A Rising Fall

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  As The Woman sat in her class she thought of Marcos lying there on the table, snuffed of life. Worry gripped at her breast for she knew that she too had been succumbing to the illness and that in these past days, like her lover, she too had been slipping in and out of distraction.

  Even now as she sat in front of a class of Children all beaming in her direction, she was still and not At Focus. She could see that they were there, that they were looking straight at her, waiting for a command and waiting for her attention. She could hear the sound of ruffling paper as The Children scrunched sheets between their fingers and she could also hear the sound of tapping feet on the cold floor.

  She could see and hear reality; she could sense it and map it out in her mind. She knew where she was and what was expected of her and she didn’t care, not in the slightest.

  She envisioned Marcos; his body laid out like some ornament with everyone about discussing what should be done, how it should be dressed and where to adorn it. His exposed and naked body was still and white, his face numb.

  As she stared into the image in her mind, the face contorted until she saw her own looking back at her from the cold metal tray with sunken cheeks, sores ravaging around her mouth and her neck with her depleted breasts sagging like two empty sleeves and her weak bones extruding from her pale blotchy skin.

  She looked over her dead body and felt as if she had passed beyond life, beyond the denial they dressed as optimism, beyond the fear they dressed as love and beyond the addition of ones that amounted to nothing. She felt light and kind at heart but as she returned to her skin, she felt scared.

  “What if this happens to me?” she thought.

  She had never been alone; not for as long as she could remember. They had done, since the blackout a great deal of memorial repression. It was the will of Marcos that for them to survive they had to let go of their past and establish new horizons; to abandon expectation and a desire for things to be like they once were.

  When the darkness fell on The City, so too darkness fell on her memories; The Woman she was before all of this and The Woman she was, before Marcos. And although she had felt like they were moving farther apart, she cursed at the thought of them never being together.

  Being alone scared her. Being alone, now; in this, terrified her but she couldn’t let on, she couldn’t let anyone know or they would leave her behind; worse yet, she would be tortured and ex-communicated, sent walking into the land of the dogs with her tongue in her hands. She pulled a smile over her face and led The Children in song.