Alive

‘It’s a little too orange!’, were her first thoughts as she continued to peer at the evening sky. She had this habit of pointing out the most obvious of things, as if she was the designated tour guide for people around her. ‘The ever so obvious Jia! nothing misses her overly observant eyes’, her mother would say with a touch of sarcasm. Which she would of course take in good humor, well, sometimes.

Although the sky being this dark tint of orange, was indeed a peculiar thing, considering there was going to be a total lunar eclipse today. Swatting away at those thoughts, as if they were a couple of irksome houseflies, Jia made her way to the bakery. She tried to mentally remember all the things that she was supposed to purchase – toast, one brown bread, three mava cakes and a dozen of eggs.

As she walked on, she started stepping only on the yellow squares of bricks on the cement pavement. Quickly making a game out of it, every time she would step on a red brick instead of a yellow one, she would do a small jump, before starting all over again. The thought of people seeing a twenty-five-year-old, merrily doing this silly routine didn’t bother her one bit.

‘A yellow brick…a yellow brick…two yellow bricks…oops a red brick! Hey, no more bricks?’

The pavement had ended and Jia finally got a chance to straighten her hunched shoulders. Rotating her neck, which had gotten stiff due to this game, she realized that she had gone a little further than her intended destination. Shaking her head with a silly grin, she turned around and saw her high school gate on her left. She loved her school, especially the promenade, behind the black gate with the bright green roof over it, which connected to the main school building. She smiled at the memory of those happy days with the long-strapped backpacks, pinafore dresses and two curly haired pony tails.

As she stood admiring the blue and white painted school building, her eye caught a sudden movement. She turned her gaze down to the big black gate, through which she could see a little girl, crying and struggling, as a woman in a pale green saree pulled her towards the steps of the building. The woman’s face was streaked with red-hot anger and she slapped the girl twice to stop her from protesting so much.

The frown line on Jia’s forehead deepened as she remembered reading a news article about a small child’s assault at a day care centre in the newspaper a month ago. She resolved to help the poor kid out, as she kept her right palm on the school crest, and pushed the gate open. Breaking into a sprint, she reached right in front of the main school building to see the woman and the crying girl turn around the now darkened corridor.

As she stepped into the hallway, she could hear the muffled cries of the girl and her heart started pounding. As the adrenaline coursed through Jia’s veins, she completely ignored that outside the school, the total eclipse has begun. The full moon, slowly took on the colour red, which mirrored Jia’s flushed face as she tried to track the girl’s cries. Just then she saw the woman dragging the girl by her hair into the women’s washroom.

She tiptoed inside the washroom and scanned it for the two sets of feet. Finding the stall in which the woman had taken the girl, Jia slipped into the adjacent stall and started thinking of a plan to escape. She had noticed that the woman did not have any sort of weapon on her, which somewhat relived her. Suddenly, a childhood memory came to her. She used to scare her younger brother late at night by imitating a scary witch’s laughter and saying – ‘There’s no one alive here!’

She decided to do just that and started laughing until her voice went hoarse, before she said those words out loud. Standing on the commode and putting her ear to the wall, she heard the shuffling of feet. The stall’s door opened, the sounds of footsteps continued and the main door of the washroom was opened.

She peaked over her stall door to see the door close shut as the green pallu was pulled. With a sigh of relief, she carefully turned her feet on the commode to check whether the little girl was alright. To her surprise, the child was staring at the door. Suddenly the child said, ‘You were right about the not being alive part’, before she turned her neck up to face Jia. But the neck never turned up really, her sliced throat hung mid-air, connected to her body only with a slice of skin at the neck. A toothless smile and two deep-black colored eyeballs looked at Jia. Not even a little whisper escaped Jia’s mouth, as everything in front of her went dark red and then black, as an eerily similar laughter escaped into the cold, night air.

The End.