At the End of Rowling Street

Life on Rowling street wasn't the best if I was being honest with myself...with half its inhabitants unemployed and some even homeless, it only perks seemed to be how disconnected from society it was.

I lived in a brown two-bedroom house with my sister and her husband. I don't know why they lived here or why I lived with them, it's just how it happened after my mom gave it all up.

This other kid from the neighborhood, Franco, spent a lot of time at our place and I guess me and him became friends somehow.

Franco was tall and always pale no matter how much time we spent outside in the sun. He had one brown eye and the other was powder blue. His blue eye was always void of feeling and filled with a laser-like gaze, and his brown eye always indicated his emotions.

I always looked at his brown eye when he was speaking to me. I felt as if there was an invisible path to his soul through that eye.

His pupils were different too; his right one always looked half the size of the other. It made him look like a deranged psychopath and sometimes it even scared me. But I knew Franco well enough to know that he wouldn't hurt me.

In fact, he was quite harmless.

One night he picked me up in his blue Pontiac and drove me to a house I'd never been before. There were a lot of people there, and a lot of noise. I'd been to several parties before but Franco didn't often take me with him.

He disappeared into the action and I made my own fun by drawing sketches in the book I brought with me. Whenever someone would peek over my shoulder at my art, they'd look at me questioningly, even a little concerned. I was different, sure; drawing glass eyes, cracked flower pots with bones buried in the dirt, skeleton keys, but it didn't bother me.

By the time I saw Franco again, he looked absolutely numb and miserable. His nose was bleeding as it seemed to on the most random occasion. His eyes were rimmed with red and I knew without question that he had been drinking.

He didn't speak to me. His hand smoothed over his mess of earthy dark hair, and he met my eyes with a look of regret and some foreign kind of sorrow. He was ready to leave. In the bright red blinking light, his blue eye looked white.

The ride home seemed to last forever. I asked Franco what he'd taken at the party and he responded saying he was clean.

I told him he'd been drinking, and he nodded as a conformation.

"I'm clean." He said again.

When we got to my sister's house, Franco asked to talk up in my room for a while. My sister allowed it on the condition that the door was left wide open.

That was no problem, I had no feelings of that nature towards Franco, not to mention he was dedicatedly sworn off of relationships.

He opened my bedroom window and climbed out onto the fire escape. I followed after him.

He told me that what he was about to say would change the way I perceived him. He told me I'd think he was crazy.

His mouth had just opened and he was about to speak.

Time seemed to stop at that moment.

The sky's hue of supple dark blue bled into crimson, a loud and thunderous crack filled my ears for a second, and then I heard my sister scream.

Franco looked as if his fate had just been sealed by the devil as we leaped to our feet and ran downstairs to find my sister's husband lying in a heap on the floor, blood running from his eyes, nose, mouth and even his ears.

I tried to rationalize what I was seeing but nothing reasonable came. Soon my sister began convulsing and then she fell to the floor, cracking her head on the corner of the coffee table. Her lips were limp and blood seemed to spew from them, staining the already dirty carpet.

Franco looked like he could weep at any second. I wanted to give him comfort of any kind but I didn't understand what was happening.

He suddenly took my wrist and pulled me back up to my bedroom. Through the open window, I could see that the sky was now black and star-covered, more so then I'd ever seen it. The horrific shade of red had disappeared without a trace.

I asked what had just happened. My voice trembled, in fact, my entire body trembled. Outside my window I could hear dozens of voices crying out, wondering if this was the end of the world. I silently cried out along with them.

"V, this is the end." Franco held my hand and his palm was sweaty against mine. Our fingers were interlocked and he seemed to be looking through everything and seeing something I couldn't. He looked so distant and so afraid that I thought my soul would burst into flames on his behalf.

I argued with him. This was not the end. He didn't hear me. His hand grasped mine even more tightly. We sat down on my bed and stayed there. He didn't look at me, he kept his focus outside the window. He wasn't even looking at the sky or the buildings out there; he seemed to be looking through all of it. A fall of tears had begun on both of his pristine cheeks and several landed on my hand and made me quiver. When that happened, he pulled me close to him and rested his chin on my forehead. His arm was around my shoulders and he seemed to engulf me entirely.

My eyes opened as a bright blazing sun rose over the roof of the building across the alley from my bedroom. Franco's arms were still around me, and my head was resting against his chest. His slow breath told me he was asleep. His grass-stained denim jacket smelled like cigarettes and had a steely whisp of cologne mixed in. I rubbed my eyes, sitting up.

Franco stirred before his eyes opened. He asked me what time he'd fallen asleep, and I didn't know. His voice broke with lingering exhaustion, and the dreadful heaviness of yesterday still showed on his face. The alarm clock on my bedside table blinked 12:00 am. The power must have gone out some time while we were both asleep.

Franco stood up and stretched his arms high over his head. He was muttering to himself and I could hear something about the blood-red sky the night before. My eyebrows knit together. I still wanted to ask him about this all, but my mind was too haunted by a mess of questions and answers that made no sense.

The only thing I could think to do now was to leave the house and look for help. Find someone who might have answers to fill the black hole of seemingly irrevocable questions.

