The Writing on the Walls

Hen Havoc was dying.

After the million and a half medical discussions, years spent in and out of a hospital chem pod, and several difficult conversations with her young daughter, Esther, she had accepted that fact well enough. She didn't know the precise number of days she had known, but it couldn't have been important if there wasn't a way of marking them anymore.

"Is there anything else you need, Hen?" her husband, Andrew asked. He had been saying her name a lot more lately, almost like it would keep her from disappearing.

"No, I think I'm just going to finish my movie," she assured him. "Thank you for everything, sweetie. You should get some sleep." She was snuggled up on the couch with the e-board playing Trucks on Fire 18.

Andrew opened his mouth and closed it. Then he whispered, "No, it's fine. I'll stay up with you." He sat next to her and rested a hand on hers. She appreciated his warmth, so she snuggled up close.

He wouldn't leave her alone for very long anymore, which she understood. It would be any day now. He could "read the writing on the walls," as her grandmother used to say. The doctor had said it would be any day now.

She shifted her focus from the e-board to the crows in the tree outside the den's window. The mother was feeding bits of food to two black chicks, who had grown a lot fluffier in the last week. When Hen turned to Andrew to gush about how cute they were, she realized he had fallen asleep.

She sighed and let her mind wander back to her grandmother's phrase, even though her entire body was begging her to get some sleep. She seemed to be tired all the time now, thanks to the treatments. What she would give to turn back time.

Stop that, she thought. She had decided to stop obsessing over things she couldn't control. Even if they lived in a world where physical records were zapped away every moment. Even if it couldn't be too much to expect the same to be possible with tumors.

He could read the writing on the walls.

She didn't know if it was the sleep deprivation or the scrambled brains from the weakened immune system, but she wanted to know more. What did that phrase mean? Why had her grandma used it long after writing was no longer possible?

Not since time had been broken somehow.

Andrew didn't agree, but she knew it wasn't natural. What was left of the fractured government had to be doing something in order to make everything permanent—physical paper and pencil essays, paintings, documents—blink out of existence as soon as it was made. Even the Internet was long gone. How could that be natural if drawings and writings existed a hundred years ago? In fact, she only knew writing existed a hundred of years ago because of the e-board documentaries from the government, the ones she watched as a child. They said the nation's enemies had built some sort of machine that messed up the world's timeline.

Andrew would say you were being paranoid, Hen thought. And that you never cared much about this before the cancer. She looked at him, sitting there with his head tipped back and his mouth hanging open. He always fell asleep like that. She covered his arms with the blankets before realizing the two baby crows had grown into adults. Their mother was nowhere to be found.

It had probably died of old age. Another symptom of time being broken. Sometimes the dusty old buildings Andrew passed on the way to work became cleaner and newer overnight. They called it clocking, when a single object got caught in some sort of time bubble which either took its years away or gave it more. She had never seen it happen with living things until now.