Emilia.            
            I found three pairs early that evening. They were lined up in a row behind the loose slat in the cupboard, right where my uncle hides the tuna cans that he’s not supposed to feed to the cat. I stood there for quite a while, staring at the small round shapes, although I couldn’t quite make out the colors in the half-dark. There was the familiar jolt, the surprise followed by recognition, as it always happens. And, as always, something sweet and sandy burst in my throat, shrinking back into a tight ball of treacle. I clenched my teeth as the ball dissolved, and then I winced. It tasted like the metal of all memory, ferrous and red. 
            I was looking at children’s shoes. That’s it: children’s shoes.
            They turn up in the unlikeliest of corners, in the houses of people whose children have long gone. The shoes are the size the children wore at their loveliest, at the point parents feel such utter certainty of loss that they welcome fear as a respite from their terrible knowledge.  
            We tried to make sense of it, but eventually realized that the shoes themselves don’t matter. The joke would be as pointless with any other child object—a yo-yo, two rag dolls, one blue marble. And so the empty punchline is played on my uncle, and on the remnants of his wife, who was also a mother of three, and on the ones who made me. These small, shiny parcels have been turning up everywhere, in all the neatly lined-up houses in so many rows of so many towns, and sometimes they appear right before the scourge hits, so that when a parent finds them
            on a high shelf,
            or waiting patiently by the garden hose,
            or maybe even on a freshly made bed,
            he shall know without a doubt that white-hot sweet metal loss has paid him a visit.

Samuel.  
            The third Tuesday of the month is Ride Your Own Pony Day at Camp Sojourner, and I get good tips. There’s a lot of generosity going around on the third Tuesday. But the good will evaporates a few days later, when many reach expiration, and our rays of sunshine turn gray. No more chubby cheeks, you’ll see. It’s always a drag on team morale. There are other feelings, too, feelings like dread and pity and such, and some employees don’t wait for protocol, taking matters in their own hands instead and disposing of the damaged goods behind the stables.
            Compressed parenting means cramming as many rites as possible into these weeks.  Rites, as we know, define lives. That’s what the boss says and that’s what we believe. Repeat Genitors have become experts at it, and they trust us to provide the best service on a consistent basis through every cycle. Our camp offers the widest variety of activities and learning opportunities that we know parents want for their child. There is virtually no limit to this virtual paradise created especially for your fleeting bundle of joy. They all send their kids to us, to Camp Sojourner, with good reason.  
            You should see their faces when they get to ride their own pony. Jeremiah leads them into the riding ring –he’s one of the few kids who’ve gone on past expiration– and they just squeal with glee. Jeremiah gets a bit misty-eyed, too: he remembers being that age, just a few months back, and he gets so excited for the kids. And who wouldn’t! Each of them is as unique as a snowflake, I like to say. That’s what I tell people: they’re one of a kind.  
            It took us a while after the scourge took the country by surprise six years ago, but now we know a blessing when we see one. It’s a chance to fill our lives with beautiful snowflakes, and to make a decent living while we’re at it, bringing smiles to everyone, doing it all over again every few weeks, and getting better at it every time.  
            That’s why I love the third Tuesday, and now that you work here you will, too, my child.

