Sudden Lockdown by Amos Talshir

Author:Amos Talshir
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 2020-03-22T04:00:00+00:00

21.

Simon’s nights grew longer with the anticipation of meeting Rose in the morning. He and his father took care to bathe at the sinks in the restroom facility, but the toothpaste was gone, and Simon suggested they brush with ground-up blades of grass. Simon had read online that the leaves contained chlorophyll, which was a sanitizer. Charlie agreed. Their teeth were tinted green, but their mouths emitted a fresh scent enhancing the sea of kisses in which Simon and Rose drowned their love.

Rose believed that abandoning her on the pitch was just one indication of David’s betrayal—of her and of the resistance’s ideal of liberation from the regime oppressing the freedom-seekers. She suspected David not merely of failing to truly strive for liberty, but of collaborating with “the Others” who had enforced an even more brutal oppression upon the audience in the stadium, and perhaps upon everyone who was outside as well.

Rose was scared to leave the burrow on her own; she had grown used to spending her nights there in the company of the bats. She believed only in Simon, who provided her with the snacks left behind once a week at the center of the sports arena by the helicopter. Every morning, when Simon arrived to bring her up to the daylight, she could taste the hot chocolate he had given her that night on the frozen turf. In the dimness of morning, in the bat burrow, Rose would kiss Simon. He grew addicted to the lips that had bestowed that first hot-chocolate-favored kiss upon him on the pitch. He encouraged her, telling her they would soon go free, and she draped herself upon his lanky body, covered him with her kisses, and was no longer certain she remembered the taste of the hot chocolate, which had now been replaced by the taste of grass. Simon promised that soon they would convene with the president in private and receive the information they needed to break free. Then they would walk hand in hand on the turf, exposing themselves to Charlie’s eyes as he gazed down upon them from the height of his seat.

Charlie had begun to believe that this was truly happening to him. The deepening relationship between Simon and Rose actually heightened his terrible anxiety. The long hours in which Charlie was at the mercy of his painful thoughts began to increase his bitterness. He did not have the strength to stop it; he did not have the immense sea by his side so that he could exhaust his body by swimming. The thoughts got the better of him. He knew this bitterness had been nesting within him since he had moved out, leaving Clara and the kids. It had been spreading in his body ever since he’d admitted to himself that he and Clara had lost even the little that still united them—their physical connection and touch.

This bitterness would assault him every time he was on his own in the boat engine repair shop, where he had been living since leaving the house on the bluff.

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