
Eleanor stepped down from the light gray bus. She clutched the worn nahk kott tightly—no, her leather bag—letting the thick straps turn her knuckles white. It was old and restitched; older than she was, made 40 years ago, before World War II forced most fleeing migrants like her to abandon them. Her bag held the only possessions she could take: a bus ticket, a hastily scribbled address, and a thin, silver necklace that glinted in whatever light it was given. The necklace was too precious to wear.
The place smelled like nothing.
Rows and rows of faded white houses stretched out forever under an unrelentingly gray sky as she took in her new life. Somewhere along this street was an address she would call a home. She had imagined it to be a haven, a sanctuary from the troubles that had plagued her. Now that she was here, however, this place looked more like a prison than anything else, the dreary picket fences stretching on like the bars on hundreds of clean, gray cells that rattled in the wind.
She was free now.
One of these houses would keep her inside, giving safety and comfort until her dying days. She could sit on the porch, sipping watered-down tea and staring for hours at the endless void of gray concrete and grass. She would sit there, year after year, with nothing to trouble her and nothing to put her in danger. The house would cradle her, keeping her functioning on that porch. Her last whispered breath would be drawn out of her without a single other soul around, pulled out of her body and becoming part of the eternal curtain of light gray clouds above her.
“I’m going to die like they did,” she thought.
A panicked rejection of her ending entered her mind, but the gray blanket of concrete muffled her thoughts to a dull whisper. She scanned her eyes back and forth, trying to gain her bearings and take in her surroundings, but the endless empty houses lulled her into a trance. She tried to clutch her leather bag as a harness to the person she remembered, but found her hands to be uncooperative. The articulation was there, but her body wasn’t quite doing what she expected. It occurred to her that perhaps there ought to be other people living here, that surely an endless neighborhood like this ought to exist for a reason. Logic was not something she could articulate either. That would require thinking, and she didn’t feel like doing that right now. In fact, she didn’t feel like doing much of anything.
Her eyes hazily checked the numbers, eventually landing on her address. That was the house that she would belong to. Not that it really seemed to matter. All of the houses were the same. All she could see was gray, stretching out to the limits of her sight. The clouds, the road, the houses, the grass.
Her mouth was dry and coarse now, the texture of sandpaper. She tried lifting a foot to make her way over, but it didn’t want to move. She tried again, putting a little more effort into it this time, and the foot moved forward just a bit. Moving forward just seemed more trouble than it was worth right now. She had already been through so much. Surely she deserved a short, never-ending rest.
Her body sat down in the middle of the road. It was more comfortable than standing anyway.
She’d always liked it here.
Nothing ever had to change.
She never had to do anything.
She’d never have to go anywhere, not ever again.
Why bother?
Her body went limp and crumpled. She hadn’t told it to do that, it just … happened. She was lying on the cold street now, staring up into the sky of gently frothing gray. A never-ending gray sky to compliment the never-ending gray street. She stared up, searching the featureless clouds for … something. She wasn’t sure what, and she didn’t really care. The gray of the clouds began to seep into her, turning her senses and her mind into the same dull gray.
She been here for years already.
That couldn’t be right. She’d just gotten off the bus. She’d just been on her way to the house. The house that she would belong to, in the neighborhood that she would belong to, in the town that she would belong to. She barely managed to raise a hand. Her arm had changed; what was already a bit on the scrawny side had atrophied to the point of being unrecognizable. Her eyes widened, cracking from the dust and dirt caked around them. Her mouth tasted like mud that had had all its moisture viciously sucked out, leaving behind an empty, cracked flat. The clouds had darkened, threatening to consume her in their gaping maw, enticing her into the dreamless sleep of death. It was getting so cold.
The sun escaped through the clouds in a flash of fresh light. She sat up suddenly, more suddenly than she could remember ever doing, and looked down at herself. The leather straps dug into her shoulder painfully. She tried to lift her shirt only to have it fall away in her hands, revealing a stomach, sunken in and emaciated. Her mind was stuck in that same thick gray haze. She tried to count. She counted each rib, bony and dry. The body she saw disgusted her. Was it right to call it hers? She couldn’t remember who she started as anymore. This form, mummified and thin, was nothing like what she remembered existing in. How long had it been?
A thought began to take hold in her head. The thought had always been there, hadn’t it? She’d ignored it for so long that she had mostly forgotten. Something had managed to pierce her head, a painful moment of clarity that had been buried. A bright, inevitable reality.
This place would never let her go.
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