The house was lone on a high hill. Anyone could've climbed up there since there was no fence; the world was its full domain as it was perched high, barely touching the sky. It did seem a little rundown, with some dirt here and there, and more in some corners. The paint was cracking while it'd lost its life. And as lonely as the house, there was a solitary olive tree standing not so far from the porch. Its scent would invade the surroundings, vainly trying to search for more than space, vainly trying to find another soul, or rather, similar leaves.

Down the hill, a beach stretched away. As lonely. There was only the golden of the sand, and the infinite blue of the sea, which’d meet by the horizon with another infinite blue belonging to the sky. Well, an infinite bright amber amalgamated with an infinite gray since it was early dawn and the threat of rain plagued the atmosphere by the time I parked the car. I got out and leaned on the car's bumper to take a breath. The enthralling scent of olive leaves kept me company for a bit while Kim was still sleeping. It was a hard-to-describe scent, like any other actually. You wouldn't know how to describe wood's, or a good meal's, or cigarette's scent anyway. Let's just say it felt nice, mild, and mesmerizing like gasoline's odor.

I visited the house a little bit to get accustomed to it. Time itself stopped inside the house; even the main door wasn't locked. Everything was seemingly the same as they left it when they died. The curtains weren't shut; dawn's light poured inside and gleamed all over the place. I went into the living room first; there was a large sofa in there before a small TV, next to which was a single armchair. Shelves and ornaments here and there. A lot of dust, though. A wide carpet, somehow comfy. A wooden table was spreading across the room's width, without even a particle of dust on it, with five chairs around it, two of which were at its ends. There was a blank vase in the middle of it, with a dead-dry flower I couldn't recognize. It was the only trace of time, with dust, in the house.

The kitchen was fairly mundane; though, there was an old-looking apron folded on a small round table's chair, y'know, the ones where you'd eat breakfast alone when nobody's up. It seemed straight outta a 50s' ad featuring a good wife. When I opened the fridge, it was of course empty, even if there were still some utensils in the drawers when I checked earlier, but the light bulb was indeed working. I tried to switch on the kitchen’s light, and it worked too; great, there was oddly electricity. I didn't mind further though. I turned the sink's tap too and the water was running clean; even better, it heated at some point. The house wasn't as desolated as it seemed. There was a laundry door from the kitchen, quite little; the only thing in there was a washing machine, a drawer with cleaning materials of the same size, and a basket standing above the machine.

Since I went around the first floor, I climbed up the stairs and investigated the rooms. There were three of them, plus a bathroom. Two doors were almost opposing at the right of the stairs; in the first one, there were two small beds, obviously for kids, also given the posters and the comics, toys still laying around. The beds were too small for either Kim or me; if we were to sleep in here, I thought, this room's no good. The drawers were empty, same for the closet.

The other room though was quite dull; there was only a bed, big enough this time, and a desk with a lamp on it. All the curiosities of the room lay upon that desk; there was a fountain pen, some deep indigo ink, and a typewriter. The thousands of paper scattered on it were almost all illegible; the writings were blurred, probably because something had soaked them. The remaining sheets were as blank as the room. A trash bin was hidden not too far, with some ash in it. I thought someone had burnt the other papers. Everything else in the room was dull, empty, like the drawers and the closet and the papers.

I got inside the bathroom next. Blank. The whiteness of the room didn't blind me for some reason, it was just bright. And fairly mundane too. A mirror above a sink, nothing behind it though, a bathtub, and a small door which led to the toilet. It sure was my lucky day since there was some toilet paper left, but quite rough. All the light which gushed in there was from a unique window, quite high, which wasn't even that large to begin with.

At last, I reached the last room; this was definitely the parental chamber given the broad bed in there. Another carpet stretched across the floor, still as comfy. There was one place that kept my attention; it was one of these narrow, extending spaces centered on a window. An alcove, it’s called if I’m not mistaken. I guessed it was made for two people to sit by. The window gave unto the downwards hill's scenery, and further, the extending sea. If you were to just stay in front of it, you'd only see infinite extending azure, meeting with another of its kind by the horizon. You'd see the sea and the sky almost blending around the horizon.

As I was about to go down and wake up Kim, I noticed a trapdoor leading to what was probably the attic in the middle of the second floor's hallway. I didn't go up though, maybe another time. I went down the stairs and noticed something else; the house's keys were just on a small table of the first floor's tiny hallway. Another thing, there were no frames or photos hung around; I realized it when I saw some nails sticking out of their walls, neatly aligned with others. I could picture perfectly well the arrangement of each frame, but what they framed was a mystery. A vague image of a happy family ran in my mind, and as soon as it gave me chills, I threw away the thought. I grabbed the key and put them in my pocket.

Around twenty minutes or so elapsed since the last time I saw Kim, but she was still and absolutely asleep in her dark purple pajamas. I tried to wake her up, gently, but she wouldn't; I didn't try harder somehow and just let her in the land of dreams. Ultimately, I decided to carry her to a more suitable place to sleep; the last room might suit her, I thought. I felt a bit uneasy as lifting her up from her seat. Her delicateness hadn't escaped my mind. She yawned a little bit in my movement, but carried on sleeping ‘til the end. Her warmth made me chill a bit; there was a fair amount of wind blowing around the house.

So, I carried her inside, up the stairs, and into the room. I took off her glasses, put them on the nearby nightstand, and tucked her inside the wide bed's blanket. Maybe the house was bad-conditioned, but I still felt the chills even up there. I drew the thick curtains to darken the room since Kim was so soundly asleep. It was as though her face amid the semi-darkness was glowing when some sun rays fled through the unclosed areas of the curtains and hit her. She didn't mind the slightest and was still deep in slumber. I didn't bother to draw properly the curtains.

