I knew there would be privation. The end of the world does not mean business as usual. And when things start going wrong, they tend to keep going wrong. That explosion… I've this picture in my head of Hermes covering his ears with his hands against the sudden barrage of prayers. I may draw it someday…
We did not die, but now there is very little water. Washing of anything is forbidden and there's not enough to drink. I remember thirst from nursing my children. I remember it as a desperate sensation. When I first became a mother, in my ignorance of just how much a child takes from you I endangered my health by not drinking enough during one of my creative frenzies. I fainted and when I was brought to and given water, I felt the liquid go directly to my breasts.
I am a creature made to sustain life.
I feel for the nursing mothers on this ship, and I share my water ration with one of them, even though she receives extra because she is nursing. It's not enough. Their pinched faces, hers and her baby's, tell me this. I give up part of my ration and suffer in my own turn. My dry tongue, sticking to the inside of my mouth, is extremely painful. But I have no other life depending on me, so it's not important.
I turn my mind to other things.
The captain of the Virgon Express had a son who was also an artist. When she heard that I was drawing on anything that would accept a graphite mark, she brought me supplies she had purchased on Caprica for her son. "He won't be needing them," she told me, handing me a large package, "but if you're anything like he is…" She stopped at her unwitting use of the present tense to describe one who was almost certainly dead. Her eyes filled with tears. She blinked and they slid down her cheeks. I would weep also, for all our losses, but I'm too dry. "Please take it," she said. Her voice trembled. My throat tightened. "And stop drawing on my bulkheads." She tried to look stern but there was a damp smile behind it. She departed for her duties. I can't thank her, it hurts to talk. I can only hope she saw the gratitude in my eyes.
The package contains charcoal and pastels, pencils, brushes and, ironically, watercolors. I don't even have the spit to make use of those. There are three large eight-cornered pads of deliciously toothed, blank paper. I spread my hands over them, savoring their texture with every ridge in my fingers and palms. I see faintly in the blankness the images of the things I will draw: the little town I lived in, the hills, the trees, the flowers. My memory is odd. Inanimate objects stay. Faces don't. I've heard that there are only fifty thousand Colonials left. Surely enough for me to draw from life.