Earth's Hospice

Day 30

The power went out on day 15. Laurel knew it was coming. It was the reason she had not left her father’s farmhouse. It had resources she would need to survive: The garden, the stove, the well, and the storage capacity for canned goods and necessities – all vital to her.

Thirty days ago, she had woken in the living room to find Papa missing from his hospice bed. The cotton bedding held only the memory of her father’s fragile tiny frame.

The house was empty. He had vanished.

Her phone calls all went nowhere. Texts all returned as “undeliverable”. She drove through town on empty streets. She did not know anyone in this place. Police and fire stations were empty. She had no other doors to knock on.

She had not found a single living creature in 30 days. There was no bird song. There was no traffic. There was no wind or whispers of anything living.

Laurel sat on the split rail fence eating an apple she had found on the ground in the orchard behind her father’s house and pondered, again, her bizarre and remarkable solitude. She only allowed herself to mourn the loss of everyone during this one hour each day. She sobbed and watched as the bright orange light of day dipped below the horizon and left her in the red glow of dusk.

It was her, the now constantly orange sky, and silence.

When her apple was finished, she threw the core across the street into the field and wiped the tears from her face. Jumping down, her boots crunched on the dry grass beneath her feet. She picked up her backpack and turned to go inside to put away the canned goods, batteries, candles and books she had scavenged from the neighbors’ homes.

Day 45

The silence was the worst part. There wasn’t even a wind weaving its fingers through the long grass. There was no hiss of air seeping through the shredded trim around the aging back French door. The stillness was agonizing. She boiled water on the wood stove in the whistling tea kettle just so there was sound.

Day 50

Only one of the jar lids had not sealed on her apple sauce batch. She pressed the top in a gentle rhythm of popping, singing “Staying Alive” in her head. She pulled the top off then and began spooning the sweet cinnamon-soaked apples into her mouth, and wondered how long the trees would produce apples with no irrigation. Tomorrow she would need to find a way to pump water from the river at the end of the road to the field behind the house.

Day 70

Laurel examined the hair under her arm. She had never let it grow. Since puberty she had shaved any sign of it away every single day in the shower. Now, she wove it between her fingers as she lay on the back deck and stared up at the orange sky. She pondered what it would be like for someone to walk up the driveway, remove their hat and beg to stay. Would she let them? Would the sight of another person shatter her guard? Would she run to them and throw her arms around the stranger’s neck in relief? Or would she be wary and make them earn her trust?

She dozed then, her mind wandering to the company she would never again keep, while the smell of her sweet trickling sweat filled her nose from her coated fingertips.

Day 71

Tucked under the blankets and reading by candlelight, she could not help but focus on the sound of her own breathing. The rise and fall of the blanket was the rhythmic movement that rocked her to sleep each night. So, when she heard the thump from outside, she immediately jumped. The wind had not blown in 71 days. There was no reason anything should have moved.

Launching from her bed she grabbed a flashlight and clicked it on. The sound had come from the back deck. Without opening the door, she shone the light through the glass, trying to see what could have made the noise.

Lying on the deck, tipped over, was a small tomato start. Its soil cascaded across the wood decking and was still sliding gently down into the cracks.

Laurel yanked open the door and rushed out, but a full examination of the back deck and yard revealed no one and nothing that could have made the plant tip over.

For the rest of the night, she lay awake staring at the ceiling, straining her ears for any other sound to come from the world around her.

Day 77

She thought she was dreaming. The tiniest of thumps knocking into her foot had to be a dream. There was nothing and no one that could be bopping the bottom of her dust coated boot. She opened her eyes to the orange light seeping through the maple tree leaves above her. She had dragged the chaise lounge out to the yard three weeks ago. It was her favorite place to nap. She blinked a few times and then felt it again.

Her eyes grew wide and she took in a long shaky breath before raising her head to see what was bumping her.

When she lifted her head, a tiny rabbit startled and scurried off the lounge and under a nearby bush.

Laurel flew into a sitting position and stared unblinking at the spot where the creature had disappeared. She could just make out a tiny brown nose twitching from the darkest depths of the boxwood. Then, it backed away and vanished.

