The pattern of moonlight was fractured. Feathered. As though filtering through a Celestial’s wing.
I urged my weary legs into a run. I had no destination in mind, only the desire to put as much distance between myself and the Celestial as possible.
The vegetation thickened as I hurtled deeper into the wood. Thorns and twigs reached for me, their sharp edges digging into my skin, making me gasp. All the while, the branches above me continued to undulate and make that wretchedrustle, rustlesound.
I only stopped when I emerged in a small clearing. The shadows were not so dark here. The moon provided more illumination. As I braced my hands on my knees and inhaled, my terror ebbed. The rational side of my brain emerged again.
Until the frog croaked.
A rather harmless noise. One that shouldn’t have induced such heart-stopping terror in me. But it did. Why? Well, a person dying of the cough will develop a similar rasping sound.
Raaaph. Raaaphuh.
“Mama?” I bleated.
Raaaaphuh,croaked the frog.
“Mama!”
My feet slid against the grass as I galloped across the clearing. “Mama!”
It was foolish to hope. Mama was dead. I’d watched her demise unfold.
* * *
Her illness began gradually.
It started on the day of our first snowfall; always amonumentous—momentous occasion. For the children, at least. I’m rather certain the adults felt nothing but fury as they stared at the white flakes. After all, they still had to complete their daily tasks, and the snow hampered their progress.
Mama was no exception.
We lived on a tomato field. The Celestials, of course, manipulated the soil; tricking it into thinking summer never faded—hence why tomatoes still grew, even as ice fell from the sky. The Celestials also gifted us with spools of mesh fabric to protect the plant life from the frigid air.
“‘Tis material from the Celestial City, love,” Mama had told me that morning as she unfurled the gleaming fabric and draped it over the vines.
I wasmemorized—mesmerizedas I ran my fingers over the silken-smooth mesh. But then the snow began swirling with renewed intensity and my focus turned to the layers of fluffy ice coating the ground. Such is the fickle mind of a young child.
Mama began coughing that day.
At first, it was a tickle that struck whenever Mama moved about in the winter air. She would clear her throat, cough a handful of times, and jest that she was developing an aversion to the cold. “Perhaps I’m turning into a Wraith,” she said.
The thought was horrifying. I pictured a piece of Mama’s soul escaping through her mouth each time she coughed. For how else did Wraiths lose their souls? “Mama!” I ran to her side, wrapping my arms around her midsection as tears burned my eyes.
“Hush, love.” Mama stroked my hair. “I’m sorry…‘twas only a comment made in bad humor. I have a touch of winter cough. Nothing more.”
But the tickle worsened. Her coughs deepened. Mama’s face grew paler and gaunter (is this a word? Gaunter?) as fever gripped her bones. Her lungs began emitting a wet, rattling noise when she breathed.
Soon, the cough took a firmer hold. Often, Mama would gag until she spat up a yellow substance she calledmucus.Toward the end, she choked on blood.
In the final hour of her life, she staggered about our field, plucking tomatoes for The Offering.
I followed her, clutching our well-worn wicker basket, as she lurched between the rows of tomatoes, splattering blood on the Celestial’s glistening mesh.
“You’ll…be…alright…love.” Each word was punctuated by either a wailing wheeze or a rumbling cough. She sluggishly plucked a tomato from the vine, inspected it with bleary eyes, and placed it in the basket. “We’ll…finish…and…I need…sleep…”
Blood dribbled down her chin as she bent to retrieve another tomato.
“It’s not ripe, Mama,” I said. The tomato was green and dull. Not red and shiny as it should have been.