Dr. Clay.            
            Before the scourge, people say before recounting a memory of time. Before is the time back when there was time, what people cry out for in their sleep. Before is before the lapse. And yes, one could speak of a fall, but that sounds biblical, and this is not the apocalypse. What we have here now is no dystopia. There are no totalitarian regimes eating their own until there is just one (or maybe two, two of each) left. No, such a scenario would at least imply hope, or a fight for redemption, or even the possibility of revenge, but this is different. What we live now is a permanent after that does not move forward.
            Some believe we have lost a dimension, and that events are no longer linked. Emilia says we live in a room where the nouns have killed off all the verbs. Others say it’s the ultimate joke:  time has been unleashed from space, it has gone insane, it has us in its grip, and we can’t complain to the gods because time took them, too. Time has stopped for the men and for the women, but it slashes through our children in a cycle. That’s the only certainty we have, the only remnant of time’s behavior as we used to know it. Our comfort lies in knowing that the cycle stops when death wins over decay, but this victory happens so rarely that most of us have lost faith in it.
            The children don’t stop coming to us. They keep getting born, growing old, and dying. In their compressed lifespan we turn once and again, even as we remain in the after, every second and every year, since we do not age.  
            Now here’s a problem: our language doesn’t work anymore. We don’t have the words we need to speak of this, because we still refer to days and lease terms and last week, when none of that exists anymore, at least not for the women and the men.    
            At some point, around six years ago, children everywhere began to get sick. Without warning, in a few weeks’ span, they all shriveled, from the Finns to the Malay. We eventually called this the scourge.  
           There’s always an event, isn’t there, that marks the end of a time, and this time for good.  An event like that needs naming. But remember that this is no dystopia, and there won’t be any running through windy, empty, newspaper-littered streets, so we refuse to capitalize it. We call it the scourge, and we spell it out small and hard.  
            The children were diagnosed with a particularly aggressive form of progeria, even though few had the genetic markers. Some lived for months –and observers noted that the condition progressed at slightly slower rates in tropical climates– but none were spared. Many parents had more children after the first batch died, and none of those were spared, either. But as this was happening, all adults, childbearing or not, stopped aging. It seemed that any human over eighteen years of age at the onset of the scourge was safe. At first this just meant that they had time on their side; they could keep reproducing if they wanted, spawning batch after batch of soon-to-be-geriatric offspring in a seemingly endless loop, fueled by a hope for difference, for an exception that never came.  
            Now, some of these adults have died. But dying comes in randomized bursts, so that every single one of its manifestations for the past six years has been sudden, and, of course, welcome. And something else has arrived with this. People know that sudden death will strike, and this certainty has given them the privilege to ignore it. The fear that waiting brings is over, as there is no end to anticipate. The same people who would have confronted their impending passing whenever collective or personal tragedy touched their lives, and so would have practiced tired rituals –hugging their children a little closer after every instance of a school shooting, speaking platitudes at funerals, taking to heart the idea that it might all end tomorrow– are now freed, finally, in absolute randomness. And Repeat Genitors are the freest of all. They beget and consume the goods needed to love their senile children, cycle after cycle: a present that breaks their indenture to mortality.  
            But once death comes to an adult, there are celebrations the likes of which we hadn’t seen since the before. Relatives of the suddenly dead cry with relief, banners go up, silence and joy overwhelm their neighbors, monks chant. The now that never changes for the fully grown, the now that is only punctuated by the decomposition of their young, is finally torn, if only for a moment, with the death of a man or the death of a woman.  

(From Memory, Memoir, Memorial: One Doctor’s Quest, Price Publishers, Offtime Unit 9)  

Emilia.
            There were two children. I saw them clearly, and I spoke to them and they spoke to me, clearly. But I seem to have been alone, and I seem to have known at that precise moment that it would be no use trying to get any of my classmates to remember, even if they were all around me on that heavy yellow day. 
            It was hot and we were playing on the baseball field. We might have been doing something else, it was gym class after all: we would always walk from the elementary school building to the field across from the high school and do the things kids do at gym class, which might have included playing some game. We wore skorts and striped knee-high socks. My mother had promised to get me new sneakers that week: these were getting tight.  I looked up and felt a thin ray of light shoot right through my temple. It was hot.
            I wandered off, but I wasn’t alone, I know that much. One or two kids came along, and we walked over to the far edge of the field, where the cyclone fence met with an abandoned property overgrown with ferns and tall weeds. The house was still there, charcoal gothic and creaking with rust and faint moans. Just as you’d expect, 
            planks warped,
            edges coiled,
            a faint patina of phosphorus limning the edges of still air,
            a structure (the house, these letters)
            with no more screws left to
            turn.  
            I felt the house wobble and hum like a mirage in heat, sucking the shine out of that yellow day. And as I paced in dotted lines at the very edge of the mowed grass I came upon the fence, and touched the searing sweet metal, and saw the children, who looked me in the eye and smiled.
            This is not a scene that turns in time, but a scent and its warm ribbon. The children smelled of something for which I still had no name. I somehow knew, even then, that this smell was not to be allowed in these bodies. It wasn’t until some years later that I recognized it for what it was, the thing wrapped up in a bundle of dense vapor and heavy eyes.
            I am there now. I don’t recall it because I can’t evoke it, and I gave up on trying to recount what happened, because this is not a memory. Instead, I am there, breathing them.  
            Now.
            As I approach the fence they walk up to me, hand in hand, until we’re so close that it would be a matter of choice –the only choice in this whole affair, it seems– to join tip to tip, fingers gingerly grazing. But I stop for a moment, jerking backwards just a bit so that I can focus to look at them. Their skins glisten and sag under the weight of their eyes. They’re both wearing t-shirts that must have been white at some point and are now muted with use and dirt, and laced-up Buster Browns that seem too small for their feet. I recognize these objects that cover flesh and joint, layered and posed carelessly, like the folded edges of paper doll clothes.
            Then I catch the air. They should smell of grass and the sweat of outdoor play, as we all did. Instead, what opens up there is a thing that grasps and hits and holds, flower of decay bright, scent humming in my temples like open treble clefs, and I can’t help but place my face close to the fence, trying to drink in as much as I can without touching them, a burst echoed and pleasured, smelling with abandon. I see that they know what they do. They see that I see, and come over a little closer yet, placing their necks at just the right angle for me, barely a centimeter away, aiming to please. I breathe in the fetid water of abandoned lily vases, the dregs of a vial of ripe musk oil, the remains of a scene, years later recalled but now anticipated –now seen– in which I found myself in a cocoon. I felt an immense happiness on the day I realized, years later, what the scent was, and I have spent most of my time since trying to meet them again, for I know they exist, and I am certain that these lovely children are the ones responsible for the scourge. 

