Age of Blight by Kristine Ong Muslim

added. “The world is going to end soon.”
    â€œLet me know if you are ready for the formaldehyde treatment.”
    It was father who said this to Beth. It was father who was schooled in the inevitable reality of irreversible entropy in classical thermodynamics. He did not look up from his morning paper, did not waver for one second from his absolute lack of empathy. He never had it in him to care about anything except for matters directly related to his personal welfare. That and boxing. He loved boxing. Beth didn’t answer him right away. I looked out the window.
    Outerbridge was particularly quiet this morning. Many parts of the world had been quieted down, too. There’s the forest near Chernobyl, for example, where fallen leaves won’t rot until forty years have passed. Had Beth been in Chernobyl, she might have a better chance at delaying the eventual corruption of her body. There’s also the town called Kalachi in Kazakhstan where people suddenly fall asleep and wake up after six days, none of them remembering anything. I sometimes wonder what the people of Kalachi dream of when they sleep for six days straight.
    Meanwhile in Outerbridge, the choir from The Church of Henry was strangely silent. Exactly four months ago, not long before Beth died, the government announced that the world was going to end on a such and such date. We did not pay much attention to it. We did not even pay attention tohow the morning sun began to develop a strange yellowish sheen. When the early light struck opaque surfaces, it did so by producing oily specks. Like the light was somehow liquefying and spattering its droplets. An announcer from the local radio station mentioned something about the early stages of redshifting, something about fluctuations in the quantum level that affected frequencies of light. We did not pay much attention to that, either. Because even if we did, we could do nothing about the impending cataclysm. Happy endings are just curses told evasively.
    So we went on with our lives, what little remained of them. Then one day, Beth died and came back to life. Her dead body was wheeled out of the emergency room. Nine hours later, around the time when mother was making arrangements with the mortuary downtown and while father was insisting on cremation, Beth regained consciousness. Thing was, she did not have a pulse. Her skin still sported a deathly pallor. A physician, schooled in the science of human vital signs, pronounced her to be clinically dead and then sent her home to her family. He recommended prompt formaldehyde treatment for sanitary reasons. He also said that nearly every family had one like my sister, so we shouldn’t take it personally.
    â€œBesides, the world is going to end soon,” the physician, who was schooled in the science of human vital signs, said. Then he winked at my sister, who did not or could not wink back.

    â€œTurn down the thermostat in your room as low as it can go and stay there,” mother told Beth after father left the room, rattling the paper in his hands. “I’ll call home services for your formaldehyde treatment this afternoon.”
    Beth did not nod in agreement. She did not say anything, either. Maybe she thought she didn’t have to. Or there’s the possibility that she had lost her hearing. Sometimes, the undead are completely misunderstood. They can’t help it if the living have to keep on living; have to keep expecting something from them. That’s the one true quality that defines life—the compulsion to draw something: an essence, a lesson, anything—from others.
    Beth continued the way she was because there was nothing any of us could do, the same way we couldn’t force back the water leaking out of a cracked vase. Even if we managed to put the vase back together by gluing its cracks, the water, some of it anyway, would already be irretrievably lost. And Beth, to be sure, was cracked. And some of what