QuoProQuid posted:

Corrosion
1091 words

There’s no way to justify Cynthia’s optimism, no reason for her to hold onto hope. It clings to her like a weed, growing in absence of sustenance, flourishing under the harshest conditions. Every day, I tell her there is nothing to look forward to. I remind her that the light of the world has been extinguished and that the world cannot get better. And yet, she clings to the idea.

Despite the wars and the chaos, despite us living in the ruins of a decaying world, she refuses to break. It is a quality I love and I hate in her. It breaks my heart and makes it soar.

“Roger, darling, you’re talking to yourself again.”

My head shoots up, almost slamming against the top of the tractor I’m dismantling. With care, I remove it, plucking a few corroded screws and washers from the wreckage as I go. My senses feel clogged by rust.

“Oh am I? Sorry, darling.” I say with forced pleasantness. I scratch my head, shaking loose dust from my few wisps of hair. In the weeks since the collapse, it’s been harder and harder to stay clean. “Any luck findin’ replacement parts for the generator?”

“Nah. Nothin’ we don’t already have.” She calls back. I catch a bob of grey hair peeking out from behind a grain cart. There’s an awkward hobbling of movement as Cynthia stretches her old bones. “How’s about you, Johnny?”

With that question, any tenderness I feel vanishes. There’s a long pause followed by the sound of metal scraping against metal. I watch as a lanky boy-child unfolds himself from underneath the grain cart. He lumbers over to Cynthia and, wordlessly, deposits a handful of rust-speckled parts. A sickening warmth spreads into my face as she looks down at the pieces, counting them with a gnarled finger. The heat becomes more intense as she crinkles her face into a smile and tousles his hair.

“Ah, very good, Johnny. Very good.”

The boy says nothing and curls back below the truck. I lock my jaw and get back to work, ignoring the pounding of blood in my head.

***

The boy called Johnny is not our boy. His name probably isn’t even Johnny.

A few days after the war, Cynthia caught him walking down the hill to our farmstead. She had watched as he stumbled, wide-eyed and blackened by soot, into our little garden. A survivor of the collapse no doubt. A refugee from one of the many annihilated cities, likely irradiated and germ-infested. A danger to us both.

And yet, that had not stopped her from welcoming him into our home, from dressing his wounds, and letting him into our son’s room. Our private space. Our sacred space. The only space in the world preserved from the ruins of the world.

By the time I learned of the boy’s arrival, he was already sitting on our son’s bed, wearing our son’s clothes. I tried not to get angry about the extra resources or the extra mouth to feed. Instead, I tried to ignore it, this intruder, this festering sore, this false substitute for our child.

I will not let this leech come between Cynthia and I, even though I know the effort will be useless in the end. So much is already failing. Our relationship might as well too.

***

The three of us walk through the field back toward our farmhouse. The silence between us is both unsettling and consoling. The only sound for miles is the whipping of the wind through reeds of sickly looking wheat. The sky looks cracked and stained, an egg yolk smeared with soot.

“You know, Roger, thanks to Johnny, we might be able to fix up some of our equipment.” Cynthia says in a bright tone amid hobbles. “He’s been a huge help these last few days, wouldn’t you agree?”

I grunt but do not meet her gaze. Beside her trudges the solitary form of the child, rising from the wheat like a scarecrow. He catches my eye for a moment and glances away.

“Johnny here could help us a lot. He’s already been cleaning and scavenge for old parts. With him helping hold down the farm, we could go exploring further to find new materials. Maybe even go into the cities…”

Again, I say nothing. The farmhouse sits in a state of mild disrepair. Shingles array unevenly on the roof. Paint flakes off the walls. The building sways as the wind rattles it. Seeing it sit there fills me with a strange bitterness. I feel my restraints snapping, the bile I’ve been holding back spill out.

“Ain’t nothing in the cities, Cynthia. Ain’t nothing in the countryside. There ain’t nothing anywhere. This kid can’t solve our goddamn problems because he’s in exactly the same fuckin’ boat as we are,” I spit. “The whole loving world is gone and what we’re doing now, scrabbling around for rusty parts, is just putting off the inevitable.”

I stop walking.

“Like, gently caress. Jesus fuckin—. Jesus goddamn Christ.” I press my hands into my face and feel something hot. My body quakes. “I don’t know how—. I don’t know how you can keep on pretending that everything is fine when it’s not. I don’t know how you can treat this kid like he’s something that’s gonna outlive us, like he’s our real…”

Cynthia’s body presses into mine as my body lets loose an awful shudder.

“It’s so stupid. So goddamn stupid.”

The skin on her hand is so thin it feels like paper. I feel it caress the rust-smeared fabric of my shirt before she pulls my face to meet her’s.

“I don’t have any kind of answer that will make everything okay,” she says, looking at me intently. “I can’t pretend the world isn’t a hard place or that I know it will get better.”

We stare into one another’s eyes.

“But we have to keep moving. We have to do all we can to help the people around us. Even when it seems hopeless, we can’t lose sight of what makes us human.”

She thumbs away a tear from my face. I look at her and then the boy.

“Alright,” I say softly. “Alright. Let’s do what we can.”

We walk back to the farmhouse together. I help Cynthia back into the bedroom and then go out with the boy to try and repair the generator. The work is hard. We struggle to replace one set of rusted parts with another. In the end, though, the machine whirrs to life.