Points Of Light

The First Boy And The Last

It arrived in the pocket of a twelve year old boy. A boy not unlike you. He had a pet dog, a bicycle he rode to school every day, and a father who took him to the beach at weekends. We think that's where he found it, mistook it for just a pretty looking pebble, glistening on the wet sand. He picked it up and showed his father, who didn't realise what it was either. The boy put the pebble in his pocket and on Monday he took it to school.

On Thursday the local school district declared an emergency. Something was making the children sick. The teachers too, the custodians, the librarians. At first we thought it was a new strain of the flu, something we had no vaccine for. The children were spreading it around, and quickly too. Parents started getting sick, siblings, babysitters, grandparents. The first boy died on the Saturday. One week after he picked up the strange pebble on the beach, and put it in his pocket.

By the time we realised we weren't dealing with the flu it was too late. The incubation time was five days, during which the infected remained symptom free. By the time they realised they were sick they had already infected hundreds of others, in supermarket queues, on buses to work, in office canteens, in the departure lounges of a dozen airports. All it took was one sneeze, one yawn, one unwashed hand. We had no hope of keeping up, of getting ahead of it. Ten days after the first patient became sick we quarantined the town. It was a futile gesture. We had already lost.

There's no way for us to know where it came from. We can't even be sure how it survived it's journey. It should have frozen to death, or burned up in the atmosphere. It didn't. Instead it landed on a Florida beach, to be picked up by a little boy, just like you. All we know is that it didn't come from the little blue world which you should shortly be arriving at. Our atmospheric sensors have checked for its deadly signature. It's not there.

I hope you will forgive us Jack, for not fighting harder to save the world which should have been yours. With all our technology, with all our knowledge, our centuries of experience, we should have won. At least, once we knew the battle was lost, there was one thing we could do, and that was to get you to safety.

I'm sorry that I could not kiss you goodbye, to tell you that I loved you one last time, face to face, but the first symptoms appeared this morning and I couldn't risk coming home to you. I never thought I would be grateful to have a job that kept me away from you for months at a time, but in the end it saved your life.

You must be looking forward by now to getting off the ship, perhaps taking Rex for a walk in your new home. I wish I could be there with you, to watch you grow in to the man I hope you'll become. Keep up with your school work son, and listen to your teachers. It's their job to raise you now. Don't forget us, me and your mother, and promise me that whatever else you do, you won't pick up any strange pebbles on the beach.

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Written for the Weekend Write In 

1st February 2019

Prompt: #arrives