The Last Mortal Hour

I have gone over the last hour more than any other, because it is the seam, the place where the warm part of my story ends and the cold part begins, and I am the only one who stands on both sides of it. So let me be careful with it. Let me give you the living girl one more time, all the way, before I have to tell you what happened to her, because after this she does not get to be warm again.

We came to the border in the dark before dawn. I was alive. I want to load that plain word with everything it carries, because you are about to watch me lose it. My heart was beating. I was cold and I could feel the cold, the good ordinary cold of a living body in the desert at night, the kind you can warm. My breath went out in front of me. I was tired and hungry and afraid and sick in the mornings, and all of it was the loud living noise of a body that was still mine enough to complain, and I had spent months hating that body for what had been done to it and through it, and in that last hour, though I did not know it was the last, some small grace let me feel it simply as alive. The thing inside me moved. We were both alive, in the dark, at the border, for one more hour. I did not know it was the only hour we would ever share.

There was a handoff at the line. There always is. One set of hands to another, the cargo passed along the chain, and I had been passed so many times I barely marked it. But this time something waited that was not part of the chain. I did not see her. I felt her the way you feel a storm before the cloud comes over the ridge, a wrongness in the air, a cold under the cold. I thought, in my last hour of thinking like a living thing, that maybe this was the rescue, that maybe at the very end someone had come after all, because something powerful was near and turning toward me, and the road had taught me to mistake any strong hand for a saving one. It was not a rescue. It was the thing that would make me what I am. The last hope I had as a living girl was a hope pointed straight at the mouth that was about to end me, and I have never decided whether that is the cruelest part or the most fitting, that I reached, at the end, for exactly the wrong salvation, the way I had been taught to reach.

I prayed. One more time, as a living girl, silent, the candle behind the cupped hand. I do not remember the words. I remember it was not a prayer for rescue anymore, I had stopped praying for that a long way back. It was only the old reaching, the refusal to meet whatever was coming without speaking to Someone first. I said it into the dark, and the dark, as it always had, said nothing back. And then the hour was over.

I am not going to tell you the dying here. That belongs to the next one, on the other side of the seam, in a different voice, because the girl who could have told it warm did not survive it. Hold her here, in her last living hour, breathing, cold, afraid, alive, with something alive inside her and a silent prayer going up. That is the last you get of her. Remember the warmth. You are going to need it for what comes next.