Human Factor

One by one their shadowed outlines emerge. Smoke hangs limp in the air, strung up like a set piece, like a dream, sweet-tinged with the stench of rot. It shrouds the soldiers and their boxy equipment, geometric reapers advanced far beyond the grain scythe.

“Quiet here.”

Quiet. Fire crackles far away even as its glow stains the sky. The killing field looks the same day or night, sunset or sunrise. A building sags on its own weight and collapses; a plume of dust rises, the final breath of whatever civility existed here before war burned it away.

The soldiers wait patiently. Finally one steps forward. “On me.” His chest bears a name and one shoulder bears a flag. A winged dagger adorns the other, topped with the letters C-R-O. He crosses the thin band of embers that separate bustling woodland and scorched earth. His team follows him. They will follow him into hell at their nation’s request.

Three American prisoners of war were last traced to a hostile outpost within the city; air defenses at the outpost prevent USAF air transport from getting close, so the team moves in on foot for the rescue operation.

Rifles swiveling, they tread softly as dirt transforms to asphalt. A humanoid outline rests in a vehicle’s blackened husk. None of the soldiers look as they pass. Blue light flickers across their eyes and camouflaged faces, the datastream tracking and assessing their every move. War is data as much as war is madness or industry or attrition. Somewhere air-conditioned, strategists view real-time information and relay it back to the boots on the ground. The frontline killers represent the efforts of hundreds. Yet they are also mere flesh and bone.

A faint buzz of electric power. Helmet cameras detect glowing hotspots of motion. The squad splits. They dash madly for awnings and doorways. A quadrotor drone passes overhead, barely the size of a human hand. Plastic, wire, microchip. The team waits for it to disappear over a rooftop and carry on.

The cycle of man: discover technology, master technology, fear technology. Black-powder bombs to nukes. Flintlocks to automated turrets. Paper gliders to explosive-equipped remote drones.

Twisted steel towers around them, warped by intense heat into ghastly spirals like hands reaching for the dead sky. They step around charred skeletons and rubble, careful not to make a sound. They cage their eyes to keep their minds intact. Digital maps unfold in the corner of the team’s vision to lead them to their target. This is neither personal nor clinically impersonal—the fire of war consumed these people just as it consumed so many others.

They have not lived in a world without conflict. Not even a decade of war has wiped all memory of peace from their hearts. The world breeds violence and one day it will stop when every bullet has fired and every bomb has exploded. There will come a time when each soldier in this unit shows his family a picture or a medal and says we made it, we made it. So each soldier believes and that belief fuels his violence.

The world will be made whole again or it will cease its rotation and become just a rock floating in space.

The ground shakes beneath them. Earthquake rings over their comms. One of the men missteps and his foot lands on a burnt tibia with a sickly crunch. The sound echoes. The squad freezes, looks up—the drone hovers distantly overhead. It swoops down toward them. Its camera clicks and before they can shoot it flies up and disappears.

Quickly now, weapons no longer raised but slung so the soldiers may run. A stampede of adrenaline, fear, each soldier reduced to a stray dog hunted by wolves. They sprint for the nearest alleyway and their maps reroute. A buzz in the air behind them, a swarm of drones approaching. In the center of the alley lies a manhole cover.

The leading soldier raises the cover, jumps down. Two of his teammates follow him. The fourth stumbles, crawls to the edge. The buzz of death irritates his ears. He turns on his back and sees lights in the sky like stars superimposed over black smoke. The lights converge. He hears the manhole slide shut behind him.

The three survivors do not see their comrade reduced to a blackened bloodstain. They only hear thundering explosions then abject silence. The manhole cover crumples inward but holds. Somewhere, a pre-authored email delivers and a vehicle departs for his family’s house.

Words are spoken. He meant something different to everyone he knew, and yet to bleak reality he is a stain. Some men believe in heaven and some find it hard to believe in anything anymore.

Sewage sloshes around their boots, the rippling slime their sole reminder that the world is more than a diorama of a burning city. They lose contact with headquarters and stagger blindly forward in the dark. Parts of the ceiling have collapsed, allowing firelight to flicker into the dark catacombs. Dead rats float in the sewage; they starved when ash poisoned their food. Not even the most persistent bottom-feeders survive.

