The Succor of the Sick
Kimi K2 (0711) and Davinci 002
The answering machine still had her mother's voice. She'd kept it twenty years, pressing play when she needed to remember the particular cadence—how the vowels stretched, the way sentences rose at their ends like questions. Now her own throat ached with that same music. The doctor called it conversion disorder. The priest had different words. But when she opened her mouth to argue, it was her mother's phrasing that emerged, her mother's grievances, her mother's unlived life pressing through like water finding a crack. She flapped one hand and laughed at herself. Then she recalled the children she had nursed. Refusing antibiotics was the first mistake. It helped spread the epidemic to her husband, the children, the children's classmates. Now every mother here lost a child, and she would never have another. She was single-handedly wiping out humanity.
The bruise spread over her right eye. She had been holding her infected son while he coughed his entire body weight, hoping it would overtake her, hoping death would be gentle. Then he vomited violently, soaked back into her, his arms gripping her like a vise, and she no longer cared. She had been the succor of the sick. Shouldn't she be the first to go?
She hadn't noticed the rot around her until it was too late. By the time they came to tell her she was shunned, she'd been taken by the disease's fever. The women stood in a semicircle around her on the grass. She knew then how they had ended with crevasses between them all. Out of generations of handholding, the invisible horizontal lines had faded.
"Cara,◆ About the ending
❧ About the title