Kumquat #14
Rating: PG/PG-13
Flavors: Kumquat #14 (the sky is falling)
Warning(s): Nothing too bad, but there is hinted at cheating and death.
Extras/Toppings: --
Word count: 1,952
Project: Tachycardia
Notes: University-age Cody. "I'm sorry I couldn't be the family you wanted...or needed." Sorry, guys. This one isn't a happy one either (lol). I've had this one done for more than two weeks now, but I've been busy with my new job (wooh!) and have been struggling on how I could possibly continue the rest of Cody's story with less tragedy.
Initially, when I started the whole Kumquat thing, there was a whole down-up-down theme, just from how I interpreted the prompts. End game Cody got freakin' rekt in my initial plot line. But, after writing 13 prompts for him, I agree that he deserves something good. I've debated on whether I could keep to the prompt in order like I'd originally intended while also not totally mowing him down, reversing then driving forward again all over Cody. I think I've come to a solution for the issue, but we'll see as I write it I guess. Not saying it's all going to be happy sailing from here on out, but I'm hoping it'll have less overall misery.
For #14, I had originally just made it a simple breakup between Allie and "Brad". It was going to be Cody's POV but more so comforting Allie through her loss. But now, well now, it's this. Loss all the same, but of a different sort.
Sickness visits.
He invites himself in without any introduction-no knock, no greeting. Nothing.
His cousins have visited her throughout her years. They are minor nuisances, causing her nose to run or her body to ache. His cousins do not stay long, a week at most. She detests them-they’re annoying!-but she doesn’t cry around them, not like when he comes.
But she hasn’t seen him since her childhood, since before she met the man that she is currently married to, since before she gave birth to the boy that is no longer a child. She thought he had left forever.
The doctor had found him that time she went in with her mother as a child. Her mother had been close to screeching at the doctor. Fright contorted the older woman’s face. What a thought! Her own mother was terrified more than she herself was. She trembled as the doctor tried to both explain the diagnosis and comfort her mother. She didn’t understand the words that spilled from the adults’ mouths. She didn’t need to. It was clear she wouldn’t be a dancer.
But the next time that she went in for a visit, after a year of swallowing nasty pills, it was magic (or so she believed because what other explanation could there be). She had been cured, said her mother. She could dance, would dance!
In the years that followed, she made her stage with ambition and hard work. Time passed, and she stopped believing in magic because that is not what a grown woman believes.
Dancing was her sole love, and she twirled in happiness. Then, she met the man that she married. Happiness began to go by a different name than “dance”.
It wasn’t until after her figure lost the hourglass and her belly swelled that she stopped believing in miracles and more in curses, in things lost rather than gained. Resentment was injected through her IV as she lay in the white hospital bed, loosely holding a child swaddled in cloth with her right arm.
She hates looking at what is her child. The boy is a trophy to her failure. He is what she has traded her career for. She hates him for that, partially. But what she hates the most is that the boy is a reminder of the mistake she made that night with a man-God, how could she have been that naïve?!-who doesn’t keep his promise of love.
She’s not blind. No, her mother made sure that she would be able to see the signs very well. Firsthand experience passed down from generation to generation between women.
No. She is not blind; she is in denial.
Her husband is distant. When he comes home late from a job that is only 9-to-5, she pretends to not know the time. When he smells of a perfume, earthy and sensual, that doesn’t resemble anything she owns in her cabinet, she pretends her nose is failing her, that her imagination is running wild. She reins her thoughts in; it won’t do to doubt.
It isn’t until she walks into the master bedroom on an early Monday afternoon-she had dropped the boy off at school but had decided, moments after, that she was too tired to go shopping in the other city like she had planned, instead opting to come home-that all the hints collide together to solve the mystery, the picture coming in clear and uninhibited by static. The discreet romp on her bed involving her husband and a young woman, who must be a dancer because her legs hold a litheness that only music can channel into the body, burns into her eyes.
It is the girl-that woman is a girl to her, so much younger than her that there is nothing else to call the female other than girl-that notices her presence first. There is a pause of silence, of disbelief, before the duo panics. Reassurances of “this isn’t what it looks like” fly from mouths faster than the jet planes at the show that she had taken the boy to see less than a month ago. She is sure that they must be screaming, but every sound is muffled by the rapid beating of her heart. For a moment, she wonders if that childhood defect of hers has made the muscle weak and more susceptible to breaking; that’s what it feels like-shattering.
The boy grows and grows. She cannot hush her anger towards the man anymore, even though she knows the boy is listening.
Now that her reminder of all the mistakes made in her past has gone away, she wonders if she can finally be at peace. After all, the man she married rarely speaks to her now that the boy isn’t around.
She finds solace in the solitude; solace tinged with a deep sadness that cannot be erased-because the past is something that is impossible to be remade or undone.