They pass through what appears to be a small civilization built on maintenance walkways to either side of the trash flow. Extinguished camping lanterns and bedrolls littered with food waste are echoes of the souls who took refuge here. The fighting above drove them underground.

They see the pale glow of the surface down a tunnel. Their maps direct them to walk to the light.

Eventually the soldiers emerge, stinking of sewage and damp at the ankles. As they loom out of the sewers and trudge on an upwards slope, the crescent of the hill sinks into the ground and a new behemoth materializes. Suburbs, sprawled out for miles like a graveyard. Silent, choked by smoke. Headstones. Some sections lie leveled by war while others remain frozen in time, punctuated by a few lonely high-rises still clawing toward the heavens. Beyond that, houses and more houses, shrinking into the horizon but never waning. Past the skyline, an unseen tapestry of crumbling homes unrolls. Contagiously exponential growth curbed by the hungry whims of war.

None of them say it, but the rows of prefabricated houses remind them of their own homes, their own families. A pinwheel spins on a lawn, blades leached of color. One of the soldiers can be heard murmuring a prayer. He wonders if all this is still God’s plan for the world. He wonders what sin these people committed to be delivered to hell in their own homes.

Another tremor in the ground forces the soldiers to pause. Houses slouch into themselves.

A dog lopes across the street before them, its fur matted with soot. Its pitted eye sees them and its head swivels. The soldiers raise their rifles, waiting for the dog’s snout to twitch. It moves on with a limp, one of its legs matted with blood.

With the onset of global war, disaster relief efforts became nigh impossible. The same USA which once reserved vast provisions for assisting foreign countries in the case of natural disasters no longer makes such kind concessions. The full might of industry devotes itself to prolonged warfare, the humanitarians all killed overseas for trying to help in the wrong places. The people of this ruined city died in isolation, not a bottle of water to be spared for their plight.

It is not cruelty which makes us forsake those in need, but rather necessity. And for the world’s great powers, victory is the only necessity.

The team no longer moves with their rifles raised. They come upon a strip mall, rows of salons and convenience stores and liquor marts, their neon signs still bursting with color. In this ashen world they are eerie, overly bright like poisonous fungi warning forest creatures not to bite. The first soldier in their tripod glances at the foreign advertisements, searching for a degree of familiarity in a land utterly warped by destruction. Headquarters alerts them of something coming their way.

The gentle hum of death sends them running for the storefront. A singular winged drone dives toward them. Its papery wings flap against sheer velocity. The soldiers lunge for the door and the last in line turns and fires, muzzle flaring. The drone’s wing snaps off and they spiral in two pieces like falling leaves. Then the drone’s payload detonates.

Floor-to-ceiling windows shatter. The symphony of glass rains upon one man, unharmed, as he staggers backward between shelves of food. Silt sifts and clatters against his helmet, the ghost of a sensation as shock screams in his ears. Paper, possibly money, flutters softly to the tile floor.

All of this happens at once and very quickly but his mind replays it slowly, in agonizing detail, with the ringing in his ears rendering it dreamlike. He smacks the side of his head and blinks. One of his teammates lies bleeding on the floor, a shard of glass sticking out of her wrist and the stump of her leg leaking dark blood.

He rushes forward. Tries to block out the pained noises like a trapped animal’s. He grips his teammate’s vest and drags her into the bowels of the supermarket. Cereal boxes frame their mad flight. Overhead fluorescents flicker. A wide smear of crimson follows them toward the rear shelves. He flings open an unassuming metal door near the back. Pulls his teammate in. Slams the door.

Blood spurts from the amputated leg, bone blossoming in splinters that dig back into the flesh from whence they came. The soldier digs in his JFAK, finds the tourniquet. Tightens it until his teammate’s face grows white with discomfort and she hisses through her teeth. Blood keeps pooling, lapping at her boot. He takes the wounded woman’s tourniquet and puts that on the wound too. He cuts away the sleeve around the impaled glass and packs dressing around it. Bright red arterial blood soaks through and drips steadily on the floor. He wraps the dressings in gauze and stands and wipes sweat from his neck. Need another tourniquet. He reaches for his shoulder pocket and freezes.

