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entropymp4 · 4 years ago

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The day the first asteroid came crashing down upon us, I was in Amsterdam. That was the worst part, I think. And I’ve had lots of time to think, to list everything in alphabetical order, and then by order of which I hated the most, and then I got sick of thinking and tried to teach myself meditation instead.

Anyway: I was in Amsterdam.

For a split second, it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. A falling star. A promise of what the universe could birth—a statement: I am everything you could have dreamed of. I am the first to realize existence, and I will be the last as well.

I was ready to go. I didn’t want to, of course, but I certainly had no illusions of surviving the apocalypse.

Except I opened my eyes to a scorched world: the skies clouded by dust and ash, the ground beneath my hands cracked open, the temperatures downright freezing. The buildings were in ruins. The people walking past me on the streets, those milling around in the shops—all gone. Through squinted eyes, I could faintly make out the silhouette of burnt men.

And yet I was alive.

How? I asked. But it wasn’t important.

What does it matter, why I lived when no one else did? Important was that I had to leave. I had to get back home. I was just twenty-three, a child masquerading as an adult. I didn’t know what the protocol was for things like these. All I wanted then was to run into my mother’s arms and hold her tight and have her tell me that it was all a nightmare.

But when I looked up, past the black sky, I watched a spark grow larger. Followed by another. And another, and another, until there were at least a thousand stars falling.

My mother’s voice echoed in my head, Time to make a wish.

Oh. Oh, how I wanted to. Let this be a nightmare. Turn back time. In our last moments, I wish to be home.

Instead, I watched the asteroids crash somewhere I couldn’t see in Amsterdam. I listed it in my head: Britain, Hungary, Malaysia. My mother’s home, thousands of miles away. All going, going, gone.

Probably, it wasn’t just the asteroids that destroyed everything.

Some countries must have tried saving themselves. Got their people underground when they figured out what was happening. Used nuclear devices to shatter the asteroids. That desperate human need for survival despite all signs pointing otherwise, it must have meant something.

“Is there anyone left?”

Death sits on the ground in front of me, hands folded in their lap. They say, I THINK YOU KNOW THE ANSWER.

“Humor me,” I say. My throat is dry. I haven’t had anything to drink for days. Weeks, maybe. It’s because there’s no water to be found, is what I tell my mother in my head. I pretend I haven’t been sitting in the same spot, hoping Death would take me soon.

NO, Death says. AND YOU UNDERSTAND I CANNOT DO SO. I HAVE SAID THIS BEFORE.

I scowl. “Don’t read my mind.”

I’LL TRY MY BEST.

Which doesn’t mean much, I have learnt. I cannot blame them for fulfilling a function of their design. It’s all mechanics. Death is omniscient and I am, as it seems, immortal.

The universe is silent. Always is, nowadays. In my dreams: my sister screams in disgust when I dig my fingers into the dirt and pack it into the shape of a snowball. The sound of my mother’s footsteps all those summers ago, up the stairs and down the hall to make sure I’ve fallen asleep. Something in me aches when I wake up.

“Tell me honestly,” I say. “Because sometimes I think nothing after the—nothing after has been real. Tell me: is this Hell? Am I actually in Hell?”

Death sighs. WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE? WHAT IS HELL BUT EXISTENCE WITHOUT LIFE?

Soon after I woke up (hours, weeks, months later), I started my search for Death.

There was nothing purposeful about it. I threw myself off of any cliffs I came across. Didn’t eat for ages, until it was the only reminder left of my being human. Dove underwater and hid in a rotten cave. I begged and begged: Let me go. Take me, please.

In the end, I didn’t find Death. Death came to me.

YOU’RE STILL HERE, Death said.

“Yes,” I said, hair sopping wet and the clothes on my back sticking to my skin.

I DIDN’T REALIZE.

“You didn’t realize?”

This time, Death sounded disgruntled. I’VE HAD MANY DEMAND ENTRANCE. MORE THAN I AM USED TO. YOU MUST FORGIVE ME FOR MISSING ONE PERSON.

The words sent a pang through me. It was obvious, by then, that there were hardly any living beings left on Earth, but the plain way in which Death spoke still stung. “Alright,” I said. “Well, now that you know. Could we get this over with?”

HM.

Death reached over, a skeletal hand wrapping around my wrist. There was a flash—my life, all of it, sprinted past me in vivid colors. I was five, thirteen, twenty-one. I was weightless and teaching myself how to be an anchor all at once.

There, I thought. Finally.

Then it stopped.

I opened my eyes. The skies were blackened. The ground beneath my feet were cracked open.