She finds comfort in the silence, but she doesn’t know that he is sitting in her living room, in the chair beside her. She doesn’t know until he decides to speak up one day and say, “Hello, it’s your old friend, Disease. Sorry that I haven’t called in a long while, but I’ve come by to visit.”
His voice startles her. She hadn’t been expecting any visitors, much less any unwelcome ones. He has grown older now, changed into something different than what she encountered as a girl. Different, but still deadly; the fear engulfs her immediately. The pain returns to her life, physically this time, and she cries because how could any of this possibly be fair!?
The bed becomes her family. It’s not necessarily the same bed but rather an assortment of them-the examination bed in the doctor’s office as she waits for her diagnosis, the bed in the master bedroom that she has nightmares in as she relives the Monday memory, the hospital bed in general care when the first symptoms come, and the hospital bed in the ICU ward.
The man that she is married to visits her for a short time every day, whispering words of encouragement. He never stays long; he never dares to touch her. Through the drug-induced haze, she manages to glare at him. He’s one of the last people she wishes to see. Hovering above her, his eyes are glazed over with fear; it’s no secret that both their times are coming. Everything is just a matter of time. Hers is just first. That’s all.
On a Monday morning, the boy-who is no longer a boy but a man-comes to visit her.
His eyes are bloodshot. From the red eye flight, he says. But his eyes are puffy from what can only be crying. She knows all too well what eyes tired from tears look like on a sullen face. She also knows what his face looks like when he has cried an ocean; she has been the cause for several seas.
When he grasps her hand, it is with a gentleness that she hasn’t known in years. The last time that they held hands locked together to this degree was at the jet show. What was supposed to be a family event wound up being just the two-mother and son. His father was busy with work, or so the man had said. The deafening sound of three jets soaring overhead and the white trail left behind to mar the blue sky was a moment for just the two. The boy had been small then but had a grip of love everlasting. She had grasped his tiny hand just as tightly. With the brilliant smile he gave her, she couldn’t help but return a small one of her own.
She wished that she could have stayed in the moment of that day forever, with the readiness to forgive. But the pain of betrayal cut deep, and the wound never stopped aching.
He spent the entire day with her. When she napped, he kept a vigil in the uncomfortable chair he had dragged closer. When she awoke, he told her about his adventures at school, about a childhood friend that was smart and had a smile that shone radiantly.
He doesn’t leave her bedside until the nurse enters and asks him to. Even then, it is with great reluctance and a final hug that he leaves, but not before promising to come tomorrow.
With the curtains surrounding her bed drawn shut, the room is dark. The tail of the crescent moon peeks in from the corner of the window. The monitor that keeps track of her pulse gives off a faint glow in the night. All the while, the IV connected to her arm continues pumping the numbing medication into her bloodstream.
Looking around the room filled with shadows and shapes, she notices a jacket-undeniably his because she has no other visitor that stays long enough to forget something-resting on the back of the chair.
For all that she has learned in her life, she cannot understand why the boy treated her so, despite all the suffering she had caused him. She never could look at the man she married the same again, could never find it in herself to forgive.
But for all the bad she has done, the once-a-boy seems happy, happy and in love.
She wonders if he would have talked fondly about her if she had treated him kindly, as her son. When is it too late to make amends?
*
Death visits.
When He does, no one laughs, but many cry.
Cody had slept at home that night, in his childhood cot. He had been ready to go back to the hospital the following day with his mother’s favorite flowers-magnolias, the symbol of nobility.
A call in the middle of the night wakes him.
He knows that, now, it is too late for apologies and acceptances to be made.
He wishes the past is something that could be changed.
*
The burial takes place a few days later.
The funeral is a silent event, quick and common.
There are few people at the ceremony. He can count the attendees on one hand-his mother, the funeral home employee, his father, a woman that seems strangely close to his father, and himself.
His mother wasn’t a church-goer. She didn’t believe in magic, and she didn’t believe in miracles.
No one stays longer at the grave than he does. Despite his father’s insistence on joining him and the lady for dinner, Cody declines and stays staring at the tombstone even after the dirt has been packed over the coffin.
Tears and magnolias fit for a dancer of her caliber are all that he can leave his mother. Tears, magnolias and forgiveness.
Regardless of the pain she had caused, he couldn’t help but miss her. If Heaven was a real thing, would she be a dancer there?
*
Allie ignores her boyfriend when Cody comes back to school after a week of being gone. Boyfriends are nice, and romantic love feels great. But she knows a best friend is hard to come by. And a friend so loyal is one to be treasured.
When Cody appears at her apartment, looking like the apocalypse has come and all that he has known is no more, she takes him inside and tells him to stay for as long as he needs.
She fixes two cups of the tea that they’re both so fond of before sitting next to him on the couch.
There is no rush, she says.
