Characters: Jesse, Sophia, Alyssa
Location: Holland Street, outside Siarra's house
Time: Day 4 - 4:00 PM
“That’s it,” Sophia said. It was the first time she had spoken since they had left from the school. “The house over there. That’s where Siarra lives.”
Turning the wheel, Jesse pulled into the driveway and parked the car. When he flipped off the ignition, the only sound they could hear were the raindrops drumming against the hood of the car. The rest was silence. Cold, dark silence.
In the back seat, Alyssa shuffled a bit and unbuckled her seat belt. She leaned forward, squinting through the blurred windshield at the house in front of them. “Where are we? Why are we here?”
“Just stay in the car,” Jesse said, reaching for the door handle. “Both of you.”
Sophia already had her seat belt undone. “Why me?”
“There’s something wrong here. Something is going on and I’m not going to risk either of you getting hurt.”
“Nobody’s going to hurt me, Jesse.”
Jesse’s hand stopped on the door handle and he looked back at Sophia. “I know, babe. I know. I won’t let anyone hurt you.” He opened the door and a sudden shower of rain poured in. “Now, stay here. I’ll be back in a minute.”
He ducked out, closing the door behind him, and hurried towards the front steps with his head low against the black sky. Rain pelted his skin. By the time he reached the door, his clothes were drenched and his hair hung over his brow like a wet mop. He wiped his eyes, glancing back at the girls in the car for a moment, and then knocked. The wind howled behind him. He shivered.
“He’s a good man,” Alyssa said, falling back into her seat.
Sophia’s heart skipped a beat. She had forgotten Alyssa was there. The noise shocked her, and yet Alyssa’s voice was distant, lost in the rain, and Sophia looked at her through the rearview mirror. They could each only see the other’s eyes. But Sophia said nothing.
Alyssa tried again. “How’d you two meet?”
Still no answer.
Alyssa sighed and played with her bookbag on the floor, twisting her foot around the strap and then undoing it. “We met a couple years ago. Back at East Shore High. You were only a freshman then.” She smiled down at her feet in reminiscence. “It was in chemistry. I was running late for class and when I got there, all the good lab partners were taken. I started to sit down by myself and then Jesse comes up to me—he looked so cute in those two-inch think goggles—and asked if he could join me. Like he needed an invitation. Like he needed a reason. God, do you know what that’s like, Sophia? Can you imagine how I felt, how I dreamed that a man like him would ask to sit next to me? It was something wondrous. How can I tell you? …But now look at me. I’m the back seat. I’m just a vision of the past, aren’t I? Something you can only see in hindsight. Something you can never touch again. I’m just a memory of a life that could’ve been. A memory, Sophia. That’s all I am.”
Sophia’s eyes turned away from the rearview mirror and she looked out the window again.
“But I was a good memory. He won’t forget me, Sophia. Remember that when you look into his eyes. You will always see me in his past, just like the next girl will always see you. No matter how hard you try, you won’t be able to escape it. You won’t escape me and you won’t escape becoming a memory. You’re just a creature of the past, Sophia. You’re just like me.”
“…No,” Sophia said. “I’m not like you. I know when to shut up.”
“Say what you will. I know the truth now. The truth about men. They long for the past, Sophia, like ghosts long for their flesh again.” She raised her eyes but not her head, catching Sophia’s gaze in the rearview mirror once more. “You don’t have to believe me. But you watch Jesse. You watch his eyes. Watch them carefully, like they were your own, and don’t let them out of your sight for a moment. Don’t even blink. See how his eyes drift to the past. Watch how they leave you alone, naked and forgotten inside yourself like a frozen caterpillar in her winter cocoon, with nothing but fruitless dreams of the future to hold you as you cling to the cold branches, wish away this life, drown in your own icicle-driven tears. Watch your world crumble, Sophia, because you will fall too. You are forsaken. You will long for the past—what I am, what used to be, what we are destined to become, souls without bodies, lost whispers in the wind. And soon you’ll know the truth, the inevitability of it all. You will share in this loneliness. You can watch, but you can’t stop the darkness. You can’t keep the eyes from closing.”
