A story by Journey Hart
Ender opened her door and sighed as the morning breeze enveloped her. She smiled as the breath of wind played around her humble little cottage, caressing the curtains and lightly touching her little flowers by the window so they waved in hello. The sun that lit the bright blue sky above, the silence and mildness of the wilderness that stretched for miles outside provoked play inside of Ender. She wiped her hands on her homemade apron, leaving the door open as she walked back inside. Maybe she could go for a run later. First, she had to make breakfast.
She opened the back door of her cottage to chickens clucking their content and the pigs happily oinking to her as she walked by. A wooden, ragged-looking shed was her destination behind all the farm animals and plants. She walked to it and opened the door, fetching some animal food she had made herself and some cow dung for plant fertilization. A basket was also taken out for gathering the vegetables.
It didn’t take long for her to finish feeding the animals, and when she was done, she went to work picking fresh and ripe fruits and vegetables to be made into her morning salad. Once satisfied with her full basket, she took it up and half skipped inside with delight.
She never made it through the door.
A man, far enough away that Ender couldn’t make out his face was limping towards her, pitifully trying to hold his head upright. Ender froze and watched. She remembered seeing people long ago, when she was 5, but it had been 16 years. The idea of one this close to her was unsettling. Though she’d understood that people still existed, the idea of one interacting with her was unwanted and unwarranted.
She gazed with wide eyes as the man made his way slowly towards her cottage, then fell into the field a few yards from her farm. A mix of concern and fear crept into her perfect day, and she resented him for that. He was ruining her farming time. This made her remember the basket of produce hanging from her clenched fist, but she didn’t know what to do with it anymore. Leave it and help the man? Finish her work? Anyhow, she was going to have to help him so he could leave. He wasn’t going anywhere in that state. She sighed and set the basket down. Better sooner than later.
When she was close enough to the man to see his face, she was, at first, repulsed. It was grimy and covered in the most dirt she’d ever seen on a living thing. And she lived with pigs.
When she’d gotten over her brief disgust, she began to study the man. His hair was matted and covered in dirt, as though each strand was caked with mud. His face was still and quiet, and it was a while before Ender went inside to get her medicine. She couldn’t carry him, and so placed the medicines beside him to drink when he woke up. Then she left and went back to her duties. She never had liked people, much less strange and dirty people. This was the most she had any inclination to do.
It was dark before she looked out her living room window and saw the man stir. She watched as he stood and shook his head. He seemed confused, she thought. He was turning all around, as if searching for something. Until he turned the whole way around and saw her cottage. Ender tensed as she watched him walk closer to her comfortable house. She clenched her fists as she listened to him knock on her front door, and she almost cried out when he called into the house, “Hello? Is anyone home? Please, all I need is a place to stay for a night. I promise, I’m not enduring any heartbreak.”
She let the man in.
She didn’t remember why she did, or how she even got to the door in the first place. All she remembered from that day was a little spark that caught fire as soon as it hit her heart.
She started fixing him up and allowing him residence. He told her his story. He was a doctor who traveled throughout the land in search of anyone who he could help. Each blessing of hope he gave was more than enough to keep him going, wandering for miles on end just to find some sign of intelligent life. He gave a lot of blessings over the years, and since most people lived alone, the job was not as dangerous as many thought it was. The deaths he pronounced did not break anyone’s heart because no one was around to hear them or care. Only the doctor who tried so hard to help them felt any despair over a person’s passing. Anytime he left those houses in that solemn state, he’d see a small crack in the earth right by the house. He’d continue his way, determined to help more lives than he lost.
And he did, until one day, he arrived at a house with a whole family.
His first observation on his arrival was small cracks in the earth around the whole house. He had to jump over them to get to the front door, where he knocked warily. He wasn’t afraid so much as he was concerned. He had only seen this kind of heartbreak around houses containing whole families. His concerns were confirmed when a little girl opened the door with pain drowning her features. His eyes widened at the sight.
She was four, maybe five. She had tears in her eyes, which worried the doctor. A woman then saw him standing in the door, tears in her eyes as well, and escorted him silently to a room at the very back of the small cottage. His gaze was hardened as he entered the room to find a little boy in bed, pale and sickly. The doctor, then understanding how dangerous the situation was, set to work with all his tools and medical expertise to help the small child.
The young boy was older than the little girl, the doctor found, and persistent too. Many times, the doctor thought there was nothing more he could do for the dying child until the boy opened his eyes again and requested a drink.
Later that night, while the family slept, the boy died despite the doctor’s best efforts to save him. The doctor cried by the bed in the middle of the night, careful not to wake the family. Shortly after, he left the house without saying goodbye. He’d left a note explaining his departure, but his escape had not worked as well as he’d intended.
