Strings

• Emma Outtrim, Grade 12, Trinity Anglican College
• Short Story
• 2015

Excellence Award in the 'The Write Track 2015' competition

One hundred thousand strings tie me to the earth and can’t get up. Their ends tied delicately, like birthday ribbons on brilliant shining gifts. It’s been a while since I had a birthday. It’s been a while since I had anything.

The sky above me is grey. Angry, like me. Jealous, unforgiving and self-sabotaging, like me. I blink at it, once. The clouds blink back. They ask me when I am going to get up. “Not ever?” they say, false pity dripping from their words. They gather together, laughing at me, rolling their eyes, staring.

The blades of grass feel like nothing. I think about the summer when everything died. This lawn was brown and the flowers turned inside out and the dust blew in under all the doors. And there was no sound except for my lungs struggling to fill themselves with life.

I remember the Christmas of that same summer, when there was no presents and no joy in our hearts and I didn’t say anything because there was nothing to be said. In the afternoon, when I couldn’t stand the fire that was always burning inside the walls of my home any longer, I sat in the driveway and watched a trail of ants follow each other. I let them crawl on my legs and I leaned back on my palms, the pavement burning my skin. I didn’t feel anything then, either.

Two weeks ago, I watched them take my father away for the things I knew he’d done, but he would never admit to. I couldn’t tell if the fire in the walls had finally escaped and burnt everything to the ground, or extinguished altogether. Either way, my home is cold now and I feel my bones freeze and snap nightly, the splinters finding their way into the chambers of my heart until I can’t breathe. But burning and ice have always felt the same.

When I was much younger and my mother was still here, we’d wait until my father left for work and she would give me a single piece of chalk and let me sit in the driveway and draw for hours. And I’d create a beautiful landscape of oceans, forests, mountains and deserts which I’d never seen but I thought about constantly. And every day, she’d wash them all away with the garden hose before my father parked his car over the wet patch that night. If he noticed, he never said anything.

These were the moments that combined to make my life. They were small, but in my mind they are sharp and I see the light filter through them like a stained glass window in a church. I admire them from different angles in my mind.

My eyes are bright.
One hundred thousand strings loosen their ties as I fall from the earth.
I feel everything.
And the sky begins at my fingertips.