IV

“Coltello, I’m sorry.”

I seriously don’t know what got into my head. I don’t even think of him like that, not in any romantic or other sense. God, this whole ordeal is messing everything up and I can’t even think straight anymore. I want to cry again and my head hurts and my only friend thinks I’ve become a freak, I’m sure of it.

The Coyrean is lying on the sofa, face towards the ceiling so as to not get his antlers in the way of the armrest cushion. He’s putting on a stern expression—a total shift from the kind one he had on just a moment ago. 

“I’m not feeling like myself today,” I start.

“You don’t say,” he says in his language. I curse to myself because he knows I find it difficult to talk about my feelings in Coyrean.

“We are not talked much in these two months.”

“No, we haven’t,” Coltello replies with a scoff at my grammar mistake.

“You know, the other week, the aliens said they are done with the… the…”

“The conservation mission.”

“Yes, that. Only a few people are able to leave. So, the rest of us are left to die.”

“How’s that supposed to make me feel better?”

“It’s not,” I say, my voice trailing off. It picks back up: “It doesn’t make me feel any better either.”

I’m sitting on the floor in front of the sofa, facing a wall with the map of all of Sieve. 

“You miss your parents, yeah?”

He doesn’t respond. 

“We have four months before… pkhew,” I say, making the sound of an explosion to replace the word for it that I don’t know. “If anything, we should find one last big thing to do.”

He grunts in what I assume to be agreement.

“But, your parents still think it’s a hoax, right? So they keep on sending us money like they used to.”

“Don’t you spend it all immediately? Miss ‘I-should-spend-this-time-all-for-myself.’”

“Well…”

This is horrible timing. I just tried to get him to kiss me because of an intrusive thought and now I’m about to tell him I saved the money to buy train tickets to go to Coyrety. They’re in an envelope in my hands. They cost so much, because suddenly everybody wants to go home when they die, and I thought that Coltello would want to be home too.

Behind me, Coltello is probably thinking that his parents would never let him go back home expecting to die. They would think that the tickets are too expensive and that he should just focus on school and aim for the stars like he always did. They don’t know that the college has effectively shut down. They don’t know that Coltello cries every night like a child, lost in the old park where he’s toughed out a few scrapes and bruises but it was alright because they were right there to support him immediately. 

“What do you think if we are able to go to Coyrety, right now?” I struggle to speak my mind in his words, and I don’t notice but it has calmed me down as my mind focuses more on finding the right words than worrying endlessly about what he thinks of me now.

“I would think this were one of your stupid distractions to get me to ignore the fact that you wanted to kiss me.”

“No,” I say, just a bit too quickly, “no. That was a mistake from my head. That, it wasn’t me speaking. Just my crazy head. I did not actually want that.”

He sighs. I think he got the message.

“How would you feel?” I prod again. I haven’t practiced Coyrean much lately, but it’s slowly returning.

“I would be happy. Happy to see my parents, my siblings, the dirt roads of Coyrety. Maybe I would be able to stay there and when the day comes, I would just hug them all tight in the living room that I grew up with.”

“Yeah, and?”

“And eat, and drink, and see the stars as I used to as a young beast, and talk to my old friends from across town.”

I look at the envelope in my hands with a bit of jealousy. To him, returning home means the world to him; to me, returning here would mean almost nothing. 

Would it be worth it to me to die here? 

I don’t care about my friends. They’ve become shells of who they once were. I only care about Coltello because he lives with me. I’ve already seen all of what View-of-Few has to offer. Tasted, heard, felt. 

Perhaps the only thing I’m staying here for is the chance to see the sunset one last time. 

The skies have remained overcast for months and the Heorlas Meteorological Service is one of those many institutions that seemingly disappeared as we all inch closer to our deaths. What does it matter if it rains tomorrow or next week? What tiny problems these are, compared to literally dying. 

I have no idea when the next predicted clear day for this town is, and if I really ask my heart if it’s worth the gamble to stay here to wait for the sunset but potentially see nothing at all, it tells me that it isn’t worth it. I want to do that one last big thing. Visiting Coyrety would be big enough for me.

“Coltello, are you there?”

I can hear him sit up straight on the sofa. He reaches over my head and grabs his phone.

“Yes, Ma.”

“Alright. We have to go tend to the fields and the feral beasts.”

“Ok. Love you.”

“Love you too.”

The call ends. It seems like Coltello’s parents were gone for a while and forgot that the call was even on. They probably didn’t even hear our conversation.

I stand up and look at the beast in front of me, colored like a tree with its bark covered in lichens. He stands on two legs and speaks civilized language. His snout protrudes from his face like a deer, not like a wolf, but he has the teeth of one. He has antlers like deer too. They curve in a sharp shape, specific to his lineage, that looks like knives cutting the air. His eyes are still lively, as if his former feral instinct is trying to keep him from dying like everybody else. 

I look at the letter in my hands and put it on his chest. 

…

“We’re going to Coyrety.”