Threnody (022).

(This is a 500-word-a-day novel project.)

Jesse looked up at the grey sky as flat as a cookie sheet. It wasn’t hard to come up with an explanation – hell, she’d been doing that since she found herself walking in a blizzard she had no memory of entering, and had started with her body (stroke, seizure, insanity, traumatic injury or out of body experience) and worked her way outward until she had arrived at sunspots, time distortions, and alien abduction.

She looked at the tattoo on her wrist. A broken heart; it was cliché. It was trashy.

I didn’t kill her, Jesse whispered.

Ryan was crawling out of the basement window, brushing his hands off. Thought I was gonna pass out from the smell there for a bit, but I found some stuff we can use. He held out a sweatshirt and a pair of women’s jeans; Jesse took them, and understood what he wanted. Get out of my girlfriend’s clothes, please.

The sweatshirt said Orchard State University. Jesse had never heard of it, in any state; she changed quickly right where she was, causing Ryan to turn away, surprised. While she buttoned the jeans, which were a surprisingly good fit, she saw that they were called Jason Brand Jeans, and all of the unfamiliar labels were beginning to unnerve her.

You’ve been doing this a lot longer than I have, she said to him. And you survived.

No way to tell how long, really, Ryan said. He was meticulously working his way through each pocket of the recovered backpack, rearranging the weight and zipping them closed. I used to think it was maybe a couple of months, or even half a year. Then sometimes I thought it was more like thirty years.

He sighed. That’s something true, too – most of the people we met said they thought time was broken. So maybe it was a couple months and thirty years. Fuck if I know. Some dudes said it must be magic or the end of the world or fucking sunspot. He laughed. Time warps. But, whatever, right? I mean, the stuff we seen, anything’s possible.

He glanced at her; Jesse felt chilled. You know what I think, he said, hefting the pack up and adjusting the shoulder straps. I think they used to be people. Those monsters? Yeah. People.

He brushed his hair out of his eyes, which had a faraway look. Most of the time you can see the red clouds coming from far enough off that you got time to run out of the way, but one time we got caught bad and got cornered. I had to shoot this….He thought for a moment. This donkey, snake, bug thing, and after it was dead I noticed it had pants on. I mean, there wasn’t much left of them, but they were pants. Still had the dude’s wallet in the back pocket.

He looks at her. Fucking pants.

She didn’t know if she should, but she touched his shoulder. We’ll figure it out, she said.