Cardinal Things

The sun was breaking light on a hopeless and bleak winter day like a flashlight into an eternal abyss. Ash thick as the snow on the ground falling in heaps clutched together tight as the survivors huddled in collapsed buildings and broken subways. All of them awaiting their near futures since the nightmarish cataclysm that had been cast upon the city moments ago. Fumes rose into the air from structures here and there, paramount as the fallout descended as winged demons pouring vials of poison into the throats of unsuspecting victims. The unmistakable aroma of death, later decay, around the streets of shattered glass and burning fires, crumbled walls and flattened rooftops, knocked over telephone poles and uprooted trees, would be the sight to behold for miles to come in a radius larger than one could comprehend. Through the mist of it all was the inglorious and haunting symphony of tortured souls wailing for their time to come. Children screaming at the top of their lungs for their mothers and fathers. Men and women expressing the pain of their injuries in the form of ghastly song. As if impaled by massive, permanent thorns in their sides. Lost limbs and fingers and puddles of blood like there had been a red rainstorm. Then at a final glance, the spirits of the dead swirling together to follow the whirlwind of air rising where the mushroom-shaped cloud had been earlier in the day. Free! they yelled in harmony. Lucky to die! Free! they thought as they drifted above into the skies streaked with smog like looking up at the rings of Saturn.

The atmosphere was clouded with an inescapable chill that froze the veins of all life who dared to breathe it in or allow their skin to be exposed to it. The unstoppable shivering did not give her permission to think. What it did give her permission for was to fear for the life of her sister, though numbly, as if its leniency had a limit. Her fingers were numb so she wrapped the first bandages she could find in the rubble around them. She scanned around her and completed a survey of her surroundings. Charred cinderblocks, collapsed pillars, cracked asphalt, honking cars buried under snow and ash, countless people crying for help or making their agonies known. It was dark so she searched her bag for a flashlight and once she retrieved it began using it to find her sister. After about an hour of searching, she found her underneath rubble not too thick and ripped asunder that the pieces were rather feathery on the small child. But the child was suffocating despite that, under the weight of the thoughts on her mind that had been haunting her for days now. The child gripped her stegosaurus stuffed toy closer for its warmth and cried silently.

Unknown to her older sister, she was in a state of delirium that was dominated by the memories of the week leading up to this apocalyptic event. Her mother had picked her up from an overnight summer camp the previous Thursday afternoon. In those prior days the grass was vibrant green, the sun was warm like a fresh cup of tea, and the air was sweet like candy. She was frolicking and dilly-dallying on the field with the friends she made since Sunday when the camp began with carefree thoughts on her mind. A mosquito landed on her arm and she swatted it away. But it had already caused its damage--a great, big bloom rising up into the atmosphere, making the land of her arm swell and burst and boom like the earth vomiting fire upwards and outwards, so irritating to her skin that she had to scratch it like the futile attempt she did so at all the rest of the red, swollen bites on the rest of her body. This was the one that had finally caused her to tear up and cry and complain to the camp leader, who called her mother and gave the phone to her. Her mother was in no comforting mood but a mother had no choice when they were a mother, so she had asked the child what was wrong and she said she had so many mosquito bites and it was itchy all over and it was really ruining her experience. She thought her life was going to end. Her mother said, “Well baby, know that mosquito bites may feel like the end of the world when you have them, but they can be controlled and prevented. Today is the last day and I will pick you up this afternoon. But next time, tell the teacher to give you extra time to spray on some repellent. You’ll be fine, honey.” And so she learned something new that day. Mosquito bites could be prevented with enough effort.

When she was picked up from the camp that day the sky suddenly lost its radiance. Her mother was in a terrible mood over something the sisters had been suffering under for the past couple of weeks which was that she was losing love for their father. For all her life, the mother had tasted clean, fresh water but one day it just felt rather vile and she decided she could not live with it anymore. The night before she picked up her child, the mother was in an hour-long argument in which both parties were being unreasonable out of spite, and she was caught up in it so long she was emotionally drained past the point of repair--and when something is broken beyond repair that signifies its end. This end was not communicated, on purpose, to her children because no child on Earth wanted to have two Christmas parties to attend every year and two birthday presents individually less valued than one big one from both the mother and father who worked on it as a team.

