Heven's Eyes

The city enveloped to her like the arms of an octopus with its suckers exposed. It threatened to pull her under, to impede her escape. Giant eyes, watery in their malice, watched her. Clouded eyebrows furrowed as she rode slowly through the battered streets.
The warehouse district looked no different than any other warehouse district in a half-dozen other towns. The brined air tasted like wasted youth. The brackish wind slid over the collar of her leather jacket. It made her sag even further than the weariness that had already added its own weight to her heart.
Riding along the tributary: a small river no more than one-hundred feet across, Heven kept close watch of those who would go unseen. They stood around fires made from garbage and scrap lumber, holding out their hands for warmth. Their icy exhalations punctuated the misspoken oaths of the forgotten. Occasionally, one would look up. Eyes would glitter back at her like red diamonds in a gesture of defiance.
The fog horn lent a muffled staccato to the fevered wash of the waves upon the cemented shoreline. Electricity, the veins of the city, coursed under her shoes, their beat: unstopping.
Dejectedly, the stoplight in front of her flashed a dull red; it was a hopeless, syncopated rhythm. Green, when its turn arrived, refused to lend its light at all. Its angry whine reached through her helmet.
Perhaps it was in deference to this homely beacon that she should happen to turn onto Oak Street. It was surely not the sign which she did find as she turned away from the water. The green rectangle glinted off the sidewalk to her left, a fresh boot print obscuring its importance.
The sound of her bike reverberated off of the cobbles of days gone by. Everywhere she looked she saw the signs: different languages, different nuances, but always the same. A remembered voice swelled in her mind, its cold tenor adding cadence to her subdued thoughts.
“This is the end of the road…”

Heven took off her helmet, the wind’s frozen tendrils snaking their way though her hair. She looked around, her eyes squinting. Out of the six buildings on the block, only one of them looked as though it held any promise of relief. Security cameras and shiny door locks jumped out at her like beacons.
Slowly she walked her Honda up to the big bay door, trying to peer in through centuries of dirt and sweat that covered each window. She couldn’t see any lights from the outside; no telltale red flashings to alert her to further security precautions inside. A burst of wind from the North made her decision for her and she jerked open the door with as little flourish as possible.
Inside, the docking bay was cavernous. Wires hung from the ceiling. An occasional bat squeaked in the gloom. The wind crescendoed outside as her bootsteps echoed beside her.
Nothing else was in the room. No a too-old-for-use delivery van. No rat-scarred equipment. Not even a battered desk took precedence from the immensity of those four walls and vaulted ceiling.
In front of her was a heavy door. It looked as though the hinges had been cemeted shut with decades of disuse: humidity and dust creating a glue that would take a sand-blaster to remove. Just at the bottom, however, shone a sliver of light.
The door, surprisingly, didn’t squeak as she opened it, but swung easily inside. It gave way to a small room with candlelight muting the colors. Her eyes followed the most graceful path and lighted upon a heavy oak four-poster with turned legs that almost grazed the ceiling. The heavy-handed geometric triangles stood out in relief of the headboard and, laying as he always had, on the right, was Augustus.
His frail body was not that of someone fifty years old, but she did some quick math and determined that he must be just that as she stepped closer to the bed. He was still asleep and his chest, beneath his robe, rose and fell in a slightly irregular pattern. His arms, twigs protruding from his body, lay lifeless on top of the red comforter she had bought him once.
The feeling of homecoming never came, though, as she walked to the side of his bed. She’d seen it in her head so many times when she was lonely or scared, but it had never started out like this. Her body moved like a rusted porch swing, though in her mind she replayed her fantasies.

He was standing before her, his arms outstretched and his blue eyes full of fire. His tie would be undone and two, no three, buttons would be unbuttoned from his striped shirt, yet the shirt (as always) would be carefully tucked in. His hair, a bit ruddy from the sun, would gracefully fall over an eye, his lashes combing it carefully as he smiled.
And his smile would melt all the frozen places within her like a snowman during the first days of spring. It would radiate through her body, finding all of the secret places that he had touched and making them alive again. One by one, little fires would be lit to fend off the numbing cold.
He would tell her that a better time was rising for them. They would have the time to find private jokes, just like they had once. They would have time to take coffee together in the mornings and look at the stars at night.
He would tell her that they didn’t have to hide anymore.

She watched him breathe, willing his eyes to open and look at her. To give her that warmth. Finally, her own eyes fell of their own accord as her body realized that, though not warm yet, at least she was safe.
Heven woke up many times in the night, not quite believing where she was. She would sit upright, her hand flailing for the nearest makeshift weapon. Her eyes would look frantically from beneath her closed lids as she patted down the comforter. In the dark, she would find his hand and, sensing who it was, lay back down to regroup for the next scare.