Inside the closed room they sat, their bodies curled, in the shape of foetuses, knees drawn up, hands together in a prayer, chin halfway down to touching their collarbones. Their eyes open, they look at each other unblinkingly.

Inside her eyes, he sees a wealth of nothing. He wonders if he should touch her. Outside the room, the wind chases away its demons, ripping at everything that was stupid enough to remain standing. Like the trees – the tall, tall coconut trees. The rain knocks repeatedly at the walls and maybe it wants to be let in.

He wonders if he should touch her.

The room is closed. There is no light. Were the windows, or the doors open, there would still be none. The storm has chased away light, the people whispered. The pious held on to their beads. In their own houses, inside their own rooms, behind boarded windows and tightly locked doors.

The boy and the girl are not pious. If you were a fly on the wall, you would see that they were scared. Not pious. They sit on the floor, in that empty room, and listen to the sound that travels in through the walls, and worry that the walls will collapse, or that lightning will burn the ceiling down. The girl, she starts rocking back and forth, but her body still has the foetus like form it seems to have adopted.

The boy worries about the girl. Fear seems to have made her hair flat (albeit soft), and her eyes empty. He wants to tell her there isn’t anything to worry about. But he’s so scared himself. With every sound from outside – it is the only sounds he can here – the winds chasing up and down the roads, the rain knocking, knocking, knocking, trying to trick them out into the open – with every sound, his fear grows more real. He is not a coastal boy. Out in the mainland, the storms are not so mammoth.

Between the boy and the girl, there is a candle. It is the only one they have. She pushed it at him an hour ago. It’s only been an hour. He looks at the melting wax, and wonders if it is melting faster than it should. It’s only been an hour since the candle, and he wonders if he should snuff it. But it seems to be all that is keeping him from crying for his mother. It is all that is keeping her in light.

The boy and girl, they are here in this coastal town on a holiday. They are not very old, and their parents are not sure where they are. The boy and the girl, they have run away. The girl has a great aunt, who gave her the keys to her home in the little town, and they took a train and two buses to get there. The boy has some money. The girl got some from her great aunt. Miles away, in the city where they live, the girl’s parents are raging at the great aunt, quite like the storm outside. This is when the boy lit the candle. They are asking her, and very loudly so, what she was thinking, to have let a couple of kids go off like that. And they want to know what they will say to the boy’s parents when they find out that their relative has given the key. That was an hour ago. An hour has passed since, and the great aunt has passed away. A heart attack – her third, and, as doctors will say, fatal. The girl’s mother will continually remain bitter about the fact that the old woman died smiling, and without answering them. The old woman knew a cat, who lives in the neighbourhood, who stalked into her house, looking for some food, and in the way of cats, some company.

At this moment, the cat is curling up in the lap of the dead old woman, who will be found sitting in her chair, in another five minutes, by the girl’s father. He will walk in, alarm the cat, who will jump up on him, scratching his new suit, and then scramble away, and they will never see her again. Because the man did not look at the cat to notice anything distinguishing, so even if he saw her again, he wouldn’t know it was the same cat who ruined his new suit. But he will, to everyone who asks, tell the story of how some crazy cat tried to claw him dead when he was in shock at finding his aunt dead. Truth is, he will be completely clinical about it, and do his duty as her most able living relative. All his life, his wife will resent that. All his life, his daughter will try and ask him about the cat.

At the precise moment that the old woman died, the boy touched the girl. As a touch, it was as chaste as you could get, in today’s day and age. As a touch between this boy and this girl, it was as monumental as it could get, as the boy has never touched the girl. As the old woman’s breath hitches for the last time, in a hiccup like sound, the boy lifts his hand, and passes it from the right side of the candle, and touches her forearm. The girl says nothing, continues to rock, and her eyes are still empty, and still almost unblinking. As the cat enters the old woman’s house, through the window of her living room, and gingerly steps around all those little trinkets that old women collect as a testament to their years, the boy rests his hand on her forearm, and then grips it, a light and comforting grip. The girl stops rocking back and forth. An almost silence settles in the closed room, and the boy holds his breath. The cat purrs, rubbing herself against the open doorway of that room, where the old woman is dead on her favourite chair that facing the window, her body basking in the evening sun. In the closed room, in the sudden hush, the girl looks at the boy, for the first time since the storm started that morning.

The cat, she finds the old woman, rubs her head against the old woman’s feet, in an uncharacteristic moment, gives her left big toe a little lick, and then lithely jumps into the woman’s lap, curls up, and goes to sleep. In the closed room, the boy, and the girl, they sit, in their foetus-like positions. The girl is still, and looking at the boy. The boy is holding her hand, in candle light.

And the devil has stopped knocking on the rooftop.