Mother of Generations

A tale of doom…or not

Her town was dying. She knew it, even if no one believed her. She had lived here since the beginning. She could feel the change coming. Let them laugh and call her a Gloomy Gloria. Far better folks had called her far worse things. She was tough. She knew they wouldn’t laugh forever. Though in fact, she wished they were right.

The signs were everywhere if only you knew where to look. So much had changed from the beginning, and now some of it was returning to how it used to be.

At the beginning, there had been plenty of space for everyone. When she first arrived, it was a flat, featureless plain of green. No mountains, no canyons, just flat and easy to cross. The temperature never varied; always a cosy, comfortable warmth. You could set up a home, spread out, take up all the space you wanted. Look around and there was no one else close by. Back then it seemed she had gone days without anything exciting happening, hearing from no one, no news at all. Just peace and quiet and minding your own business of life.

Of course, that all changed with her first babies. Two, then four, then suddenly grandbabies! Looking back, it happened in a flash. She remembered being young and thinking that she would never have babies, never experience the joy of knowing another living being that had once been part of her and then became completely independent. And her children were very independent indeed! Fussing as babies, then finding themselves, making their way, having their own babies, and then those babies had babies…she really was quite old. No wonder she was tired!

The little ones now called her Big Auntie. The big shots liked to call her Mother of Generations. She preferred the little ones; they were more fun. And unlike the big shots, they didn’t want anything from her, just a smile and maybe a cookie.

There had been hard times in her life, dreadful times. Waves of sickness. That first plague, right after their little community had really gained a foothold in this flat plain. It shrivelled you up until you just faded away. She lost friends, neighbors, even her favorite sister in that plague, so long ago.

After the plague, they lived surrounded by vast uninhabited spaces again, with no neighbors close by. She was probably the only one left who remembered those times. She still dreamed about them; had dreamed about them last night. Maybe that was why she felt so melancholy today.

Slowly they rebuilt their community after the plague until it was big enough to start feeling crowded. She even had more babies, late and unexpected joys in her life. That feeling again, of someone entirely new coming from within her, was literally marvelous, and she marvelled at them every day.

She cherished these youngest babies as precious jewels. Oh, they had great times! Melanie and Stephen, her littlest ones, now grown and gone. The memories were still with her. Laughing with Melanie over nothing, just because it was a beautiful day and the air was fresh. Looking up at the sky with Stephen, wondering what life existed out there, beyond the borders of this world. Just thinking about them now made her smile, even though Stephen was dead and Melanie and her own little ones far away.

The town’s population continued to grow. New families needed new homes. The community expanded, becoming ever more crowded. Soon she had all the neighbors she could want. She could hardly compare it with that empty flat plain from when she first arrived, or the desolation after the first plague. She had so many neighbors now!

Her neighbors were certainly an interesting mix.

Beulah Harkness, the nosy busybody across the way, who watched everyone and reported the news to everyone else. Didn’t she have anything better to do? And though she would never have said this out loud, Beulah smelled. Musty, old, like something put away in the attic a long time ago and only found after layers of dust had settled on it. Just yucky, as Melanie would have said. Probably not her fault, sometimes folks just smelled bad naturally, but still. The smell alone was enough to make her dislike poor Beulah, even without her gossipy habits.

She could never dislike Jess Schultz from up the block. He could fix anything. How many times had he fixed little items for her? A squeaky door, a stuck window, the mailbox that kept falling over no matter how she tried to prop it up with rocks. Things just listened to Jess; the door stopped squeaking with a tiny squirt of oil for him. She could have poured all the oil in Texas on it without silencing that squeak.

Jess didn’t say much, but he had a talent for walking by when she was struggling with something and offering to ‘put her right.’ A good neighbor to have, so kind and generous. He had passed away not long ago, and she knew she would miss him, even more, when the next little job popped up. Even little jobs tired her out now.

She thought of Marcel Ramirez, unlike Jess or Beulah a natural conversationalist. Marcel was the oldest child of one of her first neighbors. She remembered him as little more than a dot, dressed up for Halloween and coming to her door with his twin brother Michael, making the long journey from around the corner on their little legs. They were a different strain of folks than her family, the Ramirez clan. More sociable, always sharing parts of their lives with others, as generous as they come. Marcel could always be relied on for the interesting news of the town. Unlike Beulah, his news stories were important, relating doings in town that could affect her. He had a positive way of telling even sad news that she appreciated more and more these days.

No wonder Marcel was always joining up with one woman or another. Never for long, but he stayed friends with all of them. Not how she would have wanted one of her boys to be, but the world needed all kinds and Marcel added sunshine to many lives. So sad about Michael, gone a long time now. You would never know from Marcel’s smiling face that he had known such a terrible loss.

As new families arrived, they brought their personalities and possessions along with their children. You could almost forget what had happened. There was a small memorial at the center of town, and the papers ran a story about it every year on the anniversary of the first day that the plague had appeared, but aside from that, it was hard to tell. Her rebuilt community had become crowded and lively again.

