Blossom

It was too hot in the day for Rex to go out. He could only leave at night.

It was still stiflingly hot when he climbed the stairs at 2AM that night, the November moon hung despondently in the sky - as if apologetic for illuminating the ruins that Rex inhabited. It was dusty, bleak and all-too-familiar to him, a drudging chore to creep around his silent town night after night.

He reached his apartment and looked out from the balcony, the street he’d grown up on looked scorched and abandoned. Sweat trickled down his forehead. He took deep warm breaths and looked at Blossom’s door in the flat block across the street. She hadn’t used it in months, but he still thought of it as hers. He somehow felt he always would.

He turned back and pushed open his front door. ‘Dad?’ he called out automatically. The door swung shut behind him, the hallway went dark. He let the darkness hug him for a moment, waiting for a reply - but all he heard was a weak, hacking cough.

Rex sighed, sliding his backpack to the ground. He hadn’t found much food. His lips felt drier than ever, remembering the small amount of water that there was left to share.

He flicked on the light. As long as the solar panels on the roof could withstand the heat, there would always be power. Without the air-conditioning the electricity provided, the two of them would have dried out to dust long ago.

He turned left and pushed open the door to his father’s room. Artificial cold spun out of the air-conditioned room, bringing with it a sickly sweet smell. The room was barren and ghostly, the blinds hung dead at the window, the moon apologised to the dreary scene it lit below.

On a frail single bed, a thin grey blanket covered an unmoving body. The coughs had sunk away. The room was still.

Rex felt overwhelmingly lost looking down at this increasingly familiar sight. His father could still take care of his own basic needs, but seemed to be growing more and more languid by the day.

‘Dad?’

Nothing moved. Rex knew he wasn’t asleep; a keen level of observation hung in the air. On the bedside table - the only furniture besides the bed and an old wooden stool that lived in the room - lay a full plate of food; beans, cut up sausages and new potatoes from a can. The fork was as clean as the untouched knife that lay next to it.

‘You haven’t eaten?’ Rex asked his question with unease, he knew what it signified. He’d have felt angry if it weren’t for the grim gnaw of pity that had possessed him. Their relationship used to be bouncy, fun and seemingly unbreakable - but over the years, as Rex had reached adulthood, it had eroded. Particularly in the past few months; after their town had been evacuated, the man’s presence had become the only option for companionship. This oversaturation of each other had stretched their relationship to the breaking point that it found itself now.

‘What’s the use?’ was the old man’s response.

Rex gritted his teeth at his dad’s words. He’d waited here with him - while all the other residents of their town had been evacuated - to look after him. He’d wanted dearly to follow the residents, to follow Blossom, but his loyalty to his father had won out the battle. They had stayed just to buttress his father’s hope that Norma L. would return.

If Rex had missed Norma L. somewhat before, by now he no longer cared. She was not his mother, as much as she had tried to be. His mother had succumbed to the dust long before he could remember. Nearly two decades ago now.

Norma L. had been good to the both of them and had brought light to Rex’s father for a time. But she’d disappeared on the wind, the moment things had begun to deteriorate in the town, and now the old man’s waiting was growing somewhat pathetic. Rex was getting tired of seeing it. He stood gritting his teeth, digging his nails into his palms, blinking his eyes. He wanted to step over to his father and strike him, rip the blanket off him and strike him. But despite being a good few inches taller than the old man, he still felt smaller. Despite the weakness of the old man, he still felt deference. He still felt pity. Pity again overtook anger, Rex folded and approached his father - his guilt calmed him. He reached for the frail shoulder before him, but a sudden burst of energy threw his hand away. ‘Get off me,’ his father hissed. Sitting up, clutching his old locket in his hands. It was rusted and silver, in the shape of a heart. It had been Norma L’s once upon a time, she'd carried it everywhere and left it with him to remember her by, while she was away. That had been at least a year ago. Still he clutched it to his breast every night - as if it was his own heart. As if he’d die without it.

‘I’m sorry,’ the old man shook his head, hanging his legs off the bed. His knees were knobbly. His hair was thin, his teeth were patched with black, his skin was aged with an indication that he had little left to live for. But there was still an air of his bygone good looks left, his handsome eyes and nose were dark and striking. He’d never quite lost his workman’s tan, his thick physique; the inescapable kindness he’d carried himself with throughout life. It was because of these admirable features that Rex could not bring himself to leave his father’s side for good, to try and trace the footsteps of the evacuees. To find Blossom, who never left his dreams.

Rex shook his head and sighed, heading to the window.

