Invisible Photograph

Some nights I dream of springtime: the riotous explosion of green. The shoots so tender, yet so robust and tenacious, they could hold up the brilliant sky even before the leaves come out; so full of promise, it’s agony to wait for the buds to burst. But those dreams come from a time long before you arrived.

I dreamed of you again last night. I’m always surprised to wake up from a dream, even a tiny flicker of one like this was. I can never believe I sleep enough to get there.

You were alive, of course, and a turbulent, effervescent teenager. Lanky and handsome, almost as tall as me as I stood next to you at the harvest festival, like we used to have when I was a kid. Even if you’d lived, you’d never have been to such a place—there haven’t been festivals since I don’t know how long. What would be the point? Nothing to celebrate.

You were enchanting and full of promise… you reminded me of Heather, my beloved little sister, the first person to hold you, even before me. She would have loved you so much—did, in fact, for the brief time she had with you, before… well. I woke with wet cheeks and ears, twice as heartbroken for the loss of you as for the loss of her.

How did we survive the grief? I ask myself this every day, when I look out over the desolate landscape, and every night, when the pain in my lungs hits me with its full force. I can’t tell you the answer. I think, probably, we didn’t. Most of us actually didn’t, of course, but those few of us who did, well, we didn’t, not really. We carried on, we kept living, but we were all dead for real, on the inside. How can you survive when everything has been ripped from you, slowly at first and then violently, viciously, all the remnants at once?

In my dream, you were smiling, beaming in the golden glow of a thousand bulbs strung across the square between barns and outbuildings, a net of light to keep the dark sky at bay. Or was it to hold us in, to keep us from floating off into the unknown?

I wish the dream could have lasted even a second longer. You were just turning your face to me, your glittering eyes still locked on the lights above. I had the feeling you were about to say something—what was it? What would you have wanted to tell me? I can’t even begin to parse the things I’ve wished to tell you over the years. To share with you your story, your history, and mine, everything that happened to bring you to this world, all that has passed since you left it in such a rush.

I can’t blame you. Did you know what you were coming into? Is that why you didn’t stay long enough to hear me speak your name? Did you know you would be alone with me, if you’d stayed? Is that what scared you? I would have given my all for you, for what little it’s worth. My life, if it could have helped. But no, there was nothing in all this godforsaken hellscape that could have saved you, or Heather, or all the rest of them. It was better that way, if I’m honest. It makes me sick to admit it, but you were better off going quickly like you did than holding on like Heather, struggling through the lung-rot. I just miss you so much.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell if the pain is from the slow crumbling of my broken heart, or the poison eating me alive. I expect it’s both, at this point. Every breath is a mountain, every reluctant sip of dirty water a knife to the gut. I don’t know how long this will carry on, but I can’t help but hope for the end. It goes against everything I’ve ever believed in, but how does one buoy one’s spirits in such an empty, doomed existence? The last soul I saw was Agatha, and that must be, what, six months ago now? I stopped counting the days long before she showed up, and with the seasons gone, it’s impossible to guess. No one else is coming, of that I’m now certain. She barely lasted a week after she stumbled into our valley, her final pilgrimage for human contact. I’m glad I could provide her that comfort in her last days, but still selfish enough to resent her taking that prospect from me when she went.

I still make my way to the ever-shrinking creek at the bottom of the valley to collect what little water flows there, though it takes me longer to work up the will to set out each morning, and longer to trudge back up to my barn with my bucket. My mushrooms have all but died out, and without a healthy log to grow more, I can’t see a solution. The hunger gnaws, but it distracts me from the pain.

I spend more and more time lying on my sleeping pallet, staring at the gaps in the roof slats. How I wish for the drip of rain through those spaces, instead of the blinding orange glare of the sun, or the weird starless haze of night. All I have is the heart-shaped locket I carry in my breast pocket, and I finger it obsessively in the trembling silence. Heather found it in the dirt when we first arrived back here, I huge with you and terrified, she sickly and just as terrified. There was no chain, so I wore it around my neck on an old bootlace, until that broke and I lived a desperate, melancholy two days before it turned up in our fledgling radish patch. I’ve kept it in my pocket ever since, confirming its presence constantly. Every night I pry the two sides open and smile at the invisible photograph of you inside, the one I’ve drawn, nurtured and cultivated in my dreams for all these long years, eager and impatient to meet you when, finally, I am released from this ravaged world.