Lone

Here we are, being stripped of another chance at living jubilant lives – a constant recurrence. Once again, we are defrauded by humans - the deceptive sirens of the earth, as were the foul mermaids of the sea. My friends and I, deemed thieves in the eyes of the federal government’s disciples, or our “caretakers”.

How could we blame them though? A tale of a little box with twenty grand neatly crammed inside, being left stranded in an old attic - of which we broke into - sounds unoriginally concocted I’ll admit. But it was true.

At first, it was just a locked box and a rare dose of exhilaration implicated into our usually dull lives. However, once we’d bared its contents, it was far more than that: it was the restoration of hope for our lives. Perhaps in these coming weeks when each of us were inevitably scheduled to turn the age of adulthood and be officially removed from the system, we’d have a chance in this world. We have no family, we have no jobs, but we have this money.

We had this money.

Now it sits inside of a locked office in the basement while our foster guardians thrash out whether or not to report our alleged thievery, their ghostly voices heard scratching at the floorboards as they quarreled beneath us. All four of us sit quietly in my room, the all too familiar feeling of anguish weighing heavily in the air.

“Maybe this is good,” Tatum suggests. “I mean, maybe we’ll be forced to get jobs now. It’ll be…character building!” Even he was unsure of his own optimism as the confidence bearing his declaration was wavering.

“This is most definitely not good. This is quite literally the worst thing,” Tatum’s twin brother, Daryl solemnly refutes while pulling his long legs into his chest and burying his head in his hands.

There’s silence again as I assume, we’re all either scheming ways to successfully raid the basement and get the box back, or ultimately accepting defeat.

The silence drags on for at least a few more minutes before Ayden stifles the quiet with his plea to the universe, “Honestly, I wish we were the only people who existed. Then, it’d just be us, and we could just have fun every day, and we’d always be…okay. We wouldn’t even need the money then.”

“Yeah.” I stand from where I was sitting on the ground and head for my bed.

Everyone soon follows suit and begins settling in on the floor with the blankets they’d brought from their own rooms. I share a room with Ayden though, so he instead climbs into his bed across the room from mine.

All I hear before I drift off is his quiet voice, cradled by the silence, muttering the same naive prayer incessantly, “I wish we were the only ones on Earth. I wish we were the only ones.”

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Setting the tone for the day were the angry rants of Tatum working as my alarm for the morning; something about breakfast not having been made yet.

“You know, some people actually like sleeping past 8 AM.” I descend the stairs and quickly confirm his concerns as it was clear the kitchen was untouched. “Maybe they overslept, but I think you’re old enough to make a bowl of cereal.”

The front door swings open just as I seat myself and Daryl’s six-foot build enters the kitchen. Referring to our foster wardens, he explains, “Their car is still here, but I looked everywhere and they aren’t home. They were supposed to take me to Chicago today.” He comes over and sits across from me at the table. He leans in and whispers as if they can hear, “How mad do you think they’d be if we took their car?”

“Their car?” Tatum asks, setting the milk carton down in front of him. “If they’re gone, why don’t we go get our money back?”

Daryl and I simultaneously lock eyes for each other’s approval, but it might as well have been a predetermined decision.

Tatum springs up the steps to wake Ayden as Daryl retrieves the keys to the basement from our foster parents’ room. Tatum returns with a groggy, but still vigilant Ayden as we all reconjoin at the forbidden door. There’s no speaking for the following five minutes once we get inside, just the incessant slams of drawers, squeaks of cabinets, and metal clinks from the filing cabinet.

The filing cabinet. That’s where it had been concealed.

We still cease to talk as we allow the brown casing shrouding the money to absorb our eyes and thoughts as we stare at it sitting alone in the metal drawer.

This money was not just money. It had taken on the newly found denotation of the expansion of our futures. In five week’s time, we’ll all be individually thrown out to fend for ourselves with nothing but each other. However, with this we could do anything. We could be anything. We could see the world for what it is, and I knew what I wanted to see first.

“If we’re taking their car, can we go to the zoo?”

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It’s nearly four o’clock in the afternoon in Chicago, we’ve been driving for forty-five minutes to get here, and we haven’t seen one moving car. The roads were all seemingly deserted.

When we pulled into the zoo parking lot, the peculiarities didn’t cease. Other than two vehicles sitting in the lot, it was a ghost town.

“Is it closed?” I ask no one in particular.

“No,” Daryl confidently responds as he puts the car in park. “There’s just no one here.”

“How is there no one here?” Tatum opens the driver’s side back door. “It’s a Saturday.”

“No,” Daryl repeats. “There is no one here. Anywhere.”

“What are you saying?” Ayden opens his door too as if ready to investigate.