‘I’m sorry,’ another apology echoed from behind him, distant and more melancholy than the first. ‘But come on - what’s the point, huh? This is all silly Rex - you know that. I’ve been plugging along my whole life, scraping by to provide for you and -’ he smacked his lips and laughed gratingly. He only ever laughed in defeat, in anger. ‘The way things are now, what’s the point? It was shit before, but now it’s…’

Each new word annoyed Rex more than the last; the man had never tried in his life, never dared for something new. Now he lay in bed, a defeated dinosaur, a relic of the past. He’d worked and he’d always worked hard, but he’d never tried, he’d never dreamed.

The dinosaur’s son rubbed his eyes and ears, to try and go momentarily blind and deaf. He didn’t want to think about his father’s life anymore. He wanted to be somewhere else, doing something else.

‘I really don’t know why you bother anymore.’ A cackle ran through the air, ‘You really didn’t inherit that spirit of yours from me, didya son?’

‘Come on old man, shut up,’ Rex grunted. He received another cackle, then they were silent. Rex fumed and boiled, thinking of the day the town had been evacuated. Thinking of the look Blossom had given him, the look that had filled him with the bittersweet promise of hope, with an uncertain despair; a desperate realisation that perhaps he shouldn’t be staying behind. But he’d always been uncertain around her, he was still too young to have realised the full extent of the promise that look had portrayed - perhaps even scared to imagine a world outside his father’s home and this little town.

As if reading his son’s mind, the old man’s words came groping out, ‘You shouldn’t have stayed, you idiot, you should have followed that Blossom of yours.’ The sentence was almost meant in lighthearted jest, but it was filled with vehemence of meaning. Rex bit his lip.

‘Didn’t I say it was always gonna turn out this way? For years I’ve known it was gonna turn out this way. People just walked into this mess with both eyes open - we all knew it, always knew it was gonna end up badly. Gonna end up all fucked up like this.’ Rex zoned out to his dad’s oft-repeated rant, letting the familiar words disappear into the corner of the room. He felt tired. His dad had always been a doomsday seer, Rex would have hoped the actual doomsday would have shut his father up. But it appeared nothing could change the broken tape.

‘Ah shut up,’ Rex tutted, exasperated, suddenly turning on his father. They locked eyes for several seconds, before Rex rubbed his face and turned away a little. ‘Not everything’s about the end of the world, man. Some of us still like the idea of living.’

The old man nodded slowly. Breathed slowly, deeply.

‘You died a long time ago, didn’t you?’ Rex sighed.

The old man steeled his jaw, trying to hold in a cough. The locket still clasped in his fist, he tried to suppress the burst of lively energy that was attempting to rip free from his body. He turned red with exertion, before the cough came tumbling out, hacking at his old lungs. Rex started feeling bad about the accusation he’d just made, he looked back out the window. The street below was as empty as ever - dark, dusty and speckled with the silver light of the moon.

Finally recovered from the coughing, his dad looked embarrassed, small. He tipped his legs back onto the bed, laying his head back down on the pillow. ‘I really don’t know why you bother, looking after an old idiot like me. Look at the two of us; two idiots. It’s really outstanding when you think about it, really,’ the words carried on like this for a while. Rex didn’t listen, he’d heard it all before, countless times. He watched Blossom's door absent-mindedly, praying it would open.

The wood was pink. It wouldn’t open.

‘I saaaiddd,’ the emphasised word grated on Rex’s ear. ‘I said goodnight - you’re not even listening are you?’

Rex sighed, took one last look at the pink door. It really wouldn’t open, he had to work for that. He shook himself.

‘Goodnight.’ Rex left the room, he went to bed ignorant of the mood that had overtaken his father.

***

‘Dad?’

His dad wasn’t there. It was daylight. The air conditioner rattled on as hard as it could. The blanket was empty. The locket lay on the sheet, below the pillow where his dad’s head had rested for months on end.

Rex searched the small flat thoroughly, but his search turned up nothing. The bathroom was empty, dirty as ever, toothpaste crusting the sink. The dishes piled in the kitchen. Dust hung in every corner, waiting. Rex hadn’t even noticed these things until now, until he’d set his eyes to looking.

His father was gone. Rex shook. He paced. No one came home. His dad was gone.

Still shaking, he peeked in the old man’s room. If it weren’t for the locket, the distinct smell of unwashed sheets, it could have seemed as if the man had never been there. He must have slipped away in the dead of night. Rex was a light sleeper, especially now; with everything so quiet, he’d woken up anytime the old guy had gone to the toilet.

But now the bed was empty. Rex knew what that meant.

He sat on the stool and looked out the window, the sun unapologetically lighting the street below. The dazzling glare was hard to look at, but Rex stared until his eyes clouded over. Tears ran down his cheeks, he felt like a weight had been lifted from him, leaving instead a hole where the weight had once been.

The locket still lay on the empty bed, an old man’s heart.

The pink door across the street beckoned. Tonight he would follow.