Feast of Sparks by Sierra Simone

Author:Sierra Simone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sierra Simone

Part II

Equinox

Chapter 18

St. Sebastian

Equinox

* * *

During those bleary, delirious days when his mother went from sick to dying to dead, St. Sebastian invented a game for himself.

If he could count every second for one minute, one two three four and so on until sixty, when the minute hand on the hospital clock ticked over—and if he could count each second perfectly, pronouncing the number clearly and loudly inside his head—then he would be given a new minute for each second he counted. So if he counted one full minute, he would be given a new hour, another hour. She would be given another hour.

There was an important rule, however. He would only be given an hour of time equivalent to the minute he had counted; that is to say that if he counted a minute when his mother was writhing in pain in between morphine doses, then the rewarded hour would also be an hour of pain. If he counted a minute while his mother was sleeping, then he would earn an hour of her in peaceful rest, breathing slowly between the beeps and whirrs of the machines around the hospital bed. The best was if he could count a moment when she was happy and awake and pain-free, which he tried to do as often as he could, although those minutes became fewer and fewer between, like islands in a dark and sterile sea, until they didn’t exist at all, and all the moments left were moments of either unconsciousness or misery.

He still kept counting even then, kept trying to earn hour after hour even if they were miserable, trying to earn more time of any kind because the alternative was no time at all, and he wasn’t sure he could survive that.

Toward the end, and he can’t remember exactly when this started happening, only that it did and it made some kind of soothing sense at the time, his numbers began to change into words. It started with stay. Not one two three four, just stay stay stay stay to the rhythm of the ticking clock for an entire minute . . . and then over the next two days it changed to please—please please please—although to whom he was saying please, he didn’t even know. It was probably God—fine, he could admit that—but maybe it was to her or to the doctors or to some universe-as-benevolent-energy bullshit that he normally didn’t believe in. He was past caring about what he believed in, nothing about who he was outside the hospital room mattered, what mattered was that Jennifer Martinez was not allowed to die, not for any reason, especially not from some innocuous scratch on her arm made the day after Christmas. She couldn’t leave him, and if he had to count every second of every minute for the rest of his life to make sure, he would.

He would have done it gladly if only he’d been given the chance.

And at the end, that last agonizing day and

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