Pomegranate

The outside world was unknown to her, but she could see a glimpse of it through the window in his room.

She had lived in that room and had gazed out of that window with her husband for many happy years. It was little more than a rectangular slot where the top of the wall and the rim of the ceiling met. It was equipped with retractable lead-lined slats meant to shield them from further radiation while they slept.

Year after year, they enjoyed remarkably good health, considering their unavoidably higher exposure to radiation than the town average. Their lives seemed to inspire their neighbors in the deeper, safer levels beneath them.

But now, her husband was dead.

Her old bones now ached from his absence. For the first time in a long time, she felt sick. Her pale and spotted gnarled hands trembled with grief. The sun continued to shine in from the open window, but without him there, she felt cold.

"Mrs. Demeter," a young man's voice called out from just behind the thickly-layered door of the room, spoken through the tinny speaker of a hazmat suit, "it's time to go."

No pleasant company ever called her "Mrs. Demeter." That was how she was addressed during endless and tiresome biopsies, blood tests, physicals, procedures, studies, and surgeries.

Her friends always called her Cora.

"Not yet," Cora called back, sounding angrier than she actually felt. Her grief was buried under a fickle layer of irritation much like the waves of radioactive ash and dust that routinely blew over the hillside just outside the window.

She would leave when she was ready.

She looked around his room. There was nothing left in it but a half-eaten pomegranate husk and a few sticky seeds sprinkled on the concrete floor around her.

Just as he had left it, before he was gone.

Cora shut her eyes and faced the sun, standing before the tall vibrant bristly shadow that swayed in the breeze outside. As an old widow, all she had left were her memories.

She basked in her memories just as she basked, alone, in the window's light.

When Cora was a young woman, she had fallen in love with Herman, the town's power plant maintenance engineer. His was the most dangerous but most important job she knew. His job carried the burden, and the privilege, of living closest to the irradiated surface. As the only man in town with the training and the courage to keep the lights on and the machines running that kept everybody alive, he had to live higher than everyone else, close enough to the facility at all times in case something went wrong.

Her neighbors honored her decision with a farewell party, bringing some of the choicest delicacies they had left to share, including a precious few sweets and treats stashed away before the bombs fell.

Cora remembered the rarified taste of fruitcake and marmalade, but she also remembered how she hated each and every compliment she received regarding how "brave" her "sacrifice" was. She married for love, not to be brave and not to sacrifice anything.

Even so, she was always aware that moving in with Herman meant many more rads per day.

Few couples in town could conceive without extensive medical assistance even in the safer levels, and she knew all too well that her choice of husband and her new residence meant that she would never have children of her own.

Living with Herman isolated her from all but written correspondence with the community she chose to leave behind. Even so, she took comfort in being the talk of the town long after her absence. She always had new letters to read and replies to write.

So many questions about the window. So many fanciful, and sometimes fantastical, paintings of what her neighbors thought she could see outside of it, made from the same fungi that comprised the town's food rations.

The truth out there was often more disappointing, but sometimes more wonderful, than the imaginations of her pen pals.

Every morning, just before Herman went to work, the two of them made a habit of getting out of bed together, having a stretch, then one of them or the other in alternating turns would unveil that window.

What they saw when they pulled the slats aside was usually disappointing. It was just a barren dirty hillside for the first years, with no view of the sky. It was often so dim and gloomy that there was not much else left to imagine.

Ash and dust continually blew against the slanted outside of that window, resulting in ongoing build-up from the bottom upward, blocking even the gloom and giving them nothing left to see at all.

Some rare and wonderful nights, they could hear precious rainfall pitter-pattering while they were in bed. It was the sound of that buildup of irradiated dust getting washed away. The anticipation made it hard to sleep.

On those auspicious mornings after the rain, the view outside the window was often so warm and so bright that it almost seemed as if the long nuclear winter was that much closer to being over.

After exactly forty-five sunny reveals, most of them on her turn, they saw tiny bristly bits of grass sprouting out there.

After ninety sunny mornings, with his turn count catching up to hers, they were both brought to tears.

Happy tears.

On that ninetieth sunny morning, they saw two paired little seed leaves, small but green and vibrant, risen from the ashes.

Cora wrote to her friends about their new green baby. The replies she got back were polite, but skeptical. Some thanked her for sharing such a beautiful dream.

Herman got grumpier and grumpier, reading those disbelieving letters, until he could not take it anymore.

One day, while at work, he startled Cora, as well as the entire town beneath her, with the clamor of the emergency intercom screeching to life. That system was intended only for scheduled drills and otherwise only meant to be used to warn the town in the event of power plant related emergencies.

