On December twenty-fifth, Kael Woolstenhulme received an electric guitar for Christmas. It was a nice blue color in the middle and fell into black with a gradient around the edges. It looked almost uncannily similar to a fist-sized model he had received for his fourteenth birthday last year. So much so that Kael wondered if his family had been planning this since last year, much to his appreciation. However, despite his feelings on how much planning went into his gift, he felt oddly… disappointed. The guitar came with everything, an amplifier, a few books on how to get started, nothing was left out. But he couldn't hurdle the feeling that his family didn't really understand or know anything about him. He thought this because if they did, they wouldn't have gotten him a guitar.
In middle school, he played the clarinet, and he enjoyed it for the first few years but when his music teacher decided that if they weren't winning competitions all their effort meant nothing, he developed a disinterest in the tube-shaped instrument. The tool for music sat in the back of the closet, banished for the unrelated actions of a teacher. The experience left a bad taste in his mouth about instruments and a sweeping dislike for all things music, except for one thing. The piano.
He had told his parents as such when they pressed him for something to replace the clarinet. He enjoyed the graceful way pianist fingers moved, gliding across the keys like a boat over water. It seemed simple enough to pick up, no specific tongue placements and no breathing exercises, just fingers, something he figured he had pretty good control over. They listened and consented to the idea, even talking between themselves quickly about where they might find such a thing for cheap. The conversation ended, like all others, and he went about his day.
Seven months later and he held an electric guitar in his unworked hands, smiling pleasantly. In his mind, however, he was a touch let down by the revelation that the admittance of his interests hadn't just been ignored, but passed on! His brother, three years younger than him, sat nearby, hands fingering the keys on an electric piano. It left him feeling like a pampered child, whining over how he didn't get the gift he wanted for Christmas. He couldn't just move past it either, The guitar was obviously expensive. Kael's parents clearly had the impression that he would be interested in learning to play it, otherwise, they wouldn't have spent so much money on it. Clearly, his parents loved him, but if they were going to spend so much money on an instrument why not get the one that he asked for? Nonetheless, he played along, he plugged it in, strummed a few nonsensical riffs, and when Christmas was over, he hid it in his closet next to his abandoned clarinet.
His brother had the same idea, and both of the brand new instruments were left to rot next to unwashed clothes and boxes of old toys. It left Kael to wonder if his brother had expressed an interest in playing guitar and if he was just as disappointed as Kael. Perhaps his parents had simply gotten the two children mixed up. Regardless it was never brought up and the instruments were never seen again, that is until four years later.
Kael, now eighteen, was packing up for college. He didn't leave for a few months but getting accepted to his first choice had left him jittery and anxious, so he figured he might as well get his stuff ready. He didn't know what compelled him to pack up his guitar with his clothes and decorations, but he did. He thought about it often himself, maybe he thought it would look good hanging on his wall. Maybe he thought it might impress a few people if they thought he could play guitar. Perhaps he thought he could sell it and get a quick buck. Whatever he thought, he brought it with, and when he moved into his one-room dorm he hung it, just above his bed with the grey spread. It looked nice hanging there lopsidedly, brought a nice Jazz of color to his otherwise melancholy room.
Nobody ever came into his room, nobody ever got to look at the guitar and ask if he happened to play the guitar. It wasn't that he didn't have friends, but instead that his friends' dorms were just much more entertaining to hang out at. Kael didn't have a TV hung on the wall like some of his friends, or a cool gaming console, just a simple work computer he occasionally used to play games like Minecraft. So it sat there for one year, serving no purpose other than to sit still and look pretty to the room's only occupant.
He didn't really grasp what was happening at first. He was an adult, But he was also a college student so all he really knew was that people were getting sick and dying. He just didn't understand the severity of it. His state had been largely unaffected, being sparsely populated (it had been one of the reasons he was able to get a room all to himself) but the rest of the country got it much worse. Regardless of the relatively low infection rate, people still fled from the campus, leaving in Waves. As much as he wished to, he couldn't leave the school grounds, much less the state. Kael didn't own a car, and his parents couldn't just go on a multiple hour road-trip through swathes of terrified people just to pick him up. Besides, where would he go? He'd rather just stay where he was and let this whole thing blow over, just him and the dozen other people who stuck around.