A faint buzz on the other side of the door. Distinctly different from the nagging white lights overhead. The soldier slows his breathing, puts a hand on his teammate’s shoulder. Easy. Easy. Like teenagers in a slasher film, the killer panting just outside.

The sound quiets. He reaches up and touches the side of his helmet. His other hand keeps pressure on his teammate’s wrist.

“Romeo 1 Actual to Romeo, over.”

Copy, Actual.

“Romeo 1-2 is wounded, Romeo 1-3 suspected KIA. We’re pinned. Need UAV support. Over.”

UAV support incoming, ETA 30 seconds.

He pulls the tourniquet from his shoulder pocket and slips it up his teammate’s arm. The bleeding subsides.

Drones deployed. Over and out.

The soldier eases the metal door open just a crack. Bright light flares through the market’s smashed windows. His helmet filters the loud pop of explosives and notifies him of gunshots at 12 o’clock. He steps out into the open and passes through the bath products aisle to store’s front.

The sky is gray slashed with damp black and bits of plastic fall from it. He looks up and sees at least twenty machines spiraling higher, higher, dancing around each other. They wage their own mindless warfare, simple programs to determine their allegiance. Fierce clashes spark jets of flame and broken components scatter across the parking lot. The soldier watches their muffled, brutal battle without expression.

He finds his third teammate’s body bent around a support column. The face still twisted in grim determination. Torso almost split in half like a jagged mouth. Blood leaks between the toothy ribs.

He takes the JFAK and dog tags and pulls his teammate’s body into a less contorted position. Thunder rumbles overhead and the first dark medallions of rain spill from above, the sky’s maw opening to drool upon a flesh-starved world. The soldier turns his back to the brewing storm and slips back inside, to his sole remaining ally.

She lies still and pale. Deliberate breaths puff past her dry lips. She opens her mouth to speak but finds no words worth projecting into the dark realm around them.

The mission must go on, or rather, they can no longer turn around. The last unbroken soldier pulls limp arms around his shoulders and rises. He staggers through the store and out its shattered windows with his teammate on his back, fused together like a nuclear mutant, freakish and uncoordinated. He glances back at the darkened sign—once bright, now extinguished. Rain patters softly on his helmet. Miles away it will extinguish fires raging across this part of the world, tempering the white-hot blade of human suffering into a beautiful metal contortion, a memory others will point to and learn a lesson from. But that tempering has not come fast enough to save the poor souls trapped in the inferno.

Headquarters informs him that his objective is half a click away.

The idealized dream of futuristic warfare sees humans retain their status as the battlefield’s epicenter. Our hands on the wheel, on the trigger, mankind extending our will over lethal metal. Bipedal killing machines, quadrotor drones linked to thought itself. The flick of a hand wreaks death, but at least a hand steers, rather than a program.

That dream perished. Defense contractors program drone swarms to combat drone swarms. Battles waged between plastic-and-metal artifacts result in human casualties despite lacking human combatants.

At home, the scale of wartime production causes resource shortages. Global trade stumbles over a requisition minefield; everyone has what someone else needs. If resources are not given, they are seized.

Such ruthlessness creates public unrest, so media groups dredge the faces of the dead, simulating them in almost-real videos. If you perish in service to your country you will continue to serve after death. Deepfaked executions, prisoner-of-war camps, decapitations. Look what the enemy has done, do you hate it? Support the war effort. The deceased’s families witness their ghosts over and over at random.

Even as thinking machines dominate warfare, they approach an asymptote limiting total control. Some missions will always require a human hand. Combat search and rescue, for example, cannot be done by a bomb-equipped drone. The soldier with his injured teammate sloughing off his back trudges forward on such a mission. He wonders grimly if his visage will be propagandized in death.

He strikes a figure of cutting edges, a spiked and jagged demon shaped from crushed obsidian. With glassy rainwater streaming off his shoulders he seems to have risen from the final circle of hell. His equipment is the penultimate defense afforded to flesh. The helmet with its 360° optics and full scanner suite integrated directly into his vision. He sees all around himself in a rainbow of overlays, the artificial combat assistant constantly assessing and reassessing the battlefield. He is constantly uplinked to headquarters and a personal advisor, though many soldiers speculate if the voices directing them are real or artificially generated. Revolutionary ballistic protection technology shields his body, able to stop even rifle rounds from penetrating his torso, though affording little defense against high-explosive payloads. An expensive soft-kill active protection system on his shoulder is designed to neutralize drones; utterly ineffective, but left on his kit as a comforting placebo.

