I never wanted to be a mother.
Truthfully, I never wanted any of this. None of us did. This is just the ugly reality we’ve been saddled with.
I never wanted to be a mother, but I have acquired three children. Four, if you count Elowyn. But I wouldn’t tell her that; she’s two years younger than me, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t just a little bit scared of her.
“Juuuuuuuude,” comes the imploring voice of Delia from the makeshift nursery. At least the kids don’t call me mum. I stop midway through the mind-dulling task of scrubbing their clothes in our basin and follow the sound of her calls.
The nursery, of sorts, is a small room with two shabby, wooden frames leaning haphazardly against each other. They’re the best bed frames Killion could craft and are piled high with any spare pillows and comforters we could scout from the old bedrooms. There aren’t many of us now, so bedding is a lot easier to come across. The dirty walls are disguised by Delia’s shakily drawn pictures depicting us all in a happier life. Aled’s chaotic blobs accompany them, images that only his four-year-old mind can translate.
Delia perches on the corner of her bed, staring up at me with doe eyes.
“You’re supposed to be in bed,” I half-scold her, knowing the twinkle in my eyes would give me away.
“Aled can’t sleep,” she announces, huffing in her brother’s direction.
The little guy has burrowed deep under blankets, his eyes barely open as he flits between his dream and the room. “And what does Aled want me to do to help him sleep?”
Before he can even attempt to answer me, Delia swoops in. “He wants a story! He told me.”
“Oh, yeah?” I sit on the bed next to her.
“Yeah, about the Time Before!” She gives me her best please humour me because I’m tragic and adorable face and before I know it, we’re tucked up in bed with tales of schools and parks and circuses. These memories haunt me in a way they never would Delia.
“And the Cure!” Delia demands. “Please?”
I grimace. “I don’t think that’s quite a bedtime story, sweet. I’ll teach you about it tomorrow, how about that?”
She grumbles but snuggles further into my arms in acceptance. “Were the elly-pants bigger than… Killion?”
Short attention spans are a blessing. I grin. “Oh yeah, bigger than Killion with you on his shoulders.”
She giggles and proceeds to quiz me about the scale of elephants to, well, anything she can think of. I humour her until I hear tiny snores either side of me, then gently extract myself and leave the nursery.
***
“Do elephants still exist?” I ask as I walk into our communal room.
Another grotty room with a sofa spilling springs and foam and a few rotten chairs placed in an uneven circle. There’s a coffee table with countless rings of previous chipped mugs, telling of a time where coffee was readily available. The table mocks me.
Next to the social circle is a scratched dining table standing alone but for one chair occupied by Killion. He looks up from the knife he’s sharpening and snorts. “Probably, I don’t think they quite match Super’s dietary needs.”
Elowyn chuckles quietly from her seat in the corner, being careful not to wake the sleeping baby she’s rocking. “I never saw one, not once. Not in this lifetime.” She scowls.
“Nothing special,” Killion tells her over his shoulder. “This life is way more exciting.”
She pulls a face at the back of his head and shares a smirk with me. Elowyn idolises Killion but even she knows when he’s being a dick. “How are the terrors?” she asks, referring to her niece and nephew.
“Dead asleep, snoring away. Delia asked me about old times, but I didn’t think it was quite bedtime material.”
“Well decided,” she nods.
“When she inevitably asks me again tomorrow, how am I wording this to make the story more child-friendly?”
Killion straightens up and turns around. “Simple. Tell her there are evil people in this world who have made their lives better by eating us paupers.”
“And somehow, you’ve been elected father-figure to these kids.” Elowyn rolls her eyes.
“If you want to take over, be my guest.”
“Not a chance.”
“They’re your bloody family,” Killion shoots back.
“Right. That’s enough of that,” I announce before things get ugly. “There’s a whopping six of us left here, maybe we try to keep it that way. Let’s face it,” I shoot them both pointed looks, “we’re the only family we have left.”
***
With the two little ones in bed, I help Elowyn put Jack down for the night. She’s only seventeen, almost eighteen, and has not one maternal bone in her body. She is trying though and has graduated from squirming around Jack to voluntarily bouncing and rocking him of an evening.
It was inevitable, Jack is far too peaceful a baby to be any trouble to Elowyn. He’s a good baby to practice motherhood on, though now, motherhood seems like a world we aren’t a part of anymore. So, for now, Elowyn gains her experience with little orphan Jack.
He was born just over a year ago to our family. His parents, Leah and Michael, were twenty, like me. Our numbers were dwindling, and they took the leap to try and save our clan. But we weren’t trained in medicine, let alone equipped to assist in childbirth, and Leah unfortunately didn’t make it.
Michael was heartbroken. For two weeks, he tried to be the father Jack needed but his grief was too strong. I found him hanging from one of the fir trees lining the perimeter.
Michael became nothing more than another gravestone added to our cemetery, once a garden now merely a haunting site. Sitting right in the centre of the Haven, the garden is the only place we can see the sun without threat of Supers hovering nearby. But that doesn’t make it a welcoming place; rows of jagged stoned mark each of our friends’ resting place, each life succumbed to starvation, battle wounds, and my inability to lead like my parents. Of course, there were more bodies we couldn’t memorialise – the friends we lose to Supers never have a corpse left to bury.
