Hong Kong Young Writers Anthologies Fiction 4 - 7 2018 | Page 260

I’m about to open my mouth to speak, but the sudden thrumming of footsteps makes me stay shut.
Confused grunts of noise come from the people above us, and Elliott’s eyes are wide in his face, his chest
still.
The footsteps fade out as time passes by, but even after the footsteps have disappeared, Elliott gently
reaches for a tiny laptop, clunky in size and reaches for one of the tools I’ve taken out of my bag, making
sure a sound doesn’t escape from the rusty machinery.
Sooner or later, we both lean back against the rocks, each with our own little piece of old
technology and start taking it all apart.
It’s uneventful but strangely therapeutic, when we’re both taking apart old models. Orange sleeps
on a small bed of moss, bound to wake up with his red fur covered in wet green.
“Hey,” Elliott whispers into the dark. It’s grown a little lighter with the moon, and his dyed red
hair glows in the dark.
“Yeah?” I murmur back. It should be safe to talk normally now, but fear still follows my blood
around in my body, and it makes me alert and wary.
“I think your ancestor would be proud of you.” Elliott’s voice is slightly playful, knowing that this
is a topic I don’t touch on very often. I roll my eyes.
“It’s still an ‘apparently’ in my head.” I say, taking one of my screwdrivers from the floor and
turning a nail out of the board. “Xuanzang did probably travel ages and go and start one of the first
universities ever, but the fact mum still tells me we’re related and that,” I pause for a minute, taking the
screw out. “Is sort of hard for me to believe.” Elliott smirks in the dark and settles back, parts of dishwasher
and laptop sitting around his legs. The moon is a spotlight, illuminating everything so that it all shines and
the edges of shapes are glittering silver.
Dusk eventually rises, thin rays of sunshine starting to appear. My eyes are heavy, my hands slow.
Elliott is passed out on the wall, his eyes shut and his chest filling with air as he takes his breaths. A curtain of
darkness comes over me, and it feels like I’m home, underneath my duvet, a pillow under my head, not the
hard roots of trees and my dirt smudged jeans.
But then I feel something warm spread through my stomach, and I look down, and I see red spread
through my shirt, soaking through, and the first stab of pain shoots through me.
A bullet, lodged, so neatly in the centre of my abdomen, an old fashioned bullet from an old
fashioned gun. But still strong enough to kill a human being. Pain starts to alert me, and I sit up gently,
feeling every movement in agony. My head swims with pain as dark fades into light and light fades into
dark, over and over and over again. My eyes flicker to Elliott and Orange, and I see that a bullet is stuck in
Elliott’s chest and Orange’s fur is matted with blood. He would’ve woken up with blood on his red fur. Not
wet green. A figure stands at the mouth of the cave, his hands outstretched, and I recognize the sneakers
which are newer mine, lit by the rising sun.
But then the dark comes again, and the light does not.