Burial
The fire burned for two days. On the third it smoldered defiantly, hissing as the threatening clouds finally poured forth a deluge. By morning, the ground was black mud and ash. What was left of their house no longer smoked. A few charred beams stuck at angles, half collapsed. The brick fireplace slumped in ruin.
Amy worked a roughly hewn cross into the muck outside, near where her front door once stood. The marker stood two feet high, its crossbeam tied inexpertly with bunches of flossy roots and tough meadow grass. She'd etched a name on the cross. Barely legible, it read "Maya 2000-2010." The last "0" was marked too close to the edge and splintered the wood.
Clothes and hair still wet from the downpour, Amy pulled her canvas pack over her shoulder and stepped slowly into the ashy ruins. This was their home, a small two-bedroom ranch with a vibrant wildflower garden in the backyard. She stopped in an inky puddle surrounded by burnt memories, knowing she stood where Maya's bedroom once was. Overhead would have been a ceiling covered in glow-in-the-dark star stickers—the ones they had put in the nursery just before Maya was born.
Amy pushed her hair over her shoulder. It hung, heavy against her back, a light brown tangle that used to shine in the sunlight. The old cargo pants she wore snagged as she took a step and her eyes, clear blue like her daughter's, glanced down to see the grey, jagged lump she'd tripped on. Her breath caught in her throat as the shadows came together in sharp relief and she recognized the hollow eye sockets of a charred, crumbling skull staring, blindly back at her.
She knelt weakly in the puddle as, a few yards away, the wooden cross caught a sudden breeze and fell to the ground.
A creek ran steadily along silty banks a quarter mile from Amy's home. For miles it ran through the suburbs of Austin before finally feeding into the Colorado River. It hugged playgrounds, parks, backyards, and was a common ground for kids of all ages to play, swim, and, in the deeper sections, fish. The creek was a favorite spot of Maya's and seemed a suiting location to rest.
Amy used both hands to rake at the silt and rock along the banks, ignoring the throbbing headache that deafened her. The world was grainy and muted through eyes swollen from days of relentless tears. She jerked up a flat rock and tossed it in the creek, digging more furiously. Somewhere just above her belly button, a cavernous pain pressed hotly deep inside. Despite her whole world splintering, peeling agonizingly and irreparably apart, her body still trudged on with its unforgiving exigencies. Amy was, quite literally, starving. An acidic growl rolled from her stomach.
Hands, pale and lightly freckled beneath a layer of clay and soot, scooped a wad of mud from the hole she'd dug. She'd once read about starving children during the Dust Bowl eating mud to trick their empty stomachs into believing they were full. The first lump stuck in her throat and she choked down a few mouthfuls of water to force it through.
Immediately it threatened to come back up, so Amy tugged a bundle of needles from a short pine tree nearby and began chewing aggressively. Pine needles, she knew, were edible. Or at least they were not toxic. Somehow the needles were both sticky and brittle, unable to dislodge from her teeth, yet impossible to grind down.
Chewing to force back her hunger, to ignore the sweeping pain building behind her eyes, to silence the incoherent stream of desperate thoughts, Amy dug until the hole was finally deep enough. She picked up the skull, cracked and crumbling.
"I'm sorry," she whispered hoarsely. Her lips were cracked from dehydration and clung together with bits of sap. As she'd done every night, Amy kissed her daughter's forehead, then gingerly placed the skull in the hole.
Gnawing the last bits of her pine needles, she quickly pushed the clay and silt back over the hole. With effort, she swallowed the pine pulp, gasping at the prickling needles as they reluctantly went down. When she turned to drink from the creek, she saw her reflection. It waved and swirled in the eddies of the little pool near her feet. Her light skin was set off by the harsh contrast of black ash that streaked down her face and surrounded her lips. The same black coated her hands that had just held Maya's skull.
Tears cut through the inky streaks, running to the corners of her mouth. Without thinking, Amy licked her lips, tasting the saltiness and the smoky tinge from soot. Then she froze, her reflection staring back in horror at the realization that she was covered in her daughter's ashes. She had licked them from her own lips. They coated her mouth.
