#29 Clara

She hadn’t always been like this, this cruel and unforgiving.  At one point, she had actually been a kind an gentle soul.  She could have been a loving mother.  Could have, if the world had not become the blackest version of itself.  Could have, if she wished to be weak and at the mercy of the merciless.  But she was never a sheep.  And let’s face it, wolves do not raise sheep.

Which wasn’t to say that she didn’t have a crystal clear understanding of the wounds she was inflicting.  In the quiet secret hours of the night, she catalogued them meticulously, carving into her own heart her own version of the pain she knew her children would most likely carry with them throughout their days.  Hopefully those wounds will have served their purpose, honing their reaction time and survival skills, helping them to understand that if mercy was a choice, it couldn’t always be the right choice.  And sometimes the greatest mercy was in cruelty.

She called them her children and they called her mama, even the ones who had come to her old enough to know that they weren’t of her blood.  This day and this age details like that hardly mattered.  Times were beyond tough- times were do or die in very short order, and none of these young ones were beyond understanding it.  They had been born to it, and had found their way to her in one way or another, with or without her help.

She was making of them a tribe.  A group which stood a chance of surviving by their own hand, and not at the mercy of all the cruelly wanton souls which seemed to be roaming the earth in hordes.  She fought for them, tooth and nail, and taught them how to fight for themselves, and damned if the older ones, some who had come to her old enough to be well familiar with the way the weak could be used, knew just how lucky they were for the chance she was giving them.

Which didn’t make it any easier.  She watched them sleep, huddled in a great mass for warmth when the coals died down.  When the wounds she carved into her young ones were sharp enough, she took a knife, made a little cut upon her wrist and rubbed dark ash into it, so that she would not forget.  Even as she knew that the world she was trying to remember would be little more than a fanciful lace of words when she was dead and gone, she vowed that she would not forget.  It seemed important not to.  It seemed important to remember, most of all, that mercy was a choice.

Tags: post apocalyptic

Category: 2011, Drama, WTF