.In the morning, I crawled down the rickety stairs of my godparents home. I was paranoid, my last bit of a feeling of safety stolen from me in the dark of night. Every creak, moan and clank I heard was a snarling demon with share teeth and claws, or a bloody ghost laughing with triumph. When I saw my godparents, I was afraid their faces would turn gray or to the face of someone else who was lost to the illness that ailed our city. There are no smiles in the age of today. I feel like I could not if I tried. All the things that made me happy or cheerful had dissappeared like the  shy sun behind a bully of a rain cloud. No icing or cake, no music or clapping or dancing feet. No laughter, no cheering voices. Especially no comfort.

I shrugged on a ratty old shawl, threadbare, worn, and gray-blue. Bruised. It is no help against the biting wind. It whips through my wretched, thin ash colored dress like it is a piece of the cool air. I walk, back hunched, across the slick dull cobblestones. The buildings loom over me, like the shadows in my nightmares. Not one person is on the miserable street but me. It is a queer feeling. A fleeting sense of I was the only one in the world flashed like cold metal against my blemished heart, no longer pure. My heart ached for comforting hands and whispers of smooth encouragement, but there will be none of that because most of my world has died along with the sun, whose rays barely push through the puffy, muscular clouds that are the color of the dirty, gray snow on the ground.

I have been to so many funerals that now attending Ms. Eliza and Mr. Ethan was just another sea of sadness and wavering voices, and me realizing that, it wasn't that nobody attended the brother and sister's funeral. It was that this was all that was left. Left of the rotting town of the ghosts. I watched blindly as Eliza and Ethan's coffins were lowered into the ground and half dead flowers were thrown and weeping relatives and friends and now me were huddled around the black wooden twin coffins. When I was walking back to my godparents, I kept tripping on my shabby black dress, that once was used for rich Grandma Nana's funeral. My feet slapped harshly and loudly on the cobblestone, gray like my heart, which was as heavy as  the sky, which was as sad as the world