Mind Brigade

part 3

Time was the most fickle, yet powerful cure. For illness, heartbreak, everything – it was all mended with the passing of months, years, decades, even. It was strange, though; I wasn't sure if time had cured me or robbed me. The memories that used to bring me so much pain were now swept into a forgotten peninsula of my mind. Now, I merely felt numb recalling what used to be the most difficult-to-overcome events: the death of my mother, the petrification of the Goddess. It was like I had been wiped of my emotions, my heart injected with ice.

Fittingly enough, today was the first of winter. With only animals to tend to, this day declared also the first of a season of more free time. I didn't know what to do with this surplus time – the sun hadn't even set and I was left with nothing to tend to, my emotions and thoughts threatening to resurface.

Eager to escape, my feet led me to where I stood in the present, an awkward figure in the waiting room of the clinic, which smelled of sterile rubber gloves and clean laundry. Also in the room was Liz, the owner of the Spring Farm, who was absorbed in a magazine, and Michael, Junk Shop owner. He was playing with his fingers nervously and jittering in his chair.

Dr. Alex strolled out from one of the cubicles holding a clear plastic bag with a few multicoloured horse pills inside. He looked up, mildly surprised. "Three's a crowd," he murmured, although I wasn't sure I was supposed to hear it. "I have your medication right here, Liz. Michael, I can see you next. And Jamie...?" He shot me a pleasant but puzzled look. I was surprised to be here, too.

"I'm here to see, uh, the farm girl," I told him stiffly, keeping my voice down so she wouldn't hear me from her cubicle.

He folded his arms against his doctor's coat, which was frayed around the sleeves. "She has a name, you know."

I stopped myself from rolling my eyes. "Jill," I recited her name as if I were reading off a blackboard.

"Alright then." He sighed and waved me down the hallway. "Second cubicle on your right. If she's asleep, don't wake her – and don't shock or offend or do anything to her that might increase her blood pressure, okay? She's in critical condition." I noticed he had put extra emphasis on the word offend and smirked.

"No guarantees," I told him, making a beeline for her cubicle.

"Jamie. I mean it," Alex exasperated, but left me be. "Michael?" I could hear him say in a much gentler voice, and then the rest of the conversation was hushed. I took a deep breath: inhale, exhale, and swept the curtain aside, keeping my face nonchalant in case the farm girl was awake.

She was. I hardly recognized her, either – she had lost that healthy, youthful glow that had spited me so much upon meeting her. It was replaced by a sickly, fragile aura, and a light green tint to her face. She sat up, more skin and bones than I remembered, the machines she was hooked up to tugging along with her. "What are you doing here?" She still had her snobby vocal chords, so it was hard to completely feel sympathy for her.

Heartless monster. "Is that any way to talk to someone who tended to your crops and lamb everyday for the past two seasons, and saved your ass from financial debt?" I asked, just to see what kind of response I'd elicit from her. I knew I was terrible, taunting a sick person.

That got to her. She shrank back, and it irked me how small she looked then. When she had thrown her arms over my fence, rested her chin there and jeered at me, she had been a worthy opponent to pick on. Now, I just felt cruel.

"Thanks," she told me in a tiny voice. "...How is Cotton, by the way?"

I assumed she meant the lamb. "Fantastic. So cute I could eat her up," I said sardonically.

"...Oh. Good, I guess. That's good." She chewed on her lip for a long moment, then looked me straight in the eye. "So is that what you came here for? To see how pathetic I look? To rub it in my face how you won?"

"Won?" I blinked, disconcerted by her abrupt change in mood.

"Yeah. Did you save her? Did you save your precious Goddess?" she sneered, every word carcinogen. "Well?"

The words sent a crack into my mental brigade, a small opening that let my emotions leak out, that made my heart sting. "Excuse me?"

"That's what you wanted, isn't it?" she spat. "You wanted me to end up in here so you could go and save her yourself. You just wanted to win, and fine, you did. Are you happy? Are you?" The more I studied her face, the more I realized how much she hated me. The throbbing veins in her temples showed fury, the look in her eyes showed contempt, and the IVs pulling along with her rigid movements showed desperation.

She had never asked me to tend to her farm. In that instant, I thought of Alex, the devious doctor who manipulated everyone for the better. The pure, lone figure in our darkened society, the good thing that everyone spited.

"I hope," the farm girl said in a quiet voice, each word a little raindrop hitting a puddle. "I hope...that you never save her."

