40 Hours

[kaige68.livejournal.com]

Your challenge (should you choose to accept it) is to crank out 100 words or 1 graphic inspired by the word:
Marathon

Comments

marathon, bar, formula, multiply, fraction, cenotaph

[agdhani.livejournal.com]

They had talked for hours, as evening stretched towards midnight, of the years of living that had come between them. Of Yin’s ongoing efforts to research the plethora of ailments the Undoing had created that continued to multiply year after year. Only a fraction of those who came to her could be helped, but a fraction was better than letting each one die with no effort made to save them. One formula after other had to be restructured to replace so much of the medicinal agents lost to the Undoing, and though none of those things had saved Hu, Yin refused to give up the quest for something that might have done so, if only she had worked harder, longer. If only he had lived to see a cure or stabilizing agent generated.
QiangXu’s life had held little to tell. His search for those same answers had come in the volumes stashed away in the Queens College library, with any potential details copied and sent back to LaGuardia, to Yin, via the one man who had continued to connect them until he no longer could.
Roland Marrock.
That those shared morsels of knowledge had come to her via the husband she had sent away in an effort to protect him, her, and their child, drained some of the long-lingering resentment from her until they had bid one another good night and she had retreated to her cot to sleep. QiangXu had been granted the gift of spreading his sleeping roll in front of her wood stove, but after too many hours spent tossing and turning, he quietly rose and slipped out of the hut to clear his head and walk between the rows of chaff and harvested stalks of grain and corn that would be mulched for animal fodder and fuel for fires.
At the eastern edge of the compound, at the edge of the growing house where a cenotaph stood testimony to individuals lost in the days of the Undoing, men and women who had given their lives in a marathon effort to allow mankind to hold to some semblance of dignity and humanity. He wrapped his gloved hands around the icy metal bar that served as a barrier between the memorial and the dregs of humanity, staring at an oil flame kept burning at its base that struggled not to blow out in the dying gasps of an unfruitful snowstorm.
Would he have had the courage to do as these people had done? Strive for peace? Fight for what was right? Give his life for an unattainable ideal?
Was that what he was doing now?