Death lifted their hand off of me. I…CANNOT. IT SEEMS YOU ARE NOT MINE TO TAKE.

There is a fantasy I have. I am seventeen, even though seventeen is an awful age to be. I’m on the bus, on the way back home after a day at school. An old song plays through my headphones, the one my father sings badly whenever he walks through the front door.

Sunlight streams in through the windows. In front of me is a girl carrying two bags of groceries with one hand. The golden light strikes her at an angle and she glows and my breath catches. There is something about it, falling in love with a stranger.

The world is alight with noise. Voices overlapping one another. My heart thumps to the rhythm of living.

The skies will clear one day. The sun will shine again. The stars will form the same constellations my mother used to draw with her finger against my back.

It must, is what I mean.

One day, the first seed will sprout from the soil. And I will celebrate, dance around it like a child. There will be insects crawling about, and later there will be larger animals. And even later—humans. So it’ll take centuries. I am a master in waiting.

If not for this hope, why have I been kept alive? There has to be a reason. It has to be a matter of design, not a flaw.

YOU ARE AFRAID, Death summarizes.

“Well—yes, I am,” I reply. Who wouldn’t be? To be alive is to be alone is to be an open wound, festering and a million years too old.

When I was a child pretending to be a vampire, I had thought that immortality would be a wonderful thing. You could watch the world change before your eyes. Everything in the palm of your hands. I suppose some things are only romantic as a myth.

Now, I am old and tired and ready to be unmade.

WHAT POINT IS THERE TO FEAR?

“What point is there to anything?” I ask. “I’ve got nothing left. And it’s a terrible thing to have only yourself when you’re all emptied out, isn’t it?

A contemplative pause.

I WOULDN’T KNOW.

“I suppose you wouldn’t. You’ve got a kingdom to run, at least.”

YES, Death says, I HAVE THAT.

I hesitate for a long moment, then say, quietly, “I don’t know how long I can do this, you know.”

IT DOESN’T MATTER WHAT YOU KNOW, Death says. IN THE END, YOU WILL OUTLIVE ME. YOU WILL FIND OUT.

“Outlive you? How could I possibly outlive you?”

Death’s eyes—a shapeless, dark abyss—bore into mine. In them, nothing exists. His kingdom resides within. After all this time, I still long for it. Human desperation, right? To want despite all odds. Death hasn’t been able to take me home and yet I continue knocking at the door.

(Will you try, I say. Will you continue trying? Will you continue looking for the right key to let me in?)

How many centuries pass as we stare into each other? Time moves like molasses, like lightning. Like an asteroid crashing down and leaving me nothing.

LIKE THIS, Death tells me, solemnly.

Then, as if they were never here, Death fades away.

I close my eyes. It’s been so terribly long: I don’t know what my sister sounded like, how heavy my mother’s footsteps were. What song my father used to sing when he came back home. What my home looked like. Were there red walls? A white gate? Questions I have no answer to.

All of it: gone.

You are absolutely immortal and indestructible, but the universe isn’t, and that horrifies you

#hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm feel like the pacing is so strange #my writing

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entropymp4 · 4 years ago

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That’s not Mark.

Real Mark’s face is sharper, leaner, brighter. I know this. I have memorized this. This Mark—because it’s the name sewn onto his bag and he’s sitting where Real Mark should be sitting—has a fuller face, lighter eyes. They’re colder too.

“Hey,” he says. Doesn’t even look up as I stand in front of him. “You need something?”

It’s the way he enunciates. It’s too clean, the syllables partitioned off from one another when they should be slurred. It’s so standard. He doesn’t, at all, sound like the boy who taught me how to do a proper push-up in gym class two years ago.

I shrug. “No. Yeah. What are you doing?”

“Reading.” He glances up at me. “Is that all?”

No, of course not. You’re not Mark. This isn’t your desk. This isn’t your life. How dare you. Mark hates this book because he thinks the ending is too sad. Mark isn’t my friend but he’s nice and he talks like there’s a joke right at the tip of his tongue and he’s rushing to get to it.

But what can I say?

The school bell rings. It sounds like a warning. An omen.

“Yes,” I bite out. “I was just wondering.”

I take a step back, commit this new Mark to memory (soft jaw, blue eyes, a mole below his right eye), then start walking to the back of the class. The faces of strangers turn to watch me. Kelsey, Sheryl, Louis. I don’t know a single one of them.

It was Ava first.

I didn’t know her, not really. I knew that she sat at the front of the class, that her wardrobe was pretty much filled with shirts that had science puns printed on them, and when someone asked her about it she would laugh.

