Wither

Wither by Lauren DeStefano Read Free Book Online Page B

Book: Wither by Lauren DeStefano Read Free Book Online
Authors: Lauren DeStefano
that has pearls worked into the knit—Deirdre’s handiwork, no doubt.
    When I open the door—which is no longer locked from the outside as it was before the wedding—I find Linden waiting for me in the hall. He smiles, loops his arm through mine, and leads me to the elevator.
    It’s distressing how many hallways make up this mansion. Even if the front door were left wide open for my escape, I’m certain I’d never be able to find it. I try to make a note of where I am: a long, plain hallway with a green carpet that looks new. The walls are a creamy off-white, with the same kind of generic paintings that are in my bedroom. There are no windows, so I can’t even tell that this is the ground floor until Linden opens a door and we’re on the path to the rose garden, down the same familiar hallway of bushes. But this time we pass the gazebo. The sun has yet to come up, giving the place a subdued, sleepy feel.
    Linden shows me one of the fountains, which trickles into a pond populated by long thick fish that are white, orange, and red. “Koi fish,” he tells me. “They’re originally from Japan. Heard of it?”
    Geography has become such an obscure subject that I never encountered it in my brief years of schooling, before my parents’ deaths forced me to work instead. Our school was held in what was once a church, and the students barely filled out the first row of pews in full attendance.
    Mostly we were the children of first generations, like my brother and me, who had been raised to value education even if we’ll die without a chance to use it. And the school had an orphan or two with dreams of becoming an actor, who wanted to learn enough reading to memorize scripts.
    All we were taught of geography was that the world had once been made up of seven continents and several countries, but a third world war demolished all but North America, the continent with the most advanced technology. The damage was so catastrophic that all that remains of the rest of the world is ocean and uninhabitable islands so tiny that they can’t even be seen from space.
    My father, however, was a world enthusiast. He had an atlas of the world as it appeared in the twenty-first century, with full color images of all the countries and customs. Japan was a favorite of mine. I enjoyed the painted geishas with their penciled features and puckered lips. I liked the pink and white cherry blossom trees, so unlike the meager things that grow in fences along the Manhattan sidewalks. The whole country of Japan seemed to be one giant color photo, glossy and bright. My brother preferred Africa, with its floppy-eared elephants and its colorful birds.
    I imagined the world outside North America must have been a beautiful place. And it was my father who introduced that beauty to me. I think of these long-gone places still. A koi wriggles past me and disappears into the depth, and all I can think is that my father would have been so happy to see it.
    The grief of my father’s loss is so sudden that my knees nearly buckle under the weight of it; I force tears back down my throat, past the lump that’s forming there.
    “I’ve heard of it,” is all I say.
    Linden seems impressed. He smiles at me, and raises his hand as though to touch me, but then changes his mind and continues walking. We come to a wooden swing that’s shaped like a heart. We sit for a while, not touching, rocking slightly and staring at the horizon over the edges of the rosebushes. The color comes slowly, bits of orange and yellow, like with Deirdre’s makeup brush.
    Stars are still visible, fading away where the sky blushes with fiery color.
    “Look,” Linden says. “Look how beautiful it is.”
    “The sunrise?” I ask. It is lovely, but hardly worth getting out of bed so early. I’m so used to sleeping in shifts, taking turns keeping watch with my brother, that my body has been trained not to waste whatever sleep it can get.
    “The start of a new day,” Linden says.

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