A Dead Mother's Prayer for Her Children

Year 2. There’s a husk in the bed. Surrounded by photos, he had died in their presence not even a month ago. Starvation had torn at him, thirst left his throat dry, a noose that slowly choked away his life. No one would know what got to him first, but in year 5, a group of settlers will loot his house, not even bothering to check the room that smells of rot. In year 10, most of the photos will lose any essence of what they once were. In year 15, a scavenger will find him and place a sheet over his head. They will look over his old belongings, taking nothing because it had all lost meaning except for one photo, that of a young girl contrasted by a background of beautiful slopes once widely known as the Appalachian Mountains. It will only survive the rain because the husk will hold it close as he goes to sleep for a final time. In the now, it was all still to pass, galaxies away and still unrotted.

Months prior, he had his hair cut by his mother, still not curly and messy on his face. He spent his time in the backyard of his home, with a smile that an abusive father couldn’t shake. Those all too bright days, when looking at the plums of the two trees in their backyard was a better time spent than in the house with a man who took concoctions of anger-inducing fizz, and a woman who did nothing to stop it. Back then, he didn’t even understand how it worked, how a drink could make someone into a beast. If he complained about how scared he was, it was another painful night, said to have been deserved, something that would make him a better man in the long run. In these moments, he’d forget about it. The grass was too green to remember it. He imagined beautiful vistas, a world without the loud. A universe of blades of plants reflecting the light of a beaming sun, and at night, being allowed the shine of stars. He’ll tell himself months later that he wished he had spent more time inside when the television worked and the food was readily available. The trees only bore so much fruit.

During that time, he’d still grumble about having to leave for the city. A trip to a bustling Costco was only nice for the cheap hot dogs and a feeling of familiarity only built by constant visits on regrettable trips to a smog-filled city. When the traffic hit, his grandfather and mother would always bicker about the next place and what dull cement highway was the quickest way to the next stop. The detail that always stuck was that only a minute or so was saved on these detours, worthless in the mind of a 13-year-old boy who had all the time in the world, supposedly. He also didn’t understand why his mother would want to get to the doctors fast, it being so terrifying typically. Her leg had been injured for nearly 2 months now. How many more times would she need to be dragged up to the city in her dad's truck, with a cast that was too tight on her leg? He wouldn’t have believed that day would be the last day for such a stupidly tragic reason.

He’d read about butterfly effects, but only briefly. His understanding was skewed and would remain that way for his entire life; he believed only certain things caused a chain, when in reality, the theory described everything as a contribution to the universe's result. Perhaps if he had taken that lawn mower and tripped and fallen that day, he thought, he would’ve been the one with a cast too tight to his leg. Perhaps, because of that change, he would have later developed a blood clot that would’ve killed his brain and left his family grieving over a breathing corpse. Perhaps, in that different life, his mother would have lived on to raise another son and two daughters, one biological and the other adopted. Perhaps, in that world, a mother could pray for her dead child wherever he was. In this one, though, in a world where this boy couldn’t pray, he had to imagine that wherever his mother was, she prayed for him.

To continue in a world without her was torture for him, but the notes helped. He found it easier to reach out to people in faraway places. His mother had encouraged him to pen pal. Particularly, he loved the letters from another boy named Damien, whom he had been sending letters to for a year now. The boy would send Damien comics he had written for video games or YouTubers he enjoyed, in a time when those were found easily on a pixel screen that the family shared. In return, Damien sent photos from what he said was Virginia. If it wasn’t there, the photos were from some trips in the Midwest that he didn’t explain well in his letters. He wasn’t the most extravagant writer; his photos spoke in place of what his pen wrote out. In the worst of moments, these photos were the only things present in the grass-laden galaxy imagined in the boy's head. They existed among those stars and conjured constellations. When things were at their worst, they were larger than the sun and moon themselves in this self-contained universe.

After that terrible drive back to the house, where it was still unrevealed, but the children already knew, the boy tapped into his universe again, where he could escape. He had liked the history of Rome, and imagined a chariot with his mother on it returning. She was comforting as an empress to him. They’d be the last ones to return to the house, though, and his mother had not come before them. She died on the thirteenth of May, 2019, a few months before the sickness shocked the world. The boy’s world felt as though it had come to an end here, though, and he wanted to die with her. Some of his family comforted him, others reprimanded him for being selfish. All the same, all of them would die not a year later, his older sister being the last one to succumb to the illness. She died alone, apologizing to a boy who had forgiven her a thousand times in a world of his own creation. She’d play the words spoken to him in her head over and over again in her final moments.

“You need to understand, I lost my mother, too. This isn’t all about you.” Her voice was calm as she could make it, holding back tears and attempting to be strong for her family.

“At least you get to run away.” The boy spoke through tears.

“I’m done with you, just stop stressing everyone else out.” A hiss, a crumble of the facade. She was scared for what the future held, and wanted to escape as well.

During the short period between his mother’s death and the end of the world, the boy and Damien spoke the most. They shared a feeling that no one else in their lives did. An urge to disappear, to cease, to have not existed at all. When they read each other's letters and looked at the pictures sketched or photographed, however, life could continue with some received comfort. Every note sent made the boys smile. They shared a piece of themselves in every word. A beautiful girl came into Damien’s life, and the boy cheered him on. The boy got past another grade of school, and Damien sent him the best photo he could find. It was a relationship that couldn’t have been broken in a world where society hadn’t collapsed, nor in a world where Damien hadn’t decided months in advance he’d find his dad's handgun and leave a paint-like stain on the bathroom wall of his parents' apartment. The boy would never figure out what Damien did; he’d conclude instead that he had survived the outbreak with his girlfriend, Rolinda, and gone on to rekindle civilization and capture it all on his Polaroid.