At the end of the day, she would go to the library and sit at the table by the window. I knew because after a while, I started to do the same. I had never been an enthusiastic student and Lilian always rolled her eyes when I made excuses: the assignment is due soon, I’m behind, I don’t get this chapter. Nevermind that Lilian was the smartest person I knew and she would tutor me if I had asked.

Our conversations were short, mostly about how cold the air was or whether she could lend me a pencil. They lasted five minutes, at most. Still, five minutes that I treasured.

The rest of the time I spent hunched over my notes and every once in a while, I would find myself looking at her. With the sunlight filtering in through the window, her hair seemed almost blue. And she had this habit of chewing on the end of her pen when she was concentrating. It would have frustrated me in anyone else. On her, it was just endearing.

I tried my best not to stare—I didn’t know why I did, anyway. Something about her screamed at me. The moment I stepped into her bubble, the world slowed down a little.

Sometimes I didn’t look away fast enough and she would catch my eye, and it would be like—gravity. The corner of her lips would quirk up as if we were both in on a joke. I wanted to ask her what was so funny. I wanted to laugh too.

I didn’t get the chance to.

There were no warning signs, only the last words she spoke to me that echo in my head still: I have something to tell you. She asked to meet me at the park, at the bench right beside the pond, in the middle of the night. Shy, almost. Sweet.

She never came.

On Monday, Ava had blond hair and she wore a summer dress. Perfect for the weather, she said. When she smiled, you could see her dimples. What lovely weather!

I hold onto my weekends now. On Saturdays, I run through a list of names. I sketch them out in my head. Lilian with freckles on her cheeks and too-long fingernails because she thought it sounded cool against her keyboard. Joshua with a staccato laugh. Ava with hair the colour of midnight and a truly shit fashion sense.

On Sundays, I clasp my hands together and pray that I know every single person in that classroom.

On Mondays,

Well.

A dream, a memory, the last time I saw the real Lilian, the original girl—

“Do you remember that old thing? That old quote about your cells?”

We are laying on the grass and there’s probably an ant crawling over my leg. I kind of want to kick it off, but I don’t want to move and something tells me Lilian doesn’t want to be interrupted. “What quote?”

“You know,” she says. “The body must change. Or something. Your cells have a finite lifespan.”

I hum. “Yeah, sure.”

“So they die. They get destroyed and replaced, slowly. By new cells. So your body works better. Something like that.”

I have no idea where she’s going with this. I’m tired. I don’t want to walk in circles to figure shit out. It’s been a week since Ava became Not-Ava and no one seems to notice, not even Lilian. A cryptic message is the last thing I’m looking for.

“Is this a science lesson?”

Lilian ignores the harshness of it and presses her fingers to the inside of my wrist. There’s a crookedness to her thumb from when we wrestled in the mud and I accidentally pushed her too hard and she fell sideways. A bump. A reminder that I’ve dented her.

“No,” she says, voice even. “Liv. Listen to me. Your cells get replaced, right? So there will be one day when you’re just not the same anymore. Seven to ten years later, you’re a completely different person. New.” She frowns. “Well, kind of. About there. This is a little more romantic.”

Her tongue darts out to wet her lips. “So what I’m saying is that your body isn’t the same. The body isn’t really the same. Because we have to—we have to become better. That’s how it is, right? We become good so we can live for a long, long time. And it doesn’t matter as long as the body is fine.”

I sit up. Lilian is staring back at me when I say, “What are you talking about?”

A pause. Her fingers spread out and wrap around my wrist. She pushes herself up and pulls my hand to her chest.

“You’re my best friend,” she whispers. “I don’t know what else to talk about.”

Lilian becomes Not-Lilian. Life goes on.

“Do you remember when we were, like, eight?”

Not-Lilian hums. I take this as a sign to continue. “We used to play-fight all the time. Do you remember?”

“Yes,” she says, watching me carefully, “I do, actually. My memory’s not that bad.”

“And there was that time back in July and we were all so muddy and I slipped—”

“And you pushed me down,” she finishes. “For an eight year old, you sure were strong.”

“I wasn’t. You were just really, really weak.”

She doesn’t roll her eyes like my Lilian would. She chuckles and says, “Maybe.”

I don’t know what comes over me. I had given up after multiple rejections, after my parents told me to calm down and think things through, after my classmates shared uneasy looks and said, No difference to me.

The dream, memory, whatever washes over me. Because we have to become better.

“I broke your thumb.” Before she can hide it away, I grab her hand. It’s smooth. It was one of the things I got stuck on the first time I met her: that there was no bump on her finger. “It looks completely unbroken now.”

