A Love That Would Not Die

It has been fifteen years of isolation, fifteen years of longing, fifteen years of pure hell. When the bombs started falling, followed by the mushroom clouds, we all thought that it was the end. We were not to be so lucky.

Hundreds of millions died in the following two weeks. Those of us who lived, survived by sheer circumstance—geography, wind patterns, luck, or perhaps something darker. Maybe God turned His back on us. Maybe Lucifer took a shine to us. Either way, we were left in a state neither truly alive nor mercifully dead.

At first, it was the hunger that gnawed at us, the coughing fits from inhaling the poisoned air, the fevers that took so many in the early months. But when the worst had passed, when we finally found a way to grow food again, to scrape out some form of existence, the rulers of our new world decided that survival wasn’t enough. They wanted to prevent history from repeating itself. They called it The Covenant.

They determined that passion, proclivity, or any inclination toward emotional intensity had been the catalyst for war, for death. They decreed that all human interaction must be stripped of feeling. Love, desire, even deep friendships—these were outlawed. And so, we became ghosts in our own world.

Our children were no longer born of love but grown in test tubes, assigned at birth to communal caretakers. Everyone was a parent, but no one was a mother or father. The warmth of family, the joy of human connection—these were sins of the old world. Bright, vivid colors were forbidden, lest they stir emotion. Men and women lived apart, worked apart, saw each other only in rationed, sterile interactions. There were no lovers, no husbands, no wives. In time, even the concept of touch became foreign.

It worked, in a way. There were no more violent crimes of passion, no more wars fought over love or hatred. But what they created wasn’t peace. It was absence. A void. A silence so complete that even the dead seemed to whisper louder than the living.

I have never been able to forget.

If I hadn’t lived before, if I had never known what we lost, perhaps I could have accepted this life. But I remember. I remember what it felt like to have her fingers entwined with mine, the way her lips curled when she smiled, how she bit her lower lip when she was nervous or excited. I remember the sound of laughter that wasn’t measured, the warmth of skin against skin, the weight of a body pressed close, heartbeats aligning in the dark.

And now, I am dying.

The radiation has worked its way deep into my bones, slow and patient, unraveling me from within. There is no cure, and even if there were, what would I be saved for? A life where love is a crime?

I lie on the cold ground, my breath shallow, my limbs weak. My eyes, once so accustomed to the dull gray of our world, now catch something new.

Light.

A single beam of sunlight pierces through the eternal clouds, spilling onto the barren earth. And there, within its golden glow, something impossible—something sacred.

A flower.

The first bloom in five hundred miles. A small, defiant thing, its petals trembling in the wind, so delicate yet unbroken. It is proof. Proof that the world has not truly died. That beneath all the ash, life was still waiting, still reaching for the sky.

And love… love will find a way.

With the last of my strength, I reach out. My fingers brush against the petals.

Soft.

Warm.

Alive.

I close my eyes and smile.

For the first time in fifteen years, I am at peace.

A Flower in the Ashes

Harold lay motionless, the weight of fifteen years pressing down on him like the thick, poisoned air that had filled their lungs since the war. His body, weakened and brittle, was slipping away, but his mind remained sharp enough to witness the final beauty of the world—light breaking through after all this time, illuminating a flower that should not exist. A quiet rebellion against the barren world they had inherited.

He might have smiled, or maybe he had lost the strength to do so. He wasn’t sure anymore.

Then, footsteps.

Soft but hurried, coming closer. The sound of cloth brushing against skin, of breath caught in a throat. And then a voice, quiet but trembling.

“Harold…?”

Rose.

She was much younger than he, not yet thirty, but wise in ways the others were not. She had grown up in this empty world, a child of the Covenant, untouched by the echoes of the past. And yet—Harold had seen the way she listened when he spoke, how she lingered near him despite the risks, how her dark eyes held questions she did not know how to ask.

She knelt beside him, her hands hovering just above his chest, her breath uneven. She had never touched another person like this before. None of them had. It was forbidden, drilled into their bones from childhood. To touch was to risk. To feel was to invite chaos.

But in this moment, none of that mattered.

Her heart burned—something sharp and unbearable twisting inside her. A longing she could not name, a sorrow that was not entirely her own. She had known Harold’s pain for years, had heard his quiet musings when he thought no one was listening, had lain awake at night listening to his grief slip out in broken sobs. She knew what had been taken from him—his wife, his daughter, his entire world, stolen in the space of a single afternoon. And she had wished, more than anything, that she could give some of it back.

She did not know what love was. Not truly. It had never been given a name in her world. And yet, looking at him now, feeling the desperation rise in her chest, she knew what it was to ache for someone else’s pain, to wish she could take it as her own.

Her hands, trembling, finally met his.

The first real touch she had ever known.

A shock ran through her, not of fear, not of disobedience, but something else—something that made her pulse quicken, her vision blur. The moment she touched him, it was as though something shattered inside her.

Emotion.

Real. Raw. Uncontrollable.

A bolt of lightning in her chest, surging outward, impossible to contain. Her breathing turned ragged, her thoughts unraveled. How could this be? She had never felt like this before. She had never known it was possible.

Harold opened his eyes, barely, and for the first time in years, he saw something real in another person’s face. Not the empty, measured indifference of those who had accepted the Covenant, but something else.

Longing.

Pain.

Understanding.

His lips parted, but no words came. He could barely see, his vision darkening at the edges. But he felt her hand gripping his, her warmth seeping into his skin. A warmth he had not felt since before the war, since before the world was stripped of color.

And then, the flower moved.

For the second time in as many minutes, its delicate petals shifted toward the light, reaching, stretching.

Rose gasped.

Not because of the flower.

Because of what she felt.

A spark—small, faint, but real.

Like a whisper of something long lost, something buried under years of silence and emptiness. A dream she had never dared to have, forming in the recesses of her mind.

Was this what Harold had spoken of? Was this the thing that had driven men to war, that had burned the world down?

It did not feel like destruction.

It felt like life.

Her grip on Harold’s hand tightened, and for the first time in her life, she did not fear feeling.

She welcomed it.

And as Harold exhaled, as the weight of years settled into his body for the last time, he smiled.

Because, at last, love had found a way.

—-Keith