The cubicle was still. I had never been attacked so ruthlessly before. I had never been despised so viciously in my life. Every word she spoke pricked at my skin, and then my eyes. Eventually, lava-hot tears of realization were spilling from my eyes, and I couldn't move my paralysed limbs to hide them. When I looked at her, she had regret written on her face, but it was too late.

You couldn't un-pull a trigger. You couldn't wish back a fire.

You couldn't save a Goddess.

"You stupid girl," I whispered, shaking my head. The volume of my voice elevated and I took the four wide strides that closed the distance between us. "YOU. STUPID. GIRL."

"W-what are you doing?" The anger had been erased from her form, replaced by complete helplessness, which I thrived off of. I seized the IV pole, the machine the farm girl was hooked up to, and shook it violently.

I had control.

I would be victorious.

"Stop," she cried, cowering from me.

"Shut up," I snarled at her. I leaned in, my hands shaking from restraint. "You're pathetic. You are absolutely pathetic. I was right from the beginning. Even if I can't save the Goddess, Jill, you're the one who lost. You ended up getting sick, and I'm feeling great enough to work two jobs. You came to town with your petty little dreams, and now they're all broken, just like you are. You're the one hooked up to machines while I'm out everyday, keeping both of us out of debt. You're the stupid bitch with cancer, you're the one who's going to die, and I'M FINE!" I shouted the last two words so loudly that my entire frame shook.

I pulled away from her bed, releasing the IV pole. I was shaking.

Sometimes in life, there were moments in which you realized how truly sad the world was. Everyone felt educated, knowledgeable, like they had even a simple grasp of existence just because they'd learned to place labels on everything. In doing so, they had really accomplished nothing at all.

There was no fate. There was no karma. There was only cause and effect. If you dropped a glass against the floor, it would shatter. If you set off a bomb, it would explode.

In the end, I couldn't save the Goddess. I couldn't even save myself.

A strange, high frequency noise began to sound somewhere in the room. Like an encroaching predator, it sneaked up slowly, then pounced at top speed. My eyes directed away from the stilled farm girl to the heart rate monitor and the drilling sound it was making: a consistent, irritating, fast-paced BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP –

I could see someone grab a fistful of the cubicle curtain and nearly yank it off its handle. Dr. Alex came soaring into the room, but in my eyes, everything was in slow motion. "Jamie!" he roared, shoving me aside as he pounded straight to the farm girl.

The shove sent me flying, crashing back into reality. I watched as Alex spoke gentle words into the farm girl's ear, rubbed her shoulder, coaxed her to lie back down. And then I watched, in shock, as she buried her green face in her bony little fingers and began to sob.

I opened my mouth, but her voice beat me to it. "Shut up. Just SHUT—" The rest of her sentence was drowned in her own throat. Her entire body pulsed, just once, and she started convulsing.

The monitor was screaming. Steep, angular lines raced up, down, up down, forming what a child might perceive as a range of mountains. It sounded like a demon was in there, begging to escape, begging to explode. Jill was flailing on the bed, possessed.

Gina came charging into the room. "The defibrillator! THE DEFIBRILLATOR!" Alex was hollering at the top of his lungs. He charged out of the room, giving me the most burning cut eye I had ever received as he passed me. In that split second, I felt hell. I heard Gina scream once.

And then, the most terrifying thing happened. The delirious, screeching monitor was silenced by one defiant, long, BEEEEEEP. And then a thin line. And then Jill's head falling back on the pillow and her body going gravely still. And then nothing at all.

Gina stared at me for one long instant. Her large, circular lenses only magnified the bug gaze. I stared at the heart rate monitor and its bleak 180 degree line, feeling my own heart slow to a snail pace. "Monster," I heard her whisper.

Alex came thundering back into the room. He ignored me completely this time. "Clear!" I heard him yell, and then put the device to Jill's chest, making her dead body jolt and leap. I heard a single beep from the monitor.

"Doctor," I started to say, although I had no idea why. What was there left to say? I'm sorry? I wish I could take this back?

"Just get out," I heard Gina tell me in an angry, horrified whisper.

I didn't have to be told twice. I turned and fled from the clinic, fled all the way back to my ranch. My body was trembling and my blood was cold. Time was a concept. I was a concept.

