Last Days Pt. 2

So a crazy thing happened and a lot of you liked the excerpt of my story.

I guess I owe it to you all to continue it a bit further.

(also the posts I’m working on at the moment are exceedingly long and this was pre-written)

So here’s the first part if you missed it.

Otherwise, here’s Last Days.

I wrote it.

Enjoy.

*****

“You’re a sick fuck, Aaron, y’know that?” the guard reminded him.

It was getting close to his execution. It had been a day since he was told of the guard’s tire bursting. He still felt sorry for him. He was beginning to piece together the stories of the outside.

“A lot of people had their heads blow up somewhere near the equator.”

“I read some women gave birth to clocks that all read midnight.”

“The Irish can’t be reached for comment.”

Aaron ate up his every word. What a way to pass the days, learning about the misery in the outside world. It put his quaint life into perspective, and helped him realize that he wasn’t really suffering at all: He was the only safe person in the world. Nothing could touch him behind his bars, and the only thing that could reach him was the words of his friend, the guard.

What was suffering? Was it what April went through? April Rose, two nice, descriptive names for who must have undoubtedly been a nice girl. Aaron wished he could have met her when she was alive. Maybe if he did, he could have prevented what happened. What Aaron wished for even more was that it would make sense to him.

The guard kept telling him all the details of what he did, so Aaron was pretty sure of what happened, but the guard liked to change the story from day to day, so some bits were hazy. Nathan Rogers gave a much more vivid description.

His replacement, Tilda Ellis, gave Aaron little attention. She took a much more passive approach to her duties, preferring docile inmates to rowdy ones.

Tilda was a confusing person to Aaron. What he knew came from the guard, and the guard didn’t seem to know much. The guard knew for sure that Tilda’s husband had left her for somebody named “Stephen”, and that made him laugh. He also said ‘she liked to play with the night guard’s night sticks’, which made him laugh just as much. Aaron saw neither thing as particularly amusing, but chuckled along for the feeling of companionship.

Aaron’s experience with Tilda was not helping him put her together: he would have expected a lonely woman who liked to play with sticks to be simple and friendly. Whenever he saw her, she seemed furiously hostile.

Aaron was convinced that Tilda selectively chose when he existed.   He couldn’t come up with any logical explanation for her behavior towards him; Tilda didn’t hear two thirds of the questions he asked her, answered an eighth of them, and gave him full sentences one twentyfourth of the time.

The one time she gave him a full sentence, she simply spoke two words:

Be real.

He had been spending a lot of time thinking about this simple phrase. All he had asked was if she was having a nice day. This had been one year, two weeks, and a day ago, but Aaron didn’t remember this. All he remembered at this point was the colloquial expression. Was he not real? Was he a figment of his own, or worse, another’s imagination?

Tilda really put him in a pickle, and while he usually hated those clichés, perhaps being real included using outdated idioms.

It was during this train of thought that Tilda walked into the cell block, her high heels echoing down the humid halls.

“Get up, shit-bag, Warden’s comin’,” the guard said.

Aaron continued staring into the space in front of him until the guard threw a peanut into his eye.

As he twitched and lightly spazzed, Tilda walked up to him, staring straight up to the dark corner where he had been looking sixteen days prior.

“I do believe this cell could use a window. What do you think?” she asked the guard.

“Whatever y’say, ma’am,” the guard said.

“I’ll call the maintenance men next week. They can get to work by fall.”

“Umm, Ms. Ellis, ehm, ma’am, Miss Warden?” Aaron said.

“And maybe we can even out the floor, straighten the levels,” Tilda said to the guard.

“I-I have a question, ma’am,” Aaron said.

“I don’t know what we can do about these sweating walls, but I’m sure somebody can take a look at them shortly,” Tilda said to the guard.

“I’m sorry to bother you-“ Aaron managed.

“Are you?” Tilda said.

“I suppose I am, yes, a little bit,” Aaron said.

“Good to hear. You’ve got two days left. What can I do for you?” Tilda said.

“How are you handling the apocalypse, Miss Ellis?”

“It’s a fucking thrill.”

“Is… Is there anything I can do for you? To help?”

“YOU”?

“I’m, uhm, sorry, I just figured everybody out there must be taking it pretty harsh…”

“You’re damn right. Us human beings actually have to deal with our problems. I’m suffering, while you piddle away your life here. Why? Shouldn’t you be living what little life you have left? You’re pathetic. It’ll be no tragedy,” Tilda said.

With that, she left.

“Hey, sick fuck,” the guard said.

“Yes sir?”

“What would you do if the apocalypse came here to Albert Almond?”

“Well, I don’t know. We all have to die sometime, I suppose.”

*****

He absolutely could not believe it. Tilda finally spoke to him, and she gave him so much more to think about. He was seriously worried about her – the end of the world as she knew it certainly seemed to be stressing her out. She was suffering, and he wanted to do something about it.

The guard had been sprinkling tiny bits of pity in Aaron’s daily beratings. It was true, he and the guard were bonding. Ironically enough, the guard had used the word ‘suffering’ a week before.

How was Aaron suffering, though? In his comfort, lack of duty, and the certainty of his situation? It was quite bourgeois, simplistic, and elegant in the rigidness.

He wasn’t suffering, he was simply human.

April must have suffered. He can’t imagine what she endured as he did what he had been told thousands of times he did to her… Inhuman, really. At first, he couldn’t believe what he was told. Eventually, the prosecutor made a rather clear picture of what he did. As did the guard, the warden, Nathan, and then, Tilda.

If only he could understand.

That’s all he wanted.

“Y’know Aaron-“ the guard began.

“Am I a sick fuck?” Aaron replied.

The guard, for the first time in four years, looked up at him. There was a smile across his face. He laughed a bit, then grew somber.

“Are you alright?”

“Yeah, it’s just… I don’t know. Maybe y’aren’t so bad after all.”

“I don’t know. From what you tell me, I sound like one mean guy.”

The guard looked Aaron directly in the eye. He held that gaze, and the glimmer of sadness the guard showed worried Aaron. Made him uncomfortable. He felt emotion boiling inside him, unease, and he turned away, curling in the corner. He’d had this defensive mechanism since he was young, which he used to avoid any sort of confrontation. He almost did it during his placement exam (eighteen years, two months, and eighteen days prior), but he gripped his hands tight and pushed on. Aaron didn’t like any conflict. He preferred people to be happy.

Aaron took a deep breath, stood up, and walked back over to the guard.

“I’m sorry, kid.”

“Thanks. I’m so glad you’re around to help me with this and April. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

Thinking that he had finally found a second friend made Aaron smile. Aaron’s smile made the guard frown. The guard’s frown made Aaron feel like going back into his ball. So Aaron stopped smiling.