It was a scary day to live through, but a hilarious one to remember.

She heard cascading ongoing rumbling from the stampede of townsfolk scrambling to perform containment and evacuation procedures down there, all while presumably donning protective gear and guiding their loved ones to safety. The concrete floor beneath her feet was pretty thick, but she could still hear so much confused shouting and cries of panic that it took her a while to realize that Herman was only announcing that there was a new addition to Demeter family.

The mayor herself interjected while sounding the all-clear signal, followed by a brief but stern lecture about the propoer use the of intercom system and the dangers of its misuse, no matter how exuberant and well-meaning Mr. Demeter's announcement was.

Cora felt it was worth it.

Her neighbors started to come up to visit, a few at a time, just to take a look at what the fuss was about. From that day onward, they had never been in want of company, no matter the inconvenience of going up that high, taking an extra dose of iodine and requiring radiation scrubbing on the way back down, all to look out of the famed "room with the view."

She remembered those visitors' faces, their wide eyes, their gasping breaths at the moment each of them looked out Herman's window.

"Congratulations," a few of them had said, followed by the most memorable of blessings, "it's a girl."

She swelled with pride. For the first time, she felt like a mother.

If her pen pals were honest with her in their ongoing correspondence through the vacuum tubes, the entire town talked about their new green baby for weeks.

Some of the letters had big dreams for the little one outside, fantasizing about tall forests and birds singing and bees buzzing and other such things that were getting harder to remember.

Some were old enough to remember the taste of fresh fruit and asked if that might, just might, be a fruit tree growing out there.

Some mentioned that they petitioned the mayor to open up the seed bank and start cultivating the surface. Clearly the mayor felt otherwise, because that sproutling continued to grow alone with only occasional rain and sunshine for company and proud but worried parents watching through the window.

Some of her pen pals worried even more than she did. They even doubted whether that little two-leaf seedling would actually survive at all. Those fears were proven wrong as more days came and went and more and more days had rain and sunshine instead of ash and dust.

In time, her stubborn little girl started to grow bigger and taller and become a sapling.

As days passed and years went by, with more bright reveals, Cora and Herman watched their sapling's little spiny branches stretch that much further up toward the unseen sky.

The window's view was never more than a rough bristly grassy sloping hillside, denying them the privilege of seeing whatever sky their little green baby had the privilege of basking under. Her tiny spiny arms rose and rose, fluttering in the breeze, as if waiting for a hug that would never come.

Eventually, the mayor herself came up to visit. She was clad in a hazmat suit with a lead-lined vest and mittens that couldn't hide the poise of her posture or the commanding confidence of her gait as she stepped through the thick shielded door.

"Mayor Lethy," Herman addressed the austere woman with the commanding but sympathetic gaze persisting behind all that protective outerwear.

"Call me Sharon, please," Mayor Sharon Lethy said, raising her mittened hand in a dismissal of pleasantries. "You said there was a tree outside your window? May I see it?"

Cora felt anxious as she reached for the slats to pull them aside. She feared she would reveal nothing but ash and dust for Sharon to see, wasting her time and exposing her needlessly to undue rads.

Fortunately, there was a sunny morning to greet Sharon through the slats.

"Punica granatum," Sharon said with a thawingly warm tone, "a pomegranate. Not quite a tree yet... but it's getting there, isn't it?"

Cora and Herman took her word for it. Aside from Sharon herself, the oldest residents in town didn't remember what a pomegranate tree even looked like before the war.

Without warning, Herman's smile grew again, a prelude before he got his brightest ideas. "Punica... well named. Thank you, Sharon."

"I beg your pardon?" Sharon turned.

"Nicole is a pretty name for our little girl," he said.

Little Nicole Demeter almost immediately started to receive letters of her own, addressed to her by name, through the vacuum tubes. Some even sent painted pictures of her, some of what they imagined she might someday look like.

Some of those letters joked about whether Nicole was getting enough sunshine, whether she was drinking plenty of water, and most provocatively of all, whether she had "made any new friends out there."

Apart from those bristly grasses, no matter how long Nicole's parents watched and waited, no matter how tall she stretched, it seemed she was alone out there.

"Not for long," Herman insisted one morning, "you'll see."

At first, her husband's strange promise confused her, but two days later, she saw what his remarkably sharp eyes had spotted the previous morning. Their little Miss Nicole Demeter, taller than ever, had budding red swells amid her bristly green branches.

Fruit. After all that had happened out there, their little girl was bearing fruit.

"Cora," Herman said her name with mischief glittering in his eyes as he donned the inner layer of his work wear. The rest of his protective suit was put on, and taken off, closer to the power plant where it could be scrubbed off between each use. "Before the war, did you ever taste a pomegranate fruit?"

