The Dark and Hollow Places - Carrie Ryan [4]
Finally, I raise my head and notice a bundle left in the nook between the two chimneys where the woman was sitting. Numbly, I pick it up. It feels wrong to sift through the contents, but that doesn’t stop me.
Her few possessions amount to not much more than half-empty cases of colored powders and stains. Makeup that could never come close to hiding her age or the desperation seeped into every line on her face.
I trace my fingers through a vermillion red, something about the tone of it calling to me. Then, tentatively, I press my hand against the chimney next to where the woman sat, tracing a red slash across the smoke-blackened bricks.
Digging through the pots, I find a blue that I smudge over the red and then black around the blue. Eyes, lips, hair, chin: Bit by bit I create a portrait of the woman. Not the way she was at the end, crouched in the shadows, but how she looked falling, with her wide smile and the knowledge that her misery was ended.
Plague rats moan in the alley, and from a window below me I hear men laugh and women joke. The air’s thick with the smell of their sweat and need as they find solace together while I hunker in the night drawing the woman. I make her beautiful, make her flying through the air as if gravity would never dare to sully her with its grasp.
It’s a rush. I feel like I’m reclaiming the control the woman stole from me. And when it’s over and I step back I realize that at some point I stopped painting the stranger and started painting myself. But not how I am now, not scarred, with stringy blond hair that tangles in front of my face. How I could have been if I’d never left my sister in the Forest that day.
The woman asked me what I wanted in my life if it could be anything. I haven’t given any thought to what I want in a long time, outside of longing for Elias to come back. When we first arrived in the Dark City I’d have said I wanted to go home to my village in the Forest but somewhere along the way I’ve forgotten that. I’ve let the day-to-day existence of life blind me to dreams.
Just like this city, I used to be something once. I used to be a girl who liked to get out of bed every morning and who understood passion. Yet for the past three years—longer than that, even—I’ve been frozen, incapable of accepting that life around me has shifted without my consent.
Exhausted and lost in thought, I push away from the wall and start making my way back to my flat, needing the familiar surroundings to remind me why I’m still here.
Why I’ve allowed myself to stay stuck waiting.
The darkness of the night settles heavy on my shoulders as I retreat toward the Dark City. I scamper over bridges and wade through the line of people waiting to cross the Palisade wall into the City proper. I feel invisible, everyone around me wrapped up in their own problems, not caring about an anonymous girl with her gaze trained on the ground.
I scramble past the debris pile of what used to be a wing of the building housing our flat and climb down the fire escape, slipping through the window into the emptiness of my home. Bare walls, scarred floor, dust coating everything.
Nothing personal except for the quilt twisted at the bottom of the bed, where it landed after I kicked it off this morning. I wrap it around myself, burying my face in the tattered cloth that was once bright. That once held his smell.
Usually sleep comes fast and easy. Usually I want nothing more than to be yanked into the featureless dreams, but not tonight.
Tonight I think of the woman. The stars spin outside, chasing dawn across the sky, and sleep never comes. Only the cold emptiness of the flat.
No other heartbeat to keep me company. No voice to keep away the blackness of night. Nobody to share the length of days with.
And I realize that I’ve been spending too long trying to forget that I’ve lost the part of myself that used to belong to someone else. That I once held