The older sister Marina had no qualms about her future from this point on because she was a university student with her own place and her own path in life, but for the young child, her sister, this was everything. So when the flames touched her skin all she felt was the aching burn of her father dabbing her cuts with a cotton ball full of alcohol, and when the smoke was inhaled by her lungs all she smelled was the scent of the grilled bacon he would prepare on Saturday mornings. All of which was now stored not in the present but in the past, which would grow more inaccessible as she grew older and older and her brain matured past this low point of consciousness. So when her sister Marina said, “I found you, Raina. Try to stop crying, now. We have to move,” and cleared the rubble on her, picked her up, and dusted her clothes, all her eyes saw was the green field of that fateful last day of summer camp. She screamed to her sister with a heave of her lungs that she could not stop, that she would not stop, sobbing until Daddy and Mommy would come back. “Let’s play a game,” said her sister, “I will drop these magical seeds onto the field as I go into the forest, and wherever they grow flowers and trees, you must follow them. Okay, ready?” She began planting them. Raina saw the golden buds drop from her sister’s hand as they impacted the soil, and every contact spurred a kaleidoscope of red, blue, violet, and yellow flowers. Trees manifested themselves in a sequence as roots materialized, trunks extended, branches snaked, and leaves bloomed. Bees, grasshoppers, butterflies, ants, and crickets came soon after and hopped and buzzed and zig-zagged around in the air, tickling her cheeks and making her laugh. She giggled as she followed the trail of blooming flowers her sister created, and one by one they stepped over dead mangled bodies, radioactive cement and iron rods, shattered glass, and burning tires. She breathed in the smell of gasoline, smoke, blood, and heat, and she said, “Wow! I smell roses, lavender, sunflowers, and rain!”

“You’re doing great, Raina,” said her sister. “Over here, now.”

At the edge of the woods, an ugly troll appeared, blocking the passage under the trees. “Give me your gold!” demanded the troll, and Raina stood there paralyzed with fear. It had rotten teeth, a tattered garment, and a breath that could slay a beast with one whiff. It had large eyes on a round, bald, pinkish head. It was shorter than even her, a dwarf of a size that made him all the more belligerent.

“I’ll take care of the troll, Raina. You stay here,” assured her sister. So she asked the old man what his name was, and he answered. She brought the man inside a building with her sister, and she gave him the water in her bag. She bandaged his major injuries. She comforted him that his family was still alive. She prayed to Jesus with him when he asked her to. Then they left him alone. When they did the young child asked her if the troll would be okay. The troll was not evil, the young child could tell. He only wanted help. So the young child asked if the troll was going to die. “The troll is not going to die,” said her older sister, with authority as if it was an indisputable fact, as if it was as clear as adding one plus one or that the Earth revolved around the sun. But unknown to her little sister was this creeping dread that the older sister carried, that she had murdered him because she had left the old man to die.

After wasting no time trying to find the nearest shelter, they were now inside. The next hour was essential. She explained to her sister that there was a plague ravaging the kingdom and that it was in the air, so she was not allowed to go outside. The plague was falling from the sky and none of the citizens knew where it was coming from. The child asked her what would happen if the plague touched her. “If it touches you,” said Marina, “it will turn you into a dinosaur.”

“I like dinosaurs,” verified the child, holding up her stegosaurus plush as if it were evidence for her statement.

Marina opened a chocolate bar from her backpack and handed it to her suffering sister, aiming to ease her a little bit, to distract her from the screams of the kingdom’s citizens outside. They were incessant and endless, disruptive to the peace of their serene shelter full of packed earth and steel and brick, and they added no value to the little domain the two of them had created and envisioned. Her little sister nibbled the chocolate with small bites but tears still continued to steadily flow on the surface of her cheeks, eroding it so that the bees that were once tickling her face and making her laugh were now flying away. This was unacceptable to Marina, so she used her sleeve to wipe off her sister’s tears so they could come back. But they did not. The pink bow in her sister’s hair was so covered in dirt it looked like a fat pig that had rolled in its pen after a rainy day. So she told her sister this and the little girl smiled at the thought. She grabbed the bow from her hair and began calling it a piggy, snorting and laughing as she mimicked the sound of a pig, feeding it chocolate, and introducing it to her stegosaurus. 

But regardless of her older sister’s efforts, the young child understood the pale deathliness of the chill, the cumbersome, inescapable gravity of their situation, and the way its iciness seemed to slow down or even stop all time. How the greatest of soldiers succumbed to this meagre and innocent fact of nature, how it crept into the subliminal emotion to induce feelings of hopelessness. Sometimes even creating a despair so great that all action ceases irrationally. Still, she tenderly held onto her stegosaurus and imagined the dinosaurs roaming outside, viciously roaring and fighting. She gripped her older sister’s hand as they rested down to sleep. She continued to believe without fail.

After her mother had brought her home from the summer camp days ago, she spent every moment in the car describing the activities she had done there. But her mother’s mind was on something else. When they got home she had a private, serious talk with their father. The news of their separation came not three days later when Marina held her sister in her arms in her room. They would each have two bathrooms, two bedrooms, two fireplaces, two families, two homes. Raina brought this up to her older sister in the present, whom she did not know was already asleep. She was talking at the silence and the silence listened back. She told it she did not want two sets of dinosaur toys every birthday--she wanted one big one paid for by both of them. But the both of them are no longer one unit, Marina had explained. Her worst memory was when Marina had asked her, “Which parent do you like better? Who do you want to live with?” It was such an upsetting question to her at that time, and even more painful to have recalled it now, that she got up from their sleeping position in the present--her sister was still sound asleep--and walked away.

Marina woke up about an hour later. The moment she did she learned her sister had run away. She pulled herself off her feet and calmly began searching for her. When it was clear she was not in the immediate vicinity, she braced her anxiety about the outside. OK, death is fine, she thought. My sister is out there. So she pulled her bag over her shoulder and ventured past the building’s doors.

