The Longest Night

She sat next to him, wrapping her arms around him and rubbing his shoulders. Before this had happened, they lived normal lives. Now she knew they would deserve the fate that awaited them. All of them did. She knew it would happen to him soon, but she hadn’t accepted it. She never would.

“We’ll just wait here until they’re gone. Then we’ll get you some medicine.”

He leaned against her heavily, his breathing slow.

Last place that seemed safe. Little plastic dolls sat unmoving; they had been off for days now. No one left alive to turn them on. “It’s a Small World After All,” they should have sang. She stroked his hair, singing the song to herself, trying to block out the howls from afar. It was enough to turn blood to ice, to scare sanity from the living, to chase hope away from His land.

Had they lived just lives? She wanted to say they did. To say that they were righteous people. Everyone wanted to say they were inherently good-natured, but nobody was. To the core they were all selfish. They were built that way. Guilt was buried so that each day could be tread on a string of lies like perfectly rounded pearls. Small atrocities gathered into one sulking mass called Human. They had all forgotten God, but He had not forgotten them, and he sent his angels in the form of decay to tell the rest of humanity their sins: Pride, Gluttony, Sloth, Lust, Wrath, Greed, Envy…they conducted those crimes every day, each and every person, good or ill, and now they all received their just desserts.

Her chin quivered. The dolls blurred in her eyes. Not even innocence could be protected.

Her husband said something. His hand was stuffed in his pocket.

“What is it?” she asked him.

He removed his hand from his pocket. A gun.

She stared at it like a grotesque and ugly thing. Her heart banged its fists against her chest and she couldn’t breathe and oh my God. “Honey?”

He leaned on her heavily to lift it. “I want you…shoot…”

“What?”

“I want you to shoot.”

She shook her head slowly against his, crying hard and softly at the same time. “Don’t ask me to do this. Please don’t.”

“Please…” he moaned. “For me. For us. We don’t deserve…whatever this is. Please.”

“I can’t!” she howled, pushing his hand gently away from her. The gun fell from his grip and clattered on the floor of the boat. His arm fell across his lap weakly. He didn’t sit up. Couldn’t. But she could hear him try. To pick up the gun. His breathing became heavier, and he started again.

“We…can’t live…” he said. “Even if I was never sick, we can’t live through this. This is the end. We’re not…meant here. I don’t want to be.”

“How could you say that? How could you say you want to die? Don’t you love me?”

“Yes,” he said, his breath wheezing. “I love you very much, and…I want you…with me.”

She cried even harder then, her cries shaking the boat. He reached over to hold her hand, and she tried to hold it back, but her grip was loose. She didn’t want this to be happening now. They had run for so long—she had carried him too far for it all just to end like this. In a dingy boat in the middle of a fucking theme park ride—

“I love you…much. I. Am going. To die. And then I’ll be on you. No…don’t. We both know. I don’t know how much longer. Make sure I don’t come back. Or you. I don’t want them—I don’t want them to get us. I don’t want to be them.”

“No,” she cried. More time. Please, more time. Too abrupt. Elsewhere was a field, and in the field was a barn with a future for them. It was supposed to be theirs. This happened to other people, not them.

It was the dolls. You knew it wouldn’t happen. He would have died long before that. No treatments at a barn. A ridiculous fantasy to hold. Their lives were never for themselves, not since he got sick and they had made the mistake of believing it was. Now they were to die for it. In a boat on a river that led nowhere. This was it. She was seeing her end and she wanted to go back to the beginning. The picnic in Coney Island three years ago. The Christmas party where they spent their last days with her mother. The way his hands felt tangled in her hair when they made love. The smell of apples blossoming on the tree in their backyard. The warmth of the sun and the caress of birdsong in her ears.

Not like this, never like this. Why couldn’t our lives be like theirs? Why do we suffer for their mistakes?

Theirs is ours, and she knew. Toes hung over the cliff, and he was telling her it was time to fall. But it was too frightening to step forward.

“I love you. Please. For us.”

She closed her eyes and clenched her jaw as she bent over to pick up the gun from the bottom of the boat. She clutched it in her hand and cried at its cool touch. A blood-curdling wail echoed from far off.

The smell of pine when they sat in the park where they were married, holding hands and watching the clouds drift by. Such a beautiful world.

“I love you,” he ground through his teeth. She clutched him with her free arm tightly, never wanting to let go. And she wouldn’t. She would die holding him, and they would escape. They didn’t deserve it. God, we don’t.

“I love you too.” She cocked the gun, pressed it to his head hard to make sure she wouldn’t pull away and squeezed squeezed squeezed.

Blood and bone on her face, broken wrist, a heavy weight.

Another howl.

If she could breathe she would cry. She cradled his broken head in her arms, pressed her face to where his once was. Oh, God, he is gone, and you took him from me. You took everything from me. Gave it all and took it away.

Quick. The gun. She snatched it hungrily and stuffed it into her mouth. It has to be quick.

The chamber turned, the hammer fell, and all was still.

Her eyes flew open wide. She pulled it out. Single string of saliva between the barrel and her mouth. Open the chamber.

Empty. Empty. Empty. Blood evaporated.

A darkened home. Need to leave. Grabbed the gun. Only five rounds, not six. Extra magazine left behind.

Gave it all and took it away.

She couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, couldn’t breathe. Slammed the magazine back in. A screaming mouth, an empty gun, click, click, click.

She could not hear the hordes of God’s angels approach from behind, coming to claim their last sinner.

She flipped the booklet over in her hands, trying to find another page, but it was finished. A tear splashed on the page. No, that can’t be it. No redemption. No rescue for either of them. “No.”

This is not what she expected when Brittany told her to read it. It wasn’t good. Despairing. Bleak. Sobering to the point of breaking. Then there came the shame. What a perspective. How much she had taken for granted. She looked around the platform surreptitiously and wiped away her tears.

Then the usual train of people descended the stairs but she did not notice them until the man had touched the platform. His hard face set with some troubling thought. She tucked her face into the opposite shoulder quickly. She did not want him to see her like this, if he saw her at all. She could not stop crying. What had happened to the husband and wife had happened to her. Oh, what loss. She found herself looking towards the man again. His eyes on her (look away now). It was too fast to tell. I hope he didn’t see me. Caught somewhere between wanting him to know and wanting to remain obscure was an unending hole. The unknown was just too huge to jump into.

When he came to a stop in his usual spot, Catherine gave another glance at his back, then stared. She suddenly saw him hunched over from sickness, feet dragging as she carried him along, trying to get away from the things that wanted to take it all from them. She could see her holding the gun, and then she broke down again.

I don’t ever want to lose you, she thought. It sounded ludicrous to her because he wasn’t even hers to lose. But to imagine his death and to be left behind…as she wiped futilely again she realized that it was more than just infatuation.

And while she remained distant, hoping to keep him within arm’s reach, she began to see her own story play out. She decided she would write it for him.