Dr. Clay.
            Agents point to the unsolved children apparitions of the 1970’s as a possible catalyst for the plague that hit us years later. But these periodical, unexplained sightings, which raised no suspicions until months after the fact, when those who claimed to have seen the kids could not stop talking about them, are just a correlation. It’s never been proven that the sightings caused, or even announced, the scourge. Unlike some of their UFO-viewing counterparts, the witnesses of child sightings were always alone at the time of the encounters: they had no companions to verify their claim and no associations of sympathizers, and perhaps because of this their obsession with the event grew a layer of sadness not found in the more paranoid, but supportive, guilds of the paranormal. Once a witness mentioned their encounter with a child to their friends or to the authorities, and took them to the house where they swore the child lived, a child they had never seen before but who’d seemed perfectly at home in the front yard –and who had spoken in a natural manner of the lightning bugs he had caught the night before and the swing set he wanted for Christmas– the friends or authorities invariably found that it was a pleasant old lady who lived by herself in the house, and that she hadn’t even opened her door to a single cub scout in the past year. When these friends and authorities saw no traces of kids anywhere, and no reported missing children in the area (a common source of confusion and false hope, especially in this age of milk carton alerts) they all knew –all of them, including the witness– that this was a case of oculus infantiae, as it came to be known in the psychiatric community, but that little could be done to convince said witness of its hallucinatory nature.

(From Memory, Memoir, Memorial: One Doctor’s Quest, Price Publishers, Offtime Unit 9)  

Samuel.           
            We had a special guest at Camp Sojourner today. Frederic Price, CFO of Eternal Snapshot, came on a surprise visit and raffled off five discount passes to the studio headquarters in Purchase. The kids were thrilled. Why, I have to admit I was a bit star-struck myself. Price has single-handedly transformed the industry. He revitalized infantile dead photography, retrieving it from its nineteenth-century waste bin and adding cutting-edge technology and fresh attitude from the upcoming twenty-first. That’s what the promotional brochure he dropped off at the office says, anyway. It was Parents’ Day today, too, so we were quite busy making sure everyone enjoyed themselves and the lucky winners didn’t leave without their discount pass. 
            I know of parents who have whole walls filled with portraits of the passed, Repeat Genitors who love their temporary charges so carefully, so gladly, that they have arranged for regular appointment times at the studio, where they spend a full half hour posing in their Sunday best: mother, father, and child-body dressed, propped up, eyes closed, smiles open.
            If you’re lucky, you might be at the center of one of those pictures, my child. Someday soon after your work here is done.

Dr. Clay.            
            The child came to my practice thirty-one days ago, to be exact. He’s the second one –the younger one of the only pair known to have immunity to the scourge in the city. I’ve been fortunate enough to treat these two children, although I must admit that treatment is not exactly what I’ve done in my empirical studies for the past six years, as prodding, picking, staring, and annotating the lives of these curious survivors is more like it.
            The first one, Emilia, came to me at the onset, as an inexplicably unaffected fifteen-year old. Her two younger siblings had already fallen ill and died. Her parents reacted as expected: shortly after the deaths they fell into the usual wells of grief and refused to climb out. Within a few months they were declared clinically insane, and she went to live with her aunt and uncle, whose three young children were also stricken, one by one, in the space of a year. Emilia had already begun her sessions with me, and it’s only natural that her weekly office visits transferred into the laboratory. It’s also logical –necessary, considering the circumstances of a fertile young woman probably immune to the most catastrophic event known to man as of yet, and quite possibly hiding the key to escaping from this strange new ice age– that I had to accept my duties and responsibilities, and that these consultations extended to daily sessions in my private quarters, and that it’s absolutely mandatory to keep her safe until she finally bears fruit.

