Everything was motionless for miles. The trees stood still against the pale blue sky, and the birds were nowhere to be found among the flat landscape. The grass was dying, a sickeningly brownish yellow, curling limply towards the earth as if accepting its fate, burying itself alive underneath the dirt. The wind ceased to blow, and it was as if the world had taken a giant, collective breath and had forgotten to let it out.
The only flicker of life came from a cabin in the middle of the field of dying grass, where a boy sat next to his mother’s bedside. He didn’t say a word, just ran his thumb in slow circles around her hand, the both of them minutely comforted by the familiar motion in the midst of overwhelming hopelessness. Circle by circle, the repetitive movement lent a brief sense of normality to their world, impeding a flood of emotions from drowning their souls in irreconcilable sorrow. After some time, she looked at him and smiled weakly. The light slowly began to fade from her eyes, and the boy gently took her hand and pressed it to his face, kissing it softly with his lips before letting her hand fall limply to the side of the bed.
The boy cradled his mother in his arms, humming a soft lullaby as he pulled a blanket over her lifeless eyes and wrapped her into a white cocoon. He cast a brief glance at the knife by the window, but the very thought made him sick, so he shook his head and continued his preparations. He went outside and dug a hole about fifty yards away from the cabin, chilled by autumn’s frigid air but inspired by the importance of the task that lay before him. When he had finished, he went back into the cabin and delicately picked up his mother’s body, carrying it to the hole and gingerly placing her down. He filled up the hole with dirt and placed some dead grass around the site for ornamentation, bowing once and then ambling back to the cabin.
As soon as he sat down on his dead mother’s bed, his body was racked with sobs. He was deafeningly alone in the world, in a world he didn’t understand and could never hope to. He turned over and closed his eyes, praying for the cold comfort of the nightmare of sleep to take him away from the nightmare that was his reality. At long last, as the moon began to filter in through the window, the boy fell into a fitful sleep.
He woke up with a start. Instantly he surveyed the room on high alert, looking for signs of intruders, but was calmed upon seeing that nothing had been disturbed. Then his eyes locked on the window. Nothing unusual, except for the fact that the moonlight was broken up by a figure standing outside. The hair rose on the back of the boy’s neck, and he rolled onto the ground, crawling to the windowsill, grabbing his knife and inching towards the door.
He opened the door with a yell, hoping to startle whoever was outside and give him the element of surprise. But as the figure turned towards him and cocked its head, the boy’s voice caught in his throat. His lips moved in a silent no, repeated over and over, and he back up against the outer wall of the cabin until he collapsed to the ground. The figure creeped towards him, looking at him with the same lifeless eyes that had loved him just hours before, and the boy wept. He held the knife up resignedly and closed his eyes.
The boy whispered, “I’m sorry mom,” and a few moments later, the world was silent once more.
