What Once Was (Writer's Cramp 9/21)

(~562 words)

         The smell of frying bacon reminded her of everything good. Sunday mornings--in the years before The Decline, anyway--used to be filled with it.

         It only makes her think about those mornings, huddled around the dining room table, the chaotic comfort of her siblings’ rowdiness, as Mom tried to wrangle them to sit still for anything more than four minutes, and Dad hovered around the hot-stove. She’d laugh along with the hecticness and ruffle Allister’s hair when he finally settled down next to her, even as he tossed bits of toast at her.

         “Something wrong?” Quin’s gentle voice broke through her daydream as she pressed her fingers firmly against her temples.

         “Just--” Rae hesitated. His gleaming eyes watched her--sometimes too closely, though she knew he meant well. “The bacon…” but she doesn’t know how to explain it to him. They’ve both lost too much, and any talk about family was a touchy subject these days.

         “If you’re not hungry…” He offered, starting to get up from their small fire pit to dispose of it and start over, “I’ll make something else. It’s not a problem.” She knew it wasn’t. But she reached over and put her hand lightly on his wrist to keep him next to her.

         “It’s really okay,” She insisted. “It makes me think of home. Well--how it used to be, growing up.” But he doesn’t push her for any more details.

         Still, her mind flashes to it again. She’s too young in her memory to have any deeper understanding of the world. But she’s the oldest, so she feels far away from the silliness of Kit. And even though she’s nearly an adult, she’s still too close in age to Varra to be buddies with her just yet. But somehow her and Allister share the unspoken bond between oldest and youngest that forms simply because they find such little else in common.

         She doesn’t know yet the destruction that they’ll live to see. Or about the war that is coming for all of them. This Rae doesn’t understand the scope of their lives or the people they’ll have to grow up to be once their parents are dead.

         She can’t see past the smell of Sunday mornings, or hear past the laughter her family shares. She doesn’t think further than the long green grass between her toes as she runs barefooted through the fields, or live bigger than the stories she dreams up at night just before bed.

         But one day… she will know. She’ll see the destruction, and fight in the war. She’ll become a medic who aches to her bones to save everyone, while knowing in her heart that she can’t always win. She won’t hear the laughter of her siblings... only their cries as they are counted with the dead--funeral pyres blazing too bright for her to look at. Her feet will crunch over ash, and barren land.

         And while she finds love, and meaning, even in the darkest spaces of her world… the smell of everything that was once good, will sting her too deeply for it to feel like it was ever good. It will remind her of how the world was--once. And she will be left to wonder why she didn’t pay more attention to it back then, as she’s pulled into the warmth of a memory too good to have ever been real.