At the End of the Day

"Things were better before,” Roxy said, sitting on the ground and poking at the coals in the makeshift fire-pit with a sprig of bent metal. “Before the sun exploded, I mean.” She prodded at the smoldering lumps, turning them over and over again in pointless motions until the chewed logs above them collapsed, sending flecks of red-hot sparks up to wheedle and disappear into the air.

“Oh you mean, do you?” Roxy’s mother was standing above a scratched and dented steel counter some short distance away in the tiny metal box of a room, impatiently stirring the too-hot soup she had taken off of the now dying fire. She didn’t turn to Roxy as she spoke. “I suppose you’d have us back out there in the freezing cold just for sentimentality’s sake.”

Roxy sighed. “It’s not that it’s, just, you know.” She lay the stick down now and drew her legs up against her chest, wrapping her arms around her knees. “It was better.” Though she couldn’t see it, her mother’s head dropped a few inches, her neck bent into a nearly ninety degree angle. She said nothing.

“At least the bamboo was alive,” Roxy continued, which was not altogether incorrect- though the bamboo was not dead, it was dying slowly in the ceramic basin in the corner of the room, and though the bamboo had been livelier under the last bits of sunlight, it was unfair to blame the UV lamps that now stood above it. Roxy had slowly lost interest in the plant as the sun faded, watering it less and less often, and she had ceased talking to it altogether. The case once was where she would tell the plant everything (especially after the baby had died), but in the cramped tin of their living quarters her mother’s near-constant proximity discouraged her.

Before her mother had woken that morning, Roxy had spoken to the bamboo, the first time in months. She had crouched low, and whispered something secret.

Roxy’s mother put a hand close above the pot, and sensing that it was cool enough, poured two portions out into bowls, and carefully covered the pot over before placing it into the freezebox. Passing a bowl to Roxy, she sat down next to her daughter on the floor and the two of them sipped carefully at the thin soup, and stared into the glowing coals.

They ate their soup in silence, and Roxy's mind fidgeted. She finished her soup set her bowl aside, and putting her hands to the back of her neck in fear and frustration, she spoke.

“I think we should do it.”

Her mother said nothing, looked nowhere and was still. She blinked slowly, watching the coals of the fire hiss and snap and finally she stood up and placed her empty bowl on the counter.

“No.”

“Why not?!” said Roxy, turning her head towards her mother, fast as a whip, as though her mother's response had not been unexpected but unimaginable. “This place is empty. No one is here anymore and no one is going to-“

Her mother cut her off. “They will,” she said, not sharply but quietly and slowly, a new gravity in her voice. “They will figure something out.”

Roxy said nothing. She had nothing to say. Defeated, she turned her head back to the fire, and again taking up her scrap of metal, she pushed the coals around and watched as the sparks scattered into the air.