Page 37 of Earthly Ties

Lucy’s eyes watered as she sat up, unable to stand the adoration and longing in Dream Esther’s gaze. “Okay, I’m drunker than I thought if this is what my brain is creating for me. I want you to say that in real life.”

“I want to. So badly,” Esther’s voice was soft behind her.

“How much longer can I go on like this? What am I even doing?” Lucy dug into her scalp, massaging her temples with her thumbs as her curls bounced between her fingers. “My dreams with you are the best part of my life. The only good part. What’s the point of going back through there?” She gestured to the wrought iron and stone gate that brought her to their dreamscape every night. Next to it, Esther’s bifold closet door was diminutive, haphazardly covered in dozens of glittery fairy stickers.

Esther sat up, her brow furrowed in concern. “Lucy, you are so wonderful-”

Lucy shook her head, barely managing a fond smile over her shoulder. “No, Esther, you’re so wonderful! Thank you for everything we’ve had here. Thank you for caring.” Lucy’s smile dimmed, and her visage grew just as wistful as Esther’s had been a moment ago. “I wish we could’ve had it in the waking world, too.”

“What do you mean? We can! Let’s do it!” Esther’s face clouded with worry. “You’re scaring me, Luce. This sounds like a goodbye.”

Once again, Lucy shook her head, her bitter determination strengthening. “I can’t go back there. Through that gate is my real life, and I hate my life. I want to go through that gate instead. I want to see what’s ahead of me.” She gestured across the meadow to the uncanny set of doors, mirrors of the ones that brought them here. The doors always felt wrong, like someone else’s shoes going on the opposite feet. That uncomfortable, ill-fitting feeling had emanated from the doors since the dreams first started.

But tonight? Lucy didn’t care. Everything felt wrong.

Maybe wrong was the answer.

Esther grabbed Lucy’s hand, clinging to her. “Lucy, please. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, I promise. I’ll talk to you in real life, and we can do this together! In real life!” She gripped Lucy’s hand tighter. “Please don’t go. Please don’t leave me! This is supposed to be a good dream.”

Lucy indulged her with a soft kiss and one last fond smile. “This isn’t real, Esther. I have literally nothing to go back for. I just want to see what’s next.” She tugged her hand free and stepped off the cloud. “It’s my birthday, after all! This is my present to myself!”

With that, Lucy turned and, inspired by a drunken surge of whimsy from finally taking control over one small part of her life, skipped through the grass. Purple glitter flew around her in clouds of shimmer, erupting into butterflies. When she looked back, just before the uncanny gate clanged shut behind her, Esther was already gone.

Seventeen

“This isn’t so bad, is it? Just a little fever. A little back pain.” Esther pulls a cloth off her face that she soaked with cold water hours ago before she collapsed into bed, while I watched helplessly. The comforter has since been flung and kicked to the corner of the mattress. The pink cotton sheets around her are dark with sweat. Esther tosses the cloth across her studio, missing the sink by several feet. “Shit. Oh well, it needs washing anyway.”

A dreadful ache in my chest, as if my sternum contains a black hole sucking in all hope, accompanies the despondency of my—our? her? situation. This hurts far worse than getting pulled around. I haven’t felt this low since before I died, and I hate that I can’t do anything to fix her—my? No, it is our situation.

Esther’s situation is intertwined with mine; both are hopeless beyond hope. But Esther is Esther, and therefore she’s trying to be optimistic, even in the midst of her feverish delirium. I’m the specter, melancholy in my uselessness.

Despite my every failed attempt at this so far, I bend over and try to pick up the cloth off the floor. Even if I could pick it up, the idea that I could then rinse it out and bring it back to her is laughable.

I’d probably make Esther snap.

“How are you feeling, East?” I ask, pretending she can hear me. She should get up to refill her water, to eat something, to use the bathroom. To check her herald patch.

It feels like it’s been hours, but I have no way of knowing. Time has been weird since she got sick; the days go slower and the nights go— Well, they still last an eternity, but they’re not an eternity and a half, so they’re faster. I hypothesize the fever is affecting Esther’s sleep cycle. She’s napping constantly and doesn’t sleep as deeply at night, which affects my perception of time. If I wasn’t worried sick about her, I’d find it interesting. As it is, I’m relying on Esther to keep to the medication schedule for any sense of when we are.

“East, when’s the last time you did some self-care?” I ask. That’s what Esther has been calling the rare moments when she gets out of bed. “You should check for pockmarks. I think?” I look at the brochure on the little dining table. Sure enough, the calendar is mostly marked off, other than the empty checkboxes in the last row.

Five days. That’s how long the average wait is from when the herald patch first appears, until the pockmarks start to erupt. And in those five days, Esther has gone through the stages of acceptance as her health slowly declined, each day checked off on the too-cheerful paperwork the quarantine workers left with her. There’s a little cartoon herald patch in the header, and pockmark doodles decorate the brochure. If they’re going to hand out calendars listing out suggested activities leading up to folk’s potential impending doom, they should make them more clinical, less cutesy.

On day one, Esther was itchy and anxious, pacing around the apartment, on hold with various agencies and organizations. After hours and hours, she eventually was able to set up quarantine services for several weeks of isolation, all the while trying to convince herself that it wasn’t really the Pox, she was just being dramatic.

The nurse on the video call audibly gasped when she saw the patch.

Day two created a stiffness of her muscles and an ache in Esther’s spine, accompanied by debates with herself about the unfairness of it all, anger at herself for letting her guard down. I hope some part of her heard me when I said it wasn’t her fault.

She barely spoke at all on day three, staring at the ceiling with the occasional fit of tears, followed by her limping to the bathroom to wash her face.

The bargaining stage—where she tried to check her work email (her access was disabled because of her leave status) and convinced herself that she should be productive some other way, to keep busy and maybe her case wouldn’t be that bad—was beset by chills and what Esther described as buzzing in her skin.

Overnight, the fever set in. And with it, tiny blisters would be erupting around the herald patch, searching for a way through into the vulnerable organs.

“Fuck, where did my thingy go?” Esther wipes her face as she shivers. “It’s so hot in here.”

“You threw it across the room,” I say, as kindly as I can. “I would offer to get it for you, but…well, you know.” I hold up my useless ghost hands, reminiscent of thick smoke and just as helpful.