by Gabrielle Idso
Dear Jorune,
Your mother asked me to write because I can’t talk and she thinks I’m dying soon. Maybe I am. 70 years in this world. Isn’t that something?
I could start with my birth, but that’s not really where I began. My mother carried all her eggs from the day she was born. I was inside her before I was anything. I like thinking about that. Makes 70 feel less final.
We called her Mimi. She lived with her parents and siblings in an L-shaped house that creaked when the wind blew hard. She was the only one who had kids. Just me.
Mimi’s grandmother told her about before. Cars everywhere. TV every night. Water you could drink without boiling it three times. Mimi told me those stories like they were fairy tales. Maybe they were.
She was a nurse. Good at it too. She stole medicine to sell so we could afford the medicine we needed. Circular, I know. That’s how it worked.
I was born wrong. My eyes didn’t focus. My tongue stuck to the bottom of my mouth. Grandma blamed the bombs from 40 years back. Said the chemicals got into the groundwater, into the blood, into the bones. My uncle had it worse. His hands were lumps of swollen flesh. His skull caved in on one side. He died when I was six.
I never met my father. He was the son of one of Mimi’s patients. They spent time together when she’d come to check on his father. When the old man died, he left. Joined the military efforts trying to clean up the coast. Mimi found out she was pregnant three months later. She didn’t go looking. What would she have said? “Come back, I’m having your baby, the world is ending, let’s pretend this matters?”
I don’t think about him much. Some people aren’t meant to be in your life. That’s fine.
I was born in February on a Wednesday. Mimi said the metal table was colder than the wind outside, and the wind was cold enough to crack skin. They cut her open because I wouldn’t turn. I was breech. Stubborn from the start.
My first memory: Grandpa holding me. His hands were enormous. I grabbed his finger and pointed toward the kitchen. Even then, I was hungry.
We were always hungry. The rations came for a while, then stopped when the farms went bad. Radiation in the soil. They gave us seeds instead. “Grow your own,” they said. We tried. Nothing grew. We dug holes in the yard and pissed in them, hoping that would help. It didn’t.
But I had a childhood. My grandparents loved me. Mimi loved me. My aunts and uncles came and went, and when they were there, they played with me. I made up games. I built cities out of rocks. I told myself stories. The air was thin, but I filled it with something.
The house: L-shaped. Front door at the center of the base. Right side: my grandparents’ room, and a bathroom that was really a closet with a hole. Long side: kitchen, sitting room, sleeping space for whoever needed it. Top of the L: the room I shared with Mimi. One bed, both of us in it.
The window faced the yard. Dust and plastic toys. Things from Mimi’s childhood, still sitting there because no one had the heart to throw them away. She grew up in that house. So did I.
I need to tell you about the day Aunt Sera died, and then I need to tell you about your mother. The part your mother doesn’t remember. The part I never told her.
First, Sera. You’ll hear other versions, softer ones, but I owe you the truth.
I was 14. Sera had been sick for two weeks—something in her lungs that wouldn’t let go. She needed antibiotics. Real ones, not the watered-down shit the distribution centers handed out. Mimi had connections, people who sold medicine on the side, but we didn’t have anything to trade. No food. No valuables. Nothing but time, and Sera was running out of that.
Mimi was working a double shift at the clinic. Grandpa had gone to the distribution center to fight for our rations. That left me.
There was a store three miles east, past the burned-out school. Not a real store, just someone’s garage with shelves. The owner was a man named Vikram. He kept medicines locked in a metal cabinet behind the counter. Everyone knew he had antibiotics. Everyone also knew he’d shoot you if you tried to take them.
I walked those three miles in the heat. The dust got in my eyes, under my glasses, made everything blurry. By the time I got there, my throat was raw from breathing it in.
The garage door was half-open. Vikram sat on a stool behind the counter, his back to the shelves. He was thinner than anyone I’d ever seen. His shirt hung off him like cloth on a wire frame. When I walked in, he turned, and I saw his mouth. Half his teeth were gone. The ones left were brown, loose in his gums.
“Water’s two rations,” he said. His voice scraped. “Medicine’s five.”
I didn’t have two. I didn’t have one.
He coughed deep, wet, the kind that sounds like drowning. When he pulled his hand away from his mouth, there was blood on his palm. He wiped it on his pants without looking at it. Like it happened all the time. Like it didn’t matter.
