Hopeless Romance

Chapter Three

I understood a lot about how we lost the war.  We couldn’t make anything for war.  Our companies were in Rache.  We owed Rache billions.  The Alumen army couldn’t recruit, compete.  Alumens wanted money, success.  Patriotism didn’t pay. Alumen children were medicated for being too energetic; there wasn’t time for recess and exercise as we tried to match the academic test scores of Rache.  Many were fat, unhealthy.  Even those few who wanted to join the army often couldn’t for medical reasons. Our army shrank. 

But, we had nuclear bombs.  I wondered about that a lot.  Before we gave up, did we think about the unthinkable?  I know nuking Rache would have resulted in them nuking us.  I know it would have been suicide.  It would have destroyed the Earth.  Sometimes I wish we had died in in a fast fiery flame.

We still had our lives. It didn’t feel like living.  Alume, and its citizens, were a coma patient whose body no longer can function, kept alive artificially.  Is this what we chose? 

I remembered my Grandmother’s life being extended with drugs and surgeries.  Her days consisted of the sound of machines, a tiny cold room, and lying tethered and trapped in a narrow hospital bed.  When her eyes were open she would stare out the window to a bigger, brighter world.  When her eyes closed I liked to think she was back in time, happy, free, feeling the love of friends and family.  When she woke, she didn’t know who anyone was and I thought how lonely that would be.  She couldn’t talk, eat, drink or go to the bathroom on her own.  Still my parents chose to keep her alive. 

“I’m sorry Grandma” I whispered into the night.

Like Grandmother I had been confined and claustrophobic.  I had been a zombie, the living dead walking and talking.  The hope of seeing the delivery woman again made me feel human, alive, again. A coma patient tentatively blinking, I was starting to wake.