Written by Julia Rodriquez, Asst. Opinons Editor

She sits near the woods at the far end of an overgrown garden patio.   Staring, past the faded cobblestone zigzagged with cracks and grass, at the old crumbling house she once lived in.  Everyone who lived there is dead.  Her parents are dead.  Her siblings are dead.  She hasn’t seen another human being since her father started coughing up blood and was whisked away into quarantine.  Everyone in the world is gone, but they were rusty anchors tied with scratchy rope to her delicate ankles, holding her in place beneath dark, suffocating waters.

She does not mind the solitude.  She has always preferred being alone.  The people in her life were the root of all her problems.  The sickness that took them brought her freedom.  Yet, her lack of emotion scares her, she doesn’t feel human anymore.  Hoping for this place to evoke some feeling, she sits and stares at it, remembering the faces that walked the halls.

Something softly brushes against the nape of her neck and brings her out of the gloomy trance.  She tries to turn around and see what touched her but she cannot move.  Finally she feels something again, but it is fear.  Then pain, as she is attacked without the ability to fight back.  All she can do is scream as her flesh is ripped from her face, shoulders, chest and stomach.

“This is because of you,” she gasps between screams.

She glares at the house through the hot blood streaming into her eyes, “You got sick and left me here to die like this.”

Her whole body is stinging and throbbing when her heart begins to palpitate out of rhythm.  As she slips into cardiac arrest, she is finally able to move.  She collapses into a bloody mess of mangled flesh on the ground and slips into unconsciousness.

“What is that horrible smell?” A boy asks his grandmother as they walk towards a house in search of food.

“Something has died here…” she responds solemnly.

“There!” he points.

At the end of the yard, in the garden, lay the girl’s body, flies circling it under the beating sun.  The grandmother walks to it but the boy stays back, unable to stomach the smell.

“Grandma she’s half eaten! Don’t touch her it’s gross!”

The grandmother kneels down and takes the girl’s hand, inspecting her twisted, cracked, and bent back nails, “This girl has not had a single bite taken out of her,” she whispers to herself.