Survival Of The Fittest

He'd never blamed her for it. She had just been a baby, a tiny little bundle of love and joy which they had planned and prepared and gotten ready for long before the test was positive. Long before the bump showed, long before any of what had happened in real life had transpired. They had wanted more kids, many more kids really, but they were going to start with their Marco or Maria.

His wife had wanted the child to be Marco, he had wanted a Maria. The day she was shown to her mother and the doctor had said the gender, Beatrice had let out that huge smile that she wore so often and said that she was better than any Marco. The nurse had taken the polaroid, and they had gone home with the child.

Then, of course, they had to go back.

Complications relating to surgery, they had said. She had been infected and it wasn't responding to antibiotics, and they would have to keep her overnight to make sure. He hadn't even been able to visit her, because she had been quarantined. The last time he had ever seen her with her heart beating was when she gave him and Maria that little wave on a hospital gourney going into isolation.

He had stayed at the hospital for as long as he could, he really had. Had tried everything he could to see her again, but he had been turned away and the baby was crying. He had had to go home, had to feed her from a bottle and pat her back until she burped so that she would go to sleep. He had gone hoke to a cold bed that night, unaware that it was the first of eighteen years worth of cold beds.

Then when he had gone in the next day, she was still in a bad state. They had no clue why it was tearing through her system so fast. No clue why it hadn't responded to antibotoics. Now, they would've known about the superbugs, but back then they were a mystery to the medical world. Anomalies that didn't quite respond properly to treatment.

A week. It had taken a week for the life to have slowly been drained out of her until she was no longer living, a week until his Beatrice had left because of something that shouldn't have been. they were going to have a natural birth. Supposed to have a natural birth.

And at the end he had been left with a week-old baby girl and a set of worthless plans and pictures.

The only picture he had of all of them as a family was the one just after her birth, when she had been cleaned up and swaddled, sleeping soundly. His hand trembled as he looked at the photo, all of them smiling as the nurse snapped the shot with his old camera, and then they had been given the all clear.

The all fucking clear. He tore the polaroid in two, then two again, then over and over and over until it was laminated paper squares, no larger than the nail on his pinky finger. He walked upstairs and started to run himself a bath, making sure the water was piping hot, just as he liked it. Calmly, he swept up the polaroid shards and binned them, and then walking into the kitchen.

Everything here reminded him of her. The knives, her fouth set of treasured blades, each used for their own functions. The surefire way of annoying her was to mess with them in any way, shape or form. All of them were sharpened to a razor edge and cleaned until sparkling, to the point where she had once claimed that putting a regular blade-sharpener within a foot of them dulled the blade.

She kept the kitchen meticulous as well. Everything was neat and tidied, the washing machine emptied as soon as the plates were bearably hot, anything unsatisfactory polished and shined until they were as good as new. He left the kitchen and acended the stairs once more, checking in on the bath to make sure it wasn't overflowing with water.

From the bath, it was two long steps, then a short step to her room. The room that he had left since her dissapearence, praying and praying and praying that she would come home safe and sound to him, ignoring the candelight vigil, the outside world, everything. He had been naivee to think that God would have listened to him and not any of the others doing the same, but naivety was never a concern in times like these, only himself. Selfish, he thought, but who wasn't?

And now he would be entering her room. Untouched, he thought, perfectky untouched since the very beginning of ner dissapearence. Ne never went in nere anyway. She had wanted privacy, she had gotten privacy. It had been years since he had ever entered the room, and it felt amost wrong to be doing so now.

He pushed open the door and looked inside, before realising that he would have to turn the light on. Functionally, it seemed like little had changed since he had last been in her room. The shelves, the desk and the bed were all the same, and even little things like her desk lamp and lampshade were untouched since he had last set eyes on it.

The similaritires stopped there. Where once the room had been coloured an almost red shade of pink, now it was largley a dark blue colour, and the curtains matched. He had known of the paint, even offered to help, but she had been stubborn. On the carpet, he could see a few drips of blue, but otherwise it looked like an almost professonal job.

The walls were covered in posters and paintings. A calendar hung on the door to her ensuite, and upon closer inspection there were notes scribbled in fast handwriting in nearly every box, some of them with big red 'X's of sharpie plastered over them. Her desk was littered with pictures of different foods and recipies, including one with a note saying "d-c not done, then go ahead with prac" scrawled across the top. Next to it was her laptop, the screen still open.

He gently closed it and gave the room a final look, before heading back into the bathroom. The warer was reaching a little high, so he turned it off with a gentle squeaking sound and headed downstairs, knowing that the water would be unbearably hot for more than a little while.

In the dining room, on top of the cd rack that had lain unused for so long, was a packet of cigarettes. Maria had tried to keep her less-than-subtle drug use hidden from him, but she forgot he had been a teenager too, and she had come home reeking of pot one two many times for it to be purley other people. It was still less harmful than the ciggarettes though.

Although, he supposed, it might be that pot was the ciggarettes of the new generation. Back when he had been younger, your doctor would prescribe your medicine with a little white cylinder dangling from his lips. Nowadays, that was the time to question his sanity. Still, he lit one up anyway. His lungs were already destroyed, not like he could do any more damage to cancer.

He chuckled at the thought of killing lung cancer by smoking. Companies could make a mint "we may give you cancer, but we kill it off too!" Would be healthier than a lot of drugs anyway.

The sun, he noticed, had almost set. It was a good time he thought. A very good time. His wife had been pronounced dead at dawn, the news of his daughter had reached him at midday. Now, he would round it all off, nice and evenly. The cigarette dangled down from his fingers as he tapped the last of the ash away, and he gazed out onto the stars, smoke curling out from his mouth.

Then he dropped it outside and returned to the kitchen. A small knife, he thought. Nothing like a big deboner or something along the lines if that. There was a small blade. Global Knives, made entirnely from stainless steel. It was the smallest knife of her first ever set, and it had not a single notch or chip in the blade.

Which was why when he acended the stairs and began to undress, he knew that it would serve him perfectly well.