Chapter One

A deserted room feels a lot like a snowglobe. The dust motes swirl through the air like tiny bits of sluggish snow, and the tragic bed scene in the center is perfectly frozen. The covers remain rumpled, a startlingly shallow divot marks where a dying resident spent a final week. The pillow looks like a tombstone, and on top of it an epitaph rests in the form of a worn note folded over twice, the back heavy with indents from excuses deemed not good enough and crossed off.

This is a perfectly preserved death scene, in which the gristly bits have been removed. The death has occurred far away in an attempted act of preservation in which to spare a loved one the ugliness. It is a failed attempt, but of course the deceased is not yet aware of this fact.

Evander Ives walks in on the scene unprepared. He has a tray of breakfast decorated with a thin vase holding two daisies. It is part of his morning routine--wake up in an empty bed, creep to the kitchen, make a small breakfast for Lins and himself, and bring it to her. If she were sleeping, he would often stand in the doorway and watch the shallow rise and fall of her chest with love diluted by a sense of impending doom.

Discovering an empty bed is a decided interruption in the aforementioned routine. Evander abandons the breakfast tray on the foot of the bed. There, it will sit and the thin porridge that is all that his wife Linsey had been able to eat for the past months, will harden into cement. He picks up the note and smoothes it out with hands possessed by earthquakes while time moves in slow motion, twines itself around his ankles like a cat and does its best to trip him. There had been a full-bodied letter in the beginning, but all of the explanations have been crossed out over and over until they are unintelligible. All that is left are two lines.

It’s for the best.

Love always, Lins.

Typical Lins, he thinks numbly. She would not have found words and excuses to be enough. She would not have wanted him to find her body in this room, stiff and cold and staring at the ceiling with filmed-over eyes. And so she had left, and all that she left him with was a letter with the flowered edges cut out, revealing undecorated bones with sharpened ends. Except that in her mind, this was a gentle let-down, a mercy killing free of fluff.

He does not want these bones. The second he reads the words, they leap down his throat and catch just beneath his sternum. The ends poke into his heart and lungs threateningly. If he breathes too deeply or lets out the ugly things rattling around against his ribcage that dangerously resemble sobs with their bat wings and watering eyes, the sharp bits will puncture him.

He inhales as deeply as he can, and the sobs come rattling out of their cage of bones, cawing exuberantly at freedom. His face ends up buried in the sheets, inhaling a faint trace of Linsey’s blood orange perfume curdled by the stench of the sickness. It has a powdery edge mixed with something a few days past its expiration date, and he hates it for taking even this little bit of Linsey from him and polluting it.

Evander remains there and he cries. Really cries, cries all the tears that he had packed so carefully down the back of his throat. Each one rises, has their shining moment on his cheeks. His face is bright red as his hands search empty covers for a body that is gone.

Finally his feet find him and pull him from the bed, demanding other forms of mourning. Linsey is outside somewhere. Perhaps still alive. If he can find her in time, he can save her. In fact, there is no perhaps. She is alive and well. He would know if she was dead, and his chest is screaming that she is not.

He stumbles out of their small house with three buttons of his shirt out of place, hair sticking out in each direction like a weathervane, and Linsey’s note clenched in one fist. He is running on sheer denial and a raw sorrow.

In the end, finding her is not a struggle. Linsey had wanted to see something beautiful as she died, and her favorite place was a wide field of grass garnished in wildflowers. Most of them were turning brown and stiffening in the autumn season as they withered, but she had found a scattered spray of wild daisies to lay next to.

A flower crown made of long grasses and dead flower heads is clumsily slumping off her head. For a moment, she is sleeping. Her eyelids twitch as she dreams and Evander has never known relief before now.

Then a fly alights on the tip of her nose and crawls towards an ajar mouth, forelegs flicking out to clean its wings and face greedily. The illusion shatters. He sees her pallid skin and the black laces that tie her together in place of veins. Her head is lolled at an unnatural angle a living human would not rest in. Her expression is not peaceful—the lip is curled up in a pained grimace and her eyes are slitted open and filming over. The sickness overpowers the wildflowers and rises to his nose, a stronger reminder of what poisoned her sheets.

Indelicate and unlovely things have stained the place that Linsey loved so.

He remembers their last trip to the field. It was a good day for Linsey, though her cheer vastly outpowered her physical health.

“I have to see our field.” She told him from where the pillows propped her up. “Today. We’re going.”

He eyed her half-finished toast and the familiar twist of anxiety wrung out his gut.

“You should rest today. Tomorrow.”

“Rest isn’t going to fix me, Vander. That isn’t how this works. I want to go today.”

He wasn’t sure where her energy came from, only that it grated on the sinking sense in his chest. He was more tired than the girl with death in her veins, and the irony was not lost on him. He was just too exhausted to care. Sleeping had been dancing out of his reach more and more. He would get up and wander to Linsey’s room and watch her own fitful sleep. Sometimes he crawled into bed and held her, paying close attention to the rise and fall of her chest. The little signs of life were comforting. If he were there to observe them, he was not wasting a single precious second of them.

It was at her insistence that she take up the second bedroom, and it had caused a thunderstorm of a fight.

“I want a separate room.” She’d told him. The clouds were forming then, threatening from a distance.

He’d laughed. “But this works fine. You don’t need a separate room.” Linsey was avoiding his eyes as she toyed with the edge of the comforter. She was almost always bedbound at that point. Before then she had borne the pain, but now more often than not, it bore her.

“I think I do. All my medicines take up space, and you don’t like the incense—I know you don’t.” Thunder was crackling in the background, threatening.

“I don’t care about the incense.” It was too cloying and occasionally it worked up through his nose and hijacked his head with a dull pounding pain, but it was a livable sacrifice.

“I want the guest room.” Linsey had insisted. It hit Evander that there was an elephant crouched on the back of her tongue.

“Why?” He demanded, anger furling around the words like smoke around embers.

“I told you—“

“Why?” He insisted. Her gaze collided with his and she looked down again, lips smashed tightly together. Lightning flashed above in the clouds, threatening to strike.

“I don’t want you waking up with me dead next to you.” It hit, and it felt as though half a forest had just started on fire.

Evander fought her until her eyes died and the energy trickled out of the cracks in her body, and then he conceded. Life granted only so many wishes, and the dying often found their achievable ones falling into their laps.

Much like Linsey’s request to visit the field. Evander took her—strapped his easel and paints to his back and half-carried and then carried her on their treck through the woods.

How her face lit up. Linsey watched the birds and the leaves, who were beginning to grow orange around the temples, with the fascination of a small child. Looking down at her as she looked at everything around them, her thin arms draped around his neck, Evander felt the familiar bloom and drop in his chest as he fell a little farther in love with her. A little deeper into a bittersweet pit he knew he would never climb back out of.

He had settled Linsey in the flowers, and she had read a book while he painted her in the field. In the strokes of the brush she was glowing with health. The black stains of disease did not exist, and she had not ever informed him that she did not want to sleep in a bed with him because she was afraid he would wake up with her corpse.

Once he was done, he lay in the tall grasses and held her, skimming the pages of the book over her shoulder. On the fifth chapter she closed it and turned to him.

“I’ll love you forever, Evander Ives.” She informed him.

“I’ll love you back forever.” He kissed her as the wind pushed wildflowers over the scent of her sickness, and for a moment she was the healthy girl in his painting. They were young and held a love that would push them into years where they were old and wrinkled together, and everything was perfect.