Rose Blumen ~

(Gamya)

Mom and dad never asked where I was finding the supplies that helped them stay alive. Food, clothing, equipment.

I just smiled wry, a little absent inside. The skin around their eyes was dreadfully dark. They looked at me with such hollow faces, I wasn't entirely sure they still saw me at all. It was painful.

Also they still could barely speak, barely mutter a moan or a growl. They were focusing on packing and walking as I pulled them, breathing with strains as well.

Dad complimented me multiple times now that he had found some strength back.

Mom looked like a diseased thing, but still managed to smile at me sometimes over her strain.

Despite the toughness of the trail and their weakness. She still carried her enlarged tummy with life growing inside.

Our journey toward dad's hometown, lost in the middle of the mountains, it was long but the simplest one. Almost a bird's flight since the city we abandoned. By the roads, it would have taken much longer detours. From here we could almost go straight ahead.

But for this year's holiday trail, I was the stronger one of us despite still being the youngest.

It pained me.

Last time we went, just a couple years ago, dad could carry me on his shoulder for some of the way, even climbing up. And mom was the fastest meanwhile. She was agile. And they both smiled with healthy tans.

Now they needed me to pull their arms to make nearly every step. They stopped and sometimes fell. They looked pale as Europeans and straining themselves.

G - Come on mom, dad... Move! Don't give up! Not now! We're almost there!

All the pointless words of the past I remember hearing against me. They made me sad saying them, as much as they now hurt them.

Their sunken and teary eyes accepted my drive every time nonetheless.

They stood up and moved.

And far slower than intended and lonelier than ever, we passed the first mountains out of maybe ten...

~

I've washed myself again in freezing cold water. It's painful, replacing dirty itches by others.

I noticed how non seasonal shrubs and flowers have grown by the sides of this small stream.

I notice more details that have changed.

More and more as we go. I observe and I learn, but I also have my own good intuitions.

I prevent mom from straying away on a dangerous parterre of noxious grass.

Dad now manages to carry over and back some sticks and dry woods for us to burn during the night.

He's getting a little better, now I can notice. He had me worried sick for too long a while, but at least now I see him coming back.

He also apparently sees me back, with emotional gratitude, and mixtures of wider concerns. Not too much about me directly, but rather more toward my wider future.

He often looks back, again, but now we can't see any city anymore. We're off season for such hikes, so the struggle is not over. But it's now almost normal looking, being alone in the wild.

I can see in the ways he's so absent minded sometimes, how much he wishes it all had been but a drunk fantasy.

But once you know where to look at, it's pointless to deny.

I hold dad's hand back, before he reaches out for the shoulder of an unresponsive man we found by a corner of a cairn. The humidity washed his smells away, but it's bad. I can tell.

We both feel painful shivers of resignation, as I prevent him again from checking the life of a corpse, that now would have been like touching deadly mushrooms.

He didn't fight me off either, although he began to initially, raising hand and opening mouth, when he saw me get closer to the bag and pulled it to see what we could steal inside to survive. He saw me do, and lowered his hand and face, giving up.

The dead man grunted.

We turned around to face how much things had changed.

His head fell.

His throat guzzled and moaned.

His chest crawled away, moaning an open mouth along an odd animal.

The flesh of the ribcage carried it away for a few metres of crawling and moaning, before our horrified eyes.

The leftovers behind were of a head and hips still where they lied before.

The torso slug, in pain, slowed down, turning darker. It died, oozing darker fluids with stronger scents, as if cooked.

Now there are things inside death. There are new forms of parasitic diseases in the wild. That much was clear, as much as we would have wanted to deny it.

~

Dad was still shaking when he helped mom sit and drink boiled soup. I wasn't feeling easy either.

It mostly looked the same as normal so far in the mountains. Probably because there was no building and people to see damaged and changed.

But things below, at best they were now shrouded in a new veil of unknown. We knew the land continued over there, but no longer what was inside. This sensation of shrinking was awful.

A wide fog of unknown like a sheet all over the world. Some things were the same alright. But at times when peeling below or through, all we could see was this bubbling rot that seemed eager or willing to devour everything alive.

It worried all of us at first greatly, because all we first noticed were how the dead turned to weird things and fertilizer for even weirder plants.

Also because my parents began to fear for the response of civilisation and country to these oddities.

Like a much bigger organism, the country had been struck.

It bled, got infected seriously.

They, as mere cells, didn't have a full overall perspective, but expected to notice an answer from above, a response meaning the organism still lived...

Their phones and radios never picked up anything. Never in the sky we saw any helicopter or plane.

And with dread they gradually began to consider that perhaps this was no longer a normal delay or a quarantine.

Perhaps like the other dead man, the country had fallen and collapsed silently, leaving its defined parts to die or try their chances in resurrection, in form of smaller independences.

I - Warlords...

G - What do you mean dad?

I - Before an empire and after the next loss of union, it's a time of broaden competition. A time for princes and warlords to rise, competing for domination. It's a time of strife and civil war that would painfully ensue... If that is true...

G - Maybe it'll work out, when we reach your home. Won't we be safer out there?

I - Right... Yes, you're right.

We held our concerns swallowed. He was terrified of perspectives that still felt a little foggy and distant from me.

What would society be, next time we meet people? I had no idea.

~

Mom was growing in weirder ways her sickness, health and pregnancy. We could all see something was off.

Dad was nearly back to his sturdy self now, and helping her walk while I scouted the path ahead.

I checked the ways were the paths were now treacherous or too hard for the season. I also gathered what I could find, being resourceful and smart.

He often told me that.

The more details I noticed, the more I began to understand what was going on at a bigger scale in nature than simply our own. I kept thinking about that dead body, and what a dead society could be.

Seeing fruits always the same level of maturity weeks on end, and how crushed leaves disappeared overnight, I began to realise some abstract rules or laws.

And from them, I began noticing more of their effects, where it was harder to directly observe. In the ground, under water... And inside of us...

Their worms didn't all disappear. And I began to hypothesize that it's not even worms eggs that are stuck inside of them, or me.

I began fearing what understanding I was discovering, what story told my construction of now understandable reality.

What these laws that we bumped against and I'm trying to translate actually mean. It was terrifying me more and more.

Frog eggs found in bogs all transformed when I carried them in a bucket. The eggs all turned bad...

Now I felt like dad.

The more I realised what would come if I was right, the more horrified and worried I became.

~