"Faye Smallwood, why are you always so aaaaah gaah gaaaaaaah hah kaaaaaaaa…"

I put my fingers soft to Zillif’s lips to stop her. It felt so fiercely, fiery, lonesomely intimate, that touch. Days before and after, I touched Zillif high up and low down, washing, swabbing every nook and cranny… but that was just playing nurse, doing a job with my hands. Only that one touch stays with me — my fingertips on her loose limp mouth, hush, it’s over.

She stopped trying to talk, stopped making the fraggly jaggly un-Zillif noise. I would have kissed her if I’d had any way to get her permission. But she was closed off now: eyes, face, hands, voice, everything mudpuddled but heart and lungs.

In the following days, I still sat with her when I had the chance… held her hand till her fragile fingers changed from bed-linen white to my own fairish tan; but I felt too tongue-tied to speak much on my own. What could I talk about to such a woman? The weather? The latest death statistics? Whatever vapid fiddly-dick dreams might pass through a backwater girl’s head?

Queer thing, that: how you can feel you’re blazing on the verge of radiance one day, then suddenly know for a fact you’re dog-puke banal.

When I told Dads that Zillif could no longer talk, he upped her dosage of cinnamon. I wept at the futility.

Zillif died on a bright autumn morning, with the sun beaming grandly detached through the stained yellow canvas. You’d think there’d be scarcely a difference between a limp paralyzed body and a dead one; but there is. One second there’s the Yes of life… then there’s meaningless meat. Something gone and something gone and something gone.

Three hours later, we discovered a cure for the disease.

Olive oil. So farcical, I wanted to scream. Later, I bellowed my head off… out in the tree-starved tundra, where the deep beds of carpet moss drank up the sound. Cool, sleek, stronger-than-real-life Faye Smallwood blubbering into her hands, wiping her nose on her sleeve, crying because the world was harder than she was.