wings . arcobel

Isobel Krigel had left she and Arissa's house when the sun went down to ride on her sailboat. She had peered at the stars from the hull of her boat, but now she lies on the surface of the dark water, her arms and legs extended out from her body. She floats there, letting the water lap at her skin and soak her clothes and her hair.

The tsunami passes over her mind. She remembers how the ocean tossed her like a rag doll and then discarded her onto a pile of wreckage. She remembers drowning, this burning in her head and her chest as her body screamed for air.

And yet, she isn't afraid of the sea. She isn't afraid of death.

It's like she's swimming in the sky — on the surface of the calm ocean waters, the stars and the moon are reflected, wavering ever so slightly with the gentle tide. Her eyes are fixed on the stars above her, counting all of the ones she knows. Iso's gaze settles on her favorite, the evening star, but then her eyes find the North Star.

She almost smiles. The North Star was Brooke's favorite because it was the brightest.

"Iso?"

Sometimes she still hears her calling because she still expects to look to her side and see a freckled face and vibrant red hair. The wind will whisper in her ear and she'll think for just a moment that the brush she feels against her skin is Brooke's lips. Perhaps ghosts do exist, because Isobel has never felt more haunted in her life, and she has dealt with the dead before. It was like this when her mother died three years ago — that familiar feeling ripping through her chest when she watched Brooke's body fall to the ground.

Only now the pain — the agony — has subsided, leaving an empty void where Iso's chest was punched through. But emptiness, she finds, is a crueler sentence than pain. She would rather feel a million knives in her back than an all-consuming void in her chest. It's like that empty space is gradually drinking every lively part of her that remains and draining all the colors from her vision, leaving only a barren and dark and saturated world to stare at in silence.

Brooke loved colors, she remembers. Red and yellow and pink, the colors that painted the sunset.

When people die, everything else in the world becomes static, buzzing and flickering in the back of her mind, this white noise that fades into the background.

Isobel hones in on what Brooke's voice sounded like. It was soft, she recalls. Like a warm velvet pillow.

"Look, Iso, a shooting star!"

Her eyes dart back up to the sky, where a million silver points of incandescent light twinkle back at her. But there is no shooting star in sight.