In the Craters on the Moon Ch. 2

(text-style:"underline","expand")[In the Craters on the Moon] ------------- CHAPTER 2 WEIGHTED BLANKET ---------------- Melody, wrapped up almost helplessly in her twisted, black weighted blanket, woke up again this morning, and like most mornings, she felt no pressing need to get out of bed. Mirai, her huge, aging black cat, lay at the foot of her monstrous king sized bed, snorting and purring. His kitty asthma made him make the most bizarre noises as he slept, and his medication had the side effect of knocking him out so hard and so deeply that Melody certainly could have flipped him over, smacked his big belly, and rolled him back over, and he wouldn't have even flinched. No matter what went on around him, Mirai just keep snoozing like an big, dumb, oversized, snorting black loaf of bread. He was directly in a sunbeam. He didn't seem to care. Melody's eyes slowly attuned to the morning and her gaze began to extend past Mirai, to the corners of her large, empty bedroom. Nothing on the walls. Some cheap furniture - a white wooden corner desk, ordered online; a plastic set of drawers, designed for kids; and a massive vanity with an enormous mirror -- like the bed, it came with the house. This was her place -- as long as she paid her rent -- but it wasn't exactly home, was it? There were no curtains on the sprawling windows to her left, and on the other side of them, thousands of green leaves on huge elm trees buckled beneath the weight of last night's snow. It snowed last night? That's strange, she thought, it's so early in the year for it. Next to the windows lay the curtain rods, and next to them, in a crumped pile, a pair of thick blackout curtains. It would be a two-minute task to put the curtains up, she thought. Every time she saw them there, she thought this, but still they lay there, next to the windows in a sad, perpetual state of stillness, eager to finally be put to use. The morning bounced off the snow outside and off the sloped wall of her attic bedroom, filling the room with an almost otherworldly glow, and Melody somehow found the courage to finally get herself together. She shuffled over toward her desk, grabbed her phone, and shut the alarm off, and as was so often the case lately, Melody found herself, almost on autopilot, walking through the empty doorway of her bedroom and through the petite hallway at the top of the attic stairs. The attic -- not a large attic, but surprisingly roomy, she thought -- was split in half, on either side of the landing of the winding staircase; two doorways, both without doors, led into two identical bedrooms -- she still thought of them as bedrooms. There was hers, a starkly plain room with minimal furniture and just two or three posters sticky-taped to the sloped white walls, and then there there was the second room - an identical room, its twin, but you'd never know it. Melody, half asleep, stepping into the second room, was just awake enough to understand that no, there was no one here. She could have called out into the blinding light of the morning, but no one would reply. There would be no music, no laughter, no singing. It was just her. Just Melody in a big house with five big empty bedrooms. Three empty bedrooms. Just the ones on the second floor were empty. These two were different. The second attic bedroom could not have looked more different than hers. A big, plush bed covered in stuffed toys, mostly references to anime she'd never seen and games she'd never played sat proudly right in the middle of the room -- not up against any wall, a choice that never made any sense to Melody -- and the walls, covered every inch with photos, posters, banners, tickets, drawings, paintings, scraps of paper, cards, and who knows what else, seemed to close in all around her. Nothing in this room had been touched. She came in here often, but she couldn't bring herself to look around much or stay for more than a moment. She did find herself, from time to time, wondering what was inside the ornate set of drawers, what kind of components were in the PC nestled under the corner of the massive corner desk, and what kind of secrets she could find on the walls -- she imagined herself scanning through them for secrets, memories, something that would help her understand. Like an archeologist looking for cave paintings. Or like the police officers who examined this scene just two years ago. There was no point in looking around, anyway. There was nothing of value here -- Hunter's brother made sure of that. Nobody wanted any of this stuff, or at least, no one wanted to sort through all of it, so here it stayed. Everything Hunter had ever owned, right here, exactly as they had left it, exactly where it was when they lived here. When they lived. Melody stepped out of Hunter's room -- no, it's wasn't their room anymore, now it was just a room -- and as she got ready, she wished, as she so often did, that something, anything, would break the silence of the empty house that she now found herself living in, alone in a turn-of-the-century mansion 45 minutes from Cleveland