Grey Early Morning
By : Jericah
Helios
It was a grey morning after.
When she awoke, the stars were only
in her head and not in her window. The silence after the New Year’s Celebration
frightened her, as if she had grown all too used to merely 4 hours of endless
firecrackers. Sitting at the edge of her bed, looking out into the grey streaks
of morning, she thought endlessly of ways to bring back the noise from last
night. But the New Year comes only once in a while and she would have to wait a
year until she would be bombarded with noise and light and smoke and fire.
And fire.
Of all the things she will take with
her, it will be the fire. Light can be substituted, noise can be found
everywhere, and smoke is as easy as lighting up a stick of nicotine. But no,
the fire will burn low wherever she will go and she must take the fire along
with her to the distant shores of the unknown land.
A loud booming sound caught her off
guard and she jumped and when she landed, she wondered whether she had been
shot, if she had been lucky enough to have been shot. But when sense flooded
back a second later, she realized that it was just a leftover from last night’s
fireworks/firecracker display.
Looking at the clock which hung on
her peeling walls, it blinked back at her the fact that it was
Climbing into the bathroom, she
wondered about the futility of taking a bath. She had taken a bath before she
had climbed into bed a while ago, but her habit had been to take a bath right
after waking up. A habit she was willing to continue, her dreams left her
feeling soiled and grubby.
“Grubby, grubby, grubby” she said as
she scrubbed away at every inch of her body. The water was cold as it sprinkled
down in pseudo-rain on and about her but she hadn’t the heart to turn on the
heater. The small towel she used to scrub herself felt small and sad in her
hands and she wondered what ever caused it to be like that. With no further
thought, she finished taking a bath by taking the small blue pail half filled
with water and dumped it on her head.
On that moment, when all around her
head was an endless stream of water, she wondered if she would be able to drown
in the bathroom, by simply throwing water over her head repeatedly. The moment
passed and she could breathe again, shattering her hypothesis. She placed the
pail down and looked at it grimly. The only way she could drown herself in the
bathroom would be to shove her head down the pail full of water. She had a
vague memory of that, her head forcibly shoved down into a pail of water,
getting water into her lungs, begging for mercy. She shivered in the bathroom,
naked as the day she was born. It seemed to her that drowning like that was too
drawn out to be a suitable way to die. Besides, she loved the water, and would
not like it to be the instrument of her death.
Leaving her thoughts of death and
water behind her as she exited the bathroom, she shivered again, mostly because
she was only clad in a towel and water droplets. Drippingly
padding her way to her bedroom, she quickly dried herself and grabbed random
articles of clothing. She didn’t really care what she looked like when she was
just at home, who would see her indeed?
Climbing up the stairs and out into
the patio, she wondered again if it really was the New Year. There was no sense
of new or being born. Only a sense that something had ended, and that her
waiting time was shortening.
Looking around, she clambered up
unto the roof, slightly skidding on a few gunpowder smelling papers. Sitting
there, feeling like a lonely eagle in her nest, too far from the people to be
seen and wondered after, and too near to try to fly away, she hugged her knees
close to her and wondered if anyone was born during the time she awoke.
“Grubby, grubby, grubby” she said
again, but mostly because of the papers that had been strewn about her roof.
New Year’s celebration was messy business.
Watching the cloud float by, she
recognized faint streaks of morning sunlight peaking through and she realized
that her grey early morning was ending and was fading into a light morning.
“Goodbye” she said, waving to the
clouds. Carefully making her way down, she entered the house again and all that
could be heard, besides that of her bare feet against the wood, was that of her
soft voice repeating, “Grubby, grubby, grubby”
The End.