“It healed, I guess.”

“After all those years, it healed overnight.”

She lifts her chin. “Funny, isn’t it?”

Laughter bubbles up. “Hilarious,” I reply, and then I’m cackling. I hate her. She’s my best friend. She’s a poor imitation of my friend. What kind of—it healed overnight. She could have done better, answered better. Anything else would have been better.

The air in the room is thick. She laughs too because there’s nothing else to do. We laugh and we laugh and we laugh. The room is heavy with it.

It’s five in the evening and the sun is setting. The shadows elongate. We roll around, laughing, like this is the funniest thing we’ve both heard our whole lives.

Then I snap forward; my hands close around her shoulders and I push her to the ground.

“I know you’re not her.” I’m screaming, I think. I think I’m screaming. “Who are you? I know you’re not my Lilian, I know you’re a fake. I know, I know, I know.”

Somehow, she manages to pierce through it. “I’m Lilian! I am Lilian! Ask anyone.”

Everyone would agree. But I’m not everyone and I’m getting sick of what everyone thinks.

“But you’re not her.” It sounds accusatory. It is an accusation. I’m the only one out of the loop. “You don’t act the least bit like her. You aren’t the Lilian I grew up with, are you?”

She struggles against me and I press on. “Come on, you can’t keep up with her. You can’t keep up with me. You can’t even lie. What, they don’t teach you improv where you’re from? Who do you take me for? Fucking—”

“You think this is easy?”

The words come out snarling. Her eyes are wild, and she scratches against the floor. “You think it’s so easy being me and being around you. You don’t think, you never do. It’s not my fault my thumb wasn’t broken. That’s on them, not me. My name is Lilian, I am Lilian, I was made to be Lilian—”

She pauses to take a breath.

It takes a moment for it to sink in. She deflates, and I nearly topple over.

“No,” she says. “No, no, no. Wait, I—I don’t want to be reset.”

“What are you doing? What’s going on?”

“I haven’t been here long enough, please, it’s not my time yet, it’s not my time.”

Her face is frozen in horror and she stumbles over herself, repeating the same thing, and she doesn’t listen to me. Calm down, I try to tell her and she doesn’t calm down. She’s stopped fighting me a long time ago.

“I haven’t been here long enough,” she pleads, “it’s not my time yet.”

It takes me a moment before I realize: she’s not talking to me. Her gaze is fixed somewhere over my shoulder. In my bedroom, where I see only me and her, she’s looking at someone else.

Monday comes and someone is at Lilian’s seat. Not the original Lilian. Not the Lilian who’s been accompanying me for the past six months either.

She sees me come in. “Olivia,” she greets. Her voice is softer. It’s hard not to make comparisons, but against who I am not sure.

I nod. What can I say? Her name tastes like ashes in my mouth. “Lilian.”

Not-Ava doesn’t go to the library but here she is. Her hair is golden under the afternoon light and the pink of her dress glows and she’s not the same but for a moment, I think—it’s her. Ava. She’s back and this has all been a horrible dream. She’s back and I’ll go down to the park in the middle of the night and she’ll be there.

The light shifts.

“Hi.” Her dimples are showing. “You left your book in class.”

“Right. Thanks.”

She presses the book into my hands. “We only have a day before the big test, so—” Not-Ava laughs, a tinkling sound “—you should read it carefully. In case you miss something out.”

“Right.” I swallow thickly. She hasn’t spoken to me since she arrived all those months back. This is no coincidence.

The smell of lavender lingers after she leaves. I flip through the pages one by one, scanning through paragraphs upon paragraphs about musical theory, things I don’t understand and oh,

Right there, scribbled in black ink: 12 a.m. School storage room.

The storage room is dark and cramped and it smells like gym equipment. I can barely fit myself in. Not-Ava’s got her eyes somewhere behind me, watching something watch her.

“It’ll be you this time,” she says in lieu of a greeting. “If you want to talk, then it’ll be you this time.”

“I don’t care.”

I really don’t. I don’t think anything could be worse than this, where I remember and no one else does, and it feels like I’m the stranger.

She raises a trembling hand and tucks her hair behind her ear. Smiles. “I thought you would know. Or at least I thought you’d have figured it out by now. It’s kind of an open secret.”

“What is?”

There’s a sinking thing in my chest. Seven to ten years later, you’re a completely different person. Something like that. Something close. The pieces are falling into place. She didn’t want to be reset but the Lilian I walk home with is brand new.

