Yesterwary

“No, Demi. We nearly burn you to fucking crisp,” Kraus said, shaking his head as he bustled around the stove, preparing tasteless food for his soon-to-be-disappointed customers. “I don’t want you to get hurt again.”

“We can think of a better escape plan, in case he comes back,” Demi pleaded.

Kraus sighed, and dropped a heavy hand on her shoulder. “I think is not good idea. I am sorry.”

Demi nodded, and handed him her chef’s jacket and hat, which she’d just cleaned, somehow knowing he wouldn’t allow her to return. Kraus tilted his jaw upward, chin wavering dramatically as he made no effort to conceal his emotions. He pulled her into the same sort of crushing hug he had given her on the day they’d met, and, through struggled breaths, Demi patted him awkwardly on his ribs.

He stopped her as she pulled open the door. “It has been honor working with you, Demetria. You bring little bit of light back into this dark place.”

Demi grinned, and turned to leave, but crashed head-on with an unexpected obstruction.

“Working with her, you say?” Collet’s mouth was contorted into a victorious sneer.

“You leave her alone,” Kraus said, pulling Demi behind himself and blocking her with outstretched arms.

“She’s done nothing wrong, Mr. Kraus. You, however, have been employing a non-conformist. I am sure you’ve been here long enough to know that such an act is against the law.”

Kraus snapped his jaw shut and stood up straight; tall and proud. He towered over Collet, and probably could have taken him if he’d tried, but he didn’t. Instead, he dug a set of keys from his pocket, folded them into Demi’s hands, and held his balled fists out in front of him. Collet shackled him up with a pair of rusty handcuffs, before pushing him out the door.

“I’ll be in touch, Miss Harper,” Collet said, disappearing into the bustle of the restaurant with Kraus in his grasp.

Demi stood alone in the kitchen, stunned into silence as she let what had just happened sink in. She examined the keys that were still clutched tightly in her palm, and shuffled her feet all the way into the front room, where customers and waitresses were looking around in confusion and curiosity.

“What happened to Chef Kraus?” a frail-looking waitress asked.

“He’s—” Demi cleared her throat. “He had to go away for a while.”

“Who are you?” another waitress asked.

“I’m… I’m Chef Harper,” she said, trying to appear believable. But how could she convince others, when she could barely convince herself? “I’ll be filling in while he’s gone.”

“Can you make the food taste, too?” one of the customers asked hopefully.

Demi inhaled a sharp, static breath. “Yes. You won’t even be able to tell a difference.”

She left the mumbled whispers behind and retreated back to the kitchen. A weighty lump formed in her stomach, and heaved its way up through her throat, as she moved to close the door and realized there was no longer any need to lock it.

“You’re a non-conformist, aren’t you?” the frail-looking waitress asked from the doorway.

Demi nodded and dropped her face into her palm.

“And the gendarmerie caught on?”

She nodded again.

“We knew it wasn’t him making the food,” the waitress continued. “I wish you’d have told us. Maybe we could have helped with something.”

Tears cascaded across Demi’s cheeks as the gravity of the situation pulled her downward, and she eventually found herself balled up on the grimy floor, back against the warm oven and knees pulled up to her chin.

“Oh, there, there,” the waitress said, patting her on the head with a wrinkled, spotted hand. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

“It’s my fault. I should have been more careful,” Demi said.

“Hey, now. Otto knew what he was getting himself into. If he didn’t think it was worth it, he wouldn’t have done it,” she reassured.

Demi broke down even more. “I didn’t even know his first name.”

“Oh, honey,” she said, patting Demi on the back. “C’mon. Up you go. Why don’t you head home for the night? We’ll get everyone out of here and close up.”

Demi nodded, drying her face on her still-folded chef’s jacket. “Wait,” she said.

“Yes, dear?” the woman asked from the door.

“What’s your name?”

“Cindy. And that beautiful, young thing out front is my daughter, Kelly.”

“Your daughter?”

The woman sighed wearily. “We had our issues in the old world. But we are all each other’s got, now. We all have to stick together in this place, don’t we?”

As the waitress was about to leave, Demi stopped her. “Thank you, Cindy.”

“No worries, dear.”

Demi walked aimlessly down the sidewalk, surprised by how many people were out, but quickly realizing she didn’t typically leave work until much later. Her head swam in thought. If Cindy and Kelly were mother and daughter, that meant they hadn’t love each other in the old world, otherwise they wouldn’t have run out. But here they were working together. They appeared to get along well, and, based solely on first impressions, they seemed like nice people. If they could work through whatever their problems had been in the old world, maybe she could at least give her father a chance.