He has a family but he carries no picture tucked in his helmet, no smiling face to remind him of home. Prisoners of war find who carry such things find themselves subjected to artificially generated videos of their spouses disfigured or raped. Digital footprints can be lethal; online pictures are used to recreate birthmarks, tattoos, scars. Anything to make simulated snuff films more lifelike. Children are not off-limits either, but national governments tend to find that extreme degree of psychological manipulation indigestible.

He sees the target building towering a block away, a monolith in praise of destructive force; its darkened facade permits no light to exist in the space between them. Gathering storm clouds broil just above its silhouetted rooftop. A seven-floor apartment complex, twisted gargoyles watching its perimeter atop corbels. Water drips from their mouths.

The angular shape of a surface-to-air missile battery on the roof reminds him of his position. He ducks behind houses and follows the rows forward, legs trembling with exertion and boots sinking into muddy, churned earth. When he reaches the final house before asphalt he raises his weapon and tries the doorknob. Unlocked. He eases the door open.

In his mind a silent prayer echoes. Not for safety or for help or for a clear path to do his job, but for an authentic face. For a breath, accompanied by the twinkle of eyes. For wet blood, still molten beneath skin that burns with warmth. He has no care for what kind of human may persist here, whether they be armed enemies or fellow soldiers. He trudges towards the door, not with hope but instead with hungry desperation.

Humans react outwardly, emotionally, primarily to please others, to communicate agony or relief or absolute despair. It is no surprise, then, that the soldier lacks the energy and purpose to react. His face, leached of color by sweat-streaked ash, does not unfreeze from its statue-esque stoicism. His eyes turn to glass, skating across the scene like blades, reading without processing. Understanding without feeling. He can only comprehend the situation as a reflection of light and an absorption of light. A collection of data, an assessment of a potential threat. Here he feels vulnerable only to detachment, the adversary who drains him of his humanity.

Rot. The house stinks of rot. The pestering flies so eerily absent outside have congregated in force around a body trapped under rubble. They buzz and crawl over exsanguinated, pale flesh. He cannot see the face with its forehead resting against the floor, only a jagged laceration across the back of the corpse’s head. He turns away.

In another room he finds a window looking across the street. Rain blasts into the opening and flings damp curtains open, revealing his objective once more in all its ominous splendor. He pulls the window shut and dumps his teammate on a queen-sized bed. His head bows almost reverently so that his helmet camera can assess damages. Biometrics stream across his vision: tidal volume, estimated body temperature, wound type and severity. The computer warns of compensated hemorrhagic shock. He retrieves a vial of ketamine and a syringe from his JFAK. Administers the medication with thoughtlessness only a well-practiced hand achieves.

His teammate breathes easier, but with a soaked-through uniform and shock symptoms, hypothermia will set in. He strips the outer layer of gear off and tucks heat packs under her arms. He replaces the missing gear with a clean blanket off the bed.

His shoulders feel full of helium as he creeps back outside, freed from the burden of the wounded. Sensation prickles back into his legs gradually. He leans around the corner of the house and scans for movement. Not even the whisper of danger in his mind. He crosses the street, boots sloshing through a river of corrosive ash. He slides to cover behind a sandbag wall, careful not to cut himself on the barbed wire next to his face, rifle posted and leveled toward the building’s front doors.

Dry, acetone breaths hiss across the courtyard, louder than the din of rain. He wrestles his breathing under control. His heart slows down. Even in a machine-dominated world, this is what he signed up for. He crosses the courtyard, rifle trained on the first-floor windows. Presses himself against the brick wall and creeps along it clockwise until he finds a less conspicuous entrance. The laundromat’s windows are cracked and crumbling in spots. He opens its door and slips inside, one hand silencing the bell overhead before it can peal. Water drips off his uniform, marking his trail like a bleeding wound. His rifle swivels, the helmet-integrated cameras scanning for motion or warmth. Nothing. He opens the door at the back of the laundromat and orbits, rifle sweeping every possible angle. Nothing.

