Rose Blumen ~

(Gamya)

I hurried my parents to move on. I was begging them to hold on and keep moving.

They were both sick and weakening. It was visible and audible. I held on and pulled on their sleeves to get them to continue walking.

I'm begging you... Mom, dad... Hold on...

I wanted to cry and they looked so hollow, all their spirits drained and evacuated out of them.

It all started after that white explosion.

We were away from our ancestral cottage at the time.

My dad's old namesake family town was a world away from the city we had inhabited since I was born. But we regularly went there for holidays.

Dad and mom met in the big city near the ocean. Ages ago and long before I was born.

The world was different.

Half of the cities of the continent were already hollow, vacant and abandoned to whoever wanted to live there on their own and away from the government. Most of them were just vacant and crumbling, even before the end.

I went to school while they worked in a company just outside the city.

They told me about what they were doing. How electricity and radiowaves could function and be used despite their inherent invisibility.

I loved hearing them when we were home. School wasn't fun but they were interesting. I was still young enough to consider their voices to be that of god. And they used to smile and laugh often back then.

I didn't realise how nice it all was before it was all over.

Sleeping indoors, with dry blankets. Eating as much as I could, without going sick every other day.

Mom and dad smiling at me with healthy look over their face every and every day.

Warm water and electrical amenities. The list would be endless.

Until that day...

~

School was over. It was especially cold that afternoon.

I remember hearing a sound like a whisper behind me, and I turned around to look back.

Clouds brighter than sunlight were rolling quietly through the streets, making them disappear along the ground, and as high as the sky. A wall of foggy glow was rolling forth like a sudden avalanche in short seconds, soon to be over me. It was followed by awful cries.

I began hearing the screams getting also closer, as they were the true nature of what I initially thought were whispers. No one had the time to even attempt running away or taking shelter from that odd light making everything vanish in sight.

By the time we had noticed it near this park, it was already there and reaching us.

I felt a push as the weightless tsunami simply passed over us.

But mostly I felt a kind of wash, or as if I was cloth washed and cleaned, bleached even, through a powerful cleaning stream or steam.

I felt as if all sorts of dirt and impurities, or thoughts even, were detached from me and carried outside. All through me as I lost balance, my entire porous body felt lightened, diluted or simplified.

Like the other teenagers around me in that park and the other children nearby, I found myself falling to my knees from losing balance in that sudden shuffle and ruffling of sensations. Many of them around me had really fallen down, and now appeared asleep or writhing around, shaking.

I was under shock but not yet understanding enough of what was going on to panic. I just felt a little dizzy and unsteady as if I had yawned too strongly for a while.

Some sand and dust was still flowing everywhere around me in the wake of that weird event. Nothing violent though. It was a moment of confusion that didn't last however.

Because right after, the screams growing and drew closer. Others were in agonizing pain around me.

~

Some fissures grew in ripples along the ground and nearby walls I noticed in stupor.

Some windows had broken along these times and growths. Shards still were falling off into the streets when it happened high above ground.

I was trying to stand up in confusion and dizziness.

But I only fell flat after shaking uncontrollably.

I felt nauseous and nothing in my body felt like it was answering or reacting like it normally or usually would have.

Nothing felt as it should. I was trembling quite heavily, but trying in growing sweat and worries, to relearn how to calm my muscles and articulate my own body.

And yet as much as it pained and scared me, I quickly realised I was among the luckiest ones.

I only had to learn again how to move body. The boy nearest to me clearly was dead.

Another one just behind was convulsing in ways that ripped his skin apart, already making him bleed to death.

The whispers had turned to nearby screams, now meeting a response from the newcomers to that tragedy.

The horrible situations were everywhere and the chorus was becoming loud.

People around me as I managed to stand and limp were dying in ways I couldn't understand. They were dissolving alive and then exploding into colourful mists spooking everyone close to them. I was startled by them as well.

I was moving away from there as fast as my legs could hold me.

Gradually, mists from the accumulated dead were rising through some corners of streets. The people who had recovered enough senses were running away from them. I would soon join them in a run to escape, even though my legs were trembling.

From behind the opaque mists and fumes of worrying colours, the panicked voices were turning even worse now.

The sounds were turning cavernous and the yelling felt less and less that they came from human people.

I saw erosion spreading along metallic frames in the walls, making cracks and fissures propagate fast. The rust turned to crystalline shapes like some minerals can do, along the crumbling walls and eroding street grounds.

Then I saw weirder shapes through the colourful smokes that scared me to run away even further.

Forms of odd animals were rising and rummaging around blindly. This was turning horrifying.

Headless animals were running until they bumped into walls, staining them.

Lumps of fleshes slithered along the ground in trails that turned putrid.

Everyone still able to stand was now trying to run away from this overwhelming sight of horror. The courageous ones among them were trying to help the trembling others to move away.

I managed to move awkwardly on my own feet and shoes. My smell and the soles of my shoes had changes in consistencies, but I could move.

My breath felt uneven as if each of my lungs inhaled asynchronously, but I moved.

I began to run away from the city centre, a little blindly at first. Toward mom and dad as soon as I was again able to think about me and them.

~

As I ran through streets turning hostiles and littered with death, I remember thinking of the weirdest of things for a moment. A discussion from the previous day or so at home, on which I had begun to better understand the concepts of laws.

The question had been whether the government laws cared about theory or reality. I was then a little puzzled, but that had been a good thought exercise for me.

Mom and dad helped me think for myself like that, exercising my critical thinking rather than forcing answers like dogma onto me. And they were proud of my intelligence figuring out some of these answers.

Now as I was stepping around weird puddles with rising fluorescent tendrils around them, I better understood some of the paradoxes about law.

Not far from me, some people carrying weapons were now shooting at moving things in the darker corners, or at each other. I didn't get closer to check.

Some heads of people on the ground were deformed as they were dying. Flesh was changing, as if their skin was trying to crawl away from their bones. The rules were changing today.

With the fissures growing along the walls and grounds, some places were now crumbling. Some buildings had a window or part of a wall falling down loudly.

More worryingly for me, I saw a little further ahead how the street itself was falling down into its sewers and tunnels below, becoming a sinkhole suddenly.

As another street was collapsing nearby and hazardous things were behind me, I broke another rule myself and rushed into someone's home.

I didn't stop as they yelled after me, running to their backyard in a rush, to climb a tree and jump above their fence on the other side.

I scrapped my elbows and arms, but I made it to the other side of that block of housing, while the situation in the city behind continued to rapidly devolve into a horror movie.

I ran toward our apartment building on the outskirts of the city, and my parent's factory in the further distance in the same direction.

But now I could see a pillar of smoke was rising from their industrial site, with weird bluish glows and electrical discharges coursing through it.

Other people were running or driving away on the nearby roads exiting the city this way. Many cars simply stopped and crashed along the side of the road however. I passed by the closest ones only to notice gore inside of them.

My lungs felt like they were pulsating like hearts, but I got closer to home and my parents' path to work.

I was one of the luckiest again, because I saw them.

They were also rushing toward our apartment building in the distance.

We saw each other and rushed to embrace all together with sudden tears in our eyes.

That hug was the most intense in my life. And given how they both looked then, I think theirs as well.

~