The pine needles and mud came up in a slurry of yellow bile with countless flecks of black. As her last attempts at survival soaked into the bilious soil beside her daughter's grave, Amy's utter exhaustion and desolation finally took hold. She collapsed and the world went dark.
Her eyes could barely open, whether from swelling or exhaustion, she didn't know. It was daylight, possibly morning. Maybe a day had passed. Maybe three. She shut her eyes again. The light hurt. Her joints ached miserably. Somewhere nearby she heard the trickle of water. For a moment she thought she'd sit up and have a drink. Her lips were splinters of cracked skin and her tongue was glue in her mouth. But when she tried to move, the strain sent a wave of pain throughout her.
She would die there next to Maya and it would be the easiest thing to do. Another day or two. Not long. Amy exhaled slowly and listened to the delicate whispers of the water. A breeze lifted the leaves of the trees and rustled them softly. The silty soil crunched beneath her ear. Crunched the leaves. Rustled the dry grass. Shifted the rocks so pebbles bounced into the water with steady plopping noises. Bubbling, trickling, murmuring, whispering, shifting gravel, the symphony of nature became a cacophony until the discord focused into one clear sound.
"Ms. North?"
Amy opened her eyes again. The small mound of soil marking Maya's grave was in front of her. Nothing else. No person. No one to conjure those words.
Another footstep shifted behind her. Amy blinked. It was possible she was hallucinating. The footstep was close this time. Right next her. She could turn her head to confront this hallucination, but the urgency to survive was gone and with it all of her curiosity of the world around her.
The visitor crouched behind her and the sudden rustling of movement drove into her head like a spike. She groaned compulsively, letting her eyes shut again. Perhaps this was Death who had come to take her. He was talking again, but the words were backwards and nonsense. Black smoke, like the clouds that rolled in great plumes from her home, swirled around her mind, clogging her thoughts.
Then two words cleared a path through the smoke: "Maya's mom?"
Agonizingly, Amy turned her head a few inches and squinted up. He wasn't Death. The man crouched next to her had a decidedly stern but vaguely familiar face. His features were darkly silhouetted against the bright sky behind him. Amy tried to blink away the haziness that swallowed her vision.
"You're Maya's mom? Amelia?" he asked.
She wondered how many times he'd asked that before she registered the question. She hadn't been called Amelia in years, but hearing it now felt oddly validating in her current state.
"Yes," she answered weakly.
He stood and disappeared for a moment, then returned with a thermos full of lukewarm water. It took all of her strength to hold the bottle, shakily bringing it to her lips, but the water was plentiful and refreshing. For ten minutes she sipped at it, hoping the water stayed in her stomach. Neither one of them spoke. The man leaned against a tree halfway up the bank. Alternatively he glanced up and down the creek, across the water, over the bank behind them, and back. Like a sentry, ever on duty.
After she'd drained the thermos, she pushed herself upright and noticed the two small, green apples beside her feet. Neither much bigger than a golf ball, they reminded her of the bitter apples dropped by wild, knotty trees in the woods nearby. Whatever the feral hogs didn't eat, the neighborhood children would throw at each other playfully. Bitter though they were, they were a significant improvement to the pine needles.
Her vision was a little clearer, but she was in poor shape. Even after the apples, her stomach churned and her hands trembled. Not yet ready to stand, she looked up at the man.
"I know you from somewhere," she said.
He nodded. Noticing the apples were gone, he removed a waxed paper sachet from his bag and walked it to Amy. Inside she found a handful of tough, dried meat.
"You taught my daughter swimming at the Y," he responded. Then, after a moment he added, "Sarah Miller."
Amy's head spun as she tried to piece together these memories from before the outbreak. After a bit, they started to fall into place. "She babysat for us, when Maya was barely two," she said.
Flashes of her life came back to her. She looked up to see him watching. He didn't smile, but he didn't seem altogether unfriendly. He was different from the man she remembered. The world had changed and so had everyone in it.
"Joel, of course," she said slowly. "I remember." Then, as an afterthought, she added, "You sent us a Christmas card."
"Sarah did," he corrected.
Amy swallowed the last bite of jerky. She glanced up the bank, knowing they were alone. But she asked anyway, "Where is Sarah?"
Joel frowned and a shadow passed over his face. This was a feeling she understood.