Days pass in the gentle glow of the monitor; there is evening and there is morning.
Streetlights flickers on amid the raucous calls of hundreds of crows; the setting sun catches her eyes and breaks the reverie just enough to reawaken Petra to her body. Lord, she aches, in every sinew and every member, eyes burning, throat scraped dry and raw, stomach hollow and bladder dangerously full. She stands and the room sways around her, starts to grow dim and iris in. Deep breaths, bend over, let the blood rush to her head and clear it. She grabs a juice pack on her way to the toilet, drains it in one long pull, desperate to get her blood sugar up.
What does she remember? Fragments only: mission statements, annual revenue and expenditures, cost of goods sold, desalinization figures, an outbreak of privatization somewhere down east, the latest season of The Chirurgeon’s Journal, an unexplained fishkill in the lake that left translucent shrimp corpses rotting along the shore, distant helicopters, the roar of traffic, synthetic gunfire from someone’s open window competing with authentic gunfire echoing from the trainyards, tits and ass, succulent food, sympathetic parents, love that never fades and sales that never end.
It’s too much for her waking mind to recall, so she doesn’t try. Cooks rice, slices eggs, chews on fruit, lets it ferment somewhere back of her conscious mind. It’ll be there when she needs it, or it won’t.