three

It was a cold and long night.
He spent a majority of the night sitting in the middle of the room, knees to his chest, waiting, wide eyed, staring at the window. He was wide awake, and sleep was the last thing on his mind.
Maura had left earlier in the evening after telling him his name. After that one sentence, everything had changed. He had forgotten about the world, and for a moment his universe had boiled down to that room, that girl, and that word with so much meaning attached to it. That name.
They had laughed and smiled and reveled in the glory of the completion of his birth. They drank more, and she had left for the night, and he had laid on the floor with the fan swirling above his head, dust raining down on him in little slithers like snakes of dirty rain sliding down the sky, and the urban neon glow lighting his walls.
And then there was a noise: a loud noise, with the sins and anger and hatred and pain of the world attached to it. The silence that followed was agonizing. There was a groan. A whimper. Loud whining noises wailed in the night, echoing in the canyon walls. The neon lights faded, washed away by flashing red and blue lights. Yelling. Another noise, like the first. And then quiet.
The noise echoed in his head, screaming, drowning out the excitement he had felt only moments earlier. He felt like saying something to comfort the silence, but he was too scared, too stunned; something more powerful than the silence had gripped him, and he stared in bewilderment at the window, where, as far as he knew, the sound had come from.
The moon passed overhead. The red and blue lights were replaced by the comforting neon glow he had remembered from earlier. A car passed. Then two. Many of them stopped. The noise still remained there, piercing the silence. He tried to utter something into it, but nothing came, and nothing went. Silence came in from the windows, from the door, seeping in from the cracks in the walls, but it failed to drown out the echoing in his head. It was driving him slowly mad, and he wanted to know what had happened.
Eventually, he got the courage to stand, stumbling a little. He finally pulled himself up and tripped over to the window, grabbing onto the bars, and looked out. Red and blue had replaced the neon again, and soon he found out why: cars had pulled up, white cars with black stripes, white cars with red stripes and crosses. People were everywhere, strange men in black and stranger men in white, hovering those lying on the ground. A man in green was mopping the asphalt, a cigarette in his mouth, the pale white smoke slithering up into the night air, like the snakes that had rained down on his head earlier.
A man was lying in the asphalt, outlined in white, covered in a thin and blue sheet that was much too small. Red pooled under his head, a gaping hole where his nose once was. His mouth hung open in terror, his eyes wide and halfway rolled up into his head. A hand was reached out towards the window, as if beckoning, asking for forgiveness, or a sin, or a copper penny. Anything to save his gaping nose and slack jaw and thin paltry blue sheet.
The man wasn’t moving. His lacked a certain glow that other people had, and in a way, he didn’t think the man would ever get it back.
He stepped away from the window and leaned against the wall; the gaze of the man’s half eyes had burned into his skull, the noise echoing in his head. He slumped, sinking down the wall and into the floor, hiding in his arms and legs. He focused intently on the word that had now become important to him, to the phrase that Maura had uttered to him. He focused on the word that had defined him more than his actions could at that particular moment in time. He focused on anything to block out the sound and the image and he focused on everything.
Slowly, eventually, with time, it became muted in his mind. The lights had gone and the neon had returned; the street was quiet and once again empty. The only evidence that remained was that in his head, and he tried intensely to remove any last reference. He focused on the fan that spun round and round without a purpose or a reason. He focused on Maura’s face and eyes and smile and laugh and hair and the way she brushed it from her face. He focused on her handbag and the color of her eyes and her inability to throw popcorn into the air and catch it in her mouth. She permeated the corners of his mind, pushing out the image of the grounded and the angry violent sound accompanying it, replacing it with much more soothing images.
His eyes were closed, and he brought his head back against the cool concrete wall, feeling warm inside the cold room. The fan had begun twirling faster, and its thwap thwap thwapping filled the room. He slipped down the wall and lay again on the floor, sprawling out. He opened his mouth and felt the cool air slip down his throat and into his lungs, enjoying the crisp clear recirculated air. He held his hand out towards it, eyes still closed, feeling the air gently push against his hand, playfully, lightly, casually. He let it fall against his chest and exhaled, hearing the hiss of the air into the space in front of him.
Everything seemed much more surreal, at this moment in time. His mind was clear except for the echoing in his mind, but it lacked the nagging and panic and franticness it had earlier; now it was calm and soothing and endearing. He smiled, and he heard her say it a million times over, and replayed the precise moment a billion times more.
She had said, “I think your name should be Rhys.”