don't show, tell

[Cicada]

She hadn’t managed to get a minute of sleep, but that was something she was used to. Wakefulness could be demanding like a stale itch when there was a lot to think and a lot to do.

There wasn’t a lot to do.

((Camila Cañizares continued from My Body Is Ready))

And she didn’t want to give her a lot of thoughts free space either. They grew like shadows when she didn’t force the light of the moon to invade her wide pupils.

The sun was coming up. Next thing she knew the gorgeously melting yellow settled into a disc obscured behind the first surely signs of rain polluting the sky in uneven chunks. Slowly growing, one hour later, the clouds had all swollen, further along pregnant by the minute of her unwavering gaze.

Camila regularly hugged Regina to herself, idly, while waiting for daybreak’s glory to sit inert on her clammy skin. The teddy was mostly soft, save for the many hard nodules of eyes staring out into oblivion.

She settled to breakfast, having tried and failed to warm the cold void in her mind with a quick morning walk. Quick became hours, only it was minutes, and she didn’t seem to be well acquainted with how time was passing anymore. Yet another lifelong piece of familiarity she had to lose for no reason.

For breakfast she sat with Regina, with an opened tin of crackers and the first of her unopened bottles of water. Her throat was painfully dry, starchy like one of Pa’s overpressed shirts, but she didn’t even notice when she washed down some quarter of the bottle in one swallow. She set the bottle right by her recent acquisition from the beach- colorful and obscenely phallic. A sex toy of some sort, though she hardly had the experience to know the specifics. It amused her much like a bad joke she wasn’t supposed to laugh at, so she’d kept it when she’d found it half buried in the sand.

Her first bite of food was nausea, but she compelled herself to half-hearted nutrition. No platitudes, no ‘ma knows best’, just eating in sullen silence. She wondered what Ma would say if she were here- she’d know how best to make her eat. She’d say something in a fragment of a song and charge at her daughter with her graceful dancer’s tread and she’d get all the nonsense noise out of Camila’s head. Camila wanted that right now, needed it.

But the fact remained that she had no bustling breakfast table today and nobody to turn to- that’s right, she was supposed to be alone, from now on until forever. Important she not let herself forget that.

She ate in silence and imagined a breakfast table a million miles away. Wondered if it was still too late to speak up.

Her mechanical eating was interrupted by someone’s spiel. Also mechanical, additionally cold, almost rote. One of their captors began to list of names, claiming the dead with dispassion.

What really surprised her- surprised insofar as she could bring herself to feel the emotion when she was empty like a glass bottle and as ready to shatter- was how few names she knew. How little she had reason to care. She was still touched, of course. Each name was a reminder that she wasn’t alone, each number was a mite to the swarm of her gnawing discomfort, that there were still people out there and that they would threaten her, much as she would threaten them.

Only a few names stuck. Tyrell had killed twice. Funny how he’d only made her acquaintance formally as of yesterday. She’d sacrificed her pride for him to put her trust in him. She’d watched him prop Dante up on his meaty shoulder. Now he’d claimed two lives in grotesque manner, and she almost couldn’t make the faces line up. She had no choice, of course. She pictured his silhouette bloody, and forced herself to accept it with a firm squeeze of her eyes seconds longer than it had to be. He was not her friend.

Her friends were already dead or soon to be. She didn’t need the announcements to remind her that.

But. Dante and Benny still watched her with silent accusation. They still had questions for her. She still had no answer for them. She hadn’t even buried them. They were going to rot under the jungle sun and it’d be all her fault. She tried to tell herself that she was just being watched by the goats, but nobody believed her, not herself and not the friends she’d lost. Her excuses wouldn’t satisfy them.

Time passed, and she wasn’t alone, but she was crushingly lonely. She’d packed up all her things, one of Regina’s arms now tied around her new dick sword. And yet Camila and the teddy still had the same amount of unencumbered hands. Camila lounged against a tree, waiting on all of the nothing ongoing. Glad for peace, sad she had none.

A violently loud creak, and crack, and splash. In order, one after the other, brutally quick as if on gravity’s merciless terms. Something told her to stay away. All she could possibly do was, for another rousing go about at failing: standing around with her one good arm, watching people die, giving away what was left of her supplies for all the good that it would do. She’d be growing her crop of the damned, the chorus of ghostly whispers politely reminding her that she owed them her life.

All her cynical logic forbid her taking another step from the comfort of the treeline. Not one neuron firing in her head was convinced she could do anything. She peeked out and already expected to see nothing but trouble. Already prepared to run the other way. That was right. She had to listen to her head.

Yet she still had her heart, so she hit the ground running.

((Camila Cañizares continued in Rakshasa Country))