“You need something?” he asked.
I should’ve said no. Should’ve left. Instead, I said, “Antibiotics. For Sera.”
He laughed. It turned into another cough. More blood. “Everyone’s got a dying Sera.”
“I can pay later,” I said. “My mom’s a nurse. She can—”
“No credit.” He turned back around, dismissing me.
The cabinet was right there. Metal, but old. The lock looked flimsy. I could see the orange bottles through the gap in the door. I counted three. Maybe four.
Vikram’s shoulders shook with another cough. He bent forward, bracing himself on the counter. I could’ve done it then. Reached over. Grabbed one bottle. Run.
But I didn’t.
I stood there watching him cough blood into his hand, watching him wipe it on his pants, watching him struggle to breathe. He was dying. Maybe faster than Sera. Maybe slower. I don’t know. But I looked at him and thought: He’s someone’s Sera too.
I left.
I walked three miles back. The sun was setting by the time I got home. Grandpa was in the kitchen, rationing out the day’s haul—half a can of beans, some rice, a piece of dried meat. The meat was definitely a rat but they won’t say that today. Mimi wasn’t back yet.
I went to the room I shared with her. Sera was on a cot in the corner, the one we dragged in when she got too sick to sleep in the sitting room with everyone else. Her breathing sounded like Vikram’s. Wet. Struggling. For people who had so little access to water, we drowned everyday.
I sat next to her. Held her hand. It was hot. Too hot.
She died just after midnight. Mimi got home twenty minutes later. She’d managed to trade for half a dose of antibiotics. It was barely enough, but maybe enough. She stood in the doorway holding that little bottle, staring at Sera’s body.
“Where were you?” she asked me.
I told her. Not all of it. Just that I’d gone to Vikram’s. That I couldn’t get anything.
She didn’t ask why I came back empty-handed. Maybe she knew. Maybe she didn’t want to.
We buried Sera in the yard the next morning. Grandpa dug the hole. We didn’t have anything to mark it with, so we used one of the toys from Mimi’s childhood. A faded purple cat with a wide smile. We stuck it in the dirt and that was that.
Three weeks later, I walked past Vikram’s place. The garage door was closed. Someone had spraypainted DEAD across it in red letters. I don’t know who took his medicines. I don’t know if they needed them more than Sera did.
I just know I made a choice. I chose him over her. I told myself it was mercy. That I couldn’t steal from a dying man. That I was being good.
But goodness doesn’t keep people alive, Jorune. I learned that at 14. Sera died because I was good. Because I saw Vikram’s blood and his missing teeth and his shaking hands and I thought: He deserves to keep what’s his.
Maybe he did. But Sera deserved to live.
I don’t know if I made the right choice. I’ve had 56 years to think about it, and I still don’t know. Your mother would say I did the right thing. Mimi never said anything about it at all. Grandpa told me once, years later, that survival doesn’t have room for saints.
He was right.
But that’s not the worst thing I did, Jorune. That’s not why I’m writing this.
Your mother was three years old when the rations stopped completely. Not reduced. Stopped. The distribution centers closed. What was left of the government collapsed—not into revolution, into something worse. They turned on each other. Military factions fighting over what was left. We heard gunfire for weeks, then silence. Then nothing. Just us, starving.
It took two weeks before people started looking at each other differently.
I noticed it first with our neighbors. The Castellis lived four houses down. Maria Castelli used to bring us extra water when she had it. Her son played with your mother in the yard, back when there was energy for playing. But after the rations stopped, Maria stopped looking at me. She’d look at your mother instead. Her eyes would follow your mother across the yard, and there was something in that look that made my skin crawl.
Mimi saw it too. She didn’t say anything, but she started keeping your mother inside.
Three weeks in, someone killed and ate the Hendersons’ dog. We heard it happen. The dog screaming, then silence. The next morning, there were bones in their yard, picked clean. No one said anything. We all just looked at those bones and understood what was coming.
I had a dog. A mutt named Roux. He was old, half-blind, ribs showing through his fur. Your mother loved him. She’d curl up next to him at night, and he’d lick her face with his dry tongue.
I killed him on a Tuesday morning. Took him behind the house where your mother couldn’t see. Used a rock. It took three hits. I’m not going to describe it more than that, but I want you to know it wasn’t clean. It wasn’t quick. I’d never killed anything bigger than a rat before.
