Against my better judgment, I raced over to the slide and went to ask one of the kids if they had seen my little sister. I conjured up a description of her in my head — a small girl, rather sickly, with bright red hair, not easy to miss. She had a smattering of freckles across her face and the was wearing a flower dress with marigolds on the front.
“Hey!” I slowed my jog into just walking in place, seeing a girl about eight years old who was helping a toddler get off the plastic and metal platform. “Have you seen a girl about yay high? She has bright red hair and freckles, looks a little bit sickly?” I pictured Sienna in my head, broken and afraid of the outside world. Knowing of the horrors and understanding, but not quite grasping the direness of everything.
She had grown up with it, after all.
The eight year old responded, after attempting to carry the struggling toddler on her hip. The wisps of blonde hair in her ponytail rested in front of her eyes. “…you’re not going to make me look for her with you, are you?” She raised an eyebrow and then hushed the toddler, who was beating at her chest with his little fists.
I shook my head rapidly. “No, no, not at all! Stranger danger and all of that. I’m just wondering if you could tell me if you’ve seen her, that’s all.” I started to speed up my jogging in place, looking around every couple of seconds to see if she had somehow appeared out of the shadows just to surprise me. This isn’t funny.
She carefully scanned me with her blue eyes, “…I saw a girl like her in the slides a few minutes ago? She, um, looked like she was asleep though.”
Oh no, oh no, oh no. “Thank you!” I said, quickly climbing the playground equipment, with my legs yelling at me. I should have gone around and went up the steps, instead of trying to make it in one big bound. But my sister was on the line and I had to do something. The cold evening air bit my face and nipped at my fingers as I tried to make my way up the castle-esque playset. My head almost banged against the ceiling but I managed to be just aware enough to duck.
Then I heard her cough.
It was just distinct enough and I could hear the echo coming from the tube slide — it made sense that I couldn’t see her before, but I kept on mentally kicking myself. I peered down the tan tube and I could see some of her hair, although I couldn’t discern the color. But it was her voice, I was sure enough.
“Kiddo?” I knocked inside of the tube and I tried to wait for her response, but all I could hear was her shaky breathing and I just had to continue. “Hey, kiddo? If you could slide down the rest of the way, that’d be great. I need to take you back home.” It was stupid that I let her play around outside, I could have just lent her my laptop. A dozen plans on how to properly go about disinfecting the slide raced through my head but that wasn’t top priority. “Can you say something?”
“I’m tired, Nora.” Her voice was croaky, each breath was shuddering. She sounded like my dad, almost. The night before he —
Oh no.
My mind raced at a thousand miles per hour and I wasn’t exactly sure what to do, but instinct kicked in and I climbed over the guard-rail and jumped into the mulch below. I have to pull her out, I have to get to the hospital, I was stupid for waiting this long. My feet stung with mild pain, but I got myself over to the bottom of the slide where I could see her feet. She had kicked off her shoes somewhere.
“Kiddo, I’m really sorry about this.” And I yanked her down, just trying to get her to slide down the rest of way. My movements were trying to be gentle but I wasn’t sure that worked, but she didn’t yelp. Her legs came into view, her the ends of her blue dress came to view as they rode up her legs, and then the rest of her did. She looked paler than normal, her eyes were heavier than normal.
She was light when I scooped her up, she was easy to carry as I raced over to the parking lot to get in the car. Please, please help her. Her head curled into my chest and I just wanted her to ask to be put down, but she was oddly compliant with me. “Lemme go back to sleep,” she mumbled, closing her eyes.
“Can you please stand up for a few moments?” When there was no response, other than a small moan, I had to put her down in order to open the doors on the red mini van. I felt bad when I set her down in order to open the van doors, but she just drew her arms around herself and lay there content in the grass.
I managed to put her in her seat, as her head lolled around. The buckle clicked and I slammed the door shut, hoping that she would jump awake and maybe cry a little bit. Her actions weren’t… Sienna-like. I had always imagined that she would go out, kicking and screaming like she had come into this world. Hell, she did most things kicking and screaming and begging and pleading. Arguing into she was red in the face, because when the world was unfair, she had to show it.
-
'Nobody should die!' She yelled, tugging on the end of my shirt as I tried to finish up some Algebra problems. Her face was red with anger and tear tracks streaked down her face, but she didn’t seem to care as she wiped off the snot with the ends of her sleeve and kept on arguing. 'Can the present do somethin’ about it, Nora? Can-can-can you do something about it?'
I turned back to the paper, erasing my answer with the pencil as I ignored her protests — only to correct her a few seconds later when I was processing her words instead of the math, 'The president, kiddo. Not the present.' I went to write in my answer again, but the graphite only scrawled across the page when she jumped up and tugged down on my arm.