"Herman," she scolded, but she couldn't hold back her smile and she couldn't dismiss the temptation, even if he kept asking afterward, usually on those bright sunny days after the rain.

One day, Herman couldn't wait any longer.

"Nicole's been wanting to share for long," Herman motioned toward Nicole's fluttering bristly arm in the breeze, "see? She's waving."

"But what if the mayor..." Cora started, but Herman's confident smile took away the rest of her words.

"I've made time in my duties where no one will notice I'm away for a few minutes," Herman informed her. "Nicole's gift is ripe. There may never be a better time. She's waiting for us."

Cora nodded, anxious but excited, as she watched him leave for work that day.

She paced around and around, too anxious to read, to write, to do anything but wait until she could wait no longer.

She slid the slats open, much later than her usual alloted time. What she saw made her gasp.

She saw what she had expected to see, but to actually see Herman out there, clad in his work suit, was like a waking dream. The world was always out there, but seeing her husband leaving his prints upon the damp dirt and the bristly grass, seeing his thickly-gloved hand brushing Nicole's bristles, watching him so carefully and tenderly pluck a ripe fruit from their little green girl...

Herman stopped with the fruit in his hand, as if frozen in place, adding to the dreamlike sight. She watched him look up at a sky that she never saw, around and around at horizons she could only imagine.

Cora squinted through the morning glare, trying to make eye contact with Herman through the layers of his hazmat suit.

Herman was turned away, as if captivated by the sky.

Cora shut the slats and paced with anticipation. She couldn't read, she couldn't write, she couldn't paint. She could only hope that Herman wasn't going to get in trouble for going out there, that he didn't get himself in trouble being out there, whether or not the mayor would find out about the first man to step outside of town in decades.

Hours later, Herman came back from work, just as he always did, punctual as always. Only now, he held Nicole's fruit in his hands, and more than ever before, his old gnarled hands were trembling.

"Herman!" Cora embraced him, meeting his gaze. "Is something wrong with Nicole?"

"Nicole is fine," Herman said, sounding sincere enough to believe, but the usual warmth was gone from his voice. "She... she wanted us to have this."

His trembling hands lost their grip on the fruit, but Cora caught it.

She had never held such a fruit before. It was beautiful... but was it safe? Was there something wrong with it?

Herman seemed to know what she was asking before put her questions to words. "The fruit is scrubbed," he said with a soft, delicate tone, "just like my suit."

"How do I open this" Cora put on her brightest smile, hoping that would cheer Herman up from whatever was troubling him, "it's such a funny, pretty little thing."

Herman bent down, motioning toward the concrete floor between the window and the bed.

He must have read about Nicole at work over the years, because what he said next sounded less like his usual self and more like a recitation from a pre-war text.

Cora listened to his instructions as her smile faded.

First, she placed the fruit against the concrete floor and pressed down firmly, hearing and feeling peculiar popping sounds from the inside of the rind as she squeezed it. She even fliched at a sudden crackling noise that reverberated through her gnarled old hands and made her laugh, but then she looked up and saw Herman's face and stifled her outward mirth. He put on a brave face, but put no words to whatever was haunting him, only continuing his guidance as if reading from a book.

What else could she have done , besides be there for him, no matter what was troubling him?

She then used her thumbs and fingers to dig into the fleshy stem end of the fruit. A loud crunch sounded as the pith was broken apart from the inside.

She then rolled Nicole's gift gently back and forth along the floor. Herman kept insisting that she be gentle, that she wanted to loosen as many seeds as possible without crushing too many of them.

The fruit started to feel soft all over. Herman looked around, mumbling about misplacing his knife, but at the moment he suggested that the stem could be bitten off, Cora obliged.

The pith was remarkably bitter, but then she tasted the most unimaginably sweet and tart juice in her mouth. She shivered, overwhelmed by it, clinging to her lips and cheeks and chin and staining her blouse, but then she regained focus and let the rest of that otherworldly juice pour down into the bowl.

She then split around where she bit, looking down at all the loosened arils, and the spilled seeds on the floor. Herman lifted one to his own trembling lips.

"How does it taste, dear?" Cora asked, clinging to hope through that persistent dread of whatever was bothering her husband.

"It tastes wonderful," Herman said with all his tender heart, almost breathlessly. He trembled all over, started to whimper, then wept softly with sticky fingers and juice staining his lips.

Cora set down the partially-eaten fruit, seeds sprinkled on the concrete, droplets of juice staining the floor as well as their faces and clothes, and embraced her husband as if trying to squeeze out whatever was hurting in him.

