Deep from within their kitchen, the words rang, almost muted, but the both of them had stopped arguing to make sure they would hear them.
“Once again, the Sun rises…”
Once the sentence had been uttered, Alina swiftly turned off the radio and went back to piling up her papers in a somewhat ordered manner.
“Have they even done anything since then?”
“Why don’t you ask them.”
Alina glared at her without answering. Would naturally be hard to strike up a conversation when the recipient was face first stuck to their bed, their door wide open for anyone to see. But she had chosen that moment to spit her assumptions, there was no use for Avril to sugarcoat it. Before abruptly ending their conversation to find the comfort of their bed, they had proudly announced that their portfolio had somehow grown.
“They said… they’re probably the descendant of the Marrow Knight.”
Alina who had gone back to prepare her bag loudly scoffed.
“I let you read too much bullshit…”
“I would have agreed but do you really think it’s that far fetched? We’ve both seen the same thing.”
Alina faced her on their doorstep, sighing and meeting her eyes, despite her standing almost a head shorter.
“I told them as much, I don’t care to know, I’m heading to City Hall, you have somewhere to be too, I presume?”
Avril didn’t nod.
“As long as they keep playing around,” Alina continued, “It’s not like our lives are going to change, new Marrow Knight or not.”
“Save some cynicism for the rest of us!” Avril sung, waving her parent goodbye as Alina waved her hand dismissively, disappearing into the stairs.
Now left alone in the floor 3 hall, Avril’s eyes fell back on Raime. Even if she wasn’t right next to them, the eerie silence devoid of their usual snoring had made them panic for a second. Alina’s usual routine of complaints had distracted her from that feeling. Now she mentally weighed if she should pick up a stick and poke Raime with it to make sure they were still breathing. Instead, she chose to trust that dying face first in your bed after claiming to be the reincarnation of the last Knight wasn’t the kind of fate they all deserved. And on that hopeful note, Avril left the complex as well.
Out on the street, she found the couch blocking their neighboring complex’s entrance to still be stuck in place. Instead of displacing it, someone had found it to be a better idea to dig through it with a variety of tools, making for a warm but significantly smaller entrance. Following the ascent of the Sun, Avril made her way down the streets. Her fingers caressed the back of the tablet she used for her addresses and contacts. Contact was a big word, this list included a variety of cleaners which she knew more or less depending on how high they were on the list, and her mom. Raime would’ve been in there as well if they bothered with staying in touch literally ever but clearly that was a concept too far beneath them. It had pissed her off to no end, she would have rather preferred they had some big personal reason to not use these tablets but they never once bothered to make up a sound argument, just claiming they didn’t feel like it. This was such an incident that led her to have such a sad list they were scrolling through. Avril decided to page one of the cleaners she hadn’t drafted on her sleepless marathon a few days ago, she’d let some more time pass for them to have some even worse days and remember how well she treated them. Just as she received the lists, she sent them the address, the door and nothing more. They had their own code, they knew how to operate. People like Avril weren’t needed, they were set dressing, holding a ceremonial bow over a procedure that had lost most of its empathy, washed away by decades of perpetuation where most never thought they’d think of it again.
Whether the average person had to face this reality in their daily life didn’t change the fact that, every day, people did. A lot of them, especially in the Hull, ended up holing themselves in their rooms, the proof of their existence, and the depression left behind by their departure would go unnoticed by everyone if not for the Pillar of Life’s tireless work. Avril had met him more than once, the lists she inherited from City Hall were taken from his desk, apart of the never ending pile of supposed deaths and disappearances. He would never be able to look at them himself, as if forever trapped under the pagoda’s gilded halls. Van Kalkain was as bitter as you could imagine someone in his situation would be, but despite his age he had always strongly refused to give up his title, instead relying on those like Avril. In his words, “benevolent fools” was the apt term to describe them. Even if Avril hadn’t struck any deep friendship with her counterparts of other districts, she couldn’t imagine their own reasons for taking on the task to be deemed foolish. If it had been a deeply closeted term of endearment, Avril figured none of them would live long enough to be sure of it.