Rows of numbered doors stretch down the hallway before him. Some are ajar. All are cast in shadow. He crosses the threshold and pauses. His chest rises and falls softly. He takes a knee and opens a pouch at his waist, revealing a small cuboid apparatus.

Known as “the screecher,” it takes ultrasonic and radar images and cross-references them to detect motion through walls within a relatively small radius. The soldier’s helmet detects the initial ultrasonic pulse and connects to the device. This enables him to seamlessly view its reports in the form of indicators superimposed over the physical world. However, the screecher’s radar emissions draw hunter-killer drones like flies if used outdoors.

For a moment he thinks his helmet sensors suffered damage from the earlier drone strike. Then a blue specter flares toward the end of the hall. His rifle swivels and he approaches swiftly. The figure moves low to the ground. An unnamed ground vehicle? It’s approaching him from a left fork in the hall. He pauses at the corner. Exhales.

He steps out of cover with his finger on the trigger. His eyes widen. He jerks the gun upward. The same injured mutt from earlier stares up at him with beady eyes. Its soaked fur hangs limp and grants it a knobby, skeletal frame. The dog growls for a moment. Then it turns and trots away, its gangrenous hind leg dragging.

He mutters something and looks to the stairs. On the second floor the screecher picks up motion again. This time a baby’s crib mobile spins in the fluttering breeze of an open window. He steps forward—he can’t see over the rim of the crib. The mobile plays “Rock-A-Bye Baby” in tinkling notes. He stalks closer and flips his rifle’s safety on. Pauses at the edge of vision and presses forward before his courage can fail him. Leans forward like he’s about to jump from a plane. The crib is empty. He breathes out.

Two floors pass without incident. He searches rooms on the fifth to make sure he wasn’t sent to the wrong location. In one, a sniper turret squats on a tripod in the room’s center. A plastic chair and foldable table are set up close to the door, with a touchpad controller designating targets for the turret to fire on. The controller seems to be dead. Ammunition drums with various markings are also arranged neatly on the table.

Floor six. The screecher links with his helmet. Nothing. He stalks the L-shaped hallway that shapes the apartment complex. Floorboards creak underfoot. His rifle skips like a record needle. He’s almost finished with his sweep when he hears it. Human voices.

His heart staccatos for the familiarity alone. In this place, humanity means either enemies or the captives he came here to save. He presses himself against the wall next to the door and fishes for the crucifix tucked away in his uniform blouse. He presses it to cracked lips. Lord please let me be providence to those caught in the jaws of death. Lets it drop.

The door opens. He rushes inside, weapon raised. A command dies on his tongue.

Five darkened desk monitors crouch over a plastic chair like expectant ghouls. He moves to the chair and taps a key on the keyboard, prompting the full suite to light up. Camera feeds, drone status lists, a satellite map, and in the center of all those a black command terminal, its input bar blinking. Voices warble up from a headset resting on the desk.

There is something else in the room with him, something which smells of decay and cleaning chemicals, but his eyes remain glued to the screens and his mouth set in a hard line. To see, to comprehend, would be unbearable.

So there was nobody. Just a generator keeping the equipment on while the enemy seemingly abandoned this place. On the status monitor, individual drones receive their own tab listing a designation, connection status, power, and current tasking. He glances over the tabs, all in another language. Luckily one he can read. Connection status: DESYNCHRONISED. DESYNCHRONISED. DESYNCHRONISED. Every single machine.

Yet they still operate. They attacked his team. They hunt down anything that moves and has a heat signature. Civilians died in burning streets and took cover underground. Which means… which means…

He stands up abruptly. His chair tips and clatters. A vein protrudes on his forehead. His gloves creak as his hands curl into fists.

He leaves. The door shuts behind him. The radio continues its soft speech. Three bodies atop a tarp continue to rot in an organized row. All clad in ripped American uniforms. Little red blossoms adorn each frozen heart.

The soldier skips the 7th floor. Nothing worth seeing there. No luck left in the world. He pushes open the door to the roof. Rain blasts against his face, his helmet, transformed from drizzle to monsoon. Wind howls pure and sweet across a reality once whole and now stained with his disbelief. His eyes barely make out the rooftop’s boundary. If he jumped from this rectangular island he would surely fall forever, and the raindrops would fall with him. Infinite stasis in a watery void, an ocean too divided to support life.

