Where Did She Go?

The fireman was lying face down on the road, blood-red coat splayed across his back like a cape. The old me would have bent down, stopped to help. The new me just stepped over him, I didn’t even look. When did I become so good at that?  Removing emotion like a surgeon removes an organ. Methodically, instinctively. 

The fireman wouldn’t mind. Well, he wasn’t exactly capable of conscious thought, was he? And he was a mere fleck of dust in the tornado of destruction that had unleashed before me. 

Bodies littered the ground like trash tossed from the sky. Fallen angels. Overturned cars lay on their backs like dying bugs, crushing limbs of all those cast aside. The new me had learned quickly there was seldom a reason for anything. 

One second of distraction, that’s all it took. That blinking icon tantalising with its Siren calls: NEW MESSAGE, NEW LIKE. How many lives had gone black and turned to nothing after looking at that shiny little notification; glinting like a rare diamond at the bottom of a mine shaft? How many people had that twinkling icon imprinted in their mind as their final memory? 

I’d only looked at the screen for ten seconds, and it was as though time had continued for three hours in this other dimension. Complete carnage. 

A single lemon rolled from an overturned shopping bag. 

Lemons can hide the scent of dead bodies. The thought splashed into my mind like a carelessly tossed pebble. An echo of the old me, taunting with what I would have said. Before. Before the new me sliced the old me open in the middle of the night and crawled into my skin, sewing it back up with no hint of a scar. Taking over my body and mind like in those horror movies I used to binge. Now, I watch with my eyes shut. 

I would have said that, when I saw the lemon, but now the only synaptic connection my mind made was to a recipe for gluten and refined sugar free lemon cake. 

Wait. Was that even true? The fact about lemons and dead bodies? Or was it just a pigment of my imagination?

Hang on. Figment. Figment of imagination. Tears welled in my eyes. It was too much. All this destruction. Of who I used to be. Of everything in front of me now.  

There he was; the one responsible for all this. Emerging from the rubble, he tugged at the ribbons of my apron. Once, the old me would have worn a similar amount of material over bare flesh as an entire outfit. He was pointing at the fireman, his face twisted in hopeless agony. 

I sighed and picked up the fireman, his plastic Lego claw detaching like it always did. The old me would have left it. The new me grabbed it, constantly on high alert for choking hazards. I eyed the Lego arm. The new me knew exactly how to fix it.