Unbelong - short story

[great]

Unbelong

Doubtless no one will believe me now. I am now, quite definitely, old. Eighty-two, in fact. I feel death coming. I do not fear it, but while I still have the strength to hold a pen, I will write my story of how I became blind when I was forty-six years old. When I am gone, they will find this paper. I have no possessions; I have no will. If a kind person finds this, they will keep it to pass on through the generations until it becomes little more than a legend.



When the phone rang that Thursday, I wasn’t intending to answer it. I lay in bed at noon in my pajamas, sick. I had already called work, letting my manager know that I wouldn’t be coming in. I was looking forward to a long day sleeping. And when the phone rang, I woke up. I’d forgotten to hook it up by my bed the night before so it’d be easier to reach, and now it was in the kitchen in its practical spot by the calendar.

The phone rang a second time, and I supposed I’d better answer it. I groaned and stumbled out of bed. At least the kitchen wasn’t too far away from the bedroom – one good thing about this small apartment.

Who could it be.. I thought as it rang a third time. My spirits brightened as I thought it might be Romeo. What a romantic name – Romeo. Sometimes I almost believed that the soul mate of my dreams for the past year and a half was Shakespeare’s character come to life. Had he heard I was sick? Was he calling to let me know he’d be coming over with flowers and hot soup?

A fourth insistent ring. I grabbed the phone off the hook and attempted a “hello” in my cute-but-exhausted voice, trying to sound sick and pretty at the same time.

“Tyla?”

Drat.

“Hey.” I said it as unenthusiastically as I could, but Elect never could take a hint.

“Tyla, I need to talk to you.” Her voice was urgent.

“I’m listening,” I said curtly. Unsympathetically. I was irritated at my lack of immediate conversation with Romeo.

Elect hesitated. I could tell she wanted me to invite her over – perhaps have a talk over cookies and tea – but the house was a wreck and I didn’t really care for company. I could tell that Elect thought me terribly rude. She had always told me so (jokingly, I thought), but I didn’t care.

“Tyla, they’re coming for me.” Her voice was tight, as if she were attempting control over tears.

I sighed. Elect always seemed to assume I knew what she was talking about but most of the time I didn’t. “Who’s coming for you?” I asked.

“Or it.”

“What are you talking about?”

She sighed – a long, shaky sigh, and was silent.

She’d always come to me in her fits of hysteria. She lived, alone, in the apartment building below mine. I thought she was a bit crazy, but harmless. Too irritating to be called a friend, and I never knew what to say to her, but for some reason she always called me whenever she needed someone to talk to.

I gave in to my conscience. “Elect? Do you want to come over?”

Her wall fell down, and she sobbed a broken “yes” before hanging up.

I sat at my kitchen table, pressing my fingers to my temples. I hoped I wasn’t getting a headache. I always got really bad headaches. Migraines, too. Maybe I was getting a migraine. Maybe I should go to the doctor.

I heard Elect’s feet pounding on the stairs, then she knocked. As I headed for the door, she knocked again, then hit the doorbell repeatedly. Frantically. The moment I opened it, she sailed in like a nervous hen and slammed it shut behind her.

Her face was full of pain. A small stab of fear shook my spine. She had come to me like this often, but this time felt different somehow. The atmosphere seemed dry; unreal. The void of silence after the door slam seemed evil in a way. A strange quality was in the air, and I hated it subconsciously. I didn’t really think about it, but things seemed eerie. Whatever it was, it furthered my irritation.

Elect had always been strange, known by everyone in the Everglade Apartment complex as eccentric. She had a strange name, strange habits, and a strange, haunting voice. I had dealt with her oddities more than anyone else, and her behavior today was reflective of incidents that had occured every few months or so for the past two years I’d known her. During these fits of hysteria, she never made sense. It was like she was speaking in another language. Maybe she was; in fact, I wouldn’t have been surprised. I had ceased being surprised by her.

We stood there, watching each other. Her breath came out in hard gasps. I waved toward a chair, and she sat down.

She spoke after regaining her breath. “They’re coming.”

“So you said on the phone,” I replied evenly. “Look, Elect, I’m not feeling the greatest. Just let me know what’s going on, and we’ll –”

“Tyla!” she interrupted. “This is different than the other times. I have to tell you who I am.”

“Er, okay.” I thought I might as well play along. Anything to get rid of her sooner, anything to be back in bed with tea and aspirin.

“You’ve seen my room. My house. And all the candles.”

I certainly had. Elect’s candles were more of an obsession than a collection. They littered every available surface. She never blew them out. All day, every day (and perhaps all night too – no one ever knew) she would walk through her house, inspecting each one in turn, and making sure they didn’t go out. If the wax grew low in one, she would replace it. She must have had several hundred burning constantly.

