She had developed diabetic ketoacidosis and the vet was not optimistic.

Each of the four days she laid on the bathroom floor, I took a shower because I was hungover and stinky, and each of those days, she crawled to the shower door, leaning against it. I suppose it was because she wanted to be close to me. That horrible morning, though, she was even slower, so she was still crawling when I opened the shower door. She pulled against the unforgiving tile with her front paws, her back legs sliding uselessly behind. And I knew I couldn’t help her anymore.

She was the boss.

I was crying, but I forced myself to be rational, hungover or not. She deserved that.

I found it strange to see her back legs so limp. One of them was a cyborg leg. When she was a kitten, her brother had thrown her down the stairs, breaking her back-right knee. In that moment, which sits in my mind so many years later, she made a hideous sound unlike any sound I’ve ever heard before or since, and I went to the staircase to see her leg dangling over her head. I ran down, grabbed her, and drove 80 miles-per-hour to the vet, where she received her artificial knee. It cost $3,000 and served her well for a decade and a half.

My sweet, murderous, bionic cat, struggling to cross two feet of cold tile toward the man who had saved her once, but had failed her now. Naked and dripping, I bent down and kissed her on her head. She looked up at me, her eyes struggling to open.

Penny ruled our house with an iron fist, smacking any of the boys who got out of line, especially after the trauma she experienced as a child. Ours is a household of boys: two aging human men, two aging male dogs, and now one aging cat, also male.

We no longer have the boss.

I’ve never lived without a woman in charge. My family has a long line of matriarchy, a legacy I am grateful for every day of my life. I would not be the man I am if it hadn’t been for all the bosses. I sometimes wonder how the men I know who were raised by strong men function in the world. It seems like a disadvantage. My own father is a kind man, but he was never in charge. Thank god.

Patriarchy handicaps a happy life. Women make a boy strong.

When I was in 5th grade, my mother taught me how to punch an asshole in the face.

Long before I was born, my great-grandmother shot rattlesnakes from atop her mare Mischief in middle-of-nowhere Montana.

When I was a teenager, my gun-toting great-grandmother’s daughter taught me that two men sometimes live together down the block, and the word you use to refer to them is “neighbors.” Dad had a different word.

It’s been almost two months now since we drove Penny to her death. The pet carrier is still sitting in the dining room where I deposited it after we came home without her. I sometimes hear her little chirp of acknowledgement when I walk in the back door, and it takes a second or two to remember she’s not there. I invented the sound in my brain, which still hasn’t accepted her absence as reality.

We’ll probably need to get another creature to live in our house. I’m not ready for that yet, but there are just too many boys around here.

Sitting on the deck, overlooking a lake created through the erasure of multiple communities, I am overwhelmed by my privilege. When Grandpa and Grandma bought this land, they were the beneficiaries of the repair necessitated after decades of poverty and war. They lived those decades, so I understand their desire for a calm spot in the woods. A hundred years before their trauma, other traumas happened on this land, so my annoyance at the broom is pathetic.

Castle Rock Lake is the fourth largest lake in Wisconsin, a state lousy with lakes. I’ve barely touched the water in 20 years, preferring to look at it, like it’s a stolen art piece in the British Museum. It isn’t. It’s just a lake created by a vision of American progress that existed in the 1950s.

There are still houses under that water. People my mom’s age watched as the water covered their childhood homes. Before them, Ho-Chunk people were forced off this land. I’m friends with some of their descendants, but I met my friends in Minnesota, not where their great-great-grandparents lived, where I sit on a beautiful deck watching the water.

The only place I feel fully embodied, fully connected to the ground beneath my feet, is here. Stolen land. That seems worthy of consideration, but every time I try to consider it, I fall into a spiral of frustration and confusion that leaves me looking at the water, a thoughtless dummy wanting history to go away.

History doesn’t go away.

There’s a little grove of trees between the house and the lake. My mom hates it, and I’m considering just chopping it down. They aren’t big, and I could handle it on my own. But I like the gunk, the unintentional trees interrupting the view. I like the stupid randomness of nature around this place.

Grandpa forced me to drive the boat. We hit the wake from the boat in front of us and my little body bounced out of the pilot’s seat. Grandpa grabbed the wheel and the throttle and righted us. He didn’t tell anyone because I was too young to be controlling the boat, and he knew it. He covered for me a lot. If others in the family knew about our shenanigans, we’d both get yelled at. That’s a lesson he taught me early.

I know enough to know I don’t know how to take care of this place. Last night, I did something I never do. I prayed. Not to God, but to Grandpa. I asked him what to do with the privilege and place he gave me. Could I pull one more trick and make the bad stuff go away, like he did? I asked him what to do while I’m standing on this stolen land, feeling rooted and stable, the sun hitting my face tempered by the breeze coming from the lake.

He didn’t answer. So, this morning I swept the deck.

I don’t stop at the resort, just weaving through the greenery toward town. Town is mostly vacant, which is unsettling, but it is Tuesday, after all. There’s a parking space directly in front of the particular patio I’m seeking. The particular patio, perched on the cliff above the river, breaks my heart and rebuilds it every time I sit there, a process I’ve subjected myself to periodically for the last few years. I can’t remember what was here when I was a child, but it certainly wasn’t this.

