the Society

August 13th

Note: this is a revised version as at 23-01-19.

I wrote before about mothers I saw crying over their babies born with legs that do not kick and protest as they should, with horrifically deformed spines, with bones missing in their mouths, making them drown on their mother's poisoned milk, born too small or with malformed limbs attached where a normal child would have no limbs at all. I have not seen Suzanna cry about Cadence before, but the girl was well over twenty when she came here, and would now be approaching thirty. Perhaps Suzanna cried thirty years ago, or twenty-five, when she realised that her child would never be normal. To her credit, Cadence – aside from her poorly distributed weight and eyes which seemed both too big and too far apart – looked quite like a 'normal' person, perhaps one who could be useful. The lack of food here had stripped her of some of her weight, as it had Suzanna, as it had all of us. Suzanna's body had held the softer shape of an older woman who had borne children, but her arms and gave away the need for further rations in our world. For Cadence, her weight seemed to sink into the chair – in which she spends most of her time – years ago, making her look bottom heavy. Again, the medical student in me can't help but pipe up to her professor about the atrophied skeletal muscles in her leg struggling to push blood back up to her heart. I suppose, as I have in the past, that this is the least of our worries here.

Years ago, after the initial carnage, the world was on fire, and it burned. The already-polluted air became thick and stale, and those susceptible to respiratory infections and asthma suffered immediately, and most died. This die-off – along with subsequent epidemics of curable infections like rabies, influenza, streptococcus – scraping away at the human population until the species dwindled into what we would have labelled "of concern" before the wars. In this way, I suppose humans began to relearn the concept of survival in a new kind of wild, and in that way, have become so much crueller.

When I first found the Society, I was thin, thinner than I had ever been in the 'old' world. With their help, I was allowed a secure meal each day, and a place among people. For someone who had spent most of medical school honing her bedside manner, life out there was quiet. Not quiet as one would used the word before the war, when the hum of street lights or the sound of a car rolling along the asphalt would always disturb the silence; in the forests, the birds and the insects created a cacophony sometimes louder than the city at the same time of night. Now, especially in the urban areas, the silence is deafening.

Here, years of work outside has deepened my skin in a way that makes my professionalism worry about melanoma, and my muscles now show, wrapping around my bones in a way that I think makes me look sharp, and lithe. Most people work outside, waterproofing the shacks and houses, tending to crops, and patrolling outside the fences. My work lies with the more needy of us: the children, the mothers who bore them, the elderly and the sick, although, everyone here has been in need at one time or another. Sometimes, I wish some of the senior members would see that.

There was a town over the mountain from where the Society resides now, which – despite the destruction – was raided often by people like us for medical supplies like syringes, vaccines, insulin and antibiotics. Now, it is probably all but stripped of those more important supplies, but this no longer affected most of the living population, because when the supplies ran out, those who needed them could no longer survive, thus eliminating the need for the supplies in the first place. The cruelly rational thought still makes me feel sick sometimes, but I know I can not help those who could not survive in this world.