(OR: LOVE IN THE AGE OF RADIATION POISONING)
The day they met, she already knew she was going to die.
Through the reinforced lens of his radiation suit’s visor, he saw her walk past his mother’s scrap metal shed. She was beautiful in a fragile sort of way—an ash-covered rose blooming wild in the ruins of a world still caught in the throes of a nuclear winter. She was barefoot. Pale but beautiful in spite of the red blotches, vitrescent pustules, and slowly scabbing sores. His own skin had hardly been touched by any kind of radiation, not even the natural light of the scorned sun. His parents were one of the few that could manage to afford radiation suits. But only just.
“Hey,” he called out to her. His voice forced its way through the high-efficiency particulate filters in his mask, escaping in a sort of raspy creak. “Are you looking for something?”
She turned around, apparently surprised and mildly amused.
“No. Not really. Just walking. Nothing to do. Nowhere to go.”
She spoke in measured, efficient bursts, like machine gun fire.
“Oh cool.” Compelled by some sensation of pure need, a pure childish desire to connect with another person in the simplest of ways, he added, “So, do you want to play with me?”
She shifted her feet. Her dirty blond hair was roughly cropped close to her head and a plastic crucifix hung limply around her neck, the custodian of her unanswered prayers. Her old frock was dirty just like her skin, covered in the same ash-mud that lay all around them mixed with fallen leaves. The same mud that now coated most of the world in a gray.
“Sure,” she said. “What do you want to play?”
He smiled and silently thanked Allah. There were hardly any children in his sector of the camps, and the others like her—without suits—never responded to his attempted conversations.
“There is a place just outside the village. Perfect for hide and seek.” He smiled wider, even though he knew she could not see it. “You know how to play?”
“Sure. I do. Sounds like fun.”
“It is,” he chimed, extending his hand to her. She took it.
They skipped off into the dusty horizon where the remains of an old military complex stood like a wounded veteran—broken but uncompromising.
They played together every day after that, in old nuclear missile silos and abandoned military staging grounds and even, once, in a fallout bunker full of desiccated, petrified corpses, on a day he’d managed to turn off the tracker in his radiation suit. He’d been scolded harshly when he returned home but he didn’t care. They’d had so much fun in what was left of the world.
Some days, when she could manage it, they danced a ridiculous, corybantic dance to the music of the ruins—the crumbling and echoes and scurrying of things. She got weaker every day. More and more falling leaves flew by.
And then one day, while they sat silent on the turret hatch of a dilapidated tank, she said suddenly, “I think I’ll die soon.”
He felt a sadness his twelve year old heart could not fully articulate.
“Has summer been fun for you?” she asked him with a smile.
“Please don’t die,” he replied tearfully. “You can have my radiation suit.”
She placed her hands in his, on the padded polymer gloves of his radiation suit, and looked into his eyes through the clear visor. She shook her head. His tears fell freely like raindrops. Her eyes stayed dry. He looked her over, took her in, not as a playmate but as a dying friend. The pustules on her skin were slowly leaking. She was rail-thin. Almost cadaverous. She reminded him of his grandmother just before she had died. He cried some more.
She tilted her head and said, “Come on. Let’s get married. It’s what people in love do.”
He jerked up, surprised. “You love me?”
“Yes, I do.”
He stopped crying at that, raising his head to look into her eyes. The glistening hazel orbs set into jaundiced yellow pools held a look of happiness that defied her suffering to extinguish it.
In the haze of strange emotions a memory came to him, the sort of memory that comes unbidden in strange moments and is steeped in intense feeling. It was a memory of something his grandmother had said once which he’d only vaguely understood but which had stayed with him, idealized and polished with sentimentality. It was something about love and sin. Love was like sin, she’d said. It did not matter how big or small it was or how it had come about or where or why. In the eyes of God, sin was sin just as love was love. And all sins are equal in the same manner that all loves are equal. It was something like that. He was sure it was something like that. And so, buoyed by the warmth in his chest, the swirling in his head, and the piercing look in her eyes, he said, “I love you too.” And it felt right.
She gripped his gloved hand tight, and they both stood up, smiling first and then laughing as they clambered down the broken tank. Leafless trees poorly silhouetted by an almost blotted sun stood behind them as they walked hand in hand into the remnants of the military facility, searching the ruins for any two things they could use as wedding rings.