By Ouanessa Nana
The shaft was missing.
Someone clears their throat. I still don’t move.
“Don’t mind me,” He says, his voice a gentle rumble as he places his hand on my shoulder to get past me.
Dewey Lincoln, the body of a spear, a chiseled torso you could cut your skin on grinned at me and I blushed, suddenly flustered and egocentric. I rolled my eyes at him, wrapping my jacket tighter around myself and averting my gaze towards the problem at hand.
The empty vertical space was a mallet gorget, a gullet of ringing sirens. People narrowed the vessels, retching out their traumas, throttling rasped tumors. A woman wearing fraying black knee pads hobbles towards me, her feet barely touching the ground. I hear the sound of stifled tears down the hall as someone scratches the other side of the fingernails, begging to be let out.
“Aldea,” She says, the words firm and harsh as if she has the authority to make me listen to her. She is no one. I lost my parents long ago.
Seventy-five steps. That was the amount of wood, concrete, metal, and stone that was separating me from getting to work.
She shoves me a little and I resist the urge to congest the buildup of clenching along my chest.
Her breath bursts and the blockage of words snaps back at me. “Don’t you remember me?”
“They said on the radio that the rapping has a weakness, that the blender can be broken, switched,”
I sighed. Clandestine chronology. It has spread. This lie. She must not be the only one who knows if she came all the way down here from the fiftieth floor with bruising, gnawing knees to tell me.
“You know we must wait for the signal,” I tell her, with pretty eyes and a gentle smile.
It works. She nods and drags herself back to her room.
Dewey returns with his charismatic snide and leer and glowing viridescent eyes. He shoves his hands into his pockets, his gaze into me a bundle of warmth.
Would I survive leaving him?
Hurdles of water glint and flare, the oceanic blue, whipping and whisking. I remember how soft the milky foam was when it tore away at your fingers and I also remember how hard it ached when he rippled underneath the waves.
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