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1849
He sat by her bedside, holding her hand, watching the shallow rise and fall of her chest. Her skin was paper thin, now, creased with age. Most of her friends, the women she had been a girl with, were long dead. Twenty, thirty years. Some of them even longer, lost in childbirth or to illness. Life was hard in the wilderness they were carving into, marking with the path of civilization that had barely arrived on the continent in the two centuries Europeans had been attempting to tame it. At 87, she was near-ancient, outliving all she had loved save the man now seated by her side, holding fast to the fragile hand where he could still feel a tiny pulse of life.
His eyes swept over her, shadowed and a touch lost. He had never known love like this, not been accepted for who he was since the boy he no longer allowed himself to think about. She had known him, accepted him, loved him, been faithful to him, and shown him there was still something good in the world.
And now she was fading from it.
( He could still see the girl she had been, shimmering underneath the lines time had etched. )
He sat by her bedside, holding her hand, watching the shallow rise and fall of her chest. Her skin was paper thin, now, creased with age. Most of her friends, the women she had been a girl with, were long dead. Twenty, thirty years. Some of them even longer, lost in childbirth or to illness. Life was hard in the wilderness they were carving into, marking with the path of civilization that had barely arrived on the continent in the two centuries Europeans had been attempting to tame it. At 87, she was near-ancient, outliving all she had loved save the man now seated by her side, holding fast to the fragile hand where he could still feel a tiny pulse of life.
His eyes swept over her, shadowed and a touch lost. He had never known love like this, not been accepted for who he was since the boy he no longer allowed himself to think about. She had known him, accepted him, loved him, been faithful to him, and shown him there was still something good in the world.
And now she was fading from it.
( He could still see the girl she had been, shimmering underneath the lines time had etched. )
