Day 844

They’re all gone. Jeremy’s still breathing but he won’t be much longer. I can see it in his eyes. It’s the same look a lot of the others had before they died. It’s hard to describe. If I had to, I’d probably say it’s something like a look of gentle surprise. A sort of noiseless bewilderment, as if they’re thinking, okay, okay, this is really happening, this is it, this is my death, I should take notice, I should be present to this. And then, at some missed microsecond—because the actual moment can never be seen, no, not really, not ever—they just stop being. They’re simply there, and then they’re not. Like a sound you don’t notice until it’s gone. And then there is quiet.

Of course, the hours, days, or weeks, leading up to that moment aren’t very quiet. They’re usually ugly and loud, or violent, or bloody, brutal, terrifying—but for the briefest of moments, just as they near the end of breath, after the grappling and the writhing and thrashing and denying, there seems to be, in their dimming eyes, beauty.

She unraveled the strip of torn shirt from her fingers and the pen slipped from her hand. It rolled across the table and fell to the floor. She let it lie. She pried her fingers open as far as she could, trying to stretch them wide, but it was too painful. She let go and they crimped back into a twisted gnarl. The whole of the hand was discolored now, swollen past the point of function. She looked at it closely in the dusky half-light of the room. It seemed as if her hand belonged to another. And perhaps it did, for she barely recognized the woman she had become. The bandage on her palm was filthy, the blood already dried black. She lifted a corner of it and pulled. It stuck to her skin. She tugged at it, gently, then not gently, and worked loose the scab-encrusted cloth. Dust and blood had mingled, clotting up the edges of the wound.

A sound then, from the corner of the room, low-pitched and wet. She limped over to the boy and turned him gently onto his side, tilting his head down. Pink-tinged mucus drained from his mouth. “It’s just me,” she said, wiping clean his lips. He reached out, grabbing at the air. She let his small hand find hers and she held it and it seemed to calm him. “Shh.” His eyes were open, staring at something only he could see. She ran her broken fingers through his hair, his hair so light and fine, and long now. He’d said he was going to cut it when he turned ten.

She brushed back his bangs.

The boy quieted. 

She made it back to the table and sat.

She picked up the pen and snugged it into the crook of her thumb and tied it in place again, pulling the knot tight with her teeth. She took up the journal and pressed flat another page when a thin line of light fell across the table. She looked up. The sun was just beginning to swell the horizon. The sun that never changed. The sun that shone but never warmed. The sun chosen from a drop-down menu of a dozen other suns. The recorded sun that rose and set in an endless loop on the digital-screened ‘window’ embedded high on the wall of the room.

False dawns.

Pre-taped yesterdays made to look like todays.