My heart belongs to Daddy

My Heart Belongs to Daddy

When I was small, a child, the world was so pretty. My room pink and soft and smelled clean. With their bright lights and colorful signs, the buildings in the city were so appealing to me. The magic of things like Christmas and even Halloween all seemed so pretty, and now I long for the clean, pretty things in life. When I was seven, for my birthday, I saw Swan Lake in San Francisco. I thought I was royalty. My mother actually styled my hair, and I had a lacey dress and an arctic white fox stole. I was so excited. After my mother did my hair, she put my heart-shaped locket around my neck, and an arctic fox stole about my shoulders and new mary janes with a slight heel. I had never had any heel before and felt so grown. The fox stole was weird and creepy because it had a face and glass eyes, but the fur was so clean and beautifully soft. A fancy town car picked us up, and the building it drove us to was one of San Francisco's finest, although I don't recall which building it was. The entire evening was a very fancy affair that I occasionally allow myself to remember, but not too often, so I don't become melancholy. Just enough to not give up hope entirely.

3 days after the ballet, the news of the first deaths aired on the nightly news. It was confusing to me as a child to overhear the grown-ups discuss the mystery illness Walter Cronkite described. The information kept spreading and growing, and even as a child, I knew, by the sounds of the adults' voices, to be afraid. I wished my father was around to protect us. Ever since he left, I was more easily frightened. He used to explain everything to me. As a scientist, he had a way of explaining things away so I would not be scared. "Thunder was clouds clapping together in storms, and creaky scary sounds at night was just our old building settling and contracting," he told me. He gave me honest explanations, and I trusted him before, and now I just missed him. I had a nightmare one week after the mystery illness had begun to be reported, and I sat up screaming for my father," Dad!!! DAAADDDY!!!!!!! My mother came and consoled me. She talked with me long into the night about the illness called COVID 01 and about my father's death. She told me everyone would be staying home now, and schools would close, and people would wear masks like doctors. I asked her to tell me again what had happened to my dad. "His laboratory had caught fire," she explained, and "he was trying to get the animals and employees to safety when the building exploded. He did not survive," she said.

She explained he loved me more than anything and, she said, that when I was older, I should read the volumes of his work he had saved on his computer. He always told me he was working for me and my future and that we would make considerable contributions to science together. As an adult looking back, I wish we'd had more time to work on that.

Now the streets were dark, dirty, and not pretty, nor safe. No lights on buildings or bright signs.

No gala events. No ballerinas to dance. Nothing was pretty since the pandemic. The majority of people had died from the illness. They would not stay inside or wear the doctor masks. My mother and I stayed hidden in our home after the rebellion started. The streets were only safe one hour each day when they were patrolled. We would scurry to the market to get food, seeds, and the charcoal to filter the water. We would get home and wash before entering. My mother said it was to clean ourselves of the illness, but I believe we were washing off the ugliness of the whole event, the whole ugly world. . The tanks and guns and shouting men were all very ugly, as was the market. I remember huge grocery stores with aisles, clean shelves, cold foods, and bright displays. Delicious, colorful foods, like rainbow sherbet and red meat in clean cellophane and shiny chocolate-dipped doughnuts.

Now we mostly ate what we grew and did not grow chocolate. And we were not safe and the world was not pretty. As mother referred to them, the zombies, the homeless, surviving sick had mutated and were dangerous. Not in a brain-eating way, but a steal everything just to eat or trade, kill you for it or make you sick in the process, kind of dangerous. Many zombies started out like us, but when the pandemic hit the hardest, they were disbelievers in the illness. They thought it was a hoax or that they would be sheep if they took the precautions. The Zombies were our friends, family, and neighbors before. Now they were monsters. Mother was always telling me the latest safeguards and the news of how things continued to mutate. And as mother got older and older, things got worse. She was smaller and frail, and now I was in charge of the planting, shopping, and news of mutations. Until one, not shiny Christmas eve mother died.

My brave mother died, and in her dying breath, she remembered my father's work apparently. She told me the password to his computer was "in my heart." I thought she had the sickness! I thought she was delusional! What the hell did this mean, and why is this so important that it's the last thing she ever tells me she tells me?? I wracked my brain as I dug a forever home for the bones of my mother outside the garden patch.

In my heart? Hmmm, answer in my heart? Is that what she said? What did it mean? Was it a book? A song? A joke? A story??? Damn mother, what did you mean? I cried myself to sleep between frustration and sorrow and more sorrow to be in this world alone now. What would I do without her to care for and her company and her warmth? Alone.

I tried to carry on, hoping for an answer, a pretty sign, anything that glimmered hope. A year had passed; it was Christmas again. It was not pretty or shiny; it was cold, lonely, and deeply depressing. There was not much left to barter for seeds at the market, and the garden was not very fruitful in the winter. My old fur stole my mother would never let me trade. "Creepy ass thing," I thought. What am I even saving it for?" My mother's coat, too small for me to wear, but I could use it as a blanket. And in a dark, dusty corner of our old home was my father's computer. I don't think anyone had touched it since he passed. In the struggle to survive, I had long forgotten his constant encouragement to read his work when I was older. Then I heard my mother's dying words about my heart. I was all of a sudden fed up with all of it. The sorrow, the zombies, the tanks, and all the ugliness. The filth, the darkness, and the death. The loss of friends and family, and next thing I know, I'm flying across the room with tears burning my eyes; I knock Fathers' computer to the ground and kick the desk. I try to destroy the wood, kicking and scratching and hitting it in rage. I am sobbing and angry and, suddenly, on the ground, I see some tiny piece of pretty? Maybe I have the sick, I think. Or perhaps it refraction from my tears? A computer piece? I reach out and realize it's my heart locket! I haven't seen anything pretty in so long! I wiped it on my filthy sleeve to see it shine. It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen! As I am cleaning it, it accidentally opens. Something's written inside, wiping my eyes, stinging and dirty from the dust. As my vision clears, I see the words on a small piece of paper. I struggle to read it; what's this? User Id: Sars CoV2, Password: MRNAVAX.

Carol Snyder