"Adolescence Post-Apocalypse"
One
"We Are So Much Closer Now, We Keep Telling Ourselves; It Makes Us Whole or Hollow"
She was learning to walk again.
There were two barres, standing slightly higher than her waist. Wood, but covered with a velvety substance that helped her grip it better. The length of the barres flanked the mat nailed to the ground, which was soft, but not shifty or slippery. The room had some other equipment, exercise equipment, most of which she had and would not have any use for.
Right now, she was looking at some point on the other edge of the mat. Twenty feet, the nun had said. Twenty feet might as well have been the distance to the edge of the world.
She was tied to a contraption that was hoist from the ceiling. It went under her thighs and strapped around her waist. It didn't lift her up, not by that much, but helped her stay above the ground if she so wished. Another aid. But this would be the first time she had tried to walk in months – after the cast, there had been the boot, and still, her feet were covered with bandages.
She looked down. The first thing she did was to wiggle her toes. She had been staring at her feet and wiggling her toes for the past week. Yes, her legs were there. Her brain recognized her legs, commanded them. She wasn't crippled. She could walk.
Then why wasn't it happening? It was simple locomotion – one foot in front of the other.
Easier said than done.
It wasn't the pain that shot up her entire body the moment she put more than half her weight down. That, she was almost used to by now, or so she kept telling herself. No, the pain was nothing. It was nothing at all compared to the first few months of sheer agony, when even screaming in pain had seemed too painful in itself.
It was just that her legs had barely moved.
"The human mind is fragile," the nun offered, "You can forget how to walk if you don't do it for long enough."
"How can you forget how to walk?"
"You know what they say about something being like riding a bicycle?" the nun said, crossing her arms, "It's not completely true. Once you've been off a bicycle for long enough, you have to learn it again. You learn faster than the first time around, but you learn it still. This is just like that, girl. You have to learn how to walk again."
"I'm telling my legs to move. They're not moving."
"Be patient. Try to remember what it was like."
She tried to remember. What had it been like to have the ground underneath her feet, to not have her heavily scarred legs hang like twigs, just as useless and thin, under her? Her arms were getting stronger from carrying the burden, but no matter what she did, her legs were two strips of mangled flesh to her.
Maybe that was what it had felt like, back when she could. Torture.
She clenched her teeth and tried again.
It took her four days to move, but move she did. It was clumsy, without a hint of balance, no different than a toddler trying to cross the distance in a new way, but with far less grace. She only made it three steps. She got stuck on the third step for another three days, before finally clenching her teeth and deciding to revolutionize her world by taking a fourth step forward, maybe even a fifth. She supposed that she was power-hungry now, a tyrant, without any point that she deemed worthy of stopping at. She cleared the distance in a protracted struggle, and when she finally got to the end of the stretch, she decided to make a lap of it. Then began her quest to make a full lap, no help from the harness, just the barres that she used for balance.
When she made the lap, she upped the ante. After two months of contained one-upmanship, her legs started to feel like legs again. Every time she stepped from the wheelchair to the mat, looked down and wiggled her toes, they looked more like what legs should look like... should never have looked like.
She kept at it, until the day came when she began doing laps without the barres, but just crutches.
"I want to go outside."
"Girl, the courtyard is just... soil. It's rugged, uneven. Better not to force it just yet."
"I want to go outside." She repeated, "I need to see the sky."
"Is there nothing I can say to change your mind?"
She shook her head.
The nun sighed.
"Sit." She said, pointing at the wheelchair, "I'll roll you there. No objections."
"Yes, ma'am."
As Girl was rolled through the convent, she felt something that she only felt when the Long-Lost Prince segment came on the radio. She was expectant, curious, ecstatic. The Convent's interior, now somewhat familiar to her, didn't excite her this much when she had first seen it. Tiled ground, stone walls, all gray and colorless, lifeless and functional, barely lived-in. She supposed she was the only patient they had had in quite a while.
When Girl saw the double doors approaching as the nun pushed her wheelchair, she felt her grip on the armrests turn her knuckles white. Just outside those arched, wooden doors, was a world. The source of the breeze she had felt when the window of the ward had caught it, where the sound of the rain and scent of fresh soil would come from. Outside. Such a simple word. So full of meaning. If in here was a coffin, if she was meant to have died, then this would be her resurrection – from the coffin and into the world again.
Well, almost.
The sky was drab and gray. There were no clouds, at least none visible. Old and decayed, the branches surrounded the courtyard, itself just an opening in front of the Convent, like guardians of the dead. Girl saw that the trees stretched on far as her eyes could see, maybe into eternity,even. The dull, dim natural light painted the intertwined branches of the bare naked trees in dark shadows. Immediately ahead, she could see an opening in the tree line, leading to a rather narrow path. At the end of the path was a playground. There was a carousel, a see-saw, a slide, two swingsets, some other things she didn't know about – all seeped in rust, mud and decay. The once-cheerful paint on any of them had long since peeled off, leaving behind only the impression of a poorly-kept autopsy slab.
It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
"Girl, I..."
"No. I want to get to that playground."
"This is hardly good for you."
"If I don't push to better myself, I will never be better. Just let me. I am grateful for you watching over me, but I have to do this."
The nun sighed again.
"The playground it is."
The nun helped Girl stand and passed her the crutches.
She touched God the first time she felt the ground under her bare feet.
The crutches were putting almost painful amount of pressure on her armpits, enough that she felt them tugging at her breasts. Using them, she could take the most pathetic parody of steps forward, sort of shifting her body weight around, trying to keep the crutches firmly planted on the ground. The nun had been right, the ground was uneven. Patches of it were soft and her foot sank in – a slight rotation of her ankle it didn't take kindly to. Five steps in and sweat was pouring out of her every pore. The roots of her hair were soaking wet already. Her right arm, which she barely felt on a good day, was already demanding a rest period – it was shaking badly. Her left arm, which she didn't feel at all, was shaking as well. She decided not to make a beeline for the playground just yet.
Just standing on her own would be enough for the day.
It didn't end. The playground was her new destination, her new goal. It was Heaven, in the way it was defined in the Convent. You only got there through adversity, by being tested to your absolute limit and not breaking.
So she went.
She went further every day, even if further was a single step. The closer she got, the more she became afraid. The playground-heaven was the only thing out here, she was told. What would happen if she reached it? It was close enough that she could taste it, but wouldn't she have removed the one thing that moved her forward?
Be that as it may, Girl knew that she had nowhere else to go, either. Behind her was the Convent, hell and purgatory in one. Ahead, was the playground, heaven, and the end of her quest. She could go more than halfway into the narrow path now. The trees that rose on either side of it had grown roots above the ground and walking was especially difficult there. Her body didn't like it. Her body could go to hell.
Closer and closer until, one day, she woke up without a name and knew that she would be reaching the playground on that day. She wolfed down her breakfast, stretched and grabbed her crutches. She trotted along the corridors to find the doors slightly ajar, left open just for her. She smiled and moved along. The steps down to the ground were easy. The first stretch was easy. The narrow path, too, was easier than she remembered, as she knew exactly where to place the crutches, where to step, and where not to. She moved through it with memorized skill and abject determination.
So focused was she on moving forward that Girl didn't notice that he was sitting there until she cleared the final step of the path and looked up and ahead to see her heaven.