“Pardon me,” Demi said, accidentally bumping into a body.

Looking up, she found she had ended up outside of her old apartment building, and the street was fully overrun with onlookers, rubberneckers, and curious-cats of every sort. She weaved through a few more bodies, until she caught sight of a gurney being hauled out from the front door of the tenements.

“What happened?” she asked of whoever happened to be closest.

“Paul found a newcomer dead in one of his apartments,” a woman in a puffy, dark purple dress responded disapprovingly. “Some folks show up and they just can’t handle it. This place certainly isn’t for the weak.”

Demi pushed her way to the front of the crowd, where gendarmes formed a half-circle to keep curious bystanders out of the way. She could see that there was a body on the gurney, but it was covered by a ratty, stained sheet. A pale, lifeless arm swung down from beneath the cover, and a familiar face stared back at from the wrist.

Believing that, if she shook her head and backed away slowly she might be able to remove the event from the history of Yesterwary, she found herself encapsulated by a pair of long arms.

“Come on,” Bastian said, hurrying her away from the scene.

“He’s dead,” she whispered.

“I know.”

“And Kraus—”

“I know.”

Demi’s vision was too blurred to see where he was taking her, but she was relieved to find herself back in their sitting room, Mr. Goggles resting in his permanent, rigid stance on the table next to her.

Bastian brought her a glass of water, and sat next to her on the loveseat. He didn’t say anything, and he didn’t try to pressure her into saying anything. They simply sat there in the unrelenting silence until morning light began to wriggle in through the warped and dusty windows.

“What happened?” Demi whispered, feeling thoroughly dehydrated, as if she had used up all the water in her body on tears.

“It’s this place,” Bastian said with confidence. “You were too happy. Yesterwary corrected it.”

“You say that as if you really know,” she said, curling herself up next to him on the couch.

“I do.”

Demi looked up, eyes red and puffy, brows creased. He gaze was met by a conceding sigh.

“It’s happened before. I knew someone, a long time ago. We weren’t exactly happy, but we were content. He started hearing things, said the fog was calling to him. Then, one day, he walked out of town and never came back,” he explained.

Demi stared into the dark abyss of the fraying damask wallpaper as Bastian’s word penetrated her skin, muscles, bones. “When I told you I didn’t see anything in the fog, that wasn’t exactly true,” she said. “I saw a tree. It was reaching for me and saying my name… in my sister’s voice.”

“You’re different,” Bastian said knowingly. “I’ve never heard of anyone in all of Yesterwary who could laugh, or smile, or make food taste like food. Maybe you’re stronger than this place. It knew it couldn’t take you, so it took things away from you instead.”

“I don’t feel strong,” she whispered. “I feel… destroyed. My entire family is gone. I have nothing left.”

“I know I’m not much,” Bastian said meekly, “but you’ll always have me.”

“Will I?” she tested. “What happens when Yesterwary takes you away, too? If you knew this might happen, why did you let yourself get so close?”

“For your sake, I didn’t want to,” he admitted. “I wanted to stay away. I just… couldn’t.”

Demi glared up at him, cheeks burning somewhere between anger and hurt. “Maybe you should have. Maybe you should, now.”

The room smelled of vodka and death. The tiles seemed too clean, in comparison to the rest of the surfaces in Yesterwary. Demi stared at her father’s cold, motionless body. A dark, bruised ring circled his neck, and his lips were a shade of blue with which the farthest depths of the old world’s oceans could not compete.

“His personal effects,” a woman said, handing over a paper bag. She wore a white coat that had been bloodied and bleached so many times, varying shades of brown and yellow splattered it in a grotesque sort of tie-dye. She looked thoroughly indifferent about the situation to which all of her life decisions had led.

Demi took the bag without saying a word. She was more shocked than upset, at this point. She’d cried herself out of tears, and was having trouble feeling anything other than anger, which was mostly directed toward herself. The last thing she had said to her father was that she expected to go the rest of her life without seeing him again. And now she would.

“Do you want the ashes?” the woman asked in a monotone, covering Mr. Harper’s pale face with the sheet that had been folded over the lower half of his body.

All deaths in Yesterwary ended in cremation. Burials used up too many resources, too much time, and, quite frankly, there just wasn’t enough space. The town may have created more room in buildings as needed, but the land was unchanging. If everyone who had ever died there had been buried, the graves would have been elbow to elbow and seven bodies deep. But the ground remained untainted by the souls the city had consumed.

Demi gazed at the sheet for a moment, as if to make sure he really was gone. If no one had a heart beat to begin with, could they ever really be sure if someone was dead?

“No.”