Worthless

Grime under nails she thumbed through the paper, some torn, some burnt, some covered in blood. She reached her number, twenty thousand, feeling the weight of the wad press against her palms like it still meant anything. Smooth on her skin, a caress of a past life. She raised her arms and opened her fingers, letting the notes pass through the gaps and float into the breeze. The air rained them back down onto her, hundreds and thousands and hard-earned at that. They drifted, twirling against a burnt sky that so few eyes gazed upon still.

The money, if it was still called that this long after, drifted away, dancing a waltz over the scorched earth and collecting dirt on its travels. Every week or so she found enough to routinely let it all go, free into the world that made it, assigned value to it, used it as an excuse to cheat and harm and hurt.

Worthless. It all was now.

She craved the sensation of water on her tongue. Just a drop would suffice, the sweetness and cool would bring her alive again, a momentary respite in a world of fire and heat. Dry, so dry, moisture needed on her skin. The old money could have made fuel for fire to boil some water, but this new money curled up and smelt like tar. The plastic coating was supposed to help things but, in this life, it made it worse.

She had wandered without notice again. In her vision, scratched and sore from ash and sand, a town began to form ahead. This was not uncommon for her, finding places burnt and bombed. She preferred to stay away and let the dead grass or melted tarmac comfort her bare soles, but she admitted the towns sometimes provided the cans that kept her alive, beans or corn or lentils, sometimes peas. She didn’t have favourites. Beans were her favourite.

The town’s buildings were only just standing, crumbling in places and simply evaporated in others. Thick layers of dust frosted every surface, and no prints in them left her certain she was alone. Though, she didn’t really need prints to tell her that. She was always alone.

She found shelter from the harsh sun behind a wall of brick, still standing by a miracle. Unshouldering her pack, she sat in the dust and placed the bag on her lap. She rummaged through the contents until her fingers clasped the object she desired.

Wrapped in muslin cloth was a small, black notebook. Leather bound, scratched and stained, but the glue had held up. As soon as she unwound the cord that bound the pages together, calm and clarity washed over her, cleaving her mind from insanity.

She let herself have only a moment of this time each day. Without it, she would be dead. With more, she would be dead. Lifting her pencil with sudden dexterity, she let it extract her day from within her tumbling mind. Weather, approximate location, no sightings of people. Inventory of possessions. Water and food consumption. Zero. How she passed the time. She hit twenty thousand in cash. Only took six days for this collection. Maybe they got greedier the further inland she went.

Ash from a ten-dollar bill drifted in front of her eyes and fell, collapsing in on itself, over the cover. Violently, she swept it away, crooning to the book, bringing it close to her chest and closing her eyes as she breathed in its scent.

This notebook was her lifeblood. She could feel the energy and vitality returning to her veins as she scrawled almost illegible script onto the yellowed pages. But with that energy and vitality came reality. The horrors. The death. What she had lost. She only allowed herself this one moment every day to know, to truly accept the world, and then she left her thoughts to twist in over themselves again and again like kneaded dough. Solitude will turn even the strongest mind into such an impenetrable labyrinth that Minos would envy, her minotaur her own self.

She flipped back to an earlier entry. As was her routine, she liked to read about her life. Her life before, that was. Her eyes pooled with wetness she could not afford to lose as she drank in the contents. Flicking the tears away from her lashes, the old story she had written in another time sung to her.

Saw that new film today. Jack has been begging me to go. Can’t say I enjoyed it much when I was supposed to be finishing off my Eng Lit assessment. What does it mean when he lays his hand palm up on the rest between you in the cinema? I’m overthinking. News isn’t looking good. Dad can’t stop watching it. I might be the last Eng Lit class for a long time, they say.

She breathed in the words, and breathed them out into the wind, joining the ashes of forgotten currency in the air. Gently, she put her pencil between the pages and rebound the notebook, wrapping the muslin around it with practiced precision. It was her diamond, her guiding light, a moment from a better past that lived in the lost present.

As it returned to her bag, she felt the familiar confusion around the edges of her mind, crawling across the tendrils of her brain and fogging the synapses into numbness. Ah, to be numb again. A comfort only one who has experienced the world at its end could appreciate.

She stood, ready to continue on her way. She did not know where she was going, but she would know it when she was there. That much was hoped, at least.

Money still drifted around her like ashes in the breeze, but money could not buy her sanity back. Money could not buy her world back.

She let the paper fall. She let the paper die.