Day 79

She had spent all of the last 2 days in the backyard staring into the bushes hoping to see the tiny rabbit. It had not shown itself again.

She could not help but wonder, why her? And why this one tiny little rabbit? If they were alive in THIS place, could there be others alive somewhere else? ANY where else?

Day 80

She dropped the bucket of hot water into the farm sink, making an awful cracking noise. She did not take the time to see if the ceramic was broken, because her eyes never left the coyote crouched in the field watching the tiny rabbit. The little fluff ball was turned away from the wolf-like predator and nibbled naively on Laurel’s lettuce.

Laurel could not decide if she wanted to confront the situation or watch to see how it played out. Frozen by indecision, her feet melted into the wood floor. She gasped as the tiny furry creature turned, spotted its predator and took off for the blackberry brambles at the side of the field. It narrowly escaped the coyote hot on its heels.

She watched now as the huge, emaciated animal paced back and forth in front of the thorned bushes, trying to find a way into its prey’s den.

Laurel smiled. There was life here. It just wasn’t the one she was used to.

Day 113

The rabbit emerged again from her den on day 113 with babies following her out of the tiny hole at the bottom of the brambles. Each miniature brown ball of fluff bounced in a different direction once the orange sun hit their backs. Momma rabbit found the lettuce again and feasted as Laurel watched, unperturbed, from a few feet away.

Momma could have all the lettuce she wanted. There was no way to preserve it, and she had run out of dressings that had not expired months ago. There was only so much oil and vinegar one person could eat.

Laurel sat on the lounge, crunched on the few carrots she had pulled that day, and kept vigil over them against the coyote. They would get to enjoy at least one day of peace while she was on guard.

Day 125

Laurel pulled on the new pants she had found at the abandoned mall. The weight was falling off of her. She tended not to eat when she was stressed. That, and she missed fresh meat. As she pulled a new sweater over her head, she pondered what rabbit and coyote meat would taste like.

Day 126

She hadn’t done it. She had decided that their lives were the most precious things on the planet besides her own. She would continue to mourn, and hope, and pray to a God she did not believe in that SOME DAY, life would return from wherever it went. But for now, she would leave those creatures alone to live what little life there was.

Day 200

Laurel fed the baby bunny a long strand of clover. Its tiny white nose twitched as it chewed down the stem. It stopped shortly before her hand, looked up at her and then bounced away to where its siblings munched happily on the patch of thick clover under the maple.

There were at least 20 bunnies. She had tried counting them, but their tendency to scurry and cross paths made it difficult. The babe with the white nose was the only one whose coloring was different. She called it Doby. She could not bring herself to name any of the others, given the coyote’s proximity.

Day 365

When Laurel woke she could not believe her eyes. She rubbed them furiously and blinked again and again.

The sky… was blue. On this day, the sky was blue. She ran to the French door and flung it open. The bright white sun hit her face, and the air smelled… sweet. A breeze kissed her cheek, and she could hear birdsong. She laughed and touched her face where the wind had brushed her skin. She opened her eyes and scanned the trees around the property. Birds circled and dipped and dove, chasing one another.

Laurel stepped forward and crunched something under her foot. Looking down, the joy immediately left her. There, on her deck, lay a dead rabbit. Its white nose tainted pink with blood. Bright red coyote footprints were all around it. Her brow furrowed in anguish. She could not understand why life had returned, and why the coyote had not eaten its prey. Of all the precious little lives, why Doby?

The conflicting emotions collided in her heart and a sob wretched from her soul. Her tears would not, could not, wait for the sunset on this day.

And so, she wept.

One Year and One Day

A deep, fluid-filled rattling breath came from the hospice bed. She counted. One second. Two. Three. The deep, sharp, snore-like inhale from her father startled her, and she exhaled slowly. She closed her eyes to the almost pitch-black room. It would not be long now. She would soon be able to return to her life across the state. For today, she would live in this lonely solitude, as she had for the last year. She closed her eyes and heard a coyote howl in the distance.