Afterland Read Free

colors, but I think only angels can stir the rainbow and end up with white clouds. The rest of us end up disappointed and with brown.
                  I’ve never mastered the art of drawing starlight. It has a certain magical ambience that’s very hard to portray with paint alone. But it can’t hurt to try. I paint the sky blue, almost black. I take a small brush and paint the milky way in small white dots, adding accents of color later. It doesn’t shine like the sky. I can’t figure out what it’s missing. For more hours, I work, escaping into a magical world beyond our planet, our galaxy, our universe. For those hours of the night, I look at the sky and see it spread out at my fingertips. Right then, I can touch it and hold it, and that’s the most beautiful aspect of art: making the unreachable reachable.
                  In the time I was painting, the sky has rotated. Judging by the positions of the stars, it is around one past midnight. I am tired. I should fall asleep.
    But I don’t.
    I watch the wax stream down the candles, accumulating in small drops at the bottom. My eyes beg to close, but I deny them their request. I’m not sure exactly why I don’t allow myself sleep, but some part of me whispers that it is wrong to sleep in this situation. And besides, nowadays, I feel like I live for the hours when I become too tired to care anymore, too drunk on the night, and too hopeful that it will be different someday, and I can’t be sad at that moment. For those rare moments, I evade into a night half-life that shields me from the day half-life that is much more painful to live.
    There’s something wrong with it, of course, that I deny my body’s most basic need to prove to myself that I can. There’s something wrong with the fact that the need to prove to myself that I can survive is stronger than the need to actually do so. Besides, I haven’t been able to sleep properly since the Tragedy. I keep hearing the blast, seeing the flashes… I wake up many times a night to find my hands over my head, protecting myself from the ash that that clogged my lungs thirteen years ago. So I resist the temptation to sleep for as long as I can; I don’t want to relive it again. But eventually, sleep takes me.
    I dream of the Tragedy.
    The first sign was the earthquake. It was the only quake I had ever experienced and I was sure that it was the apocalypse. I wasn’t exactly wrong. I remember hiding in the bathtub with my parents, too afraid to even cry, keeping my eyes shut, praying that it wasn’t the end. I remember feeling the ground collapsing below my feet as we listened to the sound of the dishes my father left unwashed in the sink shattering and felt the raw power of the waves beating against our walls. The quake continued for what seemed like an eternity. When it was over, I still didn’t open my eyes. At some point, one of my parents turned on the news. The connection was failing, but I could hear a frightened voice announcing “ Evacuate… Eruption… Danger… Immediately…” Then the power went down.
    After that, we were running. All I took was the little stuffed bunny that I had already been holding. My mother held me in her arms, whispering comforting words I didn’t understand as we ran out. Our house was by the bank of the river and the waves had flooded our lawn in water. My parents footsteps squished in the mud and sent up little splashes of water.
    All of our neighbors were running out of their houses as well. Suddenly, one of them pointed to the sky and shouted “Look!”
    As everyone reacted, the sound of an entire neighborhood gasping in shock filled the air. An enormous cloud of ash was rising, spreading in our direction, and blocking out the entire horizon. It was so vast and expanding so quickly, it took only several minutes for the sun to dim. It was then that we understood for the first time exactly what scale of disaster we were dealing with.
    The sheer enormity