The walls began to collapse. The sun screeched as it hurtled down from the sky, a giant weight that caused a flood and then a drought. Her skull cracked in three places from the pressure. Clean, white bone stuck out from the crook of her jaw, the inside corner of her right eye, behind her ears.

He sat beside her, in the closet that held her dolls and dresses. He stroked her arm, lifeless now. He petted her flaxen hair. He smoothed down her blue dress and retied the ballet slippers she had refused to take off since she had begun ballet lessons nearly three weeks ago.

His cracked lips were covered in dried blood and spit. The water supply had been dwindling at best and now he had completely run dry. Yet he couldn’t stop licking his sore lips, he even bit and tore at them like a panicked dog trying to chew off his own leg to get out of a bear trap.

There was a small lamp in the closet with a pink shade that gave the closet light. As he chewed his lips, the boy slipped a comic from under him and flipped a couple pages. In the light, he read:

“Where did we leave off, Victoria? Oh. Wait, here we are. Remember this? The Justice League was repelling an invasion. The warring leaders of the planet Appellax…”

In the dim light he continued to read to his sister, reading to stay awake, reading to keep calm, reading because it was something his mother had done only days ago; a bedtime ritual.

As the small boy read to his dead sister in the closet of their house where the walls were stacked like cards, the sun dipped into the great, blue sky like a careless youth at his favoured lake, diving headlong into the murky beyond.