Before the end, when only rumors existed of the illness, the boy wrote one final letter to Damien. By that time, Damien was a week away from ending his life, and even though the letter would get stuck in a United States Postal Service Truck during a traffic jam, the package would make it to the present untouched, because mail and post cards were considered useless by most people who considered survival first before memories of the past world. Inside was a small comic book, a murder mystery based on Alfred Hitchcock’s work, poorly drawn but somehow well written, a picture of a mother and one of her sons, and a letter that the boy's father had burnt slightly while drunk with a BIC lighter to mess with him, removing the name of the sender. Damien would’ve known who sent it, though. He had known even when the boy had forgotten to write his name on it at the start of their relationship.

The letter was written before the return to an abusive household, with a father grieving the only way he had ever known how, due to an equally abusive household in his youth. This man would die without even knowing what happened, too drunk and miserable to know to stay away from people, or even know a pandemic was happening at all. The boy had wished to stay with his grandparents, or even some family friends, but his dad had custody at the time, in a world with laws and strings. He had written most of the letter at his grandparents, but before he could finish, he was taken away jarringly back to the house where it had always been difficult to be a child. Still, he was content with the letter’s format and walked to the mailboxes from his home, both to get the letter sent and escape for a while, into that same grassy field that led him to a different plane of being. These were the last days spent in a world oblivious to a sickness that would send human progress centuries back.

In the first month, he thought back to the letter he wrote to Damien. Had he ever received it? Had he tried to write back? Maybe a letter from him would be the first sign humanity was back to retake the planet. He’d just try to recount what was written to stay sane. He’d get that letter from Damien, maybe he’d even hear from his girlfriend, too. Why hadn’t he ever gotten his phone number? It was too late to call now, too, and it was all just so painful to come to terms with. He just needed to remember the note. Just remember the note.

"Hey, Damien.

By the time you get this letter, my mom will have been dead for about a week. I don't know what to do. I've been really scared lately. They said my dad was too drunk to take care of me, so I've been at my grandparents since he started drinking; he hasn't been able to homeschool me, so they had to step in. I thought I'd talk to you because no one listens. My sister said I was selfish for wanting to kill myself yesterday, told me I was stressing out the rest of the family, and they didn't need more on their plate.

I guess all this is to say that the photos you sent me are really comforting. Your girlfriend seems like an awesome person, and you've been getting better at photography. There's one I've been looking at a lot, the one of Rolinda with the hills in the back. She's smiling on a day I couldn't, and for some reason, that makes me happy.

Your favorite pen pal-"

The name is burned off with a lighter.

All this made him wonder how Damien and Rolinda were doing. He had never really seen Damien’s face (he had said he was “grotesquely faced”) and only saw one person in the photos, that being Rolinda. He wanted at first to write about both of them, but something about being able to see her compelled him. Seeing her made him think about life itself. There was a possibility that was her last smile, that he had outlived her, and he couldn’t even bring himself to smile. He thought it was selfish that he couldn’t do that, nor that he couldn bring himself to pray anymore. He believed in god, but he was scared of him, and thought this was all punishment in some way. He’d try not to think about it, instead deeply focused on the girl.

In month two, he'd start writing about the life of a girl he had never met. He assumed she had died at that point and wanted to give her something. He would write about her for months to come, keeping her photos close. He had been surviving off the plum trees in his backyard and water stockpiled in the clogged bathroom tub and kitchen sink. His siblings were gone; he hoped maybe they were still alive. They would have been here with him had his father had time to pick them up before the pandemic. Instead, he was stuck in an empty house. Maybe that was the reason he had survived so long. He felt bad for even thinking that, but it was probably true.

These were the last things he remembered after the pandemic changed everything. He’d spend the next two years searching for anything to keep going for a little while longer after his sink and tub ran dry and the trees stopped bearing fruit.

He spent more time in his imagined universe near the end, which helped him cope with how much it hurt to starve.

He climbed into his bed for the last time, surrounding himself with photos of his mother, his father, his siblings, every photo he had ever received from Damien, and drawings of a little dragon-like creature he had made a comic about when life was simple. It brought him comfort and made him forget he was aching.

It never ended. Those blades of grass shone with streetlights now, something he yearned deeply for. There were Roman chariots, stories of heroes of all kinds that he portrayed and spoke through that never had a chance to be, there were drawings he never created, people he had never had the pleasure of meeting, prayers he’d never get to speak. In the distance, in this place that was growing so small now, that girl he had seen in the photos walked towards him, just as battered as he. She cried, and so did he. She ran to him, and he ran to her. They fell into each other's arms, grieved over the losses, let out cries of how they were starving, how it hurt. There was comfort in each other; it held back the flowing bottles of alcohol, and the eyes filled with worms. As they both began to breathe, they laughed. The girl was carried away by a group of people, one with a cross, and the boy felt a hand pull gently at his wrist. There she was, the empress he had imagined riding in on his worst of hours. She carried him into the chariot, cradling him in her arms. As the boy and Rolinda were split, they smiled at each other. They were the same. They were safe. They would see the words before it was finished. Written in golden ink in this in between. A boy’s journey to smile again. A girl’s ability to survive the impossible. A dead mother’s prayer for her children.