Stripped
The wind had powered through every opening, stripping
the tower block to the bare bones of concrete. Every single thing that had made
the building home now lay strewn across the barren mountainside and beyond,
underneath the pale blue sky.
"How did you find me?"
We sat on the trunk of a toppled palm tree and looked
at the sea. It used to be a good hundred metres further away. Having swallowed
the beach and the trees, shops, and paths alongside it overnight, it appeared
satiated. For now.
Xiuying was stroking her lapdog. The little furry
creature panted in the growing heat of the tropical summer day, uninterested in
the mayhem around it.
I rested my chin on my clasped hands.
"I looked for the spot where I last saw
you."
The place was gone now; only twisted remains of a
street lamp that used to stand nearby, now half submerged in water, helped to
locate what used to be a lawn in the city beach park. It was there that, back
in the quieter days, she looked up, pointed at the gleaming new tower blocks
overlooking the sea, and whispered to me she would want to live there one day.
Together.
"But it was years ago..."
It was. Back then any regular typhoon was capable of
pummelling the seashore hard enough to break windows, tear palm fronds to
shreds and sweep away enough sand from underneath concrete slabs for them to
break and collapse – but not much more than that. Back then we could walk
through an abandoned seaside resort that had been subjected to just such a
treatment and marvel at the ferocity of elements. Back then we knew little of
what was to come. She still wore her hair short, and I had more hair. I was not
ready to start something serious – she was.
"These things you just don't forget."
Cries rose somewhere behind us and would not subside.
It wasn't the first time since the sudden blast of wind had ripped through the
sleeping town and left at dawn, with a trail of destruction in its wake. They
would come at irregular intervals from different directions across the area
behind us, with varying duration, intensity, and pitch, mixed with shouts and
yells of first responders, all confused, lost, helpless.
"Maybe they found somebody..." said Xiuying
and hugged her dog tighter till it squealed.
I looked at her profile, strikingly perfect, like all
those years ago. Then I put my arm around her and patted the dog on the head.
I'd hated it at first sight. But then she told me.
"Your husband must be going crazy." I
cleared my throat.
Last night she couldn't sleep, worried about her
husband, away on a business trip to Shanghai, with all his loud, smoking,
overcompensating business partners she never trusted. Filled with suspicions,
she got a headache. The wind outside only made it worse. Her dog came up to her
bed, restless. Normally she would wait till well into the morning, but upset as
she was, it was enough of an excuse to leave the suffocating loneliness of the
apartment on the 29th floor. She was about to step off the elevator on the
ground floor when it happened.
Xiuying cast a quick glance at me and shrugged.
"Perhaps, if he had somehow heard what happened
here."
The sudden brutal wind, of the unprecedented kind that
only recently had started making news, ripped everything, living or not, from
all apartments on all floors, out into the raging open, leaving only an empty
shell of a building, cracked and ever-so-slightly
tilting. She heard the deafening rumble and she felt the whole edifice shudder
and she backed into the pitch-black elevator and stayed there and hugged her
shivering dog and tried hard not to scream while the world howled.
When finally it was over and she emerged, trembling,
outside just as the dawn was breaking, all her night time worries were dead.
"I remember you told me" Xiuying said,
looking at the swollen waters covering the spot where we had seen each other
for the last time, "that you didn't believe it made sense to start
anything because there was no future."
I nodded, my eyes fixed on the clouds gathering on the
horizon.
"Have you started anything?" she asked.
I shook my head, and then told her about living from
one job to the next, in rented apartments, single and free, with only enough
possessions to fit in one backpack and one travel bag, occasionally visiting
places that were important to me in the past – important for reminding me of
all the futures that used to seem possible. Used to, before the climate broke
down.
"When you said 'no future'," she went on and
then looked at me, "did you mean..."
I stared at her for a moment, then turned round and
gestured towards the wasteland of destruction behind us, underneath the
menacingly pale blue sky.
Xiuying bit her lip.
"We really should go and..." she said.
I shrugged.
"There is nothing we can do. Nobody can."
We sat there in silence for a minute or two. And then
she got up and left.
Tags:
Short Fiction