He embraced her back, held her tight, spoke her name lovingly, but she had never felt his heartbeat feel so delicate, fluttering in his chest as it did.

That night, Herman looked at her when she said his name, squeezed her hand when she held it out to him, but in his eyes, he was somewhere else.

Somewhere terrible.

"Herman," Cora insisted, her own tears shed with fear and worry, "I'm here. Come back to me."

She fell asleep in his arms, but when she woke up, a suited-up emergency medical response team was just stepping out of his shielded door... and he was on a gurney, being rolled away.

"Herman!" she cried out, thrashing and fighting her way through the armored young men trying to hold her back, but as she forced her way through, she saw what they were trying to keep away from her.

Herman's eyes were open, but the life was already gone. He had died, quietly, in his sleep.

"Mrs. Demeter, please," the young man pleaded, with such urgency that Cora was pulled back into the present moment.

Cora looked down at her wretched self. She had not changed her clothes since her last meal, her blouse still stained with pomegranate juice and Herman's dried tears. She had gone to bed with Herman, holding him tight as he curled up and shivered, trying to love away whatever was invisibly killing him, but it had not been enough. She threw the door open and stared at the young man.

The young man stumbled back, raising his thickly-gloved hands defensively. "I'm sorry for your loss. Mr. De... Herman was a good man... if there's something, anything, that we can do for you..."

"I want to see where Herman worked," Cora said, steadying her fluttering breaths, knowing as the haze of pain cleared exactly where she would find her answers.

"But the radiation..." the young man protested until he realized who he was talking to: an old widow with nothing left to lose. "This way... Cora."

Walking along the bleakly utilitarian intersection of naked concrete, cracked under the strain of holding back the once-dead world above, she thought of the pomegranate she cracked with her own hands.

"I will have to tell the mayor about this," the young man warned.

"You do that, young man," Cora said with uneven steps as she held the safety railing around the bend, leading closer to where Herman spent roughly half of his life, out of her sight but never out of her mind.

She saw a heavily-shielded set of doors ahead, with a utility closet and a single man-sized locker in it, the ancient layered metal scratched with countless five-day marks up and down its entire height and width.

There were smaller scratches that showed showed outlines of Nicole as a sproutling, as a sapling, as a little tree.

Nichole's fruit was the last little scratched image, followed by a single solitary notch.

"This should be as far as I let you go," the young man warned, but Cora was already squeaking the old rusty door open, seeing her own smiling, younger face gazing back at her from the wedding picture taped to the inside of the locker by his outer suit. The guests were suited up, but bride and groom dressed to impress, defying what was supposed to be a short life together before another volunteer took his place at the power plant.

"Ma'am... Cora," the young man pleaded, but Cora started walking into and pulling up Herman's old work suit.

"You said anything, young man," Cora reminded him. "Help me put this on."

His ongoing complaints and warnings were just noise in her ears from there. All that was important was that he did what she asked of him, that he was a good boy at heart that understood at least some of an old woman's grief.

"Herman's control room is just up ahead," the young man explained as Cora plodded along in the frumpy oversized protective wear draped over her old bones. As she did, the thick gloves around her gnarled fingers brushed across a single thick wafer, like a very thick card, that looked like nothing that he ever brought home. It was on a metal clip attached to the waist strap of the suit.

"What's over there?" Cora looked to a side corridor as she closed her hand over the jingling ornament to keep it quiet, looking toward a unmarked, unlabeled, and dark avenue with plastic drapes interjecting halfway through into the unknown.

"Nowhere that you asked me to take you, Cora," he said. "Please, I'm going to be in enough trouble as it is..."

That was all Cora needed to know. The husk of the town had nothing left for her, not with Herman gone. It would no longer contain her.

She unclipped that key, pinching it between her shielded fingertips, and shambled ahead, leaving the bewildered young man and his pleas behind.

He didn't follow. If anyone was going to follow her, they'd need to put on something as thick as Herman's workwear.

"Cora! Cora, come back!" the young man cried, in vain, until he threw the alarm lever on the wall which drowned out his own voice.

Cora pressed on, just ahead of the emergency door grinding shut behind her, then she gasped for breath as she thumped against the surface of a massive door, the largest she had ever seen.

With what little light she had, she saw the glint of a vertical slot against the side of that great door. It was just wide enough for that wafer-key and she fumbled with several tries until lights blinked on and the entire ponderous thing hummed and scraped and started to slide open.

There was light, sunlight, beaming through the other side, the crack of morning beaming brighter with that tantalizingly slow opening.

All she had left was Nicole. And she was coming to see her.