Right on cue, the Sun let its first rays pierce through the upper stratum, reaching the heart of the Hull. Side by side with the rest of the district, they all kept walking, facing the new day, not paying attention to the Sun and its capricious nature. With its design washing over them all, colors shifted, skins and cloth merging together in the infinite shades of gray. Avril was thankful she wasn’t alone to bear the flow of time this early in the day. All around her, like the people she was used to visiting, they had their own unfounded bitterness, their own childish obsessions, and all of the unique catharsis that living another day might bring. It didn’t matter if the air was rank with dust and sweat, if the dark waters rose one meter higher than last month, all of their steps echoed all around the Hull, forward and backward, upward and downward, the Sun had risen and they were all alive.
Straying further away from the heart, the crowd inevitably thinned, leaving her alone to finish the journey. Avril hadn’t needed to check the address again, following the steps she had taken only two days ago. Even if the nebulous state she had been in at that moment, the path felt natural to her. Guided by an invisible hand, she was back in the empty plaza, her eyes finding the bench she had slept on. One of her best naps she could remember, surprisingly, even if she had woken up incredibly disoriented. If working herself to exhaustion guaranteed a night of sleep this good, she could be tempted to go through the trouble again. Looking at the empty spot where Raime had sat, Avril wondered if the words she’d said then had the intended effect.
“Be careful then,” Avril said to herself.
She expected herself to keep going, finish what she didn’t say at the time, but her throat tightened. Her eyes shifted to the entrance of the building, its mosaics desperately trying to show off their colors, only surviving off of passing shadows. Inside the main hall, Avril looked for the door that had opened to guide her, but all of them were shut and she didn’t need to knock on any of them. The steps felt higher, the rise longer. “Whether you want it or not, you get used to it.” The words of her counterpart from the Fringes came back to her. Avril didn’t want to get used to it, but at this point she didn’t have a choice anyway.
Standing in front of the wooden door again, it felt like only minutes had passed since she was last here. There was noone to see her, nobody to cross her paths as she made her way through the building. What could she hear? She wanted someone to be her witness, someone to hold her hand. The door stood, silent, expecting. Avril pressed a hand on it, laying it there, not putting any force against it. Not yet. It was early enough that the hall lights hadn’t turned off, residual light from the Sun only starting to creep in. Had she heard something? From across the hall, from behind the door, from where the Sun shone, all answered in silence. Avril pushed the door open.
The interior of the apartment was modest, light on decorations, even lighter on furniture. Maybe it hadn’t been so forever, the walls and floors held little dust as if it had been thoroughly cleaned recently. Avril saw a window, tall and narrow, letting a small view of the plaza down below and another plaza, almost identical up above. This one being cursed with much more light made the apartment surprisingly bright despite the lack of any lamps. Beneath the window was a lone stool, which bore a piece of torn up paper. A message had been written on it, in crude cuneiform.
“I put the furniture in the back, all of it can be given away if needed. I’m in my bedroom. Thank you.”
The letter was poorly written, as if the author hadn’t used a hard pen in a long time. The strokes were clumsy, but carefully strung together. It must have taken him a while. In a striking dichotomy, at the bottom of the letter, he had signed his name. The signature looked so elegant it had to have been practiced so long the movement of his fingers must have never forgotten it. Avril folded the letter and slid it in her pocket. He had made an effort to spare some efforts for the cleaner and her. She looked around, finding a door, half opened, leading to a dark room where some chairs and tables were folded up, leaning against empty shelves. There were paintings, traces of dust left on the wall hadn’t made this a surprise. Avril doubted there were any originals, those picking from the Scavs haul were rarely picky. The paintings were of people, never lonely, always in a scene. They could’ve been depicting real events, or fictional stories, Avril would be none the wiser, yet she looked at all of them. All of them veered more towards realism, except one, even if ordered like the others. Its faces were blurred, as if washed away, the shapes of bodies and their movements melted together, making the scene unrecognizable. There wasn’t a single detail to hold onto, almost an eerie abstract parody of the rest of the paintings he had amassed. Inspecting the ornate frame, Avril could make out a number; “1899”. A signature, a title, or a date maybe, eight centuries in the future, or so far back in the past time coiled around itself.
