Similar, Unfamiliar Streets

• Louise Ruiz, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2019

Against his own desires, he’d often remember that day; that place.

Nearby to familiar streets and familiar houses, that’s where it happened. It was a plain field. Unthreatening, placid, dull and uneventful; as any field would be.

As any field should be.

The cold autumn air sent its breeze softly as dusk came to sight. It was common to see strangers travel in these fields.

Yet on a particular day along with autumn air, winds of change also spread themselves across on this field on this particular day.

On this day, on gravel roads, thick scent of honeysuckle and pine musk travelling with the wind, was the presence of a scrawny little boy; his skin dusted of freckles and sun-kissed, hair amuck of messed strands (as a young boy would). He was like any young boy, playing off in the field like any would.

Other boys didn’t share the same wounds, however.

Others boys most definitely didn’t share the same fate he had.

A certain blurred figure would often stand before him when he remembered this day. A stranger that seemed too familiar to him. That seemed to know the story behind his scars far too well.
As if a penman observing his work of calligraphy on a canvas of his own design.

In these memories, he would attempt to cry out for help. But any attempt for a voice to escape laid stuck within the gaping wounds of his throat that had soon marked him. The figure would merely sneer. And each time, he would fall to the ground, last clasps of breath desperate and pained, digging his fingers into the crust of the earth before him.
Before he would wake up in a pool of cold sweat, turning to see he is in the same place he was before he attempted to forget.
Here he was no more than a lost boy among many that had fallen before him. Each in desperate yearning to see through the fog of the blurred figures that plagued them in a nonexistent plain that they couldn’t escape.

The boy was trapped in a place that didn’t move forward nor backward. A comforting copy of his old life, but a copy nonetheless. Similar strangers would walk similar streets and homes familiar to his own.

But they weren’t.

As comforting and familiar these familiar streets and houses were, there was a spectral, absent cold in their presence. In time, they were more an malicious reminder of what he had lost rather than a resting location of comfort.

After all, beyond death, the most one can do is reminisce and imitate what they had left behind, if they’re so able to.

And that’s all the boy was allowed to do.

A small boy, impoverish in his features, the outline of his face still retained of innocence, despite scars that placed its mark on him.
And Innocence was never brought to Death’s embrace by their own hand.