The tea goes cold before he stops crying.
Flavors: Kumquat #14 (the sky is falling)
Warning(s): Nothing too bad, but there is hinted at cheating and death.
Extras/Toppings: --
Word count: 1,952
Project: Tachycardia
Notes: University-age Cody. "I'm sorry I couldn't be the family you wanted...or needed." Sorry, guys. This one isn't a happy one either (lol). I've had this one done for more than two weeks now, but I've been busy with my new job (wooh!) and have been struggling on how I could possibly continue the rest of Cody's story with less tragedy.
Initially, when I started the whole Kumquat thing, there was a whole down-up-down theme, just from how I interpreted the prompts. End game Cody got freakin' rekt in my initial plot line. But, after writing 13 prompts for him, I agree that he deserves something good. I've debated on whether I could keep to the prompt in order like I'd originally intended while also not totally mowing him down, reversing then driving forward again all over Cody. I think I've come to a solution for the issue, but we'll see as I write it I guess. Not saying it's all going to be happy sailing from here on out, but I'm hoping it'll have less overall misery.
For #14, I had originally just made it a simple breakup between Allie and "Brad". It was going to be Cody's POV but more so comforting Allie through her loss. But now, well now, it's this. Loss all the same, but of a different sort.
Sickness visits.
He invites himself in without any introduction-no knock, no greeting. Nothing.
His cousins have visited her throughout her years. They are minor nuisances, causing her nose to run or her body to ache. His cousins do not stay long, a week at most. She detests them-they’re annoying!-but she doesn’t cry around them, not like when he comes.
But she hasn’t seen him since her childhood, since before she met the man that she is currently married to, since before she gave birth to the boy that is no longer a child. She thought he had left forever.
The doctor had found him that time she went in with her mother as a child. Her mother had been close to screeching at the doctor. Fright contorted the older woman’s face. What a thought! Her own mother was terrified more than she herself was. She trembled as the doctor tried to both explain the diagnosis and comfort her mother. She didn’t understand the words that spilled from the adults’ mouths. She didn’t need to. It was clear she wouldn’t be a dancer.
But the next time that she went in for a visit, after a year of swallowing nasty pills, it was magic (or so she believed because what other explanation could there be). She had been cured, said her mother. She could dance, would dance!
In the years that followed, she made her stage with ambition and hard work. Time passed, and she stopped believing in magic because that is not what a grown woman believes.
Dancing was her sole love, and she twirled in happiness. Then, she met the man that she married. Happiness began to go by a different name than “dance”.
It wasn’t until after her figure lost the hourglass and her belly swelled that she stopped believing in miracles and more in curses, in things lost rather than gained. Resentment was injected through her IV as she lay in the white hospital bed, loosely holding a child swaddled in cloth with her right arm.
She hates looking at what is her child. The boy is a trophy to her failure. He is what she has traded her career for. She hates him for that, partially. But what she hates the most is that the boy is a reminder of the mistake she made that night with a man-God, how could she have been that naïve?!-who doesn’t keep his promise of love.
She’s not blind. No, her mother made sure that she would be able to see the signs very well. Firsthand experience passed down from generation to generation between women.
No. She is not blind; she is in denial.
Her husband is distant. When he comes home late from a job that is only 9-to-5, she pretends to not know the time. When he smells of a perfume, earthy and sensual, that doesn’t resemble anything she owns in her cabinet, she pretends her nose is failing her, that her imagination is running wild. She reins her thoughts in; it won’t do to doubt.
It isn’t until she walks into the master bedroom on an early Monday afternoon-she had dropped the boy off at school but had decided, moments after, that she was too tired to go shopping in the other city like she had planned, instead opting to come home-that all the hints collide together to solve the mystery, the picture coming in clear and uninhibited by static. The discreet romp on her bed involving her husband and a young woman, who must be a dancer because her legs hold a litheness that only music can channel into the body, burns into her eyes.
It is the girl-that woman is a girl to her, so much younger than her that there is nothing else to call the female other than girl-that notices her presence first. There is a pause of silence, of disbelief, before the duo panics. Reassurances of “this isn’t what it looks like” fly from mouths faster than the jet planes at the show that she had taken the boy to see less than a month ago. She is sure that they must be screaming, but every sound is muffled by the rapid beating of her heart. For a moment, she wonders if that childhood defect of hers has made the muscle weak and more susceptible to breaking; that’s what it feels like-shattering.
The boy grows and grows. She cannot hush her anger towards the man anymore, even though she knows the boy is listening.
Now that her reminder of all the mistakes made in her past has gone away, she wonders if she can finally be at peace. After all, the man she married rarely speaks to her now that the boy isn’t around.
She finds solace in the solitude; solace tinged with a deep sadness that cannot be erased-because the past is something that is impossible to be remade or undone.
