When The War is Over

children playing in the dark

laughter lost to shadows

entrapping warmth

never ending nothing

an embrace from the calm

stay still

you’ve stumbled upon

the children’s laughter

stay forever

in the black

numb

everything is okay here

you are nothing

that’s okay

no one cares

in the loving

black

Chapter Fourteen

From early childhood we are trained to call 911 when someone is dying. We are made to believe that doctors can save people. A sane person would never stand by as a loved one’s blood stopped coursing through their veins.

I am exhausted from the last few days. The dark circles under my eyes, normally covered by makeup when things were normal, are left naked and exemplified. I have not slept since the fight with Brian. I am not sure if it is because I was afraid he would sneak back in by night and do what he had tried before, or because I am afraid that if I sleep I’ll miss my mother’s last few minutes of life.

“She probably won’t make it through the night, Zoe,” Dad says to me on my way back in from the kitchen this morning.

We decide to use up all remaining medicine today, even the ibuprofen in the emergency packs along with the normal assortment of heavy pills given to us by the nurses at the hospital. We trickle pills down her throat constantly. She whimpers all the time now, though her eyes stay shut. I stand waiting, watching the clock to know when I can give her more again when my mother starts moaning. Every three hours it is the sleeping pills. Dad has pulled them out of somewhere. He says they were his for a while a few months ago.

I have hours with her today, alone. Dad has fallen asleep in the chair and Carl leaves the room more often than either of us. He is always moving now. I cannot bring myself to talk more than a few minutes to her. I think about speaking for a few hours and guilt fills me when nothing comes out of my mouth. I can only move silently. I sit in the wooden chair next to her and hold her young, wrinkled hand. She feels hot, and I shift her blankets down. Her rank breath reaches my nose. I look and see dried, white medicine around her mouth, worse than the day before. I dip a cotton swab in a glass of water next to her head and wipe my mom’s chin to remove the medication that never went into her system and never helped. I take a syringe and squirt water into her mouth; her tongue looks shriveled as the water slides down it so dry and caked with medication that the water does not absorb.

It is shortly after 5 o’clock later that same day when I decide I need a nap, or I’ll lose my mind. The sun is streaming in the large window the old couple was facing when they decided to leave this Hell. Dad has been taking care of Mom’s medicine routine for the past few hours, so I feel the need to sleep now so I can make it through another night awake, to keep guard against death’s shadow.

I am near sleep. My eyes have been shut for five minutes on the couch across the room from Mom. I hear Dad stand up so fast the legs of the chair scrape the wooden floor, and he runs down the wooden hallway towards the kitchen. I keep my eyes shut.

I hear him run back down the hall with more feet following quickly behind him.

“She’s not breathing! She’s not breathing! I was holding her hand, and her chest, it stopped rising,” he speaks rapidly.

I open my eyes. I sit up. Laying down seems disrespectful.

Dad is standing by the door, Emily is next to him wringing her hands, and Tom is leaning over my mom, holding her wrist.

“She still has a pulse,” Tom says to the room

Dad moves next to me and sits down to my left on the bed. My eyes sting from craving sleep, but I find it hard to blink.

“Someone should go get Carl,” whispers Dad.

Lila leaves the room for a few seconds before she returns silently with my sibling.

Carl stands to my right. His arms folded across his chest in a waiting pose, eyes wide. I cannot look at their faces after my initial glance. I look at my mother, who has a pulse but no rising breath. Is she suffocating? Is that what is going on? Is her soul in her body as she suffocates with a pulse but no breath? Is her mind in a panic like mine when I stay under water too long? Does the pain medication kick out suffocating panic like some sick drug trip?

Tom bends down to take her wrist again. “Her pulse is gone.” It has been four minutes since Dad ran out of the room.

I look at the corpse. Corpse. I look at my dad, brother, and friends. Silence and tears. Tom’s head is bowed over my mother’s lap. He is still holding her hand. I wonder if he felt the warmth leave it. I wish I could have.

I am jealous. I am proud. I am ashamed. I create a hierarchy. Dad is king, he saw the breath cease, and was the husband rushing down the hall. I was second above the others. I had been in the room when she could no longer moan; I had been in the room the most in the past 24 hours, the good daughter. Then Tom for being brave enough to check her pulse. Then Emily and Lila. Why? Because they had not been cooking squirrel for dinner on the fire.

Fucking dinner.

Carl’s meat still lay half cooked in the frying pan on the fire outside. He is last in my little order, but his lips quiver just as much as mine.

Lila walks up and taps Tom on the shoulder. He looks up and all three of them back out of the room, leaving what is left of our family alone. Dad moves to the reclining chair closest to Mom. I wait a few moments then I follow suit, and in turn Carl follows me. We stand by her bed not looking at each other, just staring at our shriveled Ruth.

“You kids should say your goodbyes. Your mother and I did ours a long time ago. When we had the house to ourselves and you two were in school,” he says. There are tears streaking his face. He takes two fingers and wipes his eyes. He stands up and gestures for Carl to take his seat by her head.

Carl hesitates but then moves to sit by me, “I never made that shelf for her,” he finally cries after a minute of staring in silence. The kind of cry that happens when you hold it back for too long. “She wanted a bookshelf in her bedroom. I kept putting it off.”

He bends his head and sobs. I lean over and put my arm around his shoulder and all three of us cry. I am not sure how long we cry, but eventually Dad moves beside the bed and tries to close my mother’s mouth to look nice, but it is slack no matter how he tries to move it. He can’t close it and soon rigor mortis will set in, and she will forever be open mouthed with a shriveled tongue peeking through.

Dad eventually ties her head up with a bit of sheet he rips from her bed.

We all stand shortly after as if called by something all at once, and we hug, something our family rarely does.

“I think I know why Mom’s favorite color was blue,” Carl says. I can feel his head shift. I look out the huge windows with him. The expansive blue sky is beautiful. “It’s so peaceful, almost Heavenly.”

Then we hear it. From off in the distance there are gunshots. We look out the bay window into the setting sun, still in our embrace. Coming across the field to our safe haven are three ATVs, and behind them about 50 zombies stumbling over the plowed field.

We hear Tom, Lila, and Emily running around in the house, locking doors and grabbing food and weapons into a stockpile down the hall, but our little family, well we stay right where we are.

I look down at Mom and it’s like I just don’t care anymore. I am so tired from the struggle of it all for the past three years. I see her hands, they are half flesh toned and the fingertips are white. Like a magical corpse spell is slowly spreading, turning my mother into a cadaver. I begin to cry again.

Then I break out of the embrace and I walk to the window where we have all been staring out into the oncoming battle. I shut the curtains and we all sit down on the corner of the bed as the moans of the horde surround us.