The Weight of it All

A Sci Fi Short Story

I held Rachel in my arms when she died and I felt the weight of it all press down on me. Our baby had died in childbirth with her. We hadn't settled on a name.

They had to know Rachel would die soon. She was in so much pain towards the end. I don't know how she refused the drugs. I'll never forget the final tears. She couldn't speak, the pain was too great. The contusions all over her torso had to hurt so badly, but still she pressed herself into me. I held her as gently as I could. The weight of our purpose hurt her as much as the physical pain.

She'd felt it since the first pregnancy failed to take. They hadn't realized the damage done by forcing her to miscarry on her own. They must have learned something from it, or from my anger afterwards. I was with her when the next one came.

And the one after that.

They never told us how important our child was to be. They never told us anything.

Our parents taught us everything. Our mother died when I was young. But Papa told me how it was a sudden cardiac event that took her. It wasn't genetic, and it wasn't because of diet or physical health. They would have caught those. They could have fixed those. Papa always said that They would have fixed her if they knew. Dad didn't think They cared.

Before mama died, Rachel and I were raised separately. Papa took care of me and Dad took care of her. Mama tried to spend time with both of us. As much as she could. She would not admit it, but I always knew that Mama loved Rachel more by how she spoke of her. Rachel was her only daughter.

Papa always called her "The last sister of Eve" when Dad wasn't listening.

Dad died when I was still a boy. Papa had found him and told us not to enter the room. Rachel saw nothing, but I will never forget my father’s body covered with so many gashes. I dream sometimes about the red and brown stains flowing from my father's body. Blood turned to rust. Still blood. He knew They would try to stop a suicide. He was quick. there were too many lacerations to stop what had happened. Later, Papa said that he knew They must have given up, otherwise the door would have been locked as They repaired him. Sometimes I would see Papa talking to himself: "Was it a warning?" he'd ask. "I'll never do it," was always the response.

Rachel started becoming an adult just before Dad's death. papa grieved at Dad's death, but as days further separated the three of us from that incident, Rachel and I noticed he was becoming more and more removed from us. It was more that grief. Our home is not spacious or gifted with many places of privacy, but more and more, Papa would secret himself to the most remote corner of our home. Rachel and I ignored it as much as we could. Papa always said to pay him no mind.

"You two are what is important. Know each other, not your old father. Ignore the distractions given to us. they're not what matters. You are what matter. You and the precious time given to you."

He said that often in moments of kindness. In moments of anger, he lashed out with harsher words. The worst, though, were the moments where he was gone. There are few rooms to hide, but some days he could not be found in any of them. Rachel and I would search and call for hours if we noticed him gone. But he was nowhere.

When Papa would return, it was never an occasion to him. Whoever found him, Rachel or I, would rush to him wherever he was sitting as we screamed for the other to join us. "Papa is back!" we would shout as loud as we could. Loud enough to be heard in any of the rooms. He was so quiet those times. He would always hug us gently and show us out of the room. He always sat when he returned.

Time passed as we lived this way and Rachel became a woman and I became a man.

Papa stopped disappearing entirely, but would sit in and think to himself for hours or days. He mumbled sometimes, but was silent often.

I don't remember his last words.

I walked into the room he often sat in and found Rachel crying on the floor. She was at the feet of the chair where he sat. Her sobs were silent. Convulsions more than anything. But as Papa saw me enter, he placed a hand on her shoulder. She inhaled and held back the tears which lay on the cusp of falling.

"We should leave Papa be,' she said to me. I asked what was wrong. "Come with me," was all she said as she put an arm around me and led me from the room. Led me from the last place I saw my Papa sitting. Led me from the man who had raised us.

She took me to one of the bedrooms. It was neither hers nor mine. It had always been empty. She took me over to the bed and asked me to hold her. Or she told me. I don't remember, but I held her. I held her as she cried. I held her as she turned around and kissed me. I held her as we made love. And I held her afterwards as she leaned into my shoulder and cried once more.

I woke before Rachel after that. She lay in my arms and I watched her sleep. When she stirred, I kissed her forehead and snuck away to grab water. As I returned, she looked up at me in the doorway.

"You don't have to sneak. It's just us." Her voice was ice.

I sat on the corner of the bed, and she sat up under the covers. She said she was sorry. On the best of nights, I can still feel how her nails felt then, gently caressing my back. She apologized again, and I began to cry.

