You Were Laughing

• Hannah Bell, Grade 11
• Short Story
• 2011

In the very first memories I have of you, you were laughing; you laughed from your lungs, your heart and any part of your body that breathed in and out at all. The bells pealed young and shining and golden, the untarnished music of someone who had not yet seen the world. The sound, like infection, twirled on your breath like the pale curls did from your head- golden, just like the bells were. Your eyes were laughing too- pupils of sky breeze against the unpolluted clouds. I was drawn to you like a magnet; you, the brightest positive and I, just another unpolished impartial waiting to be electrified by someone with something to give.

I remember you crying over the phone to me, when smudgy wine-glass boys who had bled their insides out on football fields had missed altogether the fact that you were far from disposable. But a deep breath and a short pause, and you would be the one making me feel better; even making me forget that all I could do was catch your petals as they fell from up above me.

But at some point in the race, the leader looks back. The footsteps on the bridge halt and the pair of sparkling eyes peer over the edge into the deep of the world for the first time. The lamb wades into the mud.
That day when you picked it up- that first piece of the silent death you stacked inside yourself- I remember it so much more vividly than all the others.
“Oh, come on,” you said, “it’s not going to hurt me. You know me, don’t you?” And that ivory smile was tinted with the anticipation of decay, the chiming of the bells already starting to dull as the sludge and grime engulfed them.
Your golden curls still bounced gleefully but the silence characterised only by the monotonous suck and puff, suck and puff made me sick, like I was walking around with a lollipop I’d dropped in the dirt; it wasn’t the same.

If we push forward a few years, varnish had been replaced by tarnish, gold had faded to grey, and the function of your lungs was different; it was obvious you weren’t living anymore; you were dying. But by the time the smog covers the sun, it’s too late already.
If we were still magnets, there was something heavy and black in between, something parasitic and growing; pushing us apart with a violence we could only feel.

Your final page was only turned yesterday; the leaf that started off white, but had suffered the stains, the soaks and singes of a lifetime until it was moth-eaten and torn with immortalised moments of uncontainable dissatisfaction. The page so tired that it read only the ugly marks and wrinkles left of the body, not dead, nor asleep, but doubtless not alive; foul amongst the crisp white linen.
The cobwebs glide in undisturbed leisure over the dusty bell, the locks, long abandoned and filed away in envelopes of forgotten childhood, and the wrong concentration of toxins drifting on rasps too thin to sustain speech. The only energy you could supply were the little shocks bleeping through me, as though in surprise, as you took another breath.
Then another.
And another.
Until the greasy oxygen that had held your laughless body together faltered, and you died again.