I brought the body back and told Mimi what I’d done. She didn’t cry. She just nodded.
We built a fire in the yard. Butchered Roux where everyone could watch. The Castellis came to their window. So did the Phuongs. The Ramirez family stood in their doorway, staring.
Your mother cried for Roux for three days. I let her. I didn’t explain. How do you explain to a three-year-old that you killed her dog so the neighbors wouldn’t kill her?
But it wasn’t enough.
Four days later, I woke up to voices outside. Low. Urgent. I looked out the window and saw them; Maria Castelli, Hector Ramirez, the Phuong father whose name I never learned. They were standing in our yard, looking at our house. Talking.
Mimi was already awake. She stood next to me, watching them.
“They’re going to come for her,” she said.
“I know.”
“Tonight, probably. When they think we’re asleep.”
I looked at your mother, curled up on the bed, sucking her thumb. She was so small. All bones and skin. Barely enough meat on her to be worth it, but that didn’t matter anymore. Hunger makes you stupid. Makes you desperate.
“We could leave,” I said.
“And go where?” Mimi asked. “You think the next neighborhood will be different?”
She was right. This was happening everywhere. The whole city was eating itself from the inside out.
“We stay,” Mimi said. “We fight.”
I won’t lie to you, Jorune. I thought about it. I thought about taking your mother and walking into their yard and handing her over. I thought about it for maybe two seconds, watching her sleep, thinking about how much easier it would be. How I wouldn’t have to watch her starve slowly. How maybe this was mercy.
Then she opened her eyes and looked at me. Just looked at me. She didn’t say anything. Just looked.
And I decided.
That night, they came. Three of them—Maria, Hector, and the Phuong father. They didn’t knock. Just tried the door. Mimi had barricaded it with furniture, so they went to the window.
I was waiting.
I had Grandpa’s old hunting knife. Eight inches, rusted at the hilt, but sharp. Mimi had a piece of rebar. We stood on either side of the window and waited.
When Hector’s hand came through, I stabbed it. He screamed. Pulled back. Then Maria started yelling, saying they just wanted to talk, they just needed help, please, they were starving.
I didn’t answer. Neither did Mimi.
They broke the window. The Phuong father climbed through first. Mimi hit him in the head with the rebar. He went down. Didn’t get up. I don’t know if he died right there or later. I didn’t check.
Maria came next. She had a knife smaller than mine, but she knew how to use it. She came at me fast. I wasn’t ready. She cut my arm, deep, from elbow to wrist. I still have the scar. You’ve seen it. I told you it was from barbed wire.
It wasn’t.
I stabbed her in the stomach. She fell. Hector ran.
We dragged the Phuong father’s body outside and left it in the yard as a warning. Maria crawled home. She died two days later. Infection, probably.
Your mother slept through all of it. When she woke up the next morning, Mimi told her we’d had a visit from wild dogs. That’s why the window was broken. That’s why there was blood on the floor.
Your mother believed her.
We didn’t eat Roux’s body. We couldn’t. By then, it had started to rot, and we didn’t have enough fuel to cook it again. So we threw it out. Let the neighborhood see us waste meat. Let them see what we were willing to lose to keep your mother safe.
After that, they left us alone. Not because they stopped being hungry. Because they knew we’d kill them.
That’s what survival cost, Jorune. That’s what your mother doesn’t know. She thinks I’m a good person. She thinks Mimi was a saint. She tells you stories about how we made it through, how we stayed strong, how love kept us alive.
Love didn’t keep us alive. Violence did. I killed a dog. I stabbed a neighbor. I watched her crawl home to die and felt nothing. Not guilt. Not regret. Just relief that your mother was still breathing.
I’m not telling you this to scare you. I’m telling you because you’re growing up in a world that’s stable now, and you need to know what that stability is built on. It’s built on people like me who chose their children over everyone else. Who killed. Who let people die. Who threw away mercy because mercy doesn’t fill stomachs or stop hands from reaching.
Your mother says I should write to you so you know me like she knew Mimi. But she’s wrong. She didn’t know Mimi. Not really. She knew the version of Mimi who sang lullabies and held her when she cried. She didn’t know the Mimi who stood with a piece of rebar and crushed a man’s skull to keep her granddaughter safe.
And she doesn’t know me.
