Propane

A Chapter by Natalie Sherwood

Again, do not read if death triggers you.

I’m standing outside the Colony, holding a match.

“Get on with it, Kaida. I don’t have all day,” Bertrand barked.

But this is all wrong, this cannot happen, and she is not here to help me through this.

She was the most comforting of people.

How could she leave me?

I can’t even smell her anymore, all rosewater and clean clothes, it’s just the putrid odor of propane in the air now.

Even the scent of blood or death would have been enough for me, just to know she’s there, in a morbid sense, but there's nothing there, only rotten eggs.

She may as well be gone, erased, having never existed.

“Kaida, come on. You’ve had your time, I want that body burned before something comes after it!”

I lean down and swipe the head of the match across the concrete, and it bursts into a tiny flame.

There are so many words swirling around my head, things I could say, silently, a last goodbye, but there’s too much. My head aches with the tears that I can’t cry in front of Bertrand, and there’s a wrenching pain in my chest. I want to fall to the asphalt, cry out, scream, because nothing is right and nothing is fair.

I can’t do this.

“Come on. Drop it. Drop it now,” Bertrand demands, in a warning tone.

I drop the match, and a sense that I’ve done something terrible overcomes me.

As I walk into the building, the tears finally start pushing their way out from behind the eyes that everyone tells me are the spit image of hers.

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