Yesterwary

“When you say ‘no love left to give,’” Demi said, peering at the flickering lights that lit up distant windows in the night like chaotic fireflies.

“It means what it means.”

“But—”

The young man turned with a solemn face and snatched her dangling hand from her side. In a swift movement, he placed her palm over her own chest, and waited. Demi’s eyes widened as she felt for the rhythmic beat that would never come; her heart was as still and silent as the aisles of the building beneath them.

“I’m dead?” she whispered, pawing at the rough, cracked skin that branched out from her heart and fractured her entire chest. It looked not unlike the pathway that had led them to the library. She hadn’t noticed it before. She didn’t exactly make a habit of randomly inspecting her sternum, but now that she had, she glimpsed identical cracks peeking out from the young man’s shirt.

“Don’t be ridiculous. Your heart’s only stopped beating.”

“My… What? How am I not dead if my heart’s stopped beating?” Her voice was tinged with panic, certain she had died and entered into some horribly peculiar afterlife.

“You ask a lot of questions,” the boy said calmly, leaning against the decayed railing that lined the rooftop.

“Only when I want to know the answers.” She glared up at him, unrelenting, sure that if only she scowled long enough he would give in.

“You ran out of love, Demi,” the boy snapped. “You gave it all away to someone who didn’t love you back, and you ran out. That’s it. The end. This is what you get for it.”

“I…” she huffed, feeling as though she wanted to laugh, but finding that her body refused to cooperate. “I most certainly did-fucking-not! Besides, love isn’t something you can just run out of. It’s not a tangible thing that can be measured and weighed. You can’t use it all up—”

“It is. And you did. And now you’re here.”

“Well, we can just love each other, then… right?” The words fell from her lips in a desperate stream, and, without meaning to, stabbed the young man deep in his gut, reminding him that the only reason anyone would consider loving him was to save themselves from a lifetime of solitude. But perhaps that is the only reason anyone ever considers loving anyone, anyway.

“You’re not very good at math, are you?” he said, eyes cold from the icy pain inside. “We’re both here, which means neither of us have anything left… You can’t love me. I can’t love you. And you won’t find anyone in all of Yesterwary who can.”

“So, everyone here has to spend the rest of their lives without love? What kind of life is that?”

“A shitty one. But there’s nothing we can do about it.”

“There must be—”

“There isn’t. And if you think you’re the first person to think there is, then you’re delusional,” he said quietly. “Everyone says the same thing when they show up, here. They all start out in denial. You’ll accept it, eventually. Or go mad, in which case… we have a special place for people like you.”

“Surely, love can exist anywhere…”

“Not. Here.”

Demi considered climbing up over the railing and throwing herself from the top of the library, thinking the fall might wake her up from the absurd dream in which she had found herself. A dream. It would have explained the haze over everything, the lack of feeling, the utter nonsensicality of it all… but something kept her feet firmly on the roof. It didn’t feel like a dream—although dreams rarely do. If felt like a nightmare. But, even with such a lack of feeling, it also felt unquestionably, undeniably real.

“What’s outside of here, then?” Demi asked, struggling to search the fog that surrounded the city.

“What do you mean?”

“Something has to be outside of Yesterwary, right?”

“There’s nothing.”

“There must be something,” Demi muttered, shrugging off the guide’s words as she searched for a glowing red ‘exit’ sign, or a mileage marker for the nearest town; anything to suggest that there was something more, that there was hope of escape.

“There are a lot of ‘musts’ in your mind,” he said.

“But there simply must be. An entire city can’t just exist in the middle of nothingness.”

“You’ll retain your sanity longer if you take everything you know about ‘can’ and ‘can’t’, and put it out of your thoughts. The rules of the old world don’t apply, here.”

“But… has anyone ever thought to look? Has no one ever travelled past the edge of the city?” Demi questioned, thinking, for a moment, that she had caught a glimpse of a treetop in the midst of the distant fog.