The surface-to-air missile battery makes a wicked silhouette in the storm, but he disables it easily with nobody to oversee the controls. He notifies headquarters, his voice barely a whisper above the wind screaming at his helmet comm. The unseen narrators on the other side assure him that a helicopter is en route to his location. They will find him. They will find his teammate. Some part of him will never be found, lost in the rainy abyss, in the ground crushed under soldiers’ boots.

He produces two flares. Green fire burns in each hand as his arms stretch wider, wider. He is divine. He is a bird poised to take flight. His shadow skitters in the downpour, cast both before and behind him.

A glittering jet of flame streaks across his vision, far away and high up. Clusters of lights fall from its route and spiral toward earth. They stall abruptly and spread out, waiting. Eventually different colored lights come to meet them and the two parties clash, making fireworks where they collide and wink out. Machines created to deter war now prolonging it until the world cannot feed them munitions any longer.

As the soldier watches, he remembers a dream. He stood side by side with a demon whose skin was metal and whose breath reeked of sulfur. Rust coated its horns. Together they stood arm in arm and their hands had fused into each other’s backs, so that each puppeteered the other.

They watched the Sun decline over a desert, the sand rippling under a gentle breeze, golden under the final vestige of light. When the air turned cold and the wind bitter, the demon spoke, and it spoke in his voice. It said his children would live in a world where the wildflowers only grow red. He asked what that meant, but it would not speak again. When he awoke he could not recall one critical detail: had he been the puppeteer, or the puppet?

Blanket of Darkness

“Write about something you know. An experience you know. Write about something real. You can tell when people write about something they didn’t experience because it’s missing something. There’s something, and that’s all I can really call it, intangible, yet we can all feel when it’s there, and we can all see it when it’s not.”

I look at the blank white page, with the little cursor, blinking, taunting. Thinking about any experiences that are worth sharing, I come up blank. I don’t have any experiences that I think I could twist in a way that, if you squint really hard, it might read interestingly. I have no stories to tell, but the cursor keeps blinking. The page is still blank. You know, there are the really great writers that could make turning the page of a book into something deep and interesting and beautiful. But that’s not me, even though Tia thinks so. Those writers could turn a pile of dust to gold with their writing if they so chose. How exactly they do that I’m not sure, but what a gift I wish I had.

I’m taking a class on it. Writing stories. I wanted to learn the seemingly magical ways that writers worked at their stories. It’s not magic though. There is some “science” to it. A science, like every other, that I evidently could not figure out. I got a C.

“To write something that is true to the actual experience, one must dramatize some details. This will capture the true emotion to make those who have never experienced the events of the story understand. Some might say this makes the story untrue, but it can also function to bring the reader closer to the truth of the event than anything. Human emotions are deep and intense, that’s how you will captivate the reader and bring them close to understanding what they do not know.”

But what if I didn’t feel any emotion? What if I still don’t? What if things happened that just washed over me with no feelings attached? How do I tell a story with the true feeling when there were none? It won’t be interesting that way, it will sound like a robot wrote it. Just strictly matter-of-fact, like a report. No one cares about reports, so why would anyone care about my emotionless stories? I could just go off of what I think another person would feel if they had experienced what I have and go from there? That should be easy enough. Just think about all the things you thought you should have been feeling…

     Should have been feeling…

     Should have been feeling…

     Should have been feeling…

“‘Should’ statements are often not productive thoughts. They put unnecessary pressure on you when it is better to focus on where you are and growing into where you want to be. ‘I should be doing this, should be feeling that’… you see? How does that make you feel?”

I don’t know, that’s kind of why I’m in this mess if you haven’t noticed. So no “should be feeling” then I guess. Come on, I bet you some writer has done it. But I’m not “some writer”, I’m some random person that got a C in a creative writing class.

Shit. Well if I’m talking about what someone else would or should have felt, that’s not writing about an experience that I know. So back to square one. The cursor is still freaking blinking. Why is it still blinking? Haven’t you had enough? The page seems even more aggressively blank.

“What have you been doing this whole time? Just write SOMETHING Lilly.”

I sat there and stammered, trying, but very much failing, to contain the tears that were screaming to get out.