“Thanks for that,” Elowyn says as we leave the nursery. “I struggle getting him down on my own. Don’t think he likes me much.”
“He does,” I chide her. “You’re seventeen, you don’t need to do everything right first time.”
“Eighteen,” she corrects me.
“Not quite yet.”
“Anyway,” she sighs. “I guess you’re right. I don’t know… I just wish I was a bit more… I wish I was better with kids.”
“You don’t have to be, you’re good at hunting.”
“But I want my own someday.”
I let that statement fade into the space between us until it’s nothing but the whisper of a dream. A dream she has no business chasing. I refuse to crush these storybook endings, but we’re all orphans here. She knows how the game plays out. We are the end of our line.
“Delia’s besotted with you; you know?” I offer.
She shrugs. “Maybe. She’s getting curious about the world. She’s learning more each day. I just hope she can have a childhood.”
Elowyn dreams for a life we will never have, but I can’t bring myself to burst that rosy cloud clogging her vision. To live a romanticised life in an apocalypse is a beautiful thing, and as twisted as it is to let her live a fantasy, I can’t dunk her head underwater when she’s already drowning.
“Aled still has a few years left of blissful ignorance, though. At least we have that,” I say evenly, dancing around what I want to say. It hangs in the air, but I can’t tell if she feels its weight as I do. Thankfully, we’ve hit the crossroads in the corridor, and it’s time to depart.
“Straight to bed, I think. I’ll be out early in the morning in the perimeter, but I shouldn’t be too long.”
“Sleep well, let me know if you need anything.”
She flushes red and drops my gaze. Elowyn would never admit to needing a parent, not anymore. Anger still radiates out of her core, a fire that has burned for a decade. I understand it though – our parents had sacrificed themselves for our futures, but there isn’t a future without them. Not one we can fashion out of the bare bones of the Haven we’ve been left with.
She waves her hand in goodbye and ventures up the hall. She sleeps in some attic room that our parents had fashioned so many years ago. It’s her private loft. We rarely visit.
I turn down the opposite way, towards Killion.
He’s still in the kitchen, digging grooves into the dining table with his newly sharpened knife.
“She gone to bed?”
“Aye.” I sit down opposite him. “She was talking about children.”
“The kids?” His knife slips slightly, jerking his arm towards the table.
“No, having them. I didn’t know what to say.”
“We have to tell them, Jude.” He looks up from the pattern he’s etching. It’s a jagged spiral, drawn with harsh and twisted lines that hurt my eyes. “Or at least Elowyn. She has to know eventually.”
“I don’t know how to break it to any of them. Nobody told them about the Treaty, they haven’t been preparing for this for the past decade. It’s too cruel.”
He shakes his head. “Our parents didn’t prepare us when they made their decision. We can’t just leave them the same. Worse, even.”
“We might not die,” I reason.
“The Supers are stalking us. Elowyn’s noticed them. They’re taunting us. They’ve been waiting ten years to kill us. The minute this is over, they’ll be on us like sharks to blood.”
Of course they will. Practically speaking, we are of no use to the Supers. They’re the elites of our old world, genetically modified to be Superhuman. What use are six kids to them? Nothing. It’s the hunt, the satisfaction that comes with eating the children of the rebels.
“When did it all get so messed up?”
He laughs bitterly. “I don’t think I even know what messed up is anymore. It’s been so long that life has started to make sense. The past ten years have just been ‘okay, our parents sacrificed themselves and we have ten years. That’s all’. You know?”
I nod. “Completely.” I try to rub the tiredness from my eyes. It doesn’t work.
Killion stifles a yawn. I catch his eye, and we both grin.
“Bed?” we ask collectively. Music to my ears.
***
We share a bed, another frame Killion had fashioned out of broken pieces of wood. Time has not aged the Haven well. A lot of the original furniture has been broken through usage and fighting, both internal and external battles. We’re starting to run out of clean bedding; I have no way of washing the used ones, so ten years of sleeping and grime has built up on the sheets. I try to rinse them, though, with any spare water I encounter.
Still, we have enough bedding for the two of us, and the small frame means we share each other’s warmth. Our arrangement isn’t the worst thing in the world, and if I wasn’t plagued with the constant reminder of our fragile mortality, I would get a good night's sleep. Killion stays up most of the night too. We don’t talk though, just silently keep each other company. We can’t fear our own thoughts if we’re not alone facing them.
Tonight is no different. I bathe in our combined glow and listen to our steady breathing, a harmony of stillness and rest. Our legs twist together naturally, like our limbs were designed to slot around each other so tightly. It feels like they were. For a moment, the atmosphere around us doesn’t exist, and the quiet duet of our breath and the pressing warmth on my skin are the only two things I know.
Desperately needing to accept death has allowed me the ability to detach myself sometimes. I can turn off the knowledge of my very being, and float away from feeling, from emotions, and from consequence. If we die, we die. It doesn’t matter because we don’t exist to begin with. What is pain, other than a sensation we have assigned negativity to?
These thoughts whirl through my mind at night. They’re enough to drive anyone insane, but like Killion stated, messed up just isn’t messed up anymore. Nothing is enough to be a shock. Merely a dull ache, ever present, but a pain we are already half numb to.