I grazed Franco's arm with my fingertips, getting his attention. I suggested we search for some help and he nodded absently. I wanted to search his face for the answer to the question that floated over my entire conscience, but I couldn't stand to see the tear stains on his cheeks and the exhaustion painted over his features. He was such a beautiful example of pain at that moment, and my stomach knotted.

The entire world seemed to be completely silent. The street was empty. No birds were singing. The only noise seemed to be the scuffle of Franco and I's footsteps on the broken sidewalk. We approached the neighbor's house. After rapping at the door, which seemed to echo through the invisible air of silence over the entirety of Rowling street, no answer came. The sound of my own fist against the wood of the door caused my hair to stand on end.

I tried the door. The knob twisted easily, and the door swung towards me before I even pulled it open. A heavy, limp form landed dully on the doorframe. It was a head, attached to a neck, which was connected to a lifeless body. Blood crusted over the features of the face and lay in a puddle soaking the carpet.

He'd clearly met the same fate as my own sister, and the sudden memory of seeing her go stiff before falling dead in her own blood made my eyes burn. Franco took my hand firmly and lead me around the corpse and into the house.

There were two more inside, one on the sofa and the laying on the kitchen floor. No survivors. Only the ivory smell of blood and dust floating in the golden air.

All the houses surrounding mine had nothing but corpses. I felt sick the entire time, seeing their flesh drained of life and their faces contorted strangely.

Eventually I couldn't go on. I told Franco I had to go home and he could look without me. He refused to leave me alone, so we both returned to my house. The environment was not at all soothing to my nausea. My sister and her husband still lay next to each other on the floor.

I couldn't take it anymore. I ran into the bathroom and retched into the toilet. Soon my abdomen cramped up from the gagging reflexes I was trying to overcome.

Franco told me to go rest in my bedroom and he would take care of the bodies on the living room floor. I began to cry before I even reached the stairs. I ran to my deceased older sister. I removed her wristwatch and kissed her palm. The lifeless flesh felt like wax against my lips and caused bile to rise in my throat.

Taking the wristwatch with me, I hurried up the stairs before I became overwhelmed with the weight in my chest. My tears subsided before long and I put the wristwatch on my dresser where I could always see it. I couldn't bear to wear it after removing it from her helplessly dead body.

Collapsing onto my bed, I wiped the proof of my grief from my face and breathed heavily. With enough convincing, I buried the pain beneath a thousand layers of my conscience.

I closed my eyes, my mind a blur of nothing. The sun floated golden over my eyelids, and I envisioned the tiny particles of dust hanging in the rays of light. The weight in my chest pressed all around where I felt my heart ought to have been.

I don't know how much time had passed, but eventually, I felt Franco's weight sink into the bed next to me. Familiarity washed over me as I inhaled his smoky scent and simply felt his closeness.

He sighed heavily, with more weight then I could have imagined feeling even at that moment.

I sat halfway up so he could lean against the wall and put his arm around me. I felt safer this way. His solemn, beautiful way of portraying the hurt and confusion I knew he was feeling somehow soothed me. His eyes searched the distant horizon through the window, and I could feel his being reaching out to it as well. I didn't know what it meant but I felt as if he had some control. He was now my safe place.

Days passed. We didn't leave the house again. Franco slept on my bedroom floor every night unless I felt too alone and empty, then he'd sit next to me and I'd fall asleep to the beat of his heart.

Eventually, the refrigerator and pantry ran on empty and Franco told me he would go and search for more supplies. I wanted him to stay with me but I agreed anyway.

While Franco was gone I did the only useful thing I could think to do; I started to clean the house. All kinds of thoughts dribbled through my conscience as I did so, but at the same time, my mind seemed empty. I thought of how Franco was really all that was left in my world. I wondered to myself what that would mean for our future. I felt like a stone had dropped into my gut as I considered that I didn't really know what I felt for him. I wondered if the clarity I'd always thought I had was even ever there.

Because the power seemed to go out on a regular occasion, Franco's mobile phone was always charging by a wall socket in my bedroom so that we could change the clocks to the correct time. Franco seemed to know that if we lost the ability to keep track of how long we'd been alone, it would only drive us to madness.

After I'd wandered around the house for some time, trying to find ways to make myself feel useful, I collapsed on the floor next to the wall socket and scrolled through Franco's many pictures. He'd always had a certain talent for taking beautiful pictures, and I discovered more of me than I ever remembered him taking. Then again, I'd always been his only friend and I shouldn't have been at all surprised.

He returned soon after I'd sat down in my room, and informed me he'd been successful in his search for more food. He sat down next to me.

I wanted to hold his hand and feel safe again. He leaned the back of his head to the wall, his jaw locking into place. He looked so stern when he did that. His white-blue eye was towards me so I could see no indication of how he was doing or feeling. I felt a shiver down my spine and he turned his head to look at me.

He asked me why I looked so uncomfortable. His blue eye, I told him, startled me every time I saw it.

He gazed down at the floor for a moment before replying. He apologized that his appearance made me uncomfortable.

Objecting, I struggled to explain that it didn't make me uncomfortable at all. I tried to tell him how beautiful I thought he was, but no words came. He had a way of draining the logic from my mind.