Once one of the neighbors held a birthday party for her. The neighbor was Mrs. Gaff. She was a kind lady, everybody’s grandmother, who delivered cookies on Christmas and babysat children when their mothers had to go to the doctor. I think Mrs. Gaff cared more for Elect than I did – calling her “Ellie” and letting her know when candles were on sale somewhere. No one really knew Elect’s birthday, but Mrs. Gaff thought she might be lonely because she didn’t seem to have any friends, and so we threw a party for her.

The apartment complex was right on the very edge of the city, facing green hills with intermittent trees – for some reason, the land just outside this part of the city was never developed. It was drizzling that day and Mrs. Gaff had wanted to have the party outdoors. She was so upset that she’d have to cancel, but then we rented a big tent and had it outside anyway, with the barbecue and all. It didn’t matter to Elect. She loved the rain. We all got her candles. She was giddy with delight, exclaiming over and over how pretty they were. The people at the party were half afraid of her, I think. Some stayed away from her as if she had the plague; others treated her with a motherly, sympathetic kindness, as if she were a little child or someone with a mental disease. Both types irritated me.

She had first moved in about two years ago. Elect was probably in her mid-30s and looking great for it. I was forty-six, an old maid, and looking pretty bad for it. I remember watching the moving van out my kitchen window, watching them unload crates and crates of candles, and thinking, just my luck to be neighbor to a psycho. Turned out she wasn’t really insane – or maybe I was somehow numb to insanity. She knocked on my door the next day. When I opened it, she was a sight. Hair sticking up in random directions, a huge grin on her face, she informed that she wanted to be my friend. I reluctantly agreed and gave her my phone number.

On the whole, it wasn’t that bad. As Elect’s best friend, I had gained a status among the occupants of the apartments as an extremely nice, caring person. I wasn’t, but because I gave the impression that I cared about her, I guess they thought I was friendly, and as a result I made other friends.

Elect’s doleful voice broke into my reminiscing.

“Today they all went out.”

“Your candles?”

“Yes.”

“Oh..” I was at a loss. “Um, I’m sorry..”

“No! This is good!” she insisted eagerly, but tears ran down her face, into her dimples, and down her chin, dripping onto my expensive carpet.

I blinked.

She stood up and grabbed my arm. “Tyla, I’m not from around here. I’m sorry. It’s been so long, and you’ve been so good to me..”

I spoke logically and calmly, hoping my attitude would have a positive effect on her. “If you’re not from around here, where are you from?”

She didn’t answer. I started to get impatient. “You said earlier that you were going to tell me who you were. So, out with it. Who are you?”

It was strange asking the question of someone I had known for two years. For some reason, asking her who she was made me feel as if I ought to know. Maybe she’d cast a spell on me.

If she was offended by my rudeness, she didn’t show it. She looked up, her eyes glistening with tears, yet strangely peaceful now.

“My name,” she whispered.

“Elect,” I said, puzzled.

“Yes. Elect. I was chosen for this. To come here just for this. To learn your ways and report back – in two years. Me. I was chosen from trillions, and they named me Elect.” She had a faraway look in her eyes.

I took a breath, then shrugged away my worries. I didn’t like this. She usually didn’t talk like this. I was unnerved but I didn’t let it show. This, too, would pass – just like all the other times she had come to me, crying and babbling incoherently.

“I’m not from here!” She pointed out the window at the sky. “There, up there! You see? I live up there. Now I have to go back. My fire has gone, and it must take me with it.”

 

[great]

She was scaring me. “Elect –”

“My name isn’t Elect.”

“You just said it was.”

“It isn’t.”

I sighed heavily. Again, she seemed to assume I understood. Or perhaps she was just waiting for me to ask. There didn’t really seem to be anything else to do besides ask, so I did, spitting out each word with staccato force. “What is your name?”

“Aret.” She said it with the doom of a sledgehammer. I felt that I should make some comment about what a nice and unique name it was, but it didn’t seem appropriate now. I had always hated it when people made comments like that about my name anyway.

The air itself seemed to be in suspense. The silence didn’t ring as profound silence usually does. It was creepy.

“Okay, Aret, tell you what. We’ll go down to you room. We’ll light all the candles again, and everything will be okay. Okay?”

“No, Tyla! I have to go. They’re coming for me. Or it. I don’t know yet. I just came to tell you the truth, and goodbye. You have been so kind, the only friend I ever –”

My window blew open, letting in a gust of warm wind. I ran to close it, and when I returned, her face was white.

“I’ve put you in danger,” she said apologetically. “Come outside. You will watch me go, and no one else will see but you. Come now.” She led me to the doorway and down the steps, facing the canvas of grass. About thirty feet from the apartments, the grass was not mowed, and it grew long and wild. The wind made it flat and rather shiny, almost wet looking, but the sky was blue and the air was warm.

We squinted out at the view. It appeared that a thin orange line was flickering all along the horizon. The sky above the orange line seemed a darker blue than usual; in fact, I wasn’t sure it was blue over there at all. Even as I watched, the orange line became thicker. Whatever it was, it was clearly growing, or advancing.

