me to follow. I jumped down, and landed ungracefully. She took my hand, kissed my mouth, and said, “You will not regret this.”
I didn’t know where she was taking me, but I followed on eggshells. I could hear each grain of sand as the night breeze carried it around in circles. I gripped her hand, and she squeezed mine comfortingly as we tiptoed around fallen buildings and started sprinting towards the waters. Waves nipped at our shy toes. Since I hadn’t felt the sea in years, it was a burst of cool, slippery freedom; we let go of our inhibitions, splashing and laughing in the night air.
“This is amazing!” I gasped after accidentally swallowing a mouthful of salty seawater.
Carley grabbed me suddenly and looked me in the face, “What is it you fear so much? Don’t you see you can trust me?”
With that, I closed my eyes and fell back into a wave, taking Carley, letting its soft saltiness engulf our bodies as one. Catching our breath as we emerged with a strand of seaweed entwining us, I embraced Carley, that patient and wonderful woman, and kissing her, I tasted the salt on her lips.