“Did you not see that there was no traffic? None of the toll booths were being worked, the mailman never arrived on time, breakfast wasn’t made, and there’s literally no one here.” Daryl gets out so I do the same and we all slowly wander to the tunnel entryway.

Ayden seems on the brink of an anxiety attack. “How is that possible? What are we supposed to do?”

No one answers right away as we all ponder the obvious, but I was the first to speak, “This is what you wanted.”

After a moment, to my surprise, he actually smiles in realization before turning and swiftly pushing the unlocked doors open and walking in. The rest of us stood for another moment, the reality taking a little longer to reach us.

Tatum laughs after a minute and exclaims, “You guys, we’re off the hook!” Then, he runs inside.

He was out of sight now, but I still yell in after him. “Off the hook from what?”

“Life!”

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As we all scramble back to the car, stuffed stingrays that we took from the gift shop in hand, it seems this will be the first of many best days of our lives.

That is until the pavement beneath us began trembling. This was instantly followed up with thunderous shuddering of the zoo’s 16-foot walls that border all of the enclosures inside. The giant entrance doors could be seen rattling against one another.

“What’s going on?” Daryl has to scream over the noise.

Ayden quickly confesses, “I may have…accidentally…found the keys on our way out…and accidentally…unlocked all the cages….and enclosures….and I’m sorry.”

“Get in the car,” Daryl runs around to the driver’s side and pulls away before the rest of us could even get our doors closed.

Just as we reached the end of the lot, to my horror, I see the doors only three-hundred feet behind us erupt open and an elephant, of all things, is what leads the herd.

Ayden and Tatum scream as Daryl starts pushing 120 miles per hour. I guess it was just our luck that we could go as fast as we wanted to now.

My eyes stay fixed onto the side view mirror, but I occasionally peer over to ensure the box of money is still sitting on the dash. The elephant and most of the monkeys and giraffes frantically wandered off in all directions, while a single lion, for whatever reason, was engrossed with our bright red minivan.

“Go, go, go,” I urge him to speed up as the lion’s eyes narrow. It was only about a mile down the road.

“We should be okay,” Daryl assured. “He can only go maybe like fifty miles per hour, he won’t catch up. I won’t slow down though. Put your seatbelts on.”

Ayden and Tatum had practically been draped over the backseat staring out of the rear window, watching the events unfold.

Daryl stayed above one-hundred miles per hour until the zoo and its escapees were no longer in sight.

Once the silence comforted us and our hearts stopped pounding, Tatum asked, “What do we do now?”

“We can do anything really,” I say. “Anything at all.”

“Let’s go to Florida!” Ayden suggests. “Michael Jordan lives there.”

“Well, he doesn’t live there anymore though, does he?” Daryl laughs and we begin the newly found seventeen-hour trek.

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The mansion and the golf course out back were what the rest of them were entranced by. I, on the other hand, was admiring the private jet he had tucked away in the center of what I presumed to be one of his less frequently used courses.

“Hey!” Daryl yells over at me from the other course a few yards away. “Me and Tatum are gonna go raid the Walmart. We can literally get everything, or at least all of the things we could never afford! Do you have any requests?”

I shake my head, still fascinated with the interior of the aircraft.

“Okay,” He replies. “Ayden is gonna stay here with you.” Daryl and Tatum turn and take off through the garden.

Ayden starts heading over to join me in touring the jet.

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Tatum and Daryl finished their shopping, the van fully packed with snacks they hardly even knew existed. They’re driving down the road at an unnecessary speed when they see it: a thick black cloud of smoke off in the distance.

“Is there someone else here?” Tatum asks.

“That wouldn’t make sense,” Daryl responds, slowing the car and veering off of the road and into the field where the origin of the blackness seemed to be.

“Oh, God.” Tatum jumps out of the still moving car as it came into view: the jet.

It was likely lying on its side as the propellers were towards their car, but the aircraft was so dismantled it would be hard to tell for sure.

Tatum sprints over to the heap, small piles of ember burning his arms as he attempts to crawl through the wreckage. Daryl had reached him now and was doing the same, cutting his fingers on chipped metal as he lifted the piece that would expose the cockpit. There was only one person in it though, and it wasn’t Ayden.

Tatum lets out a harrowing howl, but Daryl could only step backwards, nearly tripping over something in the process. Presumed to be more rubble, Daryl looks down and sees a small black book that’s partially charred.

He slowly bends over to retrieve it. The only thing on the cover was his best friend’s name neatly printed with white ink; his best friend that was now gone.

Flipping to the first page, Tatum’s screams are still ringing in ears. The first line reads, “Here we are, being stripped of another chance at living jubilant lives – a constant recurrence.”

He lowers the book as his hands shake uncontrollably with grief. His legs hardly work so he sits in the shard-filled grass. His eyes finally gloss over with tears to the point of partial blindness, a pile of burning money being the last thing he saw.