Do Not Resuscitate
Death takes an extended holiday. | Short Fiction
It started with the cure for cancer. I didn’t believe it at first; no one did. It was impossible to think it was anything but fake news and plus I was wary of getting my hopes up. We’d gone through everything you could think of with Sarah. Chemo. Experimental drugs. Naturopaths. Even positive fucking thinking.
She was more positive than I was by the end of it. I guess she had to be. It was her life on the line, not mine. I was just the husband. But it was there, all over Twitter. Facebook. Every TV channel. Texts and notifications were popping on my phone. Is it real? Is it true? How is Sarah feeling?
Everyone says that now. “It started with the cure for cancer.” But it wasn’t really a cure.
Cancer just… stopped. Everywhere. All at once. I had my phone in my hand, staring down at the messages in disbelief. Even people I hadn’t heard from in months, those who avoided us under the pretext of “giving us space.” You know, those who are really just scared and don’t want to face it. They reached out now. Is Sarah’s cancer gone? Just like all the others?
I walked into the bedroom that I still thought of as ours, even though I hadn’t slept in there in months. Sarah had always wanted to die at home. Nothing was making sense; it all felt like a sick joke, but then I saw her, sitting up in bed, grinning.
“It doesn’t hurt anymore,” she said. I wanted to say it was the morphine, but I saw the drip dangling, useless. She’d ripped it out. I didn’t think she’d had the strength.
But it wasn’t just cancer. It was everything.
Well, almost everything. Nurses and doctors in hospices reported the terminally ill just suddenly feeling better. Emergency rooms had no more casualties. Heart attacks, car accidents, anything. They still happened, but everyone survived.
Even the very old clung to life.
For a while, any death made the news. People were still getting the hang of what was going on. No one quite knew “the rules” yet.
That is, until doctors, I guess, got cocky. With patients unable to die, what was the point of stressing out to save their life?
So this was the kicker, the thing no one saw coming: no one could die unless under someone’s express intent. Murder and suicide were still on the table. Someone jumping off a bridge with the intent to die, would die. Someone with poison slipped into their wine, would die.
And negligence, as it had all come to show, was equal to intent. A doctor not stepping in to save a life was effectively ending it. A paramedic dilly-dallying on their response. A parent leaving their baby in the woods.
That came like a second wave. First, no one dies. Then, too many die. Half were ruled accidents. The courts ate themselves alive with the question of culpability. If one didn’t believe their victim would actually die, how could one prove intent?
The news was too much for anyone to bear those days.
Not least of all Sarah.
And she had nothing to do those days but sit at home, watching the news.
She’d tried to get her job back but couldn’t. She’d quit when she’d got her diagnosis six months previous and when she was cured, they’d filled her position. There was no precedent for not dying when everyone thought you were going to. There was just a, “You quit. Sorry. New person is past their probationary period,” and a casual shrug.
At first it was easy to say, “At least I’m alive,” but then, I suppose, the pain of living creeps back in. At least it did for her.
The rest of the world carried on. Now that we all knew “the rules,” that is.
Nurses had to keep nursing. Safety regulations had to stay in place. Food still had to be consumed.
I’d come home from work myself and find Sarah red-eyed on the sofa. She always had questions for me. “Why they’d stop calling?” I didn’t know how to answer that one. Who did she mean? Those who stopped calling when she got sick or those who stopped calling now that she was all better?
Another day, she asked, “What will happen when we all get too old? Who will deal with us?”
And another: “Why is this happening?”
And then she couldn’t ask anything at all.
The inevitable catches up and we all act surprised though we should’ve seen it coming. But we all have to live on and live with each other.
Whatever that looks like. I can’t quite tell myself yet.
We can’t die, but that doesn’t mean we’re gonna make it out of this alive.
Previously published at The Howler Project‘s Howler Daily,
now Magpie Zine, Issue Eight, April 10, 2023.
“Do Not Resuscitate.” Something that totally wasn’t about COVID, but also probably was. I wrote this in 2021, 2022 maybe, and added it to an ever-growing catalogue of short pieces who haven’t yet found a place to belong. These several short stories just don’t have a home. A couple, I get it. I technically finished a draft, but they’re still cooking. I know I can do better with them, but I’m not yet sure how.
Another couple though, I love to bits. I read them over again and still don’t want to change a word. I don’t know why no one else seems to? (Misunderstood in my own time, I’m telling myself.)
But every so often, there’s one thing I write that I can’t even make sense of. This was one of those pieces. I wrote in a frenzy and then didn’t know where to take it. So I sat on it until I would know what else to do.
Cut to a Submittable spree in 2023 and one publication was looking for something that seemed to fit this misfit piece just right, Goldilocks style. So I quickly finished it off, turning what I thought needed to be at least 4000 words into a flash fiction piece of barely 1000, and hit submit.
Of all the stories I set up with with their polished shoes and expensive suitcase before sending out into the world, that’s the one to get accepted.
The one in old sneakers, bindle slung over it’s shoulder, ready to take on the world.