She saw what Herman saw, but whatever had taken him from her was nowhere to be seen as she stumbled out into the dazzling light of day, her husband's footwear retracing his footsteps along the verdant field beneath her, the grasses moist and dewy as she stumbled and slipped, the hillside beyond looking so different from the side angle she approached it from.

Before her eyes fully adjusted to the change in light, she had made it to Nicole's side.

Her branches fluttered back as if to embrace her.

Cora wept, happy in spite of it all. Whatever killed her husband was nowhere to be found...

Until her tired eyes adjusted further, and saw the massive industrial fans along the walled enclosure, blowing the breeze past Nicole's branches.

She looked up and saw the dazzling light of yellow-spectrum ceiling lamps.

She heard the mechanical spritzing of sprinkler systems swishing along the corners of the concrete boundaries.

"We... I," Sharon said, from a loudspeaker hanging by the ceiling lamps, echoing as if the voice of God, "usually tend to Nicole when you're asleep, but there's no need to wait anymore. I'm sorry, Cora. I am truly sorry..."

Cora had already lost Herman. Her heart was already broken, but it was still beating. The sun wasn't real. The rain wasn't real. The breeze wasn't real, but Nicole was very real, still bittersweetly staining her trembling lips.

"You knew all along, Mayor Lethy," Cora concluded.

"The worst part of my job, Cora," Mayor Lethy said, "is knowing what I know."

"What do you know? What else isn't real?"

"Everything is real, Cora," Mayor Lethy corrected. "Even your little Nicole Demeter is real. She's the first of her kind, hand-picked from the seed bank, to survive and thrive in the soil samples we've taken from the surface. What you see around you may not be the actual surface, but..."

Cora wept bitterly but she continued to listen. She was too old, too tired, too lonely to fight any more. She just wanted to stay by that tree until whatever took Herman away took her away to be with him again.

"... we're getting there. Someday. Your husband, and you, have lived much longer, healthier lives than any of our medical experts thought was possible. The radiation hazards have always been real, specifically from the ongoing cooling, structural, and system failures that Herman has kept under control with what few resources we have left down here over all these years."

"What about the actual surface?" Cora asked with what breath she had left, finding the question so ridiculous that she laughed bitterly after asking it.

"The nuclear winter ended decades ago," Mayor Lethy explained, but with a heightened urgency in her voice, as if pleading for Cora to keep listening, "but what started the war and made the bombs fall is still out there. Environmental collapse, superstorms, poisoned air, poisoned land, and poisoned seas... none of us could breathe out there, let alone plant crops..."

"Why bother?" Cora sat down by Nicole. "With Nichole? With any of this?"

"Because we made it this far," Mayor Lethy answered, "with what little we had to work with. I kept secrets, yes, but your life is proof that it does matter. Your husband was the best nuclear technician we had. Just believing that we were that close to returning to the surface, of taking in the sunshine, of planting crops and living as we once did, kept him going, kept you going, much longer than anyone dared hope, but ... what he saw here, once he snuck in, broke him. I'm sorry."

Cora plucked a fresh fruit from Nicole, remembering the bitterness, the sweetness, the tartness. Her anger was gone. Her anguish was gone. Her grief remained, but she would not want it any other way, for Herman's sake. "I understand."

"You... do?" Mayor Lethy, with all her authority and secrets, sounded relieved, even grateful. "If I could bring Herman back, Cora, I would..."

"Could you do something else for me, and for Herman, Sharon?" Cora asked as she slowly rose to standing, feeling her old bones creak, but her heart beat steadied, as did her grasp of the fruit in her gloved hands.

"Anything, Cora. Anything."

"You took care of Nicole," Cora concluded, "while we slept. For all of those years. You brought the rain, the sunshine. Your lies made us happy."

"I did, yes," Sharon admitted.

"Don't let Nicole be the last lie," Cora asked. "This soil was good enough for her. Is it good enough for a few more Demeters?"

"I should hope so," Sharon said. "Forever chemicals, microplastics, and other toxins have been processed out of this little garden as best as we could with what we have on hand, but..."

"How is the radiation in here?" Cora asked.

"The lead shutters in your room were just for show," Sharon confessed. "This place is about as safe as the rest of town."

"Teach me how to take care of Nicole, then," Cora asked, "and how to give her some siblings. Give this old widow something to do."

"That's the least I can do for you, Cora," Sharon said, "and I promise you, when you pass on, I'll find someone..."

"I think I have a few years left in me," Cora took a deep breath and leaned against Nicole. "Find someone to do Herman's job, first."

"I will," Sharon promised.

For the first time since Herman passed, Cora smiled and felt warm again.