But you will. Because I’m giving you the truth, and the truth is this: I would do it again. All of it.
I don’t regret it. I can’t. Regret means you wish you’d made a different choice, and I wouldn’t have. Not for anything.
But I need you to know what it cost. Not just Maria’s life or the Phuong father’s or Roux’s. But something in me. I stopped being good that night. I stopped believing goodness mattered. I became something that could kill and sleep fine afterward. And I stayed that way for the rest of my life.
This is one story, Jorune. One story out of hundreds. Thousands. Everyone in my generation has stories like this. We all killed something. Someone. We all made choices that let us sleep at night while other people stopped breathing.
And now they want us to forget.
They offer us medicines that make the memories softer. Treatments that smooth out the rough edges of what we did. Technology that washes your brain so clean you forget your own name, let alone the name of the neighbor you stabbed or the dog you killed or the child you watched starve because you couldn’t save them all.
Some people take it. I don’t blame them. Maria’s daughter took it. She came to see me five years ago, blank-faced and smiling, and said she forgave me for what happened to her mother. Said she didn’t even remember it clearly anymore. Said the treatments helped her “process the trauma” and “move forward.”
She doesn’t remember her mother crawling home to die. Doesn’t remember the blood trail in the street. Doesn’t remember standing at the window watching us, waiting to see if we’d come out so she could kill us too.
She’s happy now. Stable. Adjusted.
They want me to take it too. Your mother keeps bringing me pamphlets. “Memory integration therapy,” they call it. “Trauma resolution.” They say it’ll help me “find peace” in my final years.
I don’t want peace. I want to remember. Every single thing. Because if I forget, if we all forget, then who’s going to tell you what it cost? Who’s going to warn you that the stability you’re growing up in isn’t natural, isn’t permanent, isn’t free?
They’re building a world where no one remembers the hunger. Where people like me die off and take our stories with us, and your generation grows up thinking this is how it’s always been. Safe. Clean. Stable.
It’s not. It’s built on bones and blood and choices that would make you sick if you knew the details. And they want to erase those details. Sand them down. Make them smooth and easy and forgettable.
Don’t let them.
When I die—and I will, soon—they’re going to offer you and your mother the same thing. They’ll say, “Wouldn’t it be easier if you didn’t have to carry this? Wouldn’t you rather remember her happy, smiling, at peace?”
Say no.
Keep this letter. Hide it if you have to. Read it when you’re older and they try to tell you that people are fundamentally good, that society naturally trends toward justice, that we’ve “evolved past” the violence of my generation.
We haven’t evolved past anything. We’re just well-fed for now.
Your mother is good, Jorune. She’s kind. She wants to believe people are fundamentally decent, that we help each other, that love is enough. Let her believe that. She earned that belief by being protected from the truth.
But you’re my granddaughter. And you need to know that if the world breaks again—if the stability cracks, if the hunger comes back—goodness won’t save you. Your mother’s kindness won’t save her.
You’ll have to decide what you’re willing to do. What you’re willing to become.
I hope you never have to make that choice. I hope the world stays fixed. I hope you get to be seventy and die in your sleep, and the worst thing you ever did was lie to someone you loved.
But if you do have to choose—if someone comes for your child, or your mother, or yourself—don’t hesitate. Don’t be good. Don’t think about mercy.
Fight. Kill if you have to. Become the thing that keeps them alive.
The guilt will come later. It always does. But at least they’ll still be breathing when it arrives.
That’s all I have to say, Jorune. That’s my life. It wasn’t much, but it was mine, and I’m giving it to you so you know what your mother’s life cost. So you know what all of this costs.
She doesn’t need to know. She’s been protected from it her whole life, and maybe that’s mercy. Maybe she earned that protection by being three years old and helpless while I killed to keep her safe.
But you need to know. You need to remember. Even after I’m gone. Even after they try to make you forget.
Remember Maria. Remember Roux. Remember that your grandmother was not a good person, but she kept your mother alive, and that’s what mattered.
Don’t be good, Jorune. Be alive. Keep the people you love alive. And remember what it costs when you do.
Love,
__________
AUTHOR BIO
Gabrielle Idso grew up on Washington State’s coast and lives in Tacoma, where she teaches elementary school. She holds a degree in Creative Writing from Southern New Hampshire University. Her fiction has appeared in Iamb Literary Magazine.
