Fic: Quiet and Unquieted

[secondshadow]

Title: Quiet and Unquieted
Word Count: 1729
Summary: When the sickness came, first you lost your voice, then you grew weak, then you died.
Notes: For hc_bingo prompt: loss of voice and angst_bingo prompt: quarantine.


“Take this,” my mama told me, “it’ll help your throat feel better.” She extended a lozenge to me on the end of a long-handled wooden spoon that was taped to the broken off handle of an old broomstick.

I accepted the offering and popped it into my mouth, smiling to show that the intent was appreciated. It wouldn’t matter. The lozenges couldn’t do anything for what was making my throat sore. I’d overheard Mama and Papa talking about that when they’d thought I was sleeping. Nobody could do anything to help me. I had the sickness.

“All we can do is wait and pray,” Papa had said, which I thought was funny coming from Papa because he was the one who told me that prayer did “as much good as spitting in the ocean would change the tide” when I asked him about it that one time the guest speaker at school had tried to get us to go to his church.

The hard candy clicked against the back of my teeth as I sucked on it and did my best to swallow slowly so as not to make the burning in my throat feel worse. I kept the smile up, kept my face looking blank and innocent because Mama needed to know that she was doing her best for me. All she really needed to do, though, was let me see her beautiful face one more time. Instead, she kept it behind the breathing filter—and kept her distance from me—to keep herself safe from my germs. She needed to keep herself healthy, she told us, because someone needed to take care of me.

I had no way to tell her that what I needed was not what she was doing. My voice had been the first thing to go, just like with everyone. First came silence and then weakness and then death.

Instead, I watched her with eyes that were already growing too heavy to keep open as she crossed to the window, lifted the edge of the curtain, and peeked out—as if there was anything to see.

The streets would be empty. People weren’t allowed to leave their homes once anyone in them came down with the sickness. Our home had been hit in the first wave when my older brother got sick. My mama believed that he brought it home from school. She said he caught it from drinking at the public water fountain. Whether or did or not didn’t matter because he was dead now and school had been closed for a long time.

I felt my eyes drift closed and my breathing slow. I didn’t sleep. The last bit, where your mind slips over the ledge into that place of dreams, didn’t happen anymore. No one knew that, so a few minutes later, I heard my parents’ sigh that was so heavy with exhaustion. The chair legs scraped against the wooden floor as my mother sat down.

“This can’t go on forever,” she said. Her voice was funny through her mask, lower than it should be.

“They’re not going to life the quarantine until people stop dying,” my father pointed out. He didn’t wear a mask. With as much time as he spent tending my brother, Papa said it was too late to protect himself now.

I heard a pause then and knew that both of them had turned to look at me. They expected me to die soon. Sometimes I think they wanted me to die. If they lived for a whole week after I died, they’d be allowed out. That’s what the posted rules said.

No one had been allowed out, yet.

The house was warm and the air was thick with the smell of sickness. Opening the windows wasn’t allowed. The last time the door opened was when the police had come to take my brother’s body away. I don’t remember when that was, either. Time had all blurred together after my voice went away.

A fan whirred gently in one corner, but it didn’t do much. My whole body was damp with sweat and sometimes I shivered, yet I was never cold enough to know why.

Sometime later, I felt the side of the bed sag under a new weight. No one had come near me since the first symptoms appeared, so I rolled automatically toward the weight, eager for anyone’s touch. With my nose pressed to the person, I could smell the familiar traces of my father beneath the reek of body order even through my congestion. Strong fingers started to comb through my hair without any hint of disgust at how my unwashed hair must feel.

I opened my mouth but nothing came out. I don’t know why I tried.

“It’s OK, Sweetheart,” my father whispered. “I know you’re still in there. You’re going to get your voice back.”

How do you know? I wanted to ask. How can you know?

There had been rumors—when the sickness first started and before anyone knew that it was going to be the plague it turned out to be—that some people got their voices back and they were the ones who lived. The plague killed everyone else. Once your voice was gone, the only thing people could do was settle in to wait. Later, the government had started locking the voiceless in their homes after the hospitals ran out of room, and then out of doctors.

I learned a lot from listening. No one would have told me any of this otherwise because they thought I was too young, that I couldn’t understand. They didn’t understand that the mind needed things to think about, especially when it couldn’t sleep.

“When this is all over,” Papa continued, “everything will go back to normal. The schools will open and you’ll get to see your friends again.”

But I won’t get to see my brother, I thought. I won’t get to see my friends who died.

I assumed that a lot of my friends died. They probably all assumed that I had, too. Telephones were useless without voices and no one had the energy to text or type. We were stuck until people stopped dying, except that we would have no way to know when that would be. Mama said that when she saw someone else in the street, she’d know that it was safe to go outside.

“You’re strong,” Papa told me, his fingers continuing to comb through my hair. The scratching felt so wonderful. I hadn’t realized how much I craved touch until getting it again. “If anyone can live through this, it’ll be you.”

I summoned the energy to wrap my little fingers around his arm. His skin was cool, the hair that covered it rough.

Then I fell asleep. The ledge I’d been balancing on for so long gave away and my consciousness tipped into the cavern.

When I woke up some unknowable time later, my fingers were still wrapped around my father’s arm; the heavy weight of his hand still pressed against my head. I forced my eyes open and blinked against the brightness of the room. Tilting my head back, I looked up at my father, searching for more of his kind words. His head was back against the wall, his mouth hanging lax.

I struggled free from the damp, stinking blankets that were packed around me, using more strength than I remembered ever having in my possession. Without me holding on to balance him, my father’s body tumbled to the floor with a loud crash. I couldn’t react fast enough to catch him.

My mama should have come running, even if she stopped at the masking tape line that marked the boundary of how close she’d get to the sick bed. I didn’t hear her, didn’t see her. Pushing the covers farther away, I scooted down the bed for a better view. The drapes on the window hung open, letting the light stream in. Dust floated in the beams. I swung my feet over the side of the bed, sparing a glance at my papa so that I didn’t step on him by accident. His arms and legs were crumpled into no position a person would make naturally.

I blinked again and contemplated the risk of getting out of bed. What if my legs couldn’t hold me anymore? What if I fell down and couldn’t get back into the bed?

I swallowed. My throat hurt, but not as much. Maybe that last lozenge had done some good after all. Maybe another one would help. I planted my feet on the floor and gripped the side of the mattress to give myself as much support as I could. Then, opening my mouth, I tried the one thing that was even scarier than standing up: “Mama,” I called. My voice was raspy; it sounded like the chains of the swing set grating against the support bar. But I heard it. It worked. I cleared my throat, wincing only a little. “Mama,” I called again. My voice was better this time.

I heard a different thump, the sound of a chair hitting the hall from someone standing up too fast. Papa had made that sound all the time and Mama had always reprimanded him for it.

A second later, Mama appeared in the doorway. Her hands flew to her face as she took in the sight of my father and of me. “Oh my god,” she breathed. “Stay there. Please stay there. I need to call the police. Oh, god.” She lurched toward me like she wanted to get closer at the same time as she was trying to get away. She disappeared from the room.

Once again, I looked down at my papa’s body. I wondered if he had known he was sick, if that’s why he had risked coming in to touch me. “You were right, Papa,” I told him. I waited, listening for a response he’d never provide. He had died. People were still dying. The police were going to come, but I already knew they weren’t going to let us out. The quarantine would go on.

That was okay, because my mama had made it through. Even if I only had a week with her, she could take off her mask and I could finally tell her everything on my mind.