“Of course they have,” he scoffed.

“What did they find?” she asked eagerly.

“Nobody knows. None of them have ever come back.”

“Then maybe they found a way out!” Demi cried, turning to run for the door.

“Or maybe they found their death,” he said, taking hold of her arm before she could move more than a couple of feet.

“You said yourself that this life is shitty. Don’t you think it would be worth it to find out?” she asked, eyes full of excitement and expectation.

“You would rather risk sacrificing your life for something that didn’t want you than ensure your survival?” he questioned, searching her face for enlightenment.

“What?”

“Love gave up on you, Demi. You’re here because you ran out. There’s just as little for you in the old world as there is for you in Yesterwary,” he said, astounded and saddened by her determination. “Even life without love is better than no life at all.” And although he put on a convincing face, he didn’t seem entirely confident in his own words.

Demi sighed and leaned against the railing, gazing down at the empty city streets as she pondered. “If I up and disappeared, won’t people wonder where I am? Am I just going to be another face on a milk carton?” And then she wondered if they even still put the faces of missing people on milk cartons.

“Your body didn’t go anywhere,” he explained, finally thinking it safe to let go of her arm, but unexpectedly finding that he didn’t quite want to. “But it’s just a shadow of yourself. You’ll be on auto-pilot for the rest of your life.”

“So… theoretically, someone could still love me, right? And that would bring me back?”

“In theory? I have no idea,” he said, shaking his head. “But I can tell you that, in all of Yesterwary’s history, it’s never happened. No one has ever been taken back, not that we know of. Empty shells don’t typically make for appealing objects to fall in love with.”

Demi stared into the young man’s eyes, hoping he would come clean and admit that everything he had told her was just a sick joke, or that there would be some inconsistency in the stability of the world around them, hinting that she truly was in the midst of a nightmare. But all she could find in the depths of his eyes was sorrow and irrevocable loneliness.

“How does a place like this even exist?” she asked, folding her arms in on themselves at the sudden chill in the air.

“Easily and impossibly,” he said, absentmindedly removing his jacket to cover Demi’s shoulders.

She smiled gratefully, breathing in the scent of rain and cigarette smoke as she wrapped herself up in the warmth of the oversized trench coat. She had been seven years old the last time someone offered her their jacket. One winter day, not long before her father became a slave to alcohol, Demi and Margo had been playing on a frozen pond. They’d done so many times before, and nothing about the weather suggested that this day should have been any more dangerous than any other, but, for whatever reason, the ice creaked beneath them, and the young-Demi found herself submerged in frigid water. Margo had fished her out, but as she was too small to carry her to the house, she ran to retrieve their father. Mr. Harper had scooped Demi up into his jacket and carried her all the way back to the car. On their speedy trip to the hospital his gaze had frequented the view of the backseat, all the while muttering, “It’s going to be okay, sweetie. Don’t you worry.” Even though it had ended in the emergency room, it rested in Demi’s mind as a good memory, because it proved that, at one point, her father had cared about her. But that was the last good memory she could recall with him.

“Can I ask one more thing?”

The young man nodded without meeting her gaze.

“What’s your name?”

He lowered his brow, surprised that anyone cared enough to ask. It had been so long since he’d spoken it, the word felt foreign and diseased on his tongue. “Bastian.”

“Thank you for showing this to me, Bastian. It’s incredible,” Demi whispered, looking back out over the city as she stepped up onto the railing, deciding that, if everything he had told her was true, if she was doomed to live the rest of her life without love, she would at least try to enjoy the view. Trying, after all, is the most important thing anyone can do.

Bastian tilted his head toward her, eyes glistening in a rare beam of light that had managed to escape through the clouds. He had never heard anyone describe Yesterwary as ‘incredible.’ Gloomy and terrible and awful and depressing and dreary, but never incredible.

“Incredible…” he said, observing a very different view from Demi as he stared at the strange new girl by his side.