The Poppy Fields

by Nikki Erlick

She simply took up too much space to accommodate anyone else, and she declined to pursue the possibility that there could be someone out there for whom she might not mind moving over.

He’d started seeing reminders of Johnny again. Not on the surface, and not in any significant sense, but in the way that we often see impressions of the people we’ve lost in even the smallest and strangest of details in others.

Ava knew that people would always form their opinions of small towns, especially in her part of the country, but she took pride in the fact that even the tiniest of towns around where she grew up—compact communities with little more than a grocery, a gas station, and a church—often had a public library, too. It was one of the essentials, like food and fuel, the nourishment of body and mind and soul.

“My friends asked me how I could possibly let myself sleep for such a long time—could I really allow the world to just move on without me? They had no idea that the world was already moving on without me. And that’s precisely why I wanted to sleep.”

To them, the Poppy Fields was an attempt to sanitize the most brutal, and yet most essential, elements of life. But was that really what Sasha was doing now, she wondered, running away from her hardships, her duty to labor beneath the pain? Was there not a way to honor the past that didn’t press so heavily upon the future?

It was a prolonged act of losing him, of coming to accept it as immutable truth.

But Sasha couldn’t have known that crying, giving in to his emotions that way, just didn’t feel productive to Ray. Tears wouldn’t change a damn thing.

This treatment forces you to abandon your spouses, your children, and your jobs,” said one of the group’s founding members, “and then traps you in a sleep that you can’t wake up from!”

Other peoples expectations can be selfish

Or you get drunk every night, or addicted to Ambien and empty sex. Or maybe you just suffer silently for months, even years, because you feel like everyone’s judging you and no one understands. And looking at all these comments, you’d probably be right.

She never craved compliments, and flattery made her squirm. Either she doubted the sincerity of the comments or she just chafed under the attention.

I would hold his hand, the same way that I held this little boy’s hand . . . because I was the one who rode in back with him, listening to his mother scream the whole way. Only it wasn’t even a scream. It was a . . . a howl. Feral and guttural and grating, like it came from a place deep down that most of us never see in ourselves. Because most of us haven’t had our lives shredded apart in an instant. And the other medic and I just looked at each other, knowing that we’d hear echoes of that scream for the rest of our lives.

“I can still feel grateful that she lived and feel torn up that he died.”

But Ray’s father believed that if you truly cared for someone, then you owed them total honesty, even in its harshest forms. That love meant seeing the potential in someone, holding them to the highest of standards. And was that so wrong?

“It’s not normal to watch children die, but we do it, because somebody has to!” He

“I remember my mother saying once that death anoints all sinners as saints. You read any eulogy or obituary, and you’d think that anyone who ever died was perfect. When someone’s gone, it’s easy to forget all the flaws, all the fights. But . . . that flattens them. It makes them boring.

she hadn’t really learned how to do the ordinary, messy, tiring work of truly loving people.