She ventured into a scramble of directions for about ten minutes. Her thoughts were a haze against the backdrop of a foggy floor full of lifeless wonder. It was within this messiness that she gained clarity about her mortality--she recollected the ideas that made who she was up till this moment before they would all be erased and washed away by the universe. She reminisced the savoury tastes of the tender love she received, the happiness she rejoiced, the failures she pushed away to the recesses of her dimly-lit awareness, horrifyingly comprehending that sooner or later the fragility of her life would become known to her. This continued on for a moment longer until she discovered the corpse that would change everything. Her mother lying face-first on the ground--who had been not too far before the event and had evidently been desperately trying to make her way to them--covered in dust and soot and ash. Her dark hair splattered around a piece of cement, her leg punctured by glass and metal, her silence commanding respect for her death in a way that gave the clarity Marina needed at the moment. Then that clarity was interrupted. All of it broke loose when, in a frenzy, she scrambled to find the words to the fairy tale she would tell her younger sister who was in a crisis of being lost herself. Well perhaps this older girl was lost too and this was the first step in finding both of them--to attempt to explain the ineffable with beauty. And so she began: grass began to grow over her mutilated flesh, wrapping around her legs like spiderweb. Good. She added some mushrooms here, shooting up quickly and cartoonishly as if they had always been there. Better. A dandelion sprouted convincingly in a corner, its delicate petals glistening with wet moisture as if it had rained the night before. Perfect. Roots branched out and moss grew at the base. A massive trunk raised itself over her rotting carcass and from the branches and leaves that came next grew these big, round, red and orange fruits that glowed in the dark, illuminating the mist of the ashy night. They twinkled and sparkled with a vibration of awe, destined to carry within a faint sense of hope. They sang for the protection of the innocence of children everywhere. They lit up the waterfalls that appeared next, at the baseline of the growing mound at the older girl’s feet which raised ten centimetres per second, grass and moss and flowers taking shape, swirling, blooming, humming, singing--the bigger flowers opening, the petals uncurling, the anthers reaching for the sky and the entire orchestra releasing the same feeling of endless hope. Until the final result was a barely-recognizable lifeless human being, no longer withered but overgrown, into a gorgeous and elegant grove, wondrous and delightful and brilliant. The blood would be--the blood would turn into--wait, oh God, the blood, what would she do with the blood? It was everywhere. It was sickly on the rocks and it was liquid on the grime. It was sticky on the dirt and it was vibrant on the char. She had to hide the blood. No, no, no! This wasn’t going to work!

She sat down and waited for an answer. 

An infinite moment passed. It did so before, quite curiously, her younger sister found her. “I went to find Mommy,” sobbed the little girl. The older girl looked up from the ground and took her hand, pulling her down and leading her into her warm arms. They rested there for a moment, their mother hidden under some rubble, camouflaged enough that a little girl would not see it, but an older and more intelligent girl deliberately looking for her would. An older girl more intelligent, more mature, more experienced--yet unhappier, more aware, and more suffering. So she opened her mouth to explain to her little sister about the grove in front of them--and then she realized that this grove never grew in the first place, and so her sister would never see it. Its fruits failed to light up, its leaves were all crumbled dead in a heap on the ground like autumn. So instead she turned her head away. “Do you want to know what happened to Mom?” she probed. Her sister looked at her.

“Yes.”

“She is safe. She made it out.”

“Oh. When will she come to pick us up?”

“I don’t know. But she will eventually. Why don’t you go run around the field a while longer? Look, the kids are waiting for you to join their game, they are trying to slay the giant by that river down that valley.”

“OK.”

“Thank you for not crying. You are so strong.”

Her little sister followed her suggestion. She stood up and skipped forward on the crumbled rubble on the ground. On the way, she stepped on a piece of stone on top of her mother’s head, squishing her skin and putting pressure on her skull. She slid by her dirty hand, limp in a corner. She hopscotched on some rocks near her broken legs. And when she got to the end she sang a song. Marina’s eyes swelled and her mouth quivered as if it wanted to expel something. The little girl looked at the sky. Then she said, “Marina! Marina!”

“What is it?”

“The cloud in the air kind of looks like a mosquito bite, doesn’t it?”

She analyzed it herself.

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, it does!”

She wondered why her sister would ever think that. It looked more like a mushroom or tree to her. More like the fiery gates to hell where all the eternally damned souls went to rest. But when she really looked, it began to transform in her eyes and then she could really see it. And then the human carcasses on the ground, including their mother, turned into rabbits hopping, searching for carrots. The knocked-over telephone poles and stoplights turned into T-rexes and velociraptors hunting for their next prey. Even a rainbow appeared over the horizon, despite no prior rain. But it was there, and she could see it. “It’s so easy for you to get caught up in your cardinal things,” she told her sister, “but it’s hard for adults to. I guess that’s why we end up doing things like this to each other.” She got up and walked over to her sister. She looked at the giant mosquito bite in the air, pulling her sister closer to her and waiting for the emergency help to arrive--but their mother was busy arguing with their father to be picking them up from the summer camp on time--and so it possibly never would.

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