She glared at the door in front of her.
It was hot. It was terribly hot. She hadn't really noticed how the heat had picked up the last few days, but it really was starting to get unbearable. She stared at the droplets of water running down the glass in front of her. It was so strange! It never got too hot or cold inside. When it did, if the power went out, it was at least the same temperature as outside. But she saw the world outside her apartment, and it looked cold.
Cala sighed and mulled over it for a bit. Maybe... she could just, open the doors. She wouldn't be going outside and getting wet. She would just be letting the cool air in from outside so that she wouldn't be baking there.
She suddenly imagined a burst of wind blowing right at her right when she opened the door, carrying with it hundreds of little drops of water. They would tear through her little body like bullets. She'd be dead. Instantly.
She shook her head; no, that was absurd.
She might — might — get a little bit wet, but it certainly wouldn't tear her apart. She slowly moved up toward the door, then reached up and grabbed the handle. Her prehensile tail easily slipped around it, gripping and ready to pull. But she lingered.
She sat there, holding onto the door and just staring out at the rain outside. The horrid maelstrom of acid.
A single drop running down a stream on the glass. A ball of billions of molecules of pain bunched up and tearing down the window, just like thousands of others before it.
The sweet tune of little drops pitter-pattering on the ground. The banshee's wail of the torrential downpour tearing the asphalt slowly apart.
The rain outside made her linger.
She continued to linger on the glass door that imprisoned her within the jail cell of heat.
She waited just. Just one more minute.
One... more...
...
She opened the door, and she gasped.
She was blasted by a wave of heat. She stared in shock at what she saw through the open door. The sun beat down on the dried streets. The air was perfectly clear. The sky was empty, not a cloud to be seen, shining a clear blue. She saw the yellow-hot sun and felt as its beams hit her skin.
As she sat there in a stupor, seeing what was truly outside, the door slowly drifted back closed. It shut and the world outside resumed pouring. Water coated everything again.
No... this couldn't possibly be real.
This wasn't right.
She opened the door again and saw, through the door frame, the fiery world outside the apartment. She glanced over at the other, still-closed glass-pane door that made the double doors. Through the glass she saw the wet world. A hot world next to a rainy one. She wasn't seeing right.
She turned toward her bucket. She pulled out something that stuck out the top.
It was a crowbar. Red and dangerous. Much more so than the filly who held it. She took it in her tail and crawled up to the double doors. The thing was heavy and she had to drag it along the floor. She slowly lifted it up and the dense thing wobbled in her grip. Heaving a few deep breaths, she swung it toward the window. Crack. It left a small spider-web behind and Cala looked at it. Through it she saw a warped image; it looked like the world outside was melting, flowing and hot at the same time.
The illusion faded and she watched as, from that crack, clarity washed over the entirety of the door. The nearby windows grew brighter as the sun began to shine in. The sound of rain falling began to grow hard to make out; not quiet, but seeming to fade from her very senses. A blink, and suddenly everything ceased to trick her. What she saw was no longer fake. The world was suddenly right. And that was so, so horribly wrong.
Cala bounced out of that building. She left for the first time in a week.
The sun shone down on her. The abandoned city welcomed her. The empty street greeted her as she stopped there, in the middle of it, and stood, looking around. There on the horizon was the famous Seattle skyline. She spotted the Space Needle among various other buildings. Directly around her were many small structures, a few stories high and still standing proud. She looked behind her at her rather large apartment building, how it loomed over many of the others. She looked all around her, growing angrier by the second.
There was not a single drop of water she could see.
It was all horribly wrong, yet oh so terribly right. She clenched her eyes shut and bowed her head. She sobbed once. The heat of the sun on her back drove her so fast and all-too-quickly towards the edge of her sanity. Everything everywhere around her reminded her that there absolutely wasn't any water, there wasn't any at all. And it frightened her. It scared her and made her mad all the same.
She threw her head back and screamed. It was a primal scream that vented out the frustration, anger and pitifulness that she had pent up from over a week of blundering around inside. She screamed for all the time she spent sitting in front of a window, watching the fake world outside carry on without any reason. It expressed her utter contempt for the horrible fate that the world had played on her. The scream was piercing and broke the eternal stillness of the world in her direct vicinity. But she just didn't care. Let the world hear her scream! Let the heavens acknowledge the blight placed upon her shoulders! Let everyone know that Cala didn't cotton well to being toyed with!
Her yell was cut short as her voice broke. She collapsed as she finally gave into her misery. She lay there in the middle of the street, sobbing and gasping a silent cry. She cried for the umpteenth time in that week, but this was the first time she truly wept to the tune of helpless deprivation. She wept for the crippling fate placed upon her, letting her go limbless and unable to ever walk again. She wept for the family that she terribly missed, that she had hopelessly been searching for forever. She wept for the pain inflicted upon her in the pool, for it had scarred her in more places than she could possibly count. She wept for the morally inept actions she had taken, beginning to steal all of the things she could find despite them not being hers. She wept because of the horrifying realization that she had been living a lie during all that time, because she found out that the world outside was not what it appeared to be.
Most of all, though. She wept because she hated how cruel her life was to her despite all of the effort that she put in just to find her mother, or her sister, or anybody.
She hated being alone.
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