Next Time

• Zara Jahan, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2021

The first time I died, I watched the world dapple under a white light while my body wrinkled, supine in a slough of angel-coloured ink. Until I became simply a 1 and 0 combination of code amidst the nexus of pixels. Of course, I awoke from the dream, a returned 7 year old. My current ordeal is not so blissful.
I search for an answer but I’m looking for my teeth through an old man’s lens. I have glued ten bricks to my shoulders. Too much, too heavy. Oh, how I wish I could unstitch the crevices of fear and betrayal, sewn so, so, so deep above my sister's eyebrows. I entered her into a game of Russian roulette and she’s taken the bait. I’ve pulled the trigger.
My sister is the only setback. Mother does not hide favouritism well. I watch my sister dance in the meadow through iron bars. Her affection for me is tepid. If she loses the only child she loved, what other choice will she have but to love me?
In this era, happiness is forbidden. The solution was simple.
I’m wading. This is a dream and I won’t remember tomorrow. I wade through the coagulated atmosphere where I buy myself an imagination. It’s where I am forgiven.
But I am overcome with guilt. How dare I? I’ve allowed my sister to become bait to the devil.
I’ve taken too many sips of arrogance and now I’m drooling with shame. It falls down my body in shiny, sticky threads. It webs a map of my impurities and I am sopping.
I must repent. But I am starving for affection.
My reverie is wrung short with the splitting of my bones. My sister is screaming. And a rift fissures through my heart.
They don’t pay mind to her thrashing or her begging. They merely tether her limbs and tug the leash. They’ve made her a crumpled mass at their heels. I wonder if the history books will ever cover this profoundly dystopian era of society.
I’m a billion semicolons. Life comes to an end every seven seconds. Then you draw the next breath and continue the sentence. I don’t want a sentence. I want a chapter, full of sentences and second chances and clean slates. Every full stop, catalyst to start anew, to not worry about the sin blackening my soul. A choice to do it differently. I want a chance to live. Or is life a constant effort for redemption? Yes. No.
I’m indecisive.
I’m patient to wait as my blank page fills with lines, neatly, in Times New Roman, size 11, single spaced. There are sentences, teeming with so many, so many, so many–
F. U. L. L. S. T. O. P. S.