Wending

• Liam Tannoury, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2022

Before you know it, they’ll be gone. That cellmate of yours, distant on their pedestal. The worn bunk bed masks the shifting of their figure above you. You’re unsure, in the dark, if they leave. If they slip through the panes of your enclosure to greet the world outside. A star in the nights of winter, they mould you, shining through each chink in your metal cage. From backstage, you listen to raging hearts, festivals and awe-filled crowds, tucked away to boil in your bitter salivation. For longer than life, you’ve listened and wondered, what makes them so special? But now you know. When they leave, the curtains close, your bed sags and the light dims. When they’re gone, you die with them, crushed to the rear of their canvas.

Alone in your cell, you yearn for the next letter’s arrival. They whisper alluring fragments of day, peace you’re guilty of killing, the bloody, monstrous murder you dilute in your own butchery. Nothing compares to the sickness of time, past and future loom beyond these three walls you cleave. Letters from the day-filled husk arrive with memories of highlands, distant, amber sunsets and the solacing, consonant hiss of campfire. Do they write for you? Or to desperately remember those archaic epochs, temporary of the mind. Because they have not the slightest idea just how haunting they’ve become.

You feel your life decaying with their souvenirs. The letters have ceased akin to that corpse of hope. Mindlessly strolling between the corners of the room, you discover cryptic carvings within the walls: Star, one reads. You are reminded of that cellmate, faceless, deathly bright. How they left their cage to the guilt of a placeholder. You forge a decoy in your mind, using embers of life and the stagnant rock of the cell to create… it. A pile of bone and distress, it comes alive, staring at you with the same confusion and admiration as yourself to the performer past. For a moment, you wish to stay. To teach it thought, hopelessness and all else you’ve invented. A remnant yet to fall ill to the self. You could be different to the last, end this cycle of grief and loss. You escape anyway, a blur in its smooth memory, innocence sapped by that rotting chamber of shadow and guilt.

In hindsight, maybe you should’ve turned back. To end your own misery, the misery of those yet to come, the agony of stories untold. Because it’s been you all along. The one who left, unable to understand your own anguish, and the one who stayed, a drunken addict. Within those highlands of mist and dejection, you sit, deadpan to the mellow gush of false wind, written promises of colour and comfort absent. You’ll cry one day, the day you realise that this is it. All that you suffered for. And you smile anyway, that infinite star is yet to dim, and your descendant, born of despair, will witness that break of dawn.