Reaper

The ground was bitten by frost, the sky as sterile as the hospital where she had held his hand through his final breaths.

They had known, then, that the potential was there. Not just for death, but for the terrible black sedation that preceded it. Sickeningly bright fluorescent lights. Hallways overcrowded with gurneys. Nurses dressed for nuclear fallout. Bruises on the bridges of their noses.

The nightmares never stopped. Her doctor, hearing this, frowned beneath his mask. She allowed him to increase her dosage.

Her in-laws kept calling, but the approaching holidays seemed unfathomable. Not with him in the morgue. A statistic.

The trauma would come later, as the world recoiled. The tears now were purely selfish. He had been the father of her child who had once worn cable-knit sweaters and hauled Christmas trees back from the farm and brought her coffee in bed. His smile had been slightly crooked. Had been.

She cried in the hallway outside the baby’s room, where she imagined he, in some other purer form now, might be seated on the velvet loveseat by the bay window, his young features smoothed by the light of the crescent moon.

They had planned to build a life here. Now he would be burned like medieval times, and she would bury his ashes along the line of pines at the edge of the property. Thirty years old, stolen by a wheat-thrashing reaper who paid no mind to virtue or to vice.