“Nobody’s perfect. Things have to change. When a mistake is made, you have to right it, don’t you? And if you don’t change quickly enough…”

It leaves my lips before I can process it. “You get replaced.”

Her eyes widen. “Oh,” she says. “You do get it.”

“No, I—It was my fault. Lilian was my fault. The new one. The middle one, whatever.” Once I start, I cannot stop. It spills out of me, this confession. “I forced it out of her. I made her tell me. I tripped her up, she wouldn’t have otherwise, she would have been fine if not for me. It was me.”

She puts a hand on my arm. Ava—the real Ava—never did that. The most contact we had was the brushing of our hands when she handed me a pen.

“It’s okay. People have been taken for less. There’s so many reasons not to want someone in. They didn’t like Mark because he was too soft. He wanted to be a preschool teacher, I remember.”

He did. He would have been great at it. Even when teaching a sixteen year old how to get through gym class, he was sweet.

“He was smart, though.” She draws circles on my palm. “He had all these tutors too. He could have gotten all those scholarships. It would have been such a waste, the way he was going. Such a waste.”

I shake my head. “Would it really? Wouldn’t he have been happy?”

“But that’s not how it’s supposed to go.”

“And Lilian—”

“I think,” Not-Ava interrupts me, “she guessed that you could run. She was trying to give you a heads-up because she had to go. She wanted more than she should.”

I can taste iron on my tongue. It’s not fair. So Mark wanted too little and Lilian too much. And that’s it. That’s what did them in.

“There’s no use, you know, running. It makes things worse. They get mean about it. They get so mean.” She leans back on the door. “It’s best to go easy. If you’re the one who’s made a mistake, why fight back?”

“So why are you here?” I pull my hand back and stuff it into my pocket. “You aren’t supposed to be, right? You’re making a mistake.”

Not-Ava blinks and stares at her empty hand. It’s shaking. She doesn’t speak for a long while and we stand there, listening to the crickets sing. The rustling of leaves outside. A quiet meow from the school cat.

There’s a voice at the back of my mind telling me that this is my last night. Probably, it is hers too. I drown in it, the sound of living in this world before I am crumpled up and torn away.

Finally, she takes a deep breath and looks back up at me.

“No, I’m not supposed to be. But I’ll go easy. I don’t know. Maybe it’s a genetic predisposition. All of us that were made in Ava’s name,” she says. It’s almost a joke; the corner of her lips quirk up. “Or maybe when you learn someone, you become part them, and what they love you cannot help but love too.”

My mouth is dry. I scrape the words out from the bottom of my throat. “She didn’t love me. She barely knew me.”

Not-Ava sighs. “She wanted to. That’s enough.”

They come into my room on Sunday.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” is what I say but I don’t try to run. There’s nowhere to go.

The man in white, he pats me on the back. “I tried, I really did. We’re old friends, your parents and I, and I tried to overlook it but hey,” he shrugs, “there’s nothing I can do.”

The worst part is that he looks sorry. There’s nothing he can do, so he’ll drag me off—where, I don’t know, and Not-Ava doesn’t either—and put in place someone better. There will be someone who doesn’t push or ask questions or long for old friends who can’t come back.

They put a needle to my neck. There’s a prickling sensation and everything goes to black.

I wake up and it is quiet. There’s a whiteboard in front of me. On it is my name: Olivia Tanner (FIRST). My wrongdoings are organized into a neat list and underneath it, in red ink: RESET.

A shuffling sound tears my attention away, and then I’m looking at a screen. I lean forward, and my heart is stuttering because,

In it: a girl with dark hair and darker eyes. She looks into the mirror like she is looking at a stranger. “My name,” she says, like rehearsing the lines of a play, “is Olivia Tanner. Olivia. Liv for short.”

No, it’s not, I want to say. I’m here. The words are stuck in my throat; I watch her leave the room—my room—and walk down to the kitchen. She’s too stiff. I hate wearing sleeveless shirts and I only have one in my wardrobe and that’s the one she’s wearing.

“Liv!” Mom runs her fingers through the girl’s hair and presses a kiss to her temple. “Are you feeling any better?”

It takes a second. A part of me is vindicated: she’s not that good of an actor, after all. She’s not a good replacement. She’s playing catch-up.

Not that it matters. She’s the one there and I’m the one here. The body is fine.

The new Olivia smiles. “I am. I’m all good now.”

Every week, a random student in your class is replaced by someone with the same name, but a totally different personality and physical appearance. Yet, their memory is eerily intact, and no one else seems to notice except you.

#i like trying!#i know this is from like....days ago #warm ups!#my writing

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