Sophia stared forward. Jesse was inside the house now. Nobody had let him in, so he helped himself to the door. She tried to spot him through the windows, but they were dark, flashing only for a brief second when flickers of lightning rippled through the tears in the sky. Sophia shivered, rubbing her shoulder against the car door, and pushed away a wet strand of hair that clung to her cheek. Rain continued to spatter against the window. She tried to ignore everything.
“…He’ll come back to me, you know,” Alyssa said, pressing her chin against Sophia’s headrest. “He can’t live without me. I haunt his every dream. I do it on purpose. He can never forget and I will never forgive. That’s what it means to be forsaken. You never forget. You never forgive. The past is a branding on your soul that can never be erased. And when you’re naked, when you’ve been stripped of all these fallacies that adorn your future like rows of dimly lit candles, melting in false hope down the dark hallway of your life, you can no longer hide it. It makes you. It defines you. It shows you the truth. I hope you’re ready to accept it, Sophia, because your soul is marked. Your time will come. And you will feel nothing.”
“Are you done talking?” Sophia asked.
Alyssa laughed, but it was cold and her voice only made Sophia shudder again.
“What do you suppose he’s thinking about now?” Alyssa asked.
“Who?”
“You know who.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Jesse.”
“I don’t know.”
“I think you do. You just don’t want to admit it. When he’s in there, when he’s all alone, what do you really think is on his mind?”
“…Why are you here again? Nobody asked you to come along.”
Alyssa was silent for a moment. “Sometimes the unsaid is louder than words. Listen to the rain. …Do you hear it? Sometimes the voices speak to us when we turn away from the light.” She began to hum.
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
“I can make it rain, you know. Every drop belongs to me. I cried them all. I’ve danced with them. I know each of them by name. I’ve heard them call. They speak to me. Their voices carry thunder. And I know each of them by name.”
Sophia wondered why Jesse ever dated Alyssa in the first place.
“You can’t hear them, can you?” Alyssa mocked. “They mean nothing to you. They’re falling all around you and you can’t even hear them scream.”
Leaning back against the headrest, Sophia stared at the ceiling and tried to imagine what Alyssa’s face would look like after being struck by a meteor. But before she could laugh, the car door flew open. She nearly jumped out of her skin.
In one quick motion, Jesse dropped down next to her and twisted the ignition key. “We’re going to the police. Now.”
“What? Why?” Sophia stared at him. There was something frightening about that look in his eyes.
When he turned to her, she was sure of it. It made her heart stop. Cold goosebumps began to sprout from her arms, running up her wet skin like chills.
“Jesse…” she whispered. “What’s wrong?”
The car rolled out of the driveway, spinning on its tires, and then peeled down the road with water splashed it from all sides. Jesse’s eyes remained forward, frozen. “…He’s dead.”
“Who’s dead? What are you talking about?”
“Gibbers!” Jesse practically screamed. The car swerved off the road and went through a mud puddle, nearly missing a ditch. “Gibbers is dead.”
“W-what? That’s impossible. He—”
Reaching into his jacket, Jesse pulled something out and tossed it to Sophia. It landed in her lap and she screamed as if it was a snake, but it was something far worse than that. It was a handgun.
Sophia’s whole body began to shake. Her eyes were wild. Her heart pounded harder than the rain and she fell back, throwing her body against the seat, breathless. “Oh, my God… Oh, my God… Jesse, what the hell…?”
He said nothing. The traffic light ahead blinked yellow and then red, blurred colors against the falling rain, but the car shot right through the intersection. Tires screeched. Jesse tightened his grip on the wheel.
“This ends here,” he said. And the sky released its fury.
Giantess World
