A Bookshelf Elf

by: William K.

Dreams were the worst of it. She dreamed of nothing but darkness with a void that covered her. It wasn’t the darkness that scared her. It was being aware of the darkness and being in it. And having to wake up knowing she might fall back into it the next time she slept. No, she knew she’d fall back into it.

It must be the heat, she thought. Always hotter during the day. Too hot to work or scavenge for food. She had grown to hate the sun and the sky. She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d seen a cloud. It had made sense to sleep during the day, but she suspected the extra heat carried in the humidity poisoned her dreams. It was a sticky heat too, the worst. The kind that stuck to the inside of her lungs when she breathed. She hated it.

Night was better. Night was always better. Nights were much cooler. She would leave her shelter in the old house and make her way to the banks of the river. Stars that had been hidden by city lights for over two centuries streamed across the sky. Her father had once told her that the Devil had taken a third of the stars in Heaven when he fell, but humans had drowned the rest with their lights. Not drowned, Papa, she would whisper each night, we only hid them. And now they look on and I can see them looking on. 

Her father had told her stories of her great-grandfather. He had been a sharecropper. A poor man, but a man who knew how to find food. He told her that he fished in a stream near his house. He fished by killing squirrels and tying their carcasses to the limbs of a tree so they hung over the stream. They would rot and flies would settle on them, laying eggs. The maggots would grow big, and then fall into the stream where the fish would eat them. The fish would grow accustomed to eating this way. Her father said that the fish came to associate anything small hitting the water with something they could eat, so when her great-grandfather dropped his baited line in the stream the fish couldn’t help but try to take it. He caught a lot of fish that way.

She wasn’t so fortunate. She had tried his technique, using what little game she could kill. But there wasn’t much game to kill. And there were fewer fish now than when her own father had been her age. Still, every other day she would catch something. Enough to keep the darkness from collapsing in on me, she thought.

She missed her Papa.

Curled up with a filthy sheet covering her she always tried to sleep before dawn broke. Before the heat came back to cover the day. 

She had come to her shelter after leaving the city. It was the search for water that drove her. It had become too difficult to find a steady supply of it in the city. She knew the river was here, and had made her way here from the city. She worried someone else might find her. Hunger and thirst had gripped the city before she left. Mothers would drink their babies blood just to drink something. 

Could I kill a man if I had too? If I had too, yes. Could I kill a woman if I had too? Yes. A child? No. I don’t think I’m that far gone. I’m not.

Everything living comes to the water. 

He was a short man, balding, with what hair he had left forming a wispy drape over his shoulders. He had come for the water. Of course he had. She had seen him before he saw her. He didn’t see her. He drank his fill and she hoped he would be on his way. But she knew he wouldn’t. The river was a stable source of water. He would no sooner leave it than she would. He had found her church, but decided not to go inside. Perhaps he thought it was too far gone to live in. It wasn’t, but the damage done to it left one more exposed to the elements.

They did not meet. But one was aware of the other.

What if someone is aware of me but I’m unaware of them? 

She relocated her fishing lines. It was tiring to start over. But it was something she had to do. That was when they met. 

Who are you?, he asked. She didn’t answer. She had no reason to. She considered what he must be thinking. He’s thinking that he could take me. And that he could have me. Maybe. But I’ll be sure to gouge out his eyes.

Their conversation was wooden. She kept her distance, but he tried to close the distance. She refused to give her his name and didn’t ask for his. She offered him the one fish she had caught and he accepted. He bit into it, greedy from starvation. He was dangerous.

She had let him go back to his camp first. But now she would have to find a new shelter. She did not trust him not to follow her or find her while she slept in her church. She would need to move during the day. During the heat. She was not ready for the void that had taken so many others to take her.