It’s dark. Blind mice clamber along the baseboards, desperate to find cheese — or anything — to survive.
Darius Anah is too big for his bed. His buzz-cut head meets his hole-punched wall. He opens his ocean-blue eyes. His strong, seventeen-year-old limbs poke free from his bedding. He’s so tired, but how can he sleep?
Darius whips off his sheets, springs out of bed, throws a pair of loose joggers over his boxers, and grabs an old white tee from a crumpled pile. He wrestles himself into it and stomps out of his bedroom.
Now in the same territory as the jittery mice, Darius tramples past them with heavy feet, and they retreat into the walls.
Walking along the upstairs hallway, Darius couldn’t care less if he wakes up his mother, Sela. In fact, he throws open her bedroom door.
Sela sleeps soundly in her twin-sized bed. Her dark hair lies like tangled vines over her cheeks, sweat-soaked in place, sprawling on her snow-white skin.
Darius shakes his head in response to Sela’s deep slumber. He wants her to stir, and he smashes his fist against the door frame.
“I’m out!” Darius shouts. “Not that you care.”
Unbeknownst to Darius, Sela opens her eyes. She listens as her oldest child tantrums his way down the hall away from her room.
The only time Darius softens, nearly to a tiptoe, is when he is passing the bedroom of his little sister, Mahlah. She is shielded by her mostly closed door and its makeshift Do Not Enter sign, the naiveté of which tickles Darius. He stops and finger-traces the letters on the sign; he considers walking in but instead takes a sharp breath and closes Mahlah’s door.
He bolts down the staircase, not without an angry flash of his middle finger directed at the mounted photo of his Leaver father.
Once in the kitchen, Darius flings cupboards open, nearly knocking them off their hinges. He takes a few canned waters and stuffs dried vegetable bits into his shirt pocket. Some sprinkle to the floor. Darius knows it’s forbidden to wastefully leave them there, but he exits the kitchen anyway, much to the delight of the haggard mice.
Past the living room, just steps from his escape out the front door, Darius stops dead. He has met his match in the knowing gaze of his little sister, who beat him to it. Twelve years old and usually perfectly sweet, Mahlah stares, sour and sore, at her sibling idol. Her dark, bobbed hair reflects the moonlight that divides the living room in two.
Darius wants to retreat. Of all the people in his messed-up world, Mahlah is one he couldn’t say a proper goodbye to, no matter how hard he tries. Darius eyes Mahlah’s crossed arms and round fists — clenched ghost-white.
“Trying this again, are you?” she pries.
“Go back to bed, Mahlah,” Darius whispers. “I just need air.” He lies for both of their sakes.
“But the curfew —”
“I said, ‘Go back to bed,’” Darius demands.
Mahlah is frozen in contempt. Darius uses the first two fingers on his right hand to tap her on the shoulder a couple of times. This acceptable Zalmon gesture of affection warms her, despite her best effort to stay really, really mad at him.
Darius dips past Mahlah and dashes outside.