Momma Says (part 1)

        Momma says the world didn’t end like she thought it would. Not with fire in the sky or the earth tearing itself apart. It didn’t end with armies clashing. There was no booming thunder or lightning splitting cities. It was quiet…too quiet. She says it came on like a whisper, not loud and raging like the stories people used to imagine when they thought about the end.

She says she and Dad sat in the house they had before us and tried to be as quiet as they could. Tried not to make the floorboards creak or move in front of the windows. That was the smartest thing to do, she says. Stay quiet, stay invisible, and let the worst of it pass you by.

It wasn’t smart to go outside, not with the sickness out there. She says no one really knew how it spread, through the air, through the water, through the touch of someone already gone hollow. All they knew was that stepping out meant gambling with their lives. And Momma and Dad couldn’t risk that. Not when I had just begun to grow inside her. She says Dad would press his hand against her stomach and whisper that he’d keep us safe. That no matter what, I’d be born into the world, even if the world didn’t want me anymore.

So, they waited.

They waited until the cupboards were bare and the water trickled from the faucet in rust-colored spits and then stopped altogether. Waited until the quiet of their house wasn’t safety anymore, it was starvation, dehydration, and listening to each other’s stomachs groan in the dark. Momma says one night they both knew, without even speaking, that the house was no longer home.

She says leaving broke her heart. That house was where she and Dad had planted their first garden. Where they painted the walls a soft green because they thought it would be a peaceful color for the baby they dreamed of one day. Where they laughed in the kitchen and argued in the hallway and made up in the bedroom. She thought she would raise Walt and me there, with the windows open to summer and the sound of cicadas rolling in from the trees.

But she says that dream was already gone, even before they stepped outside. Raising us there would have been too dangerous. The sickness was one thing, but people were another. People grew mean when they were hungry. Even meaner when they were desperate, and desperate people, she says, make the worst kind of monsters. If I cried too loud, or I laughed too bright, someone might hear. Someone might come, and if they came, Dad wouldn’t have been able to fight them all.

“Protecting you was the most important thing,” she always says, her eyes distant, like she’s still seeing something in the shadows.

And every time, I tell her I could’ve helped. I could’ve stood beside Dad. I could’ve made the monsters run away.

She smiles at that, even though her smile doesn’t always reach her eyes. She kisses my forehead and tells me she knows, and that I’m becoming more like Dad every day.