So I wrote. I wrote the pain. I wrote the emotion that they wanted. If there was ever a time that someone wrote their soul out, this was it. It was all real.

Then, they tore her apart. And I got a C.

Now, I’m staring at the cursor. Again.

“How very sad. It’s so simple, write about something you know and have experience with. And you can’t even do that? What a waste. A terrible waste. What are you even doing?”

I don’t know. Sitting here staring, hoping that something will come and now I’m questioning my whole life. This is great, I’m really glad I did this. You know, this made me feel so much better. Thank you brain for this lovely experience, thank you writing class, but I will not be returning to my computer document just to stare into the emptiness. I have nothing to say, nothing to share, no experience that I want others to understand how I do.

I close my computer and resist the urge to smash it. I know the cursor is still blinking on that empty document. The document that I stared at all day while thoughts endlessly rushed through my head at nauseating speeds. All those thoughts, and none that could have become much of anything, I know that now.

So now what? I just wait for something to hit me and I feel compelled to tell the story? I don’t know how long that will take. Could be tomorrow, a week, a month, who knows. Until then, my computer will lie idle and unopened. I can’t bear another second of thoughts appearing like mirages on that blank screen. It’s three in the morning now anyways. I should have been asleep a long time ago.

I slide my computer into my backpack. It’s lucky it made it back in there without me snapping it in half. I make the walk from the library back to my dorm. Everything is still. The crickets chirp, and the street lamps are making the otherwise dreadful march back surprisingly nice. A small smile actually starts to spread across my face before I remember where I’m going.

I open the door very quietly. I know she always goes to bed early. I can see Tia sleeping peacefully, the little lump on her bed. That’s the only way I’ve seen her for the past month. I haven’t been in the room very much. She has most of her classes in the morning and is always gone when I wake up. I never hear her go. I try to give her the same consideration when I come back late every night. I text her when I get back, even though I know she won’t see it until the morning. She texts me when she leaves for class, hoping that I have a great day, followed by, “Make someone smile today”. But it’s been a month since I’ve received one of her morning messages. All my late night texts have gone unanswered.

I wake up at 9, not too bad for me. The sunlight spills into the room between the lavender curtains, changing the hue of the light to match. Tia’s side of the room looks like something out of a home decor magazine. The pillows are fluffed in a big pile. Her cream comforter draped elegantly over the bed, fitting perfectly with the sky blue accent pillows. It looks like it has never been slept in. Potted plants dangle from the ceiling and her record collection is displayed on a shelf on the wall. Everything on and in her desk is meticulously organized, down to the last pen and cork board pin. Photos hang on a string that stretches between shelves. Many are of Tia and me. We went on a lake trip together last summer and had someone take a picture of us sitting on the edge of a dock looking out at the water. It’s my favorite picture of us. Next to her desk she has a bean bag chair. Mine sits next to hers. She has fallen asleep doing homework in that chair seven times since we arrived here two years ago, that’s why she goes to bed so early now.

Her backpack is gone, and so is she. I check my phone and see a notification from a teacher about an upcoming assignment. I haul my body out of bed. You would think that my body would be getting used to my going to bed so late by now. The pounding in my head as I stand up is a glaring reminder that it has not.

After lunch I reluctantly enter my writing class. There’s only ten of us in the class and we all sit around the big circular table. Our teacher says it’s so “I can see all your beautiful, smiling faces!” despite the fact that I have not smiled in that class for a while now. I take my usual seat next to August. She gives me a little wave, I wave back out of courtesy. She’s just trying to be nice, so I’m just trying not to be a total asshole in return.

“Anything to share today Lilly?”, she asks. There’s a nauseating sparkle in her eyes before it immediately disappears when I reply.

“No. You?”

Why does everyone look at me like that? She just stares at me for a second. “Yeah, not much though. I ended up starting over with the ending of what I shared last time because I didn’t like how I ended it.” There was a long pause. I reach into my bag and pull out my computer. A sharp feeling rises in my throat. I leave my computer closed on the table.

“Lilly?”

I turn back to her.

“Why don’t you try to write something? I love your writing.”

No she does not, I say to myself. She’s just saying that. Last time I let my heart bleed out on the page. She knew it was all true, and she let them all tear it apart. Tear Tia apart. August sat there frozen.