Next thing I did, I took our entire luggage inside the house; I leaned the shotgun near the entrance door and put its cartridges in one of the kitchen drawers (it'd become a tradition). As for her books, and her bag, I went back to the room where she was dozing and placed them on the nearby nightstand too. I decided to take the room with the typewriter in it and put my stuff in a corner there; my bag, and the money I took. I didn't know what to do next. I tidied up the desk then and made a pile of the undecipherable sheets. The pile was standing fiercely at the far end of the study with the fountain pen and the ink next to it, while the typewriter I later cleaned was in the middle.

Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

I played around with its keys for a bit; it echoed well in the almost void room. I liked the sound, it was more talkative than me. I got bored at some point and went to check-in for Kim. Yep, definitely asleep. She was curled up like a ball, warmly tucked in the blanket at one side of the bed; there was a hollow space next to her. It was calling me. I was suddenly coated in drowsiness. I wanted to sleep there for some reason, next to her sleepy face. I took out my shoes and crept in very slowly, afraid of awakening her. It felt really warm when I got in the blanket.

Her napping face imprinted in my retinae as the same sun rays reflected off her face. I sank deeper and deeper, closed my eyes tighter and tighter… Her image was the last thing that remained.

I slept for a while. There was no clock around, but I could tell since I felt dizzy when I woke up. The sun was already high up in the sky and further; the weather didn't improve though. The sun looked like a white brilliant ball underneath a dense veil of cloud. Her glasses weren't on the nightstand anymore and the thick curtains were drawn back, letting in some faint light filtering through the clouds straight out of an ashtray. Waves were beating the sand harder. And she no longer was in the room.

Her books hadn't changed position; she was probably not far. I got out of the room and heard some noises coming from downstairs, sometimes blended with white noises and statics. I went down and encountered Kim, sitting cross-legged on the sofa in her deep purple pajamas and watching the news. And guess what, it was about me: a teenager hunted for triple murder and arson. There was no portrait of the criminal though, only a poor description followed; they had nothing on me. But there was also nothing about Kim, or about her crime, or about the atrocities done to her, or about 'her'. As though a Kimberly never lived in that house. The TV's reflection indifferently bounced off her round glasses amid the afternoon's dimness.

She turned her head at me, kinda coldly, and stared at me for some time.

"How many days left?" she asked.

"Six with today, I think," I could get what she was referring to.

She kept quiet a bit. "How do these predictions work anyway?"

"Dunno," I blatantly replied.

"No, I mean, is it just magical, like, it'll just kill you on a whim, or is it fully deterministic?"

"Damn, the fortune-telling machine's some kinda Laplace's demon? Wouldn't that mean he knows everyone's unchanging future and past, his own included? And that we're all trapped by a singular fate? Wait, that's like an all-knowing god!"

"That's still NOT a nice, all-powerful god… It's disturbing somehow to know that god lies within an animatronic gypsy, and more to realize it's impotent," she finished our little argument.

She changed the channel and watched some cartoons. The weather didn't do well to the TV; the statics carried on from time to time. Even with that little time left, I still wondered what to do. My stomach growled. Food. There was no food in the fridge. That was the next thing to settle.

"Hmm, Kim, you know cooking?"

"I guess," she said. "When someone could beat you when the dinner tasted bad, you gotta learn. I pretty much know all the house-related stuff too, because of the same asshole."

I didn't know how to reply.

"Well, I'm heading to town to buy some food. You need something else?"

"Might as well go with you since I'll be cooking," she replied.

"Alright. I left your clothes and your stuff in the room you napped in. You should take a shower too, smells like fuel and burnt. Know where the bathroom is?"

"The door in front of the room, yeah," she turned off the TV.

I followed her up the stairs and headed the opposite way in the hallway, to the room where I left my own stuff. I changed my clothes and grabbed a fat wad of bills from the plastic bag. The shotgun was still leaning near the entrance when I went down. When I got to the car, the olive scent hit me strong; it made me stay outside for a bit as waiting for Kim, leaned on the car's bumper again. If I focused, I could perfectly and absolutely hear the waves cruelly beating the sand like it was the only sound on earth. No cries though. I looked at my phone and realized it was 3 p.m. It made me wonder since when she was awake, maybe not too long before me, I hoped. She might've starved too.

When she got out of the house, I closed the door behind her; her smell blended with the olive’s as she was drying. Her very short blond hairs were still wet, even a little bit dripping on her loose hoody. I liked how her soft thighs were showing underneath her tights because of the humidity.

"Gotta buy towels, soap, shampoo, teeth brushes, toothpaste… There's nothing in the bathroom," she complained.

"Remind me later. Didn't I tell ya to take all the things you needed," I replied back.

"Oh sorry," she overdramatically said. "When a guy just comes randomly killing the people in your house and tells you 'let's get outta here', these aren't the first thing you'd take."

"Ok, I get it. Just go in the car now, please."

She hmpfed a bit and went straight into the car. I sighed as hearing her complaints. I started the engine and headed over to the town below. Actually, the house wasn't so isolated, at least in some way, since the nearest town, the one below, was just about twenty minutes of ride. She stayed pretty much silent too, she just blurted out some of the things we needed in the house from time to time. That wasn't really what I meant by 'remind me later', but I wasn't about to tell her to shut up just for it. It kinda bugged me though. Something funny came into my mind while I mindlessly listened to her listing things after another.

"AH! But you still took your books!" I interrupted triumphally.

"The hell you talking about?" she hissed.

"When a guy just came randomly killing the people in your house and told ya 'let's get outta here', the first thing you take is your books, huh?" I teased her.

She scorned a little bit. "These are very important to me, I'll let you know," she sounded serious.

I stopped teasing her further and I just drove. Soon enough, she carried on listing.