He had not gone far before a massive chasm began to wrench itself free of the Earth’s confines, a devastating cry of pleading and pain from the house fueling its growth. The ground pulled apart its massive jaws, and the doctor began to run. He abandoned his medical supplies and sprinted with all his might, aware of nothing but the need to run when the hole widened enough to catch him. Before he knew it, he had fallen into the void left by that heart wrenching discovery of a dead child. Fortunately for him, however, the chasm had met with a lake some ways away and had leaked the water into itself so that the doctor fell into a rushing river.
He ended his story by saying he’d woken up on a shore some miles eastward and that his name was Park.
Ender listened all the while, watching his glistening eyes and wondering what it would be like to have so much pain forced upon you as a career. She pitied Park, and whenever he said that he had to go back to that terrible job, she would shoo him back into the house and tell him he wasn’t ready, telling him all the while that she still had to patch up a few more things.
Weeks went by as Ender continued this act. Then months, then years, then a decade had gone by before Ender had even realized it, before the doctor had even noticed that he’d fallen in love with that beautiful girl who saved him. He promised to be with her forever in her little farm by her little shed, giving her a little ring he’d made from flowers.
It was a while before Ender began to look into her husband’s eyes and see the desire to leave their comfortable life and take up his medical supplies once more. It was shortly after when Ender accepted that she had to let him go, to let him do what he so longed to do. She wrapped her arms around his neck and cried into his shoulder when he said he needed to provide his services again. He explained to her that he wanted to give people hope. She understood but made him promise to come back in a month. He said he would. Then he kissed her on the forehead and smiled softly as Ender handed him all the medical gear she possessed. Ender waved to him as he walked away, with his bag in his hand and a fire in his heart.
She went into her farm the next morning to find a chasm just behind her farm. She had never had any cracks at all before Park had found her. She curled up on her doorstep, watching her chickens wander, and she cried.
For the next month, Ender worked painstakingly hard to manage her farm. She fed her animals, planted seeds, sowed the ground, planted more plants in her garden, anything to get her mind off the missing piece in her life. She worked harder than necessary, hurting herself more than she should have.
It felt like a year before the month had passed, and Ender was grateful she could relax again and not feel like she was wasting away. Anyways, there was nothing more to clean in her cottage to dispel her loneliness anymore. She needed Park back.
But the month passed.
And Ender began to work harder than she ever had before.
The months that passed became blurred and eerily quiet. Ender farmed and ate and slept. She didn’t talk. She barely even thought. And when she did, they would quickly be blocked by consistent, tedious work. When she fell asleep at night, she had dreams about Park, but when she awoke, she never tried to remember them. In fact, she repressed them with any kind of cleaning she could think of.
Finally, she began to forget what she did the day before. And her life began to be of survival, each day living to feed her animals, feed herself, and forget it all in slumber.
There was one day that she broke her routine. Perhaps she was feeling better that day, perhaps she couldn’t take her own misery anymore.
She walked out of her house, the wind a mere fragment of a broken world. She shut the door and stared into the distance, to that eternal field of grass and dirt, and a single tear fell down her cheek. She couldn’t remember the last time she cried. She couldn’t remember the last time she stood at her front door and enjoyed the sun.
A small whimper crawled its way from her throat. Another tear broke the surface of her eye and fell onto her apron.
A sob.
A cry.
And then she fell onto the ground with all her worries laid around her, surrounding her, her pain and passion. She cried into the world and wondered why, of all things, this would happen. Hurt became tears that fell from her cheeks as she screamed blame to something, anything. Her tears were hot and burning and the world melted around her when they hit the floor.
She barely felt the world shaking through her despair, barely understood that in her front yard, a chasm big enough to swallow her entire house and farm was opening before her.
She looked up, begging it to slow with nothing but the pain in her eyes. She gazed at its mouth as it widened and split the earth apart, too tired to move, too hardened to care.
As she stared, movement caught her eye beyond the chasm. A man was walking toward her, limping and sickly. Her eyes widened and her hands flew to her face to rub her eyes. She resented the blur in her vision but cleared it just enough to see Park struggling towards her. She pressed her hands to her mouth with joy. He was here! The Park she loved, the Park she needed was here!
But something was wrong.
He turned and began running, the limp hindering his speed. The chasm was reaching for him. Ender screamed and tried to stop it. Her pain was gone, wasn’t it? She was free, Park was here.
The chasm didn’t stop.
It found him.
And he was gone.
Ender was quiet for a moment, and the chasm mouth slowed to a stop. She watched it, her tears frozen on her face, her eyes staring at the place where her husband was taken from her. She said nothing. Did nothing.
And then she screamed, dry and hard, and suddenly her heart was being torn and ripped to shreds of pain. Her hurt, her anxiety, her desire to fall into that chasm and leave everything behind. She felt it all as it pushed itself out through her desperate cry.
She sobbed as the canyon split the horizon line and wrenched her world apart.