She finds comfort in the silence, but she doesn’t know that he is sitting in her living room, in the chair beside her. She doesn’t know until he decides to speak up one day and say, “Hello, it’s your old friend, Disease. Sorry that I haven’t called in a long while, but I’ve come by to visit.”
His voice startles her. She hadn’t been expecting any visitors, much less any unwelcome ones. He has grown older now, changed into something different than what she encountered as a girl. Different, but still deadly; the fear engulfs her immediately. The pain returns to her life, physically this time, and she cries because how could any of this possibly be fair!?
The bed becomes her family. It’s not necessarily the same bed but rather an assortment of them-the examination bed in the doctor’s office as she waits for her diagnosis, the bed in the master bedroom that she has nightmares in as she relives the Monday memory, the hospital bed in general care when the first symptoms come, and the hospital bed in the ICU ward.
The man that she is married to visits her for a short time every day, whispering words of encouragement. He never stays long; he never dares to touch her. Through the drug-induced haze, she manages to glare at him. He’s one of the last people she wishes to see. Hovering above her, his eyes are glazed over with fear; it’s no secret that both their times are coming. Everything is just a matter of time. Hers is just first. That’s all.
On a Monday morning, the boy-who is no longer a boy but a man-comes to visit her.
His eyes are bloodshot. From the red eye flight, he says. But his eyes are puffy from what can only be crying. She knows all too well what eyes tired from tears look like on a sullen face. She also knows what his face looks like when he has cried an ocean; she has been the cause for several seas.
When he grasps her hand, it is with a gentleness that she hasn’t known in years. The last time that they held hands locked together to this degree was at the jet show. What was supposed to be a family event wound up being just the two-mother and son. His father was busy with work, or so the man had said. The deafening sound of three jets soaring overhead and the white trail left behind to mar the blue sky was a moment for just the two. The boy had been small then but had a grip of love everlasting. She had grasped his tiny hand just as tightly. With the brilliant smile he gave her, she couldn’t help but return a small one of her own.
She wished that she could have stayed in the moment of that day forever, with the readiness to forgive. But the pain of betrayal cut deep, and the wound never stopped aching.
He spent the entire day with her. When she napped, he kept a vigil in the uncomfortable chair he had dragged closer. When she awoke, he told her about his adventures at school, about a childhood friend that was smart and had a smile that shone radiantly.
He doesn’t leave her bedside until the nurse enters and asks him to. Even then, it is with great reluctance and a final hug that he leaves, but not before promising to come tomorrow.
With the curtains surrounding her bed drawn shut, the room is dark. The tail of the crescent moon peeks in from the corner of the window. The monitor that keeps track of her pulse gives off a faint glow in the night. All the while, the IV connected to her arm continues pumping the numbing medication into her bloodstream.
Looking around the room filled with shadows and shapes, she notices a jacket-undeniably his because she has no other visitor that stays long enough to forget something-resting on the back of the chair.
For all that she has learned in her life, she cannot understand why the boy treated her so, despite all the suffering she had caused him. She never could look at the man she married the same again, could never find it in herself to forgive.
But for all the bad she has done, the once-a-boy seems happy, happy and in love.
She wonders if he would have talked fondly about her if she had treated him kindly, as her son. When is it too late to make amends?
*
Death visits.
When He does, no one laughs, but many cry.
Cody had slept at home that night, in his childhood cot. He had been ready to go back to the hospital the following day with his mother’s favorite flowers-magnolias, the symbol of nobility.
A call in the middle of the night wakes him.
He knows that, now, it is too late for apologies and acceptances to be made.
He wishes the past is something that could be changed.
*
The burial takes place a few days later.
The funeral is a silent event, quick and common.
There are few people at the ceremony. He can count the attendees on one hand-his mother, the funeral home employee, his father, a woman that seems strangely close to his father, and himself.
His mother wasn’t a church-goer. She didn’t believe in magic, and she didn’t believe in miracles.
No one stays longer at the grave than he does. Despite his father’s insistence on joining him and the lady for dinner, Cody declines and stays staring at the tombstone even after the dirt has been packed over the coffin.
Tears and magnolias fit for a dancer of her caliber are all that he can leave his mother. Tears, magnolias and forgiveness.
Regardless of the pain she had caused, he couldn’t help but miss her. If Heaven was a real thing, would she be a dancer there?
*
Allie ignores her boyfriend when Cody comes back to school after a week of being gone. Boyfriends are nice, and romantic love feels great. But she knows a best friend is hard to come by. And a friend so loyal is one to be treasured.
When Cody appears at her apartment, looking like the apocalypse has come and all that he has known is no more, she takes him inside and tells him to stay for as long as he needs.
She fixes two cups of the tea that they’re both so fond of before sitting next to him on the couch.
There is no rush, she says.
The tea goes cold before he stops crying.