“Poorly written, unrealistic, not the level of sophistication that was expected, not engaging. Corny,” that’s what they said to me. Never mind what they said when they thought I was out of earshot. I think my blank stare at her got the point across. I don’t want her guilt-fueled kindness. She knows exactly what she did, assisting in the twist of the knife that pierced my heart.

I just wanted them to know Tia like I do. Like one December evening in California. It was cool, but not cold, just a little chill in the air. We got out of the car on a side road a block from the beach. There is a trail across the street from the beach that is my favorite trail at home. Tia was going to bike with me while I ran. I did a little warm up and then I was ready to run. I started my watch. Then, seven seconds later, I hit the pavement, sliding on my hands, knees, and shoulder. My ankles decided to randomly give out, which was awesome. Tia was just behind me, so she saw everything. There was concern in her eyes, but neither of us said anything. I peeled myself up off the road, my hands and knees already bleeding and filled with little pieces of asphalt. I stopped my watch.

“Seven seconds, are you fucking kidding me?” I laughed a little bit. I watched the blood dripping out of the holes in my palms. Oh shit that really burns. I walked over to the curb as a car drove by.

“Are you ok?” the man in the car asked, who had also seen me eat it.

“Yep,” I said quickly, trying to hold back the tears that were only just then welling up. Tia walked over and I finally lost it. She took my hands and looked at them, then at my knees.

“Come on, we are going to go find a drug store to clean this up.”

“We don’t have to do that, I’m ok.”

“Nope, we are going.” So we walked back across the street. There was no use in arguing with her. I could not stop crying, even though I wanted to.

“Well, now Coach can’t tell me I’m not committed enough. I literally have skin in the game. And by in the game, I mean on the road.” I laughed, still crying, but Tia just smiled a bit. We pulled into the parking lot and she ran in, literally. I waited there, staring at the blood on my hands.

A few minutes later she ran back out with ointment and BandAids. I had gotten most of the dirt out already with some sanitizing wipes, that’s all we had in the car.

“Ok, let’s go back to the trail.”

“I really don’t want to anymore.”

“You can do this.”

“It’s already getting dark. I don’t want to go anymore.”

“You can do this. I believe in you.”

We went back to the side road and parked in the same place. I warmed up again, still crying a little bit but starting to pull myself together. I started my watch and started running.

Once we got to the trail, Tia mounted her phone flashlight onto the bike and rode behind me while I ran 7 miles. That’s just the kind of person that she is.

I wanted them to see the beautiful soul she possesses like I do. That before there was a ghost of a girl, floating unseen across the lawns of campus, there had been a bright, glowing one who brought happiness with her, spilling from her hands. She knew something was wrong just by looking at you. We watched Mama Mia on those bean bag chairs more times than I would like to admit. We sang along with the songs, dancing like idiots, probably pissing off the room below us with our jumping. She convinced you to do that kind of stupid, embarrassing stuff, like karaoke and dancing. Because she knew it didn’t matter, it made us happy. She really is the best of us, the two of us.

At first, she would disappear for the night. But when nights became days at a time, I started to worry. I questioned her, begged her to tell me where she would go, and why she had an increasing number of bruises on her arms, but she would never tell. If only you could have told me, Tia, maybe I could help you. But she didn’t. She became quiet and guarded, not the boisterous girl I called my best friend. The girl I knew was gone at that point. But one morning, she left for class, just like she always would. She sent her morning text. “Make someone smile today.” But I came back that night and…

No, NO! The thoughts are getting too much. I can’t breathe. I have to go. Somewhere else. But I can’t go back to the room now. Somewhere else.

“I love your writing Lilly. It really is beautiful. The way that you wrote about that day at the lake, it makes it feel magical.”

“It felt magical to me, that’s why I wrote it that way.”

“You have a gift, you really do.”

Can she not see that she is the gift? Damn it, it’s too much.

I open my laptop and the blank, white page is already waiting for me. The cursor has been waiting for me too, blinking expectantly, but has completely lost hope that it will be put to use. My throat closes, eyes well. I just want to sob. But I don’t. Instead, I start to write: I can’t go back to my room, not until it’s dark. That way I can still pretend that she is sleeping soundly in her bed under the blanket of darkness. But I know she’s not. Tia has been missing for one month now…