[Kaimee]: 5.Short stories.Rhymes

© Kate-Aimee Conrick. All rights reserved!

---

Sometimes things just happen, and they don’t happen for any reason or as any punishment as far as I can tell. They just happen, to good and bad people alike, and there's nothing anyone can do about it – either to change or stop them – because they’ll always just keep happening. There is no rhyme or reason, there is no way to guard against them and there is no way out. You're stuck, and things happen, and that’s that.


I knew I couldn’t really hate life. I knew it, so why did I have to keep tempting fate? I mean, come on, if you were fate and one day you heard yet another whingy teenager declaring that they hated life and wanted to die blah blah blah… who’s to say you wouldn’t snap and just do it? Just once, just to make that one stupid kid realise how wrong they were? Oh god, but how I wish it wasn’t me.
I’ve been here for... it must be weeks now. I remember the fifth day, and I remember days after that, but I don’t remember how long or how many days. It gets hard to focus on what’s really happening. I know there are other people here, but sometimes they seem to move so fast that their faces blink in an out of existence when they check on me.
The world ended.
In my dreams, it hasn’t. In my dreams I’ve gone missing, or run away and my parents appear on the news to plead with the world to bring their baby back. But here, this world, this is ended. This isn't my world, and it’s ended. That’s all I really know.

I lay on the grass, pulling the seeds off a dandelion – one by one. I sighed. I sighed because sighing seemed to eat up a few seconds, and I was absolutely bored as hell. Out here, all day every day. I’d run out of comics and books a couple days ago, and the library was closed until renovations were finished next week. I needed those books. They provided this little guilt buffer, sort of like… if I were reading, that was learning right? So if I was learning… there was no need for me to go to school, and as long as I was learning I didn’t need to feel bad about all this lying. Right? Yeah, right. I read somewhere a joke, "In Russian, and in many other languages, a double negative intensifies the denial, just as it does in ungrammatical English. But curiously, nowhere, in any language, does a double positive make a negative." To which, a voice from the back of the lecture hall said, "yeah, sure." I sighed again. 3:45, time to go home.

“She’s at it again.”
“I know. There's nothing we can do about it though, we’ll just have to make sure she hears it somehow.”
“You cant just ignore her the rest of the time, she needs to know this stuff! How will she ever succeed if she doesn’t know!?”
“You're forgetting, Miss April, she will know, no matter what happens. She succeeded thousands of years ago, so no matter what we do now we can’t change it. She’s already succeeded.”
“So why are we even here!? If there's no doubt, why do we bother watching?”
“What if we need to do this again some day?” his laugh sounded hollow, even in his own ears.