at age 28. Something warm brushed against her leg -- Mirai meowed a prolonged, yelping meow and looked straight up at Melody. "Jesus, kitty." Melody took a breath. "Can you not sneak up on me? Fucking..." Mirai made a face, or as much of a face as a cat can make. "Yeah, I know. I'm sorry." Mirai screamed again, this time louder than before. "I know, baby. I know." Melody bent down and rubbed her hands along the cat's huge, goofy face. Mirai liked having more people here, didn't she? Melody thought about it a lot. Mirai must really miss having everyone else around. The other cat, too. He got used to it, sure, but he was only ever coping, she thought. Was Mirai ever actually thriving, or just suriving? Was he okay with just her? Melody looked a bit deeper into his eyes. "Are you lonely, baby?" Mirai didn't say anything --just rubbed against her hand and closed his eyes. He must miss Hunter, she thought. That's why he never goes in that room with her. That's why he just sits in the doorway and stares, wide-eyed, every time. Or maybe cats don't think too hard about stuff like that. Maybe she was just projecting. Maybe it doesn't really matter. Thoughts of her old friends came rushing back to her this morning. They always did -- she was essentially living surrounded by the ghosts of them -- but this morning in particular, the weight of their abscence seemed just a bit heavier than usual. This house was so lively back then, the seven of them spending all of their waking hours laughing, playing music, sharing stories and songs, playing games, gardening in the huge backyard, and most of all, talking about their dream game, a game like no one had ever made before -- WanderMoon, a massively multiplayer online sci-fi-fantasy game about cute little wizards and witches on a post-war colonized moon, set tens of thousands of years in the future. It was a big dream. But back then, big dreams didn't seem so big. Around all of them -- around Hunter -- it all came to her so effortlessly. A bunch of twenty-something kids crammed in Emily's room, the one with the big bay window, stretched out in odd positions all over the bed and the floor, Emily trying her best to do her work-from-home tech support job while everyone else tried their best to make her laugh. "Guys, you are LITERALLY gonna me get in trouble," Emily would say, grinning through her clenched teeth. The way Nessie would stay up late playing drums in the basement -- covers of Built To Spill songs, over and over again, jamming on and on, endlessly smashing away, deep into the dusty, foggy night. Sunday evenings spent around the big table in the kitchen, eagerly awaiting Antoine's cooking, knowing none of them could help without getting scolded for improper technique. Late nights around the fire pit in the backyard. Billie getting obsessed with some new whim, whatever it was this week -- Cheesemaking? Embroidery? Woodworking? -- and bringing whoever would listen (usually Roger, until he got exhausted) along on the ride with her, both of them spending a sleepless night or two throwing themselves headfirst into a new hobby and subsequently forgetting about it the next week. Sharing one tiny smelly bathroom. Sharing one tiny smelly fridge. Sharing needles. They didn't know any better back then. That was a lie, of course. Melody knew better. Emily, Antoine, Nessie, Roger, Billie, and Hunter all knew better. Every single one of them knew better, and yet there they stayed, dragging each other down, making each other worse, hurting each other and sinking deeper into the cycles that their traumas shaped for them. And it was wonderful. Melody thought so, at least, and she missed it. Ever since WanderMoon shut down, she had been missing it even more than before. She'd never tell anyone she did -- she'd always say it was a different time, that she had grown, that she's not that person anymore. But maybe she was. Walking around the big empty house every morning and hearing no one cooking, no one playing drums, no one talking or gardening or singing or laughing -- the silence was bothersome at times, and crushing at others. Melody could have moved into one of the big bedrooms on the second floor instead of cramming into the same attic room she'd moved into six years ago. She could have found new roommates. But that's not true. She couldn't have. She can't. Mirai missed it. Melody knew he did. Mirai was lonely, and doesn't like hanging out in empty bedrooms with no other cats. He'd more or less given up on chasing the occasional mouse that would take up residence in the kitchen or basement, and now had contented himself with sleeping all day, curled up under Melody's blankets, rarely if ever leaving the attic. He was getting old. That what cats are like when they get old, right? That's just what they're like. It's normal. Yeah, Melody thought. It's normal. -------------------- <a href="http://sherrycdrom.neocities.org/craters/chapter2"> Next chapter.</a> <a href="http://sherrycdrom.neocities.org/craters"> Back to the chapter select. </a> <a href="http://sherrycdrom.neocities.org"> Back to the main site.</a>