Except that it didn't blow ever, at least not in the way he'd expected. Months went by, and the government didn't give anyone any details except to stay away from the infected. Another month went by and first the electricity was cut, leaving him and everyone else on campus trapped in darkness. The food spoiled in the cafeteria and they stopped giving away food. A week later and when he went to go take a shower, no matter how hard he turned the handle, only a few drops of water squirted out. This he had foreseen, and thankfully had stockpiled enough water to last. He hadn't had contact with his parents for months, and nobody had talked with anybody outside of the campus. School grounds were a few miles at least from any majorly populated areas, so for all any of them knew the whole state had been evacuated to an offshore base. Another month passed like this, and people started leaving again. The first people that cleared out had family, someone to be reunited with them, so they left. Next went the employees, the few teachers and cooks that had stuck around for the sake of people that depended on them had left. The people that stayed were the people that had nowhere else to go, but soon they left too. It was out of anxiety instead of any real scarcity of supplies. They just didn't like how quiet it felt to be out here Kael supposed. One by one they all left until one day, he realized he was the only one left.
If he thought he could, he would have left too. He wanted nothing more than to be with his family again, especially after radio silence for months on end. Yet he knew he couldn't leave, everyone he cared about lived in another state, practically another world without any kind of communication. Besides, He knew his limits, he wouldn't be able to navigate across a whole country without GPS anyhow. Regardless, this place wasn't so bad, He wasn't one hundred percent sure he'd want to leave, despite his general ignorance about the state of the world outside of his school he knew he was doing better than most people. He lived off of ramen soaked in cold water and other non-perishables like cereal, And since most people left in a hurry, desperate to be back with their family, he guesstimated he had enough food to survive for at least the next year. Ignoring the nutritional deficiencies he'd doubtless get along the way. How bad could scurvy possibly be? It rained often enough to support his modest 'baths' and if he went through a dry month he had bottled water left over from the cafeteria and some of the more athletically inclined students.
The real problem was boredom. All-encompassing mind eating boredom. He was a firm believer in the importance of mental health, and though he doubted he would go crazy, he knew if he didn't get a hobby that didn't require electricity he would, at the very least, get depressed. He's been down that venue thank you very much, and he would rather not give it another joy ride. He knew right away what would inevitably happen, but he felt strangely against touching the instrument on his wall. He ran away from it at first, ironically by taking up jogging. It didn't even last the afternoon, a ramen diet was not an ideal one for a training athlete. He tried out drawing for a little bit, but when he realized he didn't have anything to draw, and when he noticed how his mind now seemed incapable of imagining things, he dropped it almost as quickly.
Finally, after a month of avoiding it, he picked up the blue electric guitar in almost a year and a half. He perceived it as cursed, holding something that so obviously belonged on the wall? Blasphemy. It felt as though it represented everything wrong with his family, as ridiculous as that sounded. Despite this, he stuck with it. Pulling out the "guitar for beginners" manual he kept tucked away in a little niche with everything else he wanted to forget about. He propped it up on his monitor, sat back in his office chair, positioned his fingers accordingly, and strummed an A note. Nothing miraculous happened. Nothing "clicked" or filled him with determination. It made a nice sound, however, and he liked how the taught metal cords stung his fingers. So he lined up his hands for the next step, a simple chord, and strummed again. For the rest of the afternoon he attempted to play a straightforward four-note melody without looking down at his hands. When it got dark he was forced to stop, his fingers were raw from playing anyhow, but overall he enjoyed it somewhat.
