The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [41]
The busses filled with children. Some orphans—mothers and dads fled already—mounted the stairs alone, taking a snack from the basket in the aisle. When parents appeared, they held their kids’ hands. Their faces showed something no one could decode, mouths stretched into grins. They delivered their children into the hushed busses, then bent down to the cargo bays to stuff in a suitcase. Children with labels stitched across their coats, their names rendered in scrawls of yarn, as if they weren’t already lost. Walking toxics, before we fully understood the poison of scripts: the slower, awful burn of writing when you saw it. Children should be neither seen nor heard, especially if they carried names on their clothing. Then together or alone the parents returned to their cars and drove home.
And the busses roared from the neighborhood. Headed elsewhere, carrying part of the problem away from us. For now.
Because this exodus was optional, some children still remained. Including Esther and her friends. But was friends really the word for that group, who lorded over the neighborhood in our final days, creating barriers of speech so putrid you could not cross them?
Per Thompson, I escalated my smallwork in the kitchen lab from solid medicines to smoke. Even if this succeeded to numb our faculties and kill off input, it would be the mildest sort of stopgap. At best I was buying us dark minutes, prolonging the stupor. At worst I was rushing us closer toward some highly unspectacular form of demise. If we were dying I wanted us to die differently.
Otherwise we’d be found in sweat-stained pajamas leaning against the toilet. We’d be found on the low bench we’d installed in the closet under the stairs, for hiding, Claire’s face stuck to my hair. We’d be found deep under our blankets in whatever bed we’d made for ourselves that night. Or we’d not be found, because one of us would have wandered into the yard and then the woods, confused, only to collapse in a ravine.
In those last weeks at home Claire sometimes shuffled into the kitchen and surveyed my lab work. She pulled up a stool and sat at the counter as I fed our medicine through the bottle-size smoker.
Claire watched while I freebased for her one of the mineral trials, using a kitchen apron draped over her head for a vapor hood.
She endured the exposure without coughing and I detected gratitude in her eyes. I could tell even without looking that she was smiling at me while I worked, content to be together in the evening.
The medicinal smoke was bitter and I swept it from her face when she finished a dose. She looked at me so gently, and when I held her for a neck injection her skull felt small and cold in my hands. When I needed Claire’s vitals she accommodated the kit over her ribs, opening her robe for me without complaint. She even did so without my having to ask.
Every few days, it seemed, she graduated to the next belt buckle on the kit, her body losing size, her face retreating on her head, taking on that awful smallness.
I wanted only to provide Claire with some medicine that might help her sit near Esther, to endure her company without symptoms. After precisely timed doses, she dragged herself through the house and tried to visit with her daughter, if by chance her daughter was home. A narrowing of her motives had led to this small desire, but it remained difficult, and Esther had little patience for a chilled and sick mother who only wanted to cuddle.
One night I heard Esther yell, “You’re disgusting,” and walked in to find Claire sprawled on her back, smiling up at me. She’d gotten what she needed. She’d hugged her daughter, and the retaliation had been worth it.
Esther, inside her large coat, headed out the door.
If the