“What is it?” I whispered, barely more than a thought, but Elect, or Aret, somehow heard me anyway.

“It’s fire for me. All my candle fires ever – together. My fire. Me going home.”

My brow furrowed. It certainly looked like fire.

“Aret,” I said, feeling foolish, as if I were talking to a baby. “Will your fire take me home too?”

“No.”

“Will it hurt me?”

“No. Once it has taken me, it will go,” Aret said with decision in her voice, and for some reason I believed her and relaxed.

“I should have known you wouldn’t understand,” she murmured, but not accusingly. She looked at me, and in that look she seemed like a very old person who has experienced thousands of years of pain condensed into a lifetime. “I will miss you, Tyla.” She smiled. Her tears had stopped altogether now, and her face seemed beautiful in a strange way. She was very petite, but now she seemed like the strongest person I had ever seen.

In the distance, I could see now that the orange streak was quite definitely fire, and approaching rapidly. Above it, a layer of smoke dissolved into the atmosphere. The wind died down just a little, and the air grew warmer. I glanced behind me, worried that some tenant would see the fire and panic, and not understand that it wasn’t dangerous because Aret had said it wasn’t.

“I don’t want you to go,” I said to her suddenly. It was true. For all my aloofness she had wormed her way into my heart somehow, and I didn’t even realize it until she was about to leave. In that moment, she looked quite alien, and I half feared her. She stood and stared in my face for a few eternal seconds, and smiled gently. Then she was walking away from me, towards the monster.

It advanced – an impossible, screaming, mile high wall of fire. Blood-red circular whirls of flame boiled high into the sky, turned black, and became smoke. Strangely enough, I wasn’t afraid of the fire, and I wasn’t afraid for Aret. I didn’t even think it would hurt her. And if it did, I knew she’d be strong enough to take it. She seemed bent on her reasoning that this fire would take her home, wherever that was. I missed her already. I wanted to call her back, but my throat was unbearably dry; and even if I had, I don’t think she’d have come anyway. It was like she wanted to go.

I believed everything she had told me. I was seeing something I couldn’t believe, but somehow my mind accepted it. I felt drowsy, or drugged somehow. There was an odd quality in the air that seemed to numb my sensations. It smelled sweet and spicy. I could have been dreaming but for the heat, the smell of smoke, the roar of unnatural wind.If she feared the fire, she did not show it. She just kept walking toward it, with grace. She may have been smiling.

There was no way to tell how close the fire was. Trees seemed to shiver and melt like a mirage, and some were actually in the midst of the fire. They were still leafy green though, like Moses’ burning bush.

When I had first looked out, I’d only seen a small glow along the horizon – and now this! It must be moving dozens of miles per minute.

The air grew warmer, though not unbearable – more like a “scorcher” summer’s day. The great fire filled the air with smoke and my heart with sorrow. Still Aret walked. Her legs seemed to move slowly, but she was already at least half a mile away from me. I saw her stretch her arms out as if to embrace the flames. Tears ran down my face and evaporated on my hot skin before I could wipe them away.

As it came closer, the wind near me picked up harshly. Where she was, it nearly blew her backward. She knelt, covering her face from the heat, bowing to the impenetrable force about to consume her. I saw her hair aflame, and then I turned my face away and ran back up the stairs, into my apartment, and to the bathroom where I threw up. Then I lay on the floor and sobbed.

Twenty minutes later, I looked out my kitchen window. No fire. No burnt land. And no Aret. I went outside. There was a strong breeze, but it was cool. A soft rain began to fall, watering my red-rimmed eyes. I stared up at the hideous blue and white spotted sky. Clouds were moving in. It might turn into a storm. Fire for Aret, then rain for Aret. I turned until I found the sun still shining. The sun. Was that where Aret lived? I couldn’t pull my eyes away from it. I stared and stared at it until I couldn’t see anything but it anymore. And when I looked away, I was blind.

Throughout these sightless years, I have not regretted my lost vision. Sometimes I imagine I saw her up there in the sun, her smile shining on me happily. I have not forgotten her face. Lovely and alien. She was a stranger in my land. I think often about her life, and how I may have affected it for better or worse. I wonder if, when she arrived back home, she was treated as a sort of celebrity. I wonder if she remembers me.

I assume I’d be the only one ever to deny that I dreamed all this, but even if this is the case, I don’t hold it against you, reader. If your mind cannot accept my story as true, then believe it to be false, but still pass it on to your children. Perhaps one day, Earth will have another visitor from the sun. Perhaps you are a visitor. Tell Aret I loved her.

I miss her tremendously. I’m not sure exactly why. Maybe it was the way she laughed when I explained jokes to her. Maybe it was the way she smiled at me as if I were the most special person in the world. Maybe I needed her to need me. Even though I loved her, I know she had to go back – back to her sun, back to her friends, and the life she interrupted for my sake, or so it seemed. She did not belong.

 

[great]

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