When we left the bedroom later that day, we walked passed many unoccupied bedrooms. All the same. All empty. They did not matter. The room we left together would always be our room. Until the end of our days.

Life then was just us. We settled into being in love in the days that followed our first encounter as adults. Some nights, the memory of Papa would not come to mind. Those were the nights I hurt the least. Some nights, Rachel would tell me stories of Mama. It seemed to hurt her I did not remember how much Mama had loved me. Rachel was so painfully in love with the woman. The hurt was contagious and we wept at our loss together sometimes. We would share stories of Papa and Dad as well. The stories of Papa always made me most sad. I never told her how I saw Dad in his last moments. Bleeding out on the floor. Silent and yet begging for death. Wanting it. I left the tales as vague as Papa's disappearance.

They first appeared in our life again when Rachel became pregnant. It had been a few years since Papa went away when I searched our home one morning and Rachel was gone. Panic set in and I searched chinch by inch, room by room, for her, but there was no in the other rooms to shout if they had found her. There was no one home but me. No one shouted, "Rachel is back!" As I looked in the final room of our home and saw it was as vacant as the first, I began the search again. I lost count of how many times I completed the circuit. Room by room. I never slowed. I only stopped when I came into a room and saw her sitting quietly in the corner. I rushed over to her, incoherent words flowing out of my mouth, without a care what made sense.

I hugged her, and she made no movement.

"I'm pregnant," she said with a voice so faint my exasperated panting should have muffled it.

"You're pregnant?"

"We're having a baby."

Again, the cold in her voice.

I forgot entirely about her disappearance as I moved her over to our room and asked her if she needed anything. She was starving, and I cooked for her and I fluffed our bed and took care of the dishes and made sure everything was tidy and perfect for her.

As we laid in bed, I held her close, her hands holding mine. I began to drift into sleep when I asked her, as if from the space between waking and dreaming: "How do you know?"

She left our embrace and turned to face me, never letting go of my hand. She told me of the other room. Rooms where things moved on their own. Beyond the rooms we knew. Where They poked and prodded at her and took blood and urine into vials that disappeared behind walls. Rooms where the walls were not blank as the ones we lived in but had text on them that read: BE FRUITFUL AND MULTIPLY.

Rooms that she disappeared into once a week at the least. Rooms that I could never see. Rooms that she was alone in as something we had created together had died and left her body.

After the first miscarriage, she told me of Them. Papa had known little, but he had told her everything he could.

"The watch us," he said. Rachel told me that was the line he repeated over and over again: "They watch us." he did not know why. Well, he kept saying he did not know why, but he told Rachel what Mama and Dad had thought. Their parents had told them different stories that Papa's parents did. Their stories had a purpose. The same purpose that the words on the wall in the hidden rooms stated: We need to procreate.

I was angry as she told me the stories. I was angry at her. I left her there and for a time we lived separately. I took another room. Another empty room, used by neither us, nor Papa, nor Dad, nor Mama. The only three people we'd ever known. Rachel and I saw each other a little. We never walked the hall that led to our room. When we tried to reconcile, I couldn't. It felt wrong with Them watching. I knew They had to be.

I hate myself for our time apart. I was stupid. How? How was I so stupid? How did I let myself not see what little time we had?

It may be the greatest day of my life when she took me back into her arms after the long silence between us. Life was good again for a time.

The rooms felt oppressive in their emptiness then. I can never again walk down the hallway to our room. I found myself staring at the glasses in the cabinet. If I were quick and shattered one, I may be able to die like Dad did. Die before They could reach me to keep me alive.

I was staring at my wrists, glass in hand, when I heard a sound. There was never sound in my home. Not since Rachel had died. It had come from the last room I saw Papa in. Glass in hand, I walked in to where the sound had come from.

I was blinded by a thousand pinpricks of light emanating from the walls.

My eyes adjusted, painfully and slowly, to the new light. As they did, I saw a silhouetted in the center of the room. It was an inhuman shape, but it made a human gesture, pointing towards the spots of light.

I looked at it, stunned and silent, and it gestured again. I walked forward to see what it would show me and the weight of it all fell off my shoulders.

End.

(January 4, 2021)

Thanks for giving that a read! The best way to support my work (for now) is comment below, check out a pledge, and share my work however you like.

Love ya!

Max