Bone Water
The wind was freezing, and the cave that Marco and Lucia huddled in offered very little warmth. They had somehow managed to survive through this bleak winter until now, but as they sat across from one another with only the pot of transparent soup between them, Marco could sense death hanging upon Lucia’s starved frame.
By his estimation, the girl couldn’t have weighed any more than fifty pounds. Her cheeks and eyes were sunken deep, and her body was frighteningly frail. She lacked nourishment. She was starving. They both were.
The soup consisted of a bone lying at the bottom of a pot of water; it was a bone which had been picked clean quite some time ago. They had obtained the water from thawed snow and ice. That’s all that was left in the cave by now: bones, snow, and ice. When the fire was fully raised beneath the old rusted pot, Marco and Lucia would attempt to boil any trace of nutrients from the dry bone to sustain themselves.
This bone, and the rest of the bones that littered the cave, were all that remained of their last shared supper. It had been a distant time ago. To the starving, the days can seem as years. Still, both of them remembered it vividly. The warm meat had filled their bellies and had kept them alive just a bit longer. Because of it, they had been able to further preserve their own hopeless, walking-dead existences.
Lucia had slept constantly for the past week. She would curl up in the far corner of the cave, and her wasting body would drift into sleep. Marco would watch her as she slept, while her body faded to a shadowy remnant. The next time, he knew, she probably wouldn’t wake up.
Time elapsed. The two of them were drinking the soup, the warm bone-water. It tasted just like the ordinary drinking water that had quenched their thirst in the past. It filled them, but did nothing to satiate the bottomless hunger.
Lucia was silent, as she had been for days. Marco speculated that she might be thinking about that last wonderful meal, or perhaps about what had befallen her husband, who had gone into the frozen wastes in a desperate search for food in any form.
When Lucia’s husband never returned, Marco ventured out of the cave to find him. In the vast icy wasteland, he happened upon her husband lying still in the snow. Marco remembered exerting himself to his absolute limit in dragging the man back to the cave’s sanctuary.
Lucia lay down in her corner now, her stomach filled with the unsatisfying warm water. Marco watched her as she dropped into her usual slumber. Her skeletal form shuddered dangerously, and her breathing was abnormally shallow. Eventually, with only these futile liquid meals for sustenance, she wouldn’t awaken. Death would take her, as it had taken her husband.
How long before her body wasted away completely? What cruel forces of nature could leave her to live out these final excruciating days in this frozen abyss of suffering? Marco would outlast her, and then he would be alone to deal with this terrible, never-ending hunger.
Perhaps soon, Lucia and her husband would be together again. Marco rubbed his painfully drawn stomach.
He refilled the pot with ice and snow. Over the fire it would thaw, and then it would begin heating to a boil. Marco’s eyes wandered back to Lucia’s skeletal form, and then drifted upward to the cave’s ceiling as he became lost in anticipation of the meal to come.