Heaven in a Matchbox

Heaven in a Matchbox By Lex Baker Normally, though not tonight, Regan liked the world. She liked the smell of a cold wind in the air and the black branches of the trees swaying in the breeze. She liked the crispy nights and the foggy mornings that smelled of wet ash. She liked it when she lit a fire and they spent the day inside, talking or playing a board game. The whole world was around the two of them, the whole world was in their flat on the second floor. Yes, the whole world was their flat on the second floor. It had taken a long time for things to become the way they were. In the beginning, it was just Regan and the Silence. After They came, after the inferno and the hysteria and the chaos, it was silent for a very long time. An eternity, it seemed, because who needed the exact measurement of time when there was no one around to keep in time with? It got dark and it got light again, over and over again. In the beginning, there were words left; tons of words, buckets full of words. But as the dark and the light came and went, the words left Regan’s head until she couldn’t remember anything. Not even who she was, not even what she was. She felt the desire to eat and to drink, and she ate and drank what she could find without knowing what it was. She moved around aimlessly, staying wherever she was when tired, regardless of whether it was pitch black or blazing bright. She moved from cities to towns from hills to valleys until she didn’t know where the buildings came from or who had made the charred trees and the empty subway tunnels But after years and years of the Silence, there was Emmeline. Emmeline, who was the most beautiful thing Regan had ever encountered, gave her words again. She showed Regan that life was not silent, not always anyway, and she told her with great patience of what had happened and what was happening to them still. Regan learned everything all over again, and as she did, very slowly and erratically bits of her memory came back. The memories didn’t stay, but they brightened Regan’s world when they arrived and brought with them meaning and order. It made her infinitely happy to remember something and then be able to draw in the ash on the ground and say, This is what coffee looks like in a paper cup with my name on it! And then she would listen to Emmeline tell her all about coffee and paper cups and why people had thought these things were so important in the past and why they had neither of those items now. Emmeline explained the world to her. Emmeline was her world.