Avril felt a buzz from her suit’s pocket, the cleaner was paging back, informing that they were closing in. Walking back to the front door, Avril searched the remaining rooms, finding an open bathroom, and finally a closed door. More often than not, she would have had to check. She would be the first one to see them like this, when noone else would. Her hand froze against the handle. The front door hadn’t been locked, but this one could. A bedroom like a closet, an attic, a bathroom. They would find a key to turn, they would close themselves off, no matter how well she spoke, how nice their conversations would be, how satisfied they sounded. Privacy, dignity, fear, loneliness. It all sounded so simple to explain, for her to make it sound as painless as possible, so that they would not spend their last moments lost within themselves. Had it ever worked like she wanted? Seeing them, dried tears against their cheeks, their hands clasped in prayer, skin stuck underneath their fingernails, Avril knew she could have done better. She could have said something more, empathized better with who they were and why they needed her. She kept going, no matter what, she kept going. Because here, she was the only one with her hand on that handle, before the cleaner would take him. Avril pressed against the handle, and the door opened slightly. Avril let go, not pushing it further, her own ragged breath the only noise echoing in the apartment.
She sat outside of the apartment, opposite of the door she had opened. From where she was, she could only see the traveling light of the window, making its way across the floor. She heard them work, it could have been hours or minutes she wouldn’t have been able to tell. Her eyes were dry where before, they wouldn’t have been. Whether she wanted to or not, a part of her had gotten used to it. She heard the wheels roll before she saw the gurney pass into the hallway. The cleaner clapped their hands together as Avril clumsily rose to their feet.
“You don’t see that often,” the cleaner sighed, putting back their bottles of product under the gurney, “One being as ordered on their way out.”
Avril nodded, her eyes stuck to the body bag, shaded black beneath the timid sunlight that found its ways down to their level.
“Better looking than most too. Shaven, eyes closed and smiling, good for him don’t you say?”
Avril’s nose itched, nodding once more. There were no more smiles for him to give, wrapped from head to toe and headed for his terminus. Without any more words, the cleaner headed for an elevator, to the other side of the building. Avril walked to the front door that had remained open, looking one last time at the window, the stool still standing vigil beside it. She closed the door, inexorably leaving the last of his life stuck inside. Avril heard the elevator doors closing. The cleaner, whose name they never felt like sharing, wouldn’t remember this day. Maybe she wouldn’t either. Could she remember everyone she’d ever visited? Years after years of still faces inexorably blurring together. Early on, she had gripped onto Alina, heaving in panic, fearing she would forget. Fearing that no matter how hard she tried, everyone around her would vanish and that she wouldn’t even be aware of what she’d lost. She didn’t remember her face that day, she had forgotten her words as well, an irony that vindicated her past anxiety. But she still felt the warmth of her embrace. She could have damned her, forced her to face her own choice, she could have pulled her away from this path, convincing her there were other ways she could go. Maybe she did, maybe she whispered both into her ears, laying the cards for her to look at, decide which one to take, either to fold or to play her hand. She had chosen then, that’s why she was here, standing alone in the hallway of a complex only visited by passing wind.
Without questioning herself, Avril went up the stairs, instead of heading back down. She found it again, the door Lana had hammered on with surprising vigor. Nothing around had changed and the door was still shut. Avril hadn’t thought of why she even came up here. If there was some resolution she could be apart of, she couldn’t know where to begin. Like Lana’s, this door had a peephole, if there was someone on the other side, if they’d been here two days ago, they didn’t make themselves known. Would Avril come back for them one day?
She wouldn’t mind someone else making rounds with her, she couldn’t always make it in time to even have a chance to say anything. Their time, their unspoken words and unresolved woes, trickling like sand, didn’t wait for her. If this one preferred to remain in their lonesome silence, she wouldn’t force their door open. Too much people to see, too little time, torrents washing away her mistakes. Avril’s hand fell back on her tablet, without seeing it, she knew the list hadn’t been cleaned out. If she went back to Van Kalkain, there would be more. Avril remembered the story, the Marrow Knight, in their final act, fueled by despair and a pulsating desire to put an end to the spreading devastation, offered themselves to bind Dark and Light, dispersing their will to their shapeless forms, in the shade of the Marrow Tree. Avril then thought of Raime. Could they erase everyone’s pain? She thought of their hands, gentle, perfect, hands that took, hands that changed. Simplicity. If Prys had been alive, would they have felt something? Whoever Raime took that day, had they felt something? Liberation.
Avril still stood in front of the door, not a sound coming from either of them. She must’ve looked already tired, this early in the day. She took out Lana’s letter, still folded, and slid it underneath the door. No answers still, but before turning away, Avril spied a shift in the shadows coming from the slit beneath the door. She pretended not to notice,pulling out her tablet and heading back to work.