sToRieS

In the seven years since the coming of the plague, I have learned how to live alone. At first I had the excuse of needing to bury my loved ones. I washed my husband's corpse, a task more intimate than sex. I settled my daughter in her grave, glad at least that it was me, and not some rubber-gloved undertaker. And then they were gone and there was nothing left to do. No one to tend. No one to live for.

So I learned to get by without reasons. I have no justification for my existence anymore. I am nobody's mother, nobody's wife, nobody's daughter or sister or friend. It shames me sometimes, this urge to survive. It seems shallow and animal, to want to go on when everyone I ever cared for is dead.

And then a stranger came and talked to me and made me remember what it was like, to discover the echoes of yourself in someone else's story.


(from Destiny: A Chronicle of Deaths Foretold by Alisa Kwitney)