(1) Symptom of the Natural, or Tectonic War. Contagious in speech and inscription, it is prevalent among the peasant militia. Those standing within the disease are rendered directionless and deaf handed. Suggested treatments include undressing the addicted, charring the flags and fabric, turning the tourniquet until their eyes are uncircled and quiet.
2) Reports of Victory Disease have been recovered from every known continent, including those the War has cornered underground.
Jillison spent the last day breaking her hand to make it clear to me. That was her open warning, her work around way of saying there wasn't anything "natural" about it.
I had reasons to leave. I'd never been great at eye contact. I had a body stocked up in botched postures, there was a shredded screen door where my skin should have been. I never practiced the citizen's walk the way the rest of them did.
So there was all that too.
---
I moved back when it was done, and I was that young again. I don't know how, it was another trauma without a cause. Maybe it was more shrapnel I'd inherited from Jillison's side of the war, maybe it was another accident no one wanted to explain to me. That first week though, I didn't leave my room, I stayed in bed, I slept and slept to try and get the years back into me.
When I was awake, I tried to tell everyone I was past this continent and past the one before it too, I tried to tell them I was older than I looked. I said I had a list of preconditions and post-war symptoms.
If they didn't believe me I showed them pictures where my legs were long and sharp, where I was holding a rifle and covered in a curtain of camouflage. I told them to ignore the rest of it and to look at my legs, I asked them how much weight they looked like they'd lost. They would glance at the pictures and say, "why didn't you just say so?"
If we had lost the war, things would've been different. If they had never started calling it "the Natural War", things would've been different.
---
I stayed in bed because I couldn't walk anymore. I should've said that before.
It didn't matter. I guess when I say everyone was broken, I don't mean much. There weren't a lot of other choices to make, you were either in pieces or you weren't there at all.
---
The war abridged: the months were wet as sweaty mammals, we talked a lot about the fog, and whether they would be able to find us. We fought them with mirrors, lenses, leftover radiation equipment.
It was real, we were all there, doing our best to enter the Hereafter alive. We all left with our diseases instead.
---
Jillison brought me books to read. The one I remember most was called "The Father of the Tectonic Cavalry." It was about a father who kept his children organized by war status and various levels of decay. He had rooms for each outbreak, the room of the Common War, the room of the Only War, the room of the Natural War. He kept his children there until they started new diseases from scratch.
It wasn't a good story, what I remember most of it was that it took place back when fathers were everywhere, when almost anyone could've been "The Father of the Tectonic Cavalry", that's how common fathers were. I guess it was interesting for that alone.
---
I had my chores there too. They rolled my bed into the kitchen and had me wash the silverware and put it away. They told me to keep myself useful. I didn't complain. The shadows were growing mold in my room, everywhere else was an improvement. Even the kitchen.
For the most part, I left the appliances and outcomes alone. I don't know how much it bothered them. Sometimes they threw out parts of me and sometimes made a list of the things I needed from the store.
I was kept on a good and canceled diet. Sometimes I looked through the kitchen windows to see a few kids setting trash cans on fire and roasting over them.
I still a face like theirs, but it didn’t speak for me anymore.
---
The weeks wore into the wallpaper and Jillison kept hanging plants over what was left. Wild four o'clock, heartleaf four o'clock, heartleaf umbrella wort. It was all different names for the same plant.
She was still reacting with her scream on the side. If she ever had a parachute it got scared through long ago. I noticed her in my fingernails, nowhere else.
There were talks of a water rescue, the kind that would get me walking again. The pressure would unplug the muscles and make them work like they used to. It wasn't likely, it was a last chance, a clampdown to keep the disease from doing the rest.
Jillison believed in it. She signed the papers and pulled my bed down the stairs.
The water was warm enough to wrinkle me. Jillison held my hand as I laid there, legs spread and tied apart. I tried to stretch, but everything below my waist stayed vacant, accidental, empty. A nowhere half to my anatomy.
They tried to startle me into a stand. They shouted and shoved waves at me. I slapped at the ripples to keep from sinking. I felt the water wreck up against my hips, but that was it. Whatever was supposed to wake in me was wiped out, whitewashed away. The water therapy was another test where all the answers were not now and never again.
I came back every week but it was always the same. The disease was splitting a disappearance into me.
---
Before she made a dead line out of me, I watched Jillison getting ready for years.