The next day he practiced some more, and for the first time in months, sound filled the dorm. For weeks upon weeks he repeated the process, waking up, eating, playing guitar, sleeping, and repeating. it was dreadfully repetitive and he suspected that if another person were to visit he would have stopped and never continued. But no one came so he continued. After doing nothing but practice for months on end, Kael thought he had gotten pretty good at the guitar, good enough to play the Minecraft theme even, or at least the parts he could remember. Playing the guitar was tactile, kept his hands busy and away from that knife housed in what he called the kitchen. It also cut through the silence that seemed to hover around everything he did. Without a pushy teacher or the expectations of parents, he realized he liked playing the guitar. Enjoyed the sound the nylon strings made, the way it echoed in his ears.
About four months after he started playing Guitar, late July by his own calculations, he finally saw another person. It was late morning and Kael was trying to perfect the soundtrack to a game he barely remembered when he looked out of his window at the figure standing in the middle of where the dorms met the classrooms. He barely registered what he was seeing before he was skipping steps in the stairwell in an attempt to reach the only human he'd seen in months. He sprinted into the glaring sun, painfully aware of the stitches in his sides and the weight in his left hand as he ran to greet the figure, now rapidly approaching. He stopped, gasping and wheezing from his mad dash to smile goofily at the man in front of him. He shouted out a hello, one that was deaf even to its sender. Unlike Kael's giddy response, the male figure in front of him didn't acknowledge him at all. Kaels grin fell away as he pondered the reason for his silence. Surely any normal person would be cautious of such a rapid approach, and now that he thought about it, if a stranger started sprinting at him with a guitar in hand and a manic grin on their face, he'd hardly deign them with a response. However taking a second look revealed that the man was approaching, slowly as though hesitant.
Silhouetted by the sun as the figure was, Kael couldn't make out any specifics about the man, other than his pale complexion, though Kael wasn't anyone to talk, seeing as he spent most of his time inside and more resembled a sheet of paper than a human. Even so, the man's quiet approach resulted in Kael's suspicions rising, and a consequent double take. Now that his eyes had adjusted to the morning sun, he realized that the "man" he'd had a one-sided conversation with wasn't a man at all, but instead a woman. Her bloated proportions would've given anyone pause, but that wasn't what Kael was focused on. Instead, it was her mangled face. Her face looked like cold butter spread on warm toast, caved in in places with liquid spilling out. Worse than that, her left wrist was hanging on by a single tendon and swung back and forth as she plodded her way towards him.
He tensed in horror as she let out a raspy croak and reached for him with her almost severed wrist. The smell was horrible, indescribable even. Once when he'd been eight, his father had gutted a pig, "for the experience!" he crowed. The meat was left in the freezer they kept in the garage, or it was until one day the freezer broke. The pig rotted, leaving bones and rotten flesh behind. Kael was the unfortunate soul that had found out the freezer wasn't doing its job. When he smelt that rotting pig, he threw up, he took a whiff of the rancid meat and puked all over the garage floor. He inhaled deeply, trying to recover, but the smell got into his mouth leaving him dry heaving on the floor. Finally, he had the sense to scramble out of the garage, crying and gagging on his way to his father's room. The women in front of him smelt like that, and while he was no longer an eight year old, it still made him want to cry.
The woman picked up speed unexpectedly the last few feet and managed to grasp Kael's cotton clad shoulder. He stumbled back, eyes tearing up from the fumes of the clearly deceased lady in front of him. She brought her stained black teeth to the place where Kael's neck met his shoulder, but instead of biting down on fresh blood, she was forced back by his adrenalin-filled arms. At that moment, he didn't know what came over him, but he knew he really loved the guitar.
For a week he went without a guitar, his last one saved his life and he could hardly regret the circumstances of its loss, but still, his fingers itched for that now familiar sting in his fingers. He left the campus a week after he lost the closest thing to a companion he had. Had he stayed, he could survive as long as the world allowed, but he knew deep down, he would never return, and for the first time in his life, he was genuinely thankful for that gift he received on Christmas.
If you read this story thanks. I hate ANs as much as you, but if you could please tell me how to improve my writing I would appreciate it. I'm here to practice my skills, and for fun so please tell me what I can do better, or what you though I should keep doing.