(Unauthorized notes, from Memory, Memoir, Memorial: One Doctor’s Quest, 2nd ed., Price Publishers, Offtime Unit 9)  

Emilia.            
            I speak to myself in the old fashion from time to time. I use words like years and soon and phrases like used to, which my eighth-grade Spanish teacher taught us to express in the imperfect tense. You can’t tell a story in Spanish without mastering the differences between the imperfect and the preterite tenses. I was a good Spanish student. Now few people speak it, or any of the highly tense-marked languages.
            I tell myself that I am twenty-one years old. I keep track of lunar phases and planetary rotations, just for the sake of maintaining some of these cancelled forms of knowledge. If this were before, I’d be twenty-one. In the after I am an eternal fifteen, and my body will be fifteen until I receive the one mercy for which we all yearn. Dr. Clay has told me that I do not age, that I am in the same pocket of stasis –-pocket of stasis, I like that awkward string of letters– as all the Eighteen-and-Overs entered when the scourge hit. He tells me that I need to take care of this body, all shivers and dew –all shivers and dew, he says with a smile– so that it can carry out its purpose. Carrying out and carrying forth, bringing out a child unscathed.
            Dr. Clay is a meticulous worker, always keeping up with the latest research, hoping against hope that something called legacy will remain after him. A good man, I think. I ponder these things during every single session. Session after session of meticulous diligence. And no fruit yet.

Samuel.            
            I have been going behind the stables to get goods for quite some time now, my child, and, to be honest with you, Dr. Clay hasn’t had much success in finding sources of serum in any of the tissue samples I’ve brought him. ”Sources of serum” and “tissue samples” are his words, of course, not mine. The last time I trudged up that hill with a package I thought that it was only a matter of time before he’d hit the jackpot. He already had Emilia, you see: all he needed was a live child who exhibited the disorder but hadn’t manifested fully, one for whom time had slowed down. His words again, not mine. I listen to him vent and I memorize what he says because I think I might have to use it someday. And what I’ve been seeing this past few weeks tells me that my gift to him last month will not go to waste.
            You are taking Jeremiah’s place for the very simple reason that Jeremiah is serving a higher purpose now. Everyone assumes he’s received the one mercy, and that it only took a little longer than usual, and that I am training you like I’ve trained so many others. This is not true.  Jeremiah is alive. That is, he exists. You, on the other hand, will be trained, of course, and you will do your work well, and you will enjoy Ride Your Own Pony Days, and you will die soon thereafter.
            But something tells me we’ve found him, at last. He who will pull us out of the scourge.  Who would have thought he’d be living near the stables? Who would have guessed he’d be one of ours? Now Dr. Clay can do his work.  Now we wait, my child.

Dr. Clay.
            Jeremiah poses a fascinating problem that I had long suspected existed, and which has changed the course and focus of my research. He doesn’t die. 
            Instead, he continues to age, his progeria manifesting so mildly that at times it seems to recede, though its path is clear. When Samuel mentioned that one of his staffers, “a kid gone on past expiration,” kept working despite the usual increase in senescent characteristics (wrinkling, low muscle tone, severe spinal curvature), I was cautiously optimistic about possible immunity. Once he brought him in, I was able to observe protracted degeneration (shrinking, dementia, diminished collagen production), but also a rate of decay that was a full sixty-five percent slower than that of the typical transient child. Tithonus’ damnation. I was elated. 
            I immediately set to work, charting Emilia’s cycle, adjusting her sometimes unstable luteinizing hormone, tinkering with the restraining straps on the ergonomic fertilization chair I had modified for Jeremiah. I must admit to a bit of wistful disappointment over the end of my sessions with Emilia, whom I have grown to view with a fondness that surely stems from more than our regular intercourse. A clinician’s work does not necessarily preclude enjoyment of duty, and I also dare say Emilia has been a willing subject. She knows what’s at stake. 
            So now I hand her over to him, and him to her, and I will spend the next couple of days overseeing a coupling my predecessors might have condemned, since they never lived through the hell that has been our home for the past six years. Six, perhaps so.

(Unauthorized notes, from Memory, Memoir, Memorial: One Doctor’s Quest, 2nd ed., Price Publishers, Offtime Unit 9)  

Emilia.
            Dr. Clay just told me that the coupling was a success. “Just imagine, Emilia. We might break through evanescence. We could have time again. Time! We might never again face the brief children. Wouldn’t that truly be the one mercy!” I have never seen him so excited. And I’m part of it, I, who saw the children and burrowed in their scent, I, who picked up their shoes and knew the loss. I am carrying the child, the one who will live and die, as it should be.                                    
            I will speak in tenses then,                                      
            in months
            tensed,                                                   
            in time then.

Samuel.
            The child was born today. I must admit I felt something different, something from the before. I think it’s joy! Dr. Clay sent out a press release to all of the news outlets, and word spread quickly. Camp Sojourner will close, Eternal Snapshot will shutter; Emilia is the Mother; the cycles are at an end! Dr. Clay was smart enough to extract Jeremiah’s seed, a bit each day, and to store it in the vault before he withers. And when this child and the others grow, smooth and strong, they will populate the earth. And we will forget the scourge ever came.

            The door to the lab was jammed that morning, so he forced it open. The air smelled of petals in vase water, thick and slow. Samuel walked over to the metal examination table. A gob of sweet acid burst in his throat.  
            He howled.

            On the table was a pair of children’s shoes.