One Yellow Eye

by Leigh Radford

Spread meant death.

She wondered what Tim would make of it all, him being bitten at the very end of the outbreak and her condemned to a life in therapy because of it. She wasn’t always sure whose fate was worse.

Talking was a pretense, an act of concealment, like gift wrapping a plastic turd. It was also the only thing they had.

Grief does that. It hacks great chunks out of you and what remains regenerates into a poor imitation of what existed before.

She had the indoor voice. And without him it was barely a whisper. What she wouldn’t give to be embarrassed by the sheer volume of him now.

One yellow eye watched her. It saw but didn’t see, and it never, ever blinked.

Men getting their legs blown off in a war zone was one thing, that was natural, but a woman weeping for her dead husband? Nightmare.

“So where have you been all my life?” he asked as Mark returned his camera. “Waiting,” she said.

“Murder, exactly, but it saves a lot of trouble in the end, doesn’t it.”

The lab and her home. Work and Tim. The light aboveground and the darkness beneath the surface, the two Kestas living in disharmony trying to make everything sing again.

Though death may be inevitable, to those trained in the art of deferring it indefinitely, to lose a patient is to lose the battle.

There’s money in information. Power too.

Love is a wound from which you can never heal. She knew that he’d be the death of her eventually, but that it would be a happy death just the same.

So much like it had always been, just the two of them in love, and yet so very far away from what they’d ever meant by until death.

It’s always biting, she thought. There’s something horribly intimate about that, the kiss of death even if the thing kissing you has six eyes and wings.

“I had no choice there, dear. It was keep busy or die. Cheers.”

“Important to find someone you can lean on,” said Cooke, “friendships, that sort of thing. You can’t do loneliness by yourself.”

Their laughter filled the room, filled them both, reminding them that while it may be darkest before the dawn, the black and the white, the darkness and the light, both exist side by side, neither one precedes the other. You feel them both at the same time, such is the nature of life.

I can never let you go. I don’t want to ever let you go. I can make a life for us out of this. This is enough for me. I can accept you like this, forever.

Magic and medicine are necessary bedfellows. Illusion makes the ominous appear benign.

Was this her husband holding her or was she in the arms of the virus?

She took it.

Could anything you did in the name of love ever be considered to be wrong? Love was hope and hope was love, wasn’t it?

Without her, Tim might die. With her, Tim might die.

The word remission means absolution.

“I just find it very, very difficult to—to talk, that’s all. I don’t like talking about it. I don’t want to talk about it. Because I live with it. All the time.”

We are expected to sanitize it, aren’t we, Dr. Walling? To make it less extreme for other people; to make them feel that the support they offer us is adequate when it isn’t.”

“She didn’t think that love would hurt her. She knew it would. True love is promises made in the dark, ones you cannot hope to keep but will die trying to, regardless. Without expectation. Without even stopping to think,”