West to the End of the World

Meant to Suffer

Present time...

    It's just another day, Dunbar thought as his feet pounded the sidewalk of Main Street. His side had gradually recovered over the last few days; he supposed his previous discomfort had been the persistent result of his flight's turbulence. He had not yet begun to feel wholly as if he was back to his usual self — like the Mack truck his mother built him to be — but he was getting there, and that counted for something.

    As Dunbar licked his own wounds, he had also spent the majority of the previous three days at the assistance of Cosima's recovery.

    The day of the robbery, the siblings sacrificed nearly four hours of their lives at the police station for questioning. For being severely traumatized by the ordeal, Cosima's memory was as fine-tuned as ever. She described the culprits as two men. The first was white, mid-thirties, six-feet, two-hundred pounds, and dark hair; the other Hispanic, late-twenties, maybe five-foot-ten, around one-seventy, and also dark hair.

    Afterwards, Cosima was sent to the hospital. Much like the airport had been on Dunbar's arrival, the hospital was inordinately congested. Many of them suffered from the sickness, with the occasional broken bone or domiciliary accident. The siblings sat in the waiting room with their shirt collars pulled over their faces; the air was thick with the bacteria, mucus and puss that awaiting patients practically oozed from their orifices. Dunbar was sure that the man beside him would actually cough up a lung. An old woman had even died in the waiting room, a few rows away from Dunbar and Cosima. That was their cue to leave.

    Dunbar and Cosima had been allowed to return to their mother's house that night, though, not without a police escort. A cruiser parked in front of the house until the following morning, so as to dissuade the culprits from returning for more of their mother's possessions.

    Despite the cruiser, Cosima refused to sleep. Instead, she sat on the couch with a switchblade in her breast pocket. Dunbar had tried to assure her that she would not need it. After awhile of wasting his energy on deaf ears, he decided he would do something productive. Until the morning sun began to peak over the horizon, Dunbar dedicated himself to dressing Cosima's wounds. After the swelling reduced, none of them had been particularly bad; at least, not enough for stitches to be deemed a necessity.

    The next morning was spent assessing the damage. The missing items and the broken window of the front door provided the most immediate headaches. Then there was also the fact that the thieves — who had not yet been identified by the police, even with Cosima's spot-on descriptions — spared nothing in their rampage through the house. The family photos that once lined the walls of the main hallway had been ripped from their hooks, leaving fragments of shattered glass lodged in the crevices of the hardwood floor. In the living room, there was a fist-sized hole deep enough to expose the beams inside the wall. Many of the porcelain accoutrements of the bathrooms had been cracked or otherwise destroyed. The thieves had taken Tracey's collection of fine china as well; the rest of the dishes they shattered across the kitchen's linoleum tiles.

    Tracey's funeral was the afternoon following the assessment. Everything continued as planned, except for a few small details, such as the fact that the company Cosima contracted to provide the floral arrangments refused their services due too not receiving a payment in advance. Thankfully, a friend of Tracey's, who had cultivated an expansive garden in his backyard over the years, allowed Dunbar to take a few dozen lillies for Tracey's funeral. Dunbar promised to repay him for the favor. The list of compensations only grew as Dunbar was notified by the funeral home that the organist had not received payment, and neither had the collectors of two other service fees. The providers of these services, however, had been more sympathetic toward Dunbar and Cosima's situation. They requested half of the payment on the day of the funeral, and the other half within the following week. Dunbar, who was already strapped for cash, managed to provide a little more than half of the payments on the day of the funeral in hopes of proving that he was good for it. The providers did not seem to mind.