The one before her had been a leeway man, the kind that went from factory to factory until they found him out. He had an expired license as long as I knew him. His arms were brown around the elbows, his hands were about the size of mine.
At work, he crawled through ceiling corridors for hours, a flashlight in one hand and a toolbox dragged next to him. As far as I know he just sat up there for hours, until his uniform was grimy from the gray air they kept up there. Then he would come to our house until we opened the windows and let his weather in.
The only thing he ever fixed was an escape.
The one before that took Jillison to the seaport for a few days. It felt like a longer wait, a layaway mat left for me. When they came back Jillison's cheeks were cut up red, it was easy to see the blood under her skin, dead as dry ink inside of her. His mouth was filled with fish bones, his eyes were blanker than basement walls.
We talked about it one more time again and then we never did.
---
They brought my grandmother to see me once. She slowed into my room behind a silver walker. She wore small stones in her shoes to keep herself steady. I could hear them shuffling with every step. She was decades away from herself and about to take it out on both of us.
She looked at me in the bed, paused and put her hands to her lips, then she looked at Jillison. She didn't blink.
Jillison stared straight back at her. Her eyes told two sides to the same story. She gave her both options:
1. "even though sometimes..."
2. "malaise/fainting/underdevelopment/other..."
---
I warned them weaknesses aren't always what they seem. It was another failed attempt, more phrases past fatigue. I didn't want to keep playing trick or treat. If they wanted to try and tell me the beginning and end of it again, that was their problem.
No one asked me but I would've told them: Most people grow up in panes of glass. It gets harder and harder to tell who's playing at human for a day and who was actually stuck that way.
---
I called it the rehearsal, and Jillison called it the rehearsal, but it made more sense to call it the day the red blood cells run out. I don't know when we began calling it the rehearsal. I think Jillison started it, sometime after the water treatment, after she realized what we were coming to.
I wanted to argue but it never made it to my mouth. If there was a way off the continents I didn't want to audition for it. I didn't want a theater stage or a talent show. I wanted to stagger through the standstills and then sit through it all.
---
Jillison told me once there were nerves inside me that never ended. She told me they went past my body, past the ground, past this continent, past the war. I think she was trying to cheer me up. I was a hundred weight and hungry none of the time.
We started staying up past the small talk. Jillison let me be the asker.
Over and over, she answered close. and then she said she had one for me, just one.
I told her it felt like a baby bee sting. I told her every day it felt like less and less and less. I told her sometimes I woke up and I was back in the war, on my hands and knees and it never happened. I told her I didn't miss it.
---
A quarter of the continent passed and my legs were still crooked as children's cursive, close to crippled but not completely. The wind was heavy and illegible inside my room, I ate off white plates lying on my back, on the floor sometimes. When I wanted to keep my body blindfolded to the bed, I did. When I wanted to walk through the door, I waited.
There was more disease in me than they let on. My body was becoming a display case for it, but they acted like I couldn't tell.
They kept a tarp over my legs at night. It was black, made of plastic. It should've been uncomfortable, I didn’t feel it at all.
It was Jillison who opened the door when the cold came through. She handed me a list of misconceptions and told me to add myself to the end of it.
Drowning is often thought to be a violent struggle, where the victim waves and calls for help. In truth, drowning is often inconspicuous to onlookers. Raising the arms and vocalizing are even usually impossible due to the instinctive drowning response. Waving and yelling (known as "aquatic distress") is a sign of trouble, but not a dependable one: most victims demonstrating the instinctive drowning response do not show prior evidence of distress.
---
It got close, and then the rehearsal came. The winter was up past my hip, I was wide awake and waiting in bed. The disease had left everything lighter than lukewarm. It was my last season, war less. The sun outside was short and hollow, a hole in a worn away wall. Soon there wouldn't be anything left to see, which meant there wouldn't be anywhere left to go. My feet had frozen into full stops, the fatigue was a feedback loop.
In my sleep, I watered my skeleton until it straightened and settled inside me. My legs were wet, unweakened or worn away from the war. The front door was an afterthought I'd already forgotten again, I fell through whatever forfeit it had for me.
---
For those who asked, I wasn't unimportant there. I was the one who put the silverware back in the drawer. I was the one who narrowed away the water's edge, alone in a white walled room. I was the one who took them at their word and waited for the Natural War to end.
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