When I got into my house, tripping and stumbling into the threshold, I ran up and ripped a piece of paper from one of the farming manuals I had in my bookshelf, my fingers the victim of a tremor as I reached for a pen. I shakily wrote down four simple words before an unfamiliar, painful sensation tore through my body – it was dreadfully cold and completely overwhelming. I dropped both the paper and the pen and slid to the floor. I crawled over to the door and kicked it open with my foot before I exploded with unbelievable pain; a newborn baby trying to walk, its rounded feet twisting, its soft head slamming against the flat ground.

Shaking. The whole damn world was shaking. They say that before you die, you see your whole life flashing before your eyes – but what do you see when someone else dies? When you're responsible for their death?

I saw red. I saw every shade of red, and then I felt a fissure split my head in two. My whole body was wrapped in a catatonic glacier. I was sweating but cold, I was screaming but I couldn't hear myself. I was convulsing, I was insane.

"My mom. She died of some rare genetic illness that put her into a cold sweat and then killed her in a heartbeat."

I couldn't think. I was scared for my life, scared for the farm girl, scared for everything I had ever lived for and the one being I would die for. But she was long gone already – the Harvest Goddess. I was screaming her name now, asking her to save me as I spasmed on the floor. Begging her for mercy, forgiveness, all these things I didn't deserve.

The beads of sweat rolling down my face were caught in the ice cold net that had been thrown over my body – an electric wired net. A net that trapped me, stunned me, and then inevitably killed me.

I screamed and screamed until I saw a colour that didn't exist, and then I felt an indescribable detachment from the entire world. It was in that moment that I knew that it was all over, that if deities and humans went to the same place – if they went anyplace at all – that I'd soon be seeing the Goddess.

I'd lost. I'd lost the game.

WILL

heart – farm girl

Summer 22, 6:15PM

Dear diary,

This year has been insane, to say the least. I feel like a little kid writing in this, but I suppose that's healthy, as all the youth had been zapped away from me the moment I was enrolled in med school. And for the record, Martha suggested this.

I would keep a time line of all the things that have occurred, but that would just be cryptic and painful. For starters, a new farmer moved in last year in the spring. She was bedridden because of a rare heart condition we were sure she wouldn't be able to live through without a donor. On the first night of her hospitalization, after I had given her all of her medication, she had asked me to stay at her bedside. I did, and she broke down, telling me her entire life story, about how her heart had always been weak and how she couldn't finish school because the doctors predicted she wouldn't live long enough. It was a long, heartbreaking tale. When she finally fell asleep, I knew that I couldn't let what was left of her life rot – I had to find someone to take care of her farm.

I went to Jamie immediately the next day, a cold-hearted rancher on the north side of town. To my surprise, he accepted Jill's forged request, a rare act of charity. He tended to her farm and single animal for two seasons. Ironically, he ended up being responsible for her cardiac arrest in early winter. The anxiety and guilt he felt must have triggered something, because not long after, he died. Bob, the town shipper, found him halfway out his front door, dropped dead just moments earlier – the cause of a rare genetic illness that he had inherited from his mother, I could safely assume.

Jamie did not, however, die in vain. He left a piece of paper behind with four simple words on it. It was his rushed will, instructing that his heart was to be given to Jill. I can see that he was overcome with grief from giving her a heart attack when he visited her at the clinic, but I don't think he had intended to die that day. I would say that he didn't deserve to die, but who am I to decide that? Nevertheless, I deeply regret my final moment with him.

We transferred Jill to the hospital in the city immediately. We managed to keep her holding on in time with the defibrillator, and she had the heart surgery performed right away. I wouldn't say she's perfectly healthy now, but relatively she's in great condition. She has since sold her riverside property and brought her sheep, Cotton, to live with her at the Jamie Ranch, which she has decided not to rename. She does owe that man her life, after all.

In other news, the resident barmaid, Eve, gave birth to a baby girl just a few days ago. She had initially wanted an abortion, but after giving it some long, hard thought, I guess she decided to keep it. She named the baby after Jamie – thankfully it's an androgynous first name – and I know she'll raise her with love.

I'm beginning to think Jamie will be like a monument to Flower Bud. Truly, I couldn't think of anyone more deserving. I could always tell just by the way he looked at me that my actions befuddled him – that he couldn't understand for the life of him why I did what I did, why I chose to be a doctor and aid people who never thought twice about me. I'm happy that he could understand how I felt before he died – I'm happy that he could understand how amazing it felt to save someone's life, even if it meant gaining nothing in return.

In conclusion, Jamie was a great man. I'd go as far as to say he was the bravest man I've ever known.

Signed, Alex of Flower Bud Village.