The Hauntings of Playing God (The Great De-Evolution) by Chris Dietzel

unfinished before he died. She and the people she cares for are stationed on a remote moon base, isolated from the rest of mankind. That is why she cannot leave the room with her Blocks. Try as she might, she is unable to forget she is in the remnants of a gutted gym, not a far-away crater.
    Every fantasy has a problem. The historical, the pure fiction, it doesn’t matter. They are all counterfeit and, eventually, begin to unravel. And each time her daydreams collide with her real life, she is left worse off than before because she realizes her circumstances will never improve. They cannot be altered, can only get worse.
    As a nurse, waiting for Churchill’s boats to arrive and save them, she cares for the wounded. “I’ll get you home safely,” she tells one. “Don’t worry, the allies will regroup and defeat Hitler,” she tells another. She calls her Blocks sir, salutes them, pretends their frail bodies are the result of limited rations or injuries in the trenches. The thunder above her is not thunder at all, but German shells bombarding their encampment.
    Although she sometimes feels silly putting on this act, it adds a little excitement to a day’s worth of chores. Not a single soldier goes unattended. Each will be cleaned and cared for as if the soldiers’ loved ones were right there doing the nursing.
    But in the morning, exhausted after a day of ensuring there are no more casualties, of putting her head down each time a bomb goes off overhead, she looks around and sees the same track and field banners hanging above her that have always been there. The banners are covered with a lifetime of dust, are barely legible, yet they still hang overhead to remind her of what high schoolers used to do with their time. Some of the felt letters are missing. A random R, a misplaced C. She finds them, periodically, after they have fallen from the banner and drifted down to the floor. Although not a historian, she can guarantee none of the soldiers at Dunkirk ever looked up and saw a banner declaring who the state champion was in track and field.
    In one corner of the group home, parts of the old factory line are pushed into a pile, a reminder of when hundreds of men and women constructed food processors here. Maybe, if she squints her eyes, the scrap metal can be confused for mortars or spare parts for a tank. It always seems to look like remnants of a factory, though.
    To add to this, there are no other nurses. Nor does she see soldiers coming and going, checking on their friends periodically in-between preparing for the retreat. Boats never arrive. The storm passes; the blitzkrieg is gone for one more night. The Germans have stopped firing on them for a while. She is returned to the only life she has for herself. History will not remember her as gallant. Sore, she pushes herself out of bed and begins caring for the Blocks as nothing more than an old woman who has outlived everyone else.
    It’s no more useful to envision herself as Mother Teresa, caring for the poor and the sick. Like those near death, her Blocks do not cry for help. They do not ask for anything. But while she is old and unbelievably wrinkled—that much of the alternate life is easy to believe—she lacks any kind of faith. She cannot, in good conscience, tell her sick and dying that God loves them, that they will soon be in heaven where they will never feel pain again, because she doesn’t know if this is true or not.
    A wet compress is wiped across a Block’s head as the air conditioning struggles to keep the enormous room comfortable. She offers little affirmations of love in each person’s ear. Little additions to her care, such as wet cloths, whispers of love, gently rubbing their hands, only put her behind schedule. She tries not to notice the day slipping away just because she is offering love to each person. For a few hours, nothing is more important than feeling as if each Block is not only being cared for, but is receiving true