The Last Page

“Do you remember this one?” May said as she pulled out the first 50-odd pages.

“Yeah. Dad read us that one when you were sick.”

Tansin pressed herself tighter to May, the two of them a woollen statue beside a small smouldering fire, a mound frost-grey blankets. May threw pages 1 to 55 of Alice in Wonderland into the sad flame.

“Remember how he did the voice of that worm?”

“It wasn’t a worm,” May admonished, throwing in 57 to 114. “It was a caterpillar.”

“Smoking a fag.”

May laughed softly in her nose. “It was a pipe, doofus.” She tried to keep her hands as still as possible as she tore out the next chapter, but Tanny wouldn’t have noticed anyway. Her tiny frame was wracked, unable to control the shaking cold. Clouds of it were coming in under the door and through the cracks in the floorboards. Like the smoke on the big stages with the men with no shirts on in the old book they’d just burned. The Rolling Stone Illustrated Book of Rock and Roll.

Outside sounded like a vacuum now. The cold was sucking itself in like breath across the ground, almost metallic. It had happened so quickly. Last week there was still some colour outside, brown and red of dust and dirt as the ice began to settle. Now the world was grey, one big last inhale, taking with it all breath and colour. And always, the giant black wave in the sky rolling in from the north.

The droplets of white on Tanny’s eyelashes were the red ends of matches. Her lips and nose the last of red as she became the colour of dirty bathwater. The fire was the last proper hue in the world, May’s final gift to her sister. That tiny thing who was pink when she met her, whose golden hair would tickle her cheek as she read her the classics; The Hungry Hungry Caterpillar, See Spot Run. Oh, The Places You’ll Go.

“There’s the rabbit," Tansin said. "With the fogwatch.” On the page the white rabbit stared at his gold watch, levitating in panic. “It looks like your necklace, Maysie.”

“Fobwatch.”

The flame whimpered and May ripped pages 115 to 162 from their leather spine. She was having trouble gripping the paper now. She fed Alice to the fire, the dormouse, the hatter, the white queen, and for a moment they gave light.

“And what did the rabbit say?”

“I’m late!” Tanny’s little body juddered, her breath opaque in the air.

“Late for what?”

“A very important… I can’t remember, Maysie.”

May watched the flame devour Alice in her blue dress, waking from her dream in a field of flowers.

And that was it. The final book. It had taken them three days since they found the cabin, since leaving their father on the road, lungs choked with tumours and venom. It was a big bookshelf, full of strange names May had never seen – Murakami, Zadie, Flannery, Vonnegut. She never got to take their breath from the pages, but she felt like she knew them.

“I’ve got something for us, Tanny.”

“What is it?”

“Something to eat. It’s magic.”

“Will it make us grow tall?”

With dumb fingers, May felt inside her collar. She approximated rather than felt the chain and dug it out, the heart-shaped locket falling into her palm. With her last remaining effort, she landed a fingernail between the golden discs and twisted. The locket gave, and between her father on the left with his big, sideways grin, and her mother on the right, a hand shielding her eyes from the sun, lay two small white pills.

Outside, that great cloud rumbled closer, stealing the last of the frozen air.

The locket was the first gift she remembered her father giving her, seven years ago on her fifth birthday. The pills were the last.