CONTENT WARNING: death, decay, fatal illness
Songbirds greeted the morning sun with applause, as the crickets hid within their subterranean dens. The sound of water crashing against rock reminded Sarah of the fountain in Central Park. Coughing violently, Sarah’s ears were deafened by the reverberations from her lungs. By her side was John, holding a bottle of water, his hands shaking. K was still asleep in the room over. Sarah worried her coughing might wake her.
“Here, love.” John said, lifting the bottle to Sarah’s lips.
Sarah drank down as much of the water as her throat could stomach, before coughing up the rest.
“Its alright, its okay, let me get you a towel.” John said, his eyes nailed to the floor.
Sarah wished that he would look at her, but she knew he was scared. Scared of how thin she had become, how weak. Whether it was the cancer that killed her mom, or some unknown illness borne from the wind, she couldn’t say, but each day she was weaker, and each day she reminisced fondly towards the freedom she had in the last. It had been a month since she was able to support her own weight.
As John walked off to get a towel, K appeared in the doorway.
“Are you sicker, momma?” She asked.
Sarah tried to speak, but her voice had become raspy and labored. All she could spit out of her craggy gullet was “Yes.”
K frowned, and stepped towards the bed. She tried to climb up, but her legs and arms were too small.
“I’ll help.” Sarah coughed out, as she struggled herself to a half-seated position.
“No, mommy, stay in bed! Daddy says you have to stay!” K insisted.
Sarah collapsed back into the bed. With what little strength she had left, she pulled her blanket to her mouth to rub off the dried blood from her nightly coughing fits. K shouldn’t have to see me like this , she thought.
John returned with a towel, Sarah’s neck and chest dry. Once he noticed K in the door way, he turned his head towards her, and said,
“Go on back to bed, hon, I’ll take care of mom.”
K shook her head. “I wanna stay with momma.” She replied.
Sarah struggled against her lungs as she tried to speak. She wanted K to stay with her.
“Momma wants to be alone, kiddo.” John said. He was wrong.
Sarah tried shaking her head, but she could barely move her eyes, let alone her neck.
“Please,” she eventually managed to say, “...stay”
John wiped the sweat from his brow, scooped K up in his arms, and placed her on the bed.
“I’ll start on breakfast.” He said, stepping out of the room.
“Wait.” Sarah spat out, “open—” she then coughed violently, blood speckling her lips and hand.
“Momma wants you to open the window.” K said, pointing to the curtains.
John nodded, pulled open the curtains, and left. All without looking at Sarah. She would do anything to have him just look at her for a moment. She missed his eyes. Those beautiful, shimmering emeralds affixed under his melancholic brow.
Wind wafted in from the window, cooling Sarah if only slightly. She relished the cool air, the songbirds, the crashing water from the nearby falls. She wished she could wander the woodland trails like she had only 3 months back. It wouldn’t be safe to have John raid a hospital for a wheel chair, but she missed the water enough that she considered asking anyway. In truth, she wasn’t even sure how far they were from what used to be Baltimore, let alone the Johns Hopkins campus where they might find a chair. The city had long since been leveled, and whatever irradiated mess might be found within the ruins was hardly worth the risk to scavenge. Still, she missed the water, the trees, the birds....she missed it all. Laying by her window, she was given tantalizing glimpses into a world that had abandoned her to rot. Her body was failing system by system, and all she had in her final days with her family was a tiny little window that John always forgot to open for her. She wished that a good storm would come by so she could feel the splashes of rain against her face. Anything but the stale water John brought her to choke on.
K held Sarah’s hand, and began to cry.
“Closer..” Sarah said, gesturing to her daughter to lay against her.
K pressed her head into Sarah’s chest. It hurt to feel the pressure against her lungs, but it was worth it to embrace her sweet K.
“Shhhh, its...okay.” Sarah said.
“Daddy says you won’t be here much longer...I don’t want you to go.”
If Sarah had the tears to, she would have been crying at the thought of the world that K now had to inhabit, one where a child of 4 years had to watch her mother die.
“I...won’t go....I’ll be...” Sarah struggled, “I’ll be with you. Just remember my face....I’ll be with you.”
K looked up at her mother. “I’ll never forget, mommy.”
Sarah smiled, then coughed up a chunk of flesh, and more speckles of blood.
K held onto Sarah even tighter. Although she couldn’t breathe, Sarah didn’t want her to stop. Maybe she’d suffocate and her final moments would be in the arms of K. That wouldn’t have been so bad.