I snapped to look at her, getting ready to berate her and then make her sit in her corner of our bedroom as I tried to finish up homework. But she looked me dead in the eye, opened her mouth, and started to scream at the top of her lungs.
-
Thank God for automatic doors, I thought, as I tried to adjust her sleeping form in my grasp. She was light, yet heavy enough that I staggered when entering the admission room. My voice was frantic when I called out, in denial but facing the truth in front of me at the very same time. “She’s dying,” I yelled, my voice raw in my throat as it ripped out of me in absolute terror. “She stopped breathing!” I tried to make over to the admissions desk, over to the receptionist in the green scrubs with the bun, she looked nice enough, she could help.
Everything was processing so fast in my mind that nothing was fast enough, not really. Each and every step I took, each and every time I blinked, every word of distress that I yelled out didn’t matter in the end. “She’s dying!” I screamed again, “Please help her!”
This is my fault.
The receptionist stood up from her desk, but I couldn’t read the reaction on her face. There were about fifty thousand other people waiting in the room and I could hear all of the coughing and muttering and vacant words, but none of that really seemed to matter.
My world slowed down just a little bit by the receptionist was by my side in a matter of seconds, “I’ll go get the nurse, kid. Is she breathing? Is she still breathing?”
I looked down at her, slowly. Not fast enough. “No, she’s not breathing.” She was almost dead weight in my arms and I just wanted to drop her, I just wanted to drop her and I just wanted to sob. “Can you save her? Can … can you please save her?”
The words, coming from another person, didn’t seem real. They seemed like the articles about the cure in development or my mom holding my arms and telling me that the world was going to be okay soon— I wanted what she said to be real and on some level and so I believed her, on some level. It helped. “We can save her, kid.”
There was a hospital bed, there was my sister being hoisted from my arms, and there were questions in my ears as I walked along with the bed with wheels. The promise was real, the world was real, but I didn’t feel real. “What’s your relationship to her?” A nurse asked me, someone different, someone new. A different person, but they would have to uphold the same promise. She wore blue scrubs and she smelled like rubbing alcohol.
“She’s my sister —” new room now, with lots of bed and lots of people in and out. Green curtains, shiny floors, lots and lots of beeping. Emergency room. She might die. “Sienna Solo — seven soon, she’s six now.” From hospital bed to another bed.
Someone said something about heart rate, but from the looks of it, she looked to be dying. No breathing, no response, but she had been responding in the car ride. She had been talking to me, she had been mumbling. She had been alive, because it had been my job to keep her alive. Seeing the stark difference between her sweaty hair and the bed hit me, like a load of bricks.
“Has she been exposed to W.E.V.?”
“Yes. My fath… She has been exposed to the virus, yes.”
A year and a half, the virus had been out there for a year and a half. For some reason, I was sitting down in a chair. The world ran by me at a thousand miles per hour, but I was still so goddamn slow. She was there, barely breathing. People were checking on her and there was someone over her, getting ready to perform CPR.
“Go easy on her, she’s fragile!” I said, wanting to get up but knowing that I couldn’t do much. My words held no weight. “…why aren’t you guys worried about the virus?” Dead bodies in the streets, in abandoned tunnels under roads because the morgues stopped having space. Gray bodies with the blood in the back of their head, just waiting to be found. Bodies in trash bags, long internet posts about how you shouldn’t even let the common symptoms pass you by.
“Immunity,” the nurse answered. She sounded tired. “It’s not really world ending.”
I had heard that before. It was a load of bullshit.
“My sister? She's okay, yeah?”
There was no heart monitor, the CPR had stopped, she must have been okay. They could bill us and then we’d be on our way, just trying to hold out until the blessed cure. Until her birthday. There were noises that I couldn’t fully understand and that weren’t connecting in my head, but she was going to be okay because I had been promised. I had to protect her—
I started to stand up.
‘Dead’ wasn’t really a word to me, not when it was connected to Sienna at least. I had always imagined her dying kicking and screaming, yes, but I never hyper fixated on the death. Only on the fact that she would fight death off with her bare hands. Because that’s what she did. She clung at the ends of my shirts, kicking and screaming and begging and pleading.
“I’m sorry, your sister …” the nurse had obviously broken news like this before, “is dead.”
-
W.E.V. didn’t end the entire world. The cure was actually real and immunity was a thing, inflation went down, happiness went up. The world slowly placed itself back into order, even with a significant dent on the population. It was mostly an American-centric thing, if I really thought about it. But everyone pieced everything back together, identified the dead, and continued to live their lives. (PTSD was high among, well, a lot of people, but we managed.)
Each morning, after the fact, I woke up early and poured two cups of coffee. I set my father’s at the end of the table. Then, I poured two mugs of hot chocolate. Five marshmallows for her, zero for me. I set her cup on her chair and waited.
Because that’s all I could do.
W.E.V. didn’t end the world, but it ended my world. The name still fit.
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