Then came the second disaster. It started with a light misty rain one day. Came out of a clear sky, didn’t last long, but soon after that, death was everywhere again. This time instead of shrivelling, you turned white before dying. Not grey or yellowish like a normal death, but an almost shiny white. It was truly bizarre to see, and she had seen plenty of it. Nothing worked to stop it: not staying clean, no medicine or home remedy, not even isolating yourself from everyone around you. They called it The Mildew, for the way it started as just spots and then spread across the body, like mildew on a shower curtain.

Poor little Michael Ramirez had been one of the first victims. After he died it ran rampant through the town. The Mildew took her family, too. She had locked herself in at home with Martin and any children and grandchildren still at home at the first sign of trouble in the neighborhood, but to no avail. They had all been out in that mist, and they all died of The Mildew, every last one. Martin first, turning white and shiny over several days. Stephen, dying quickly, what a relief. Her grandbaby Seraphina (and what a turmoil her name had caused in the family!), slower, crying and scratching at the white patches slowly covering her. No smiles remembering that time; thinking of Seraphina, in particular, still made her cry.

Finally, after what seemed like ages, the deaths stopped. All of a sudden, too. It wasn’t as if those who got sick recovered; the survivors just didn’t get sick. The Mildew was gone as if it had never existed.

Thinking back, she remembered a few families that never caught the deadly plague. They went right on, growing, having babies, who had babies…wasn’t that interesting? It was like this second plague couldn’t touch some families. They didn’t just survive. They thrived, their babies thrived, and now they were the leading families. The Diegos. The Monaghans. The Khompas. Most of those big shots that called her Mother of Generations came from those families.

She herself never got sick, never had so much as a day of feeling under the weather. Her family died around her, children, nieces, nephews, grandchildren, even great-grandchildren. It was terrible to watch, terrible to feel so helpless as they sickened, and terrible to remember them now.

Yawning as she went back inside, she realized something. Despite the plagues that washed through her community, she had never been sick a day in her long life. Why was that? Why did she survive? Would she die from disease? Or would she just fade away from age?

She was going to die one day, and it was probably coming sooner than later. The end was near, obvious to anyone who took the time to look around them. Not that religious ‘the End is Near’ kind of end. More like an ’it’s the end of the road for all of us’ kind of end. Since that fog had rolled through a few weeks ago, her community seemed to have emptied out again.

While the fog lasted, she stayed inside, windows closed, curtains drawn, calling friends and neighbors and warning them to do the same. For two days she waited for some new illness to appear. She mulled over how it had started the last time, the Mildew starting with spots and then spreading. In those first days, she examined herself from head to toe every few hours. She had seen parts of herself not looked at since Martin died, smiling slightly at the thought.

She watched her neighbors carefully to, like Beulah Harkness peering from behind the curtains, but the white spots never came. She dared to sigh with relief, to think that perhaps that it had just been fog. Unusual, sure, but not another harbinger of doom.

Now? Now she wasn’t so sure. That old silence seemed to be returning. Everywhere she looked, neighbors she had known for ages were gone, their houses closed and silent as if they had evaporated with the fog. Visitors to her home, once a steady stream coming for cookies or conversation, had dropped off. Come to think of it, no one had visited in a while, and the last few left after only a short visit, complaining of tiredness after long days.

There were also fewer young ones around at all. She didn’t why, but she knew there weren’t as many of them; no one was raiding her cookie jar. Add the loss of neighbours she had known for ages, like Jess and Marcel; and something had definitely changed.

Maybe it was just her age, but she was tired all the time now too. Used to be that she could go all day entertaining children, talking with neighbours, avoiding Beulah, and still have energy at night. Lately, she was sleeping later, going to bed earlier, sleeping more deeply. She had even started taking naps! What was the world coming to?

She yawned again. It had been a long day, despite that fact that she really hadn’t done much of anything. These memories were tiring. Closing her eyes, she drifted off…

*****

It worked! Dr Genna Slobic was practically jumping up and down with excitement. Carefully picking up the petri dish, she walked it over to her lab head. ‘Maria, look — this is the test plate for that terrible strain of MRSA.’

Dr Maria Goesslin, lab head, DVM, dual PhD and Nobel Prize finalist, looked up from her work. ‘What, the one that came in from Mexico‘?’

Dr Slobic nodded. ‘Yes, that one, the ‘flesh-eating bacteria’ that destroyed both of that little girl’s legs after she scraped her knees on the playground. It survived testing with two of our other ‘great hope’ antibiotics. After a subset survived the last one, I let the colony recover, then I tried that tiny sample of ‘’kanamycin’’ we had on the shelf. And it worked. Look at this petri dish — not a single colony left, only 48 hours after I sprayed it on!’

Dr Goesslin had trained, and then taught, at The University of Pennsylvania, the Pasteur Institute, and MIT and was now a star researcher at the Max Planck Society in Munich. Widely recognized as the world’s foremost expert on necrotizing fasciitis, known to most people as the Flesh-Eating Bacteria disease, she was also a firm believer in mentorship and encouraging young scientists. She had plucked Genna Slobic from relative obscurity in her local University lab in Belgrade, spotting something of her own tenacity and devotion to research in the newly-minted PhD. And now it had paid off. Genna might really have discovered something amazing.

‘Genna,’ she said, smiling broadly, ‘congratulations, it’s a great first step. Let’s see if you can repeat it. Grow up another population and try it again.’