Soon, the smell of frying meats, and eggs wafted into the room, as John carried in a plate of bacon and jammy toast. He had been burning through the stockpile of good quality meats, fruits, and produce the past few weeks. It was clear to Sarah that John knew that she wasn’t going to make it much longer, but in truth she considered the use of the food a waste. It would have been better to save it for K. Still, she would not turn down bacon and jammy toast, even if she knew she’d struggle to force it down her throat.
“Do I have a plate, too?” K asked John.
“Shit—er, shoot, let me grab that.” John said, placing Sarah’s breakfast on the bedside table, “here you go, hon.” he said.
K reached over Sarah, grabbed a piece of bacon, and brought it to her mother’s lips. Sarah nibbled at the edge of the bacon, letting the salty fat wash over her tongue.
As she nibbled, John returned with a plate for K, putting it on the bed next to her, as he pulled a chair over to the bedside table, and took over the task of feeding Sarah. John placed a piece of toast against her lips. She bit down, swallowing as much as she could, coughing up the rest. John brushed off the bits of partially chewed food onto the floor.
K dug into her plate, eating with a ravenous vigor not unlike a starved wolf. In that moment of pure glutenous bliss, Sarah hoped that K could escape. Before long, K had cleared her plate, and looked back at her mother, now covered in bits of bacon and toast she couldn’t swallow.
“Should I get another towel?” K asked.
John shook his head, as he grabbed another piece of bacon, “I’ll take care of it, hon. You go ahead and practice your reading, I’ll be there to help once I finish with mom.”
K nodded, before plopping off the bed, and scurrying out into the other room beyond Sarah’s sight. K was smart, and excited to learn. John wasn’t as good of a teacher as Sarah had been, but before she got too sick, Sarah had written out lesson plans all the way out to what would have been K’s 12th grade, so there wasn’t much room for mistake. K had a right to a good education, even if the bombs took the normalcy of school away from her.
Before the bombs, Sarah had been a professor at the University of Maryland. She taught Psychology, and did research on students who volunteered. In her desire to learn, and to teach, she learned enough to pass on those basics to her child, but it would have been arrogance to suggest she was knowledgeable enough to carry past introductions to subjects that John hadn’t even heard of. Algebra was extended only up to the quadratic equation, slope-intercept form, and the basics of logarithms. Her history, as useless as it seemed after the bombs, only covered up to the 1940s in any depth, and fell apart into the modern day. Her English barely surpassed the concept of a metaphor. Sarah hoped that the gaps in her own education would not limit K’s ability to learn, and that John might hold some secret knowledge or capacity for knowledge that Sarah had thus far been unaware of throughout her 15 years of knowing him. It was a fool’s hope. What broke her heart the most was all the lives of all those people throughout time that would be lost by the death of human civilization. Who would know of the Baghdad House of Wisdom? Of the Grecian knowledge that the House had saved from oblivion? Who would know of the burning of the library of Alexandria, or even the conquest of Alexander that the library was named for? Who would know of Pompeii, and all those people who were crushed under Mount Vesuvius? Who would know of the Carpenter Yeshua born of Mary of Nazareth, who had once shaped the entire world order for two thousand years? All of it was lost, and even if John succeeded in passing that knowledge onto K, would she pass it onto her children? Would K even live long enough to have children at all? Would the world let out a final gasp of air before K even completes her John-led studies? Jesus Christ was doomed to the same oblivion as the books of Alexandria.
John pressed more bacon against Sarah’s mouth, but she turned it away. She didn’t have the stomach to continue.
“You have to eat, love.” John insisted.
Sarah coughed. “I’m not hungry.” She managed to say.
John began to quake the way he always did when he panicked. He wrapped his arms around himself and rocked.
“Please, just eat, hon, please....” He begged. Still not looking at her.
Sarah took another bite to please him. She hated seeing him like that. Every refused bite was a reminder of what was coming.
“I got all K’s books in order. Been studying them. Feels’ like I’ll end up with a GED by the end of it.” John laughed.
Sarah smiled, as she felt the exhaustion of her breakfast pushing her to sleep.
“Before I go, look at me?” Sarah said, with a clarity she had not had in months. Only the words had never left her mouth, as the trick of sleep had convinced her that her voice had finally become clear. And sure as her dream-John looked at her, the real John Sarah in the room alone to attend to K. The day grew old, and so did Sarah’s dreams, as she saw her John and K dancing in the rain for one final time.
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