The patio is the conflagration of all the weird paradoxes of this paradoxical town. The fake green of the concrete beneath my feet clashes with the real green of the elms and oaks across the river, so dense I can’t imagine how the striated sandstone can hold all the roots. I imagine the underground battle for space and sovereignty. Beneath my feet and the preposterous green concrete is Ho-Chunk land, but you wouldn’t know it unless you knew it. Since the loggers came in the early 19th century, businessmen have built businesses upon the soil, layering commerce over commerce over commerce, lacquering the land. Layers on layers of entertainment staring at the ancient layers of the sandstone cliffs, staring back in judgment. Brothels rebranded as family-friendly attractions, fudge shops resisting time across the street from the Dells version of the club, where I sit wondering when the customers will come. I hope they don’t because this frantic, make-believe town is better when it’s quiet enough to hear the family of ducks slapping their feet against the ancient, sacred water, even as the train passes on the elevated track, its mechanisms interrupting the swaying trees.

Wilson Phillips comes on the sound system because I’m now the old guard, not Grandpa, and if this place knows how to do anything, it knows how to operationalize nostalgia among people with an extra $20 in their pocket. A duckling veers off course, and the whole crew waits as it sorts things out. You got this, buddy. Don’t cha know, things will change, things will go your way, if you just hold on for one more day?

I cooked myself enough in May that my hands are starting to look like Grandpa’s, a strange brown that emerges when we let our Nordic skin connect to the sun. I remember him sinking into the water, and I wonder if he knew about the layers it contained, the layers under the concrete, the sandstone’s weight.

What was here when I was a kid was the Kilbourn Inn, as the sign across the patio reminds me. The Kilbourn Inn is no longer here, but the sign is. The desire for permanency is so strange in this place whose entire identity seems to be unreality. The ducks are gone, so I guess the kid figured it out. They’ve moved onward, down the river. I should close my tab.

This summer, I will offer three 4-week academic writing boot camps. These are opportunities to write in community with guidance from an experienced writing professor, dissertation coach, and editor. Participants will receive real-time feedback, reviews, one-on-one coaching sessions, and a 10% discount on my standard editorial services.

This opportunity is appropriate for both graduate students and established researchers.

Each session will be limited to 12 participants, so interested writers should register soon. Please share the attached flyer widely with students, scholars, and doctoral candidates who may be interested.

I continue to offer my standard editorial and coaching services. Feel free to share my email (kevin@calamuswriting.com) and website (www.calamuswriting.com/academy) with anyone who might be looking for writing support.

Thank you!

Kevin

She made eye contact with me, and I did something I don’t do typically. I flipped her off. Both hands.

Shocked at my own meanness, I pulled my hands to my chest and mouthed “I’m sorry.”

I was sorry. She had made the mistake. And then I made another one.

In the moment between my middle fingers raising and my regret for doing it, a whole mental process occurred. She’s my neighbor. I noted her Minnesota license plate. I’m not mean to my neighbors as a rule, but the rage I felt was undeniable and required reflection.

She was distracted. All Minnesotans are currently distracted. The terror we have lived through in the last few months is messing with our synapses. We are generally kind people. But trauma changes cognition.

I’m reinvesting in my anger, and I think she is too. I need to not do that.

When I got home, I did what I have been doing a lot in 2026. I listened to my friends’ band, The Gated Community. Specifically, I listened to “Hope to Hell,” a song written in response to Operation Metro Surge. It’s weird to hear my friends sound so mad. They are nice people.

The lyrics include “I hope to hell that the temperature starts warming.” It’s kind of a tired metaphor that we’ve all been using. The paramilitary goons started showing up in December, they started murdering people in January, and they kept up their presence throughout February. Those are months of deep pride for Minnesotans. They are hard months.

Tens of thousands of Minnesotans marched in downtown Minneapolis in -20-degree temperatures the day after I heard an ICE agent complain about the weather in a dive bar in West Saint Paul. I rolled my eyes at the goon, and the next day my neighbors showed the monsters from Texas and Florida and Arkansas what Minnesotans are like.

Cold.

My friend sings, “so damn tired of being nice today,” and I know he’s singing about more than niceness. I hope the woman in the four-way stop intersection has a nice day today. She and I are neighbors. We are Minnesotans. And holy shit have I learned how valuable my neighbors are.

I asked him to send me a private chat message, rather than having the conversation while other students could hear. You wouldn’t believe some of the things students tell me about their lives, so this conversation could have been about anything. Any bad thing I could imagine, and I have a particular skill for imagining bad things.

So, feeling like a chatbot, I read and typed rather than listening and speaking. The topic was the most common bad thing students talk to me about: late work. He’s a great student. It’s not going to be a problem. But he was scared, explaining in writing rather than speaking that the mental toll of the semester was turning him into the kind of student he didn’t want to be.

I could hear the words I was seeing. The classroom was emptying and despite the silence left behind them, I heard his shaking voice. I typed back, frantically, desperately trying not to confess that I’ve decided I can’t continue doing this either. That I don’t care about the lateness of his paper. That the mental toll of the semester broke me, too. That I likely have 3 weeks left of my career in higher education.

“Cut yourself some slack. This has been harder than it should have been. Forgive yourself because I already did,” I wrote before I realized the tears were showing up.

The truth is, it’s getting too hard to present the optimism young people deserve. They are owed hope. We’ve given them despair.

But then again, I deserve hope, too.

The particular university I was at this morning has instituted a hiring freeze for full-time teaching positions, foreclosing any shot I have of finding stability or safety there. The university across town where I’ll be tomorrow hasn’t formalized its freeze, but it’s understood. It’s always understood.

The adjunctification of the education workforce means I no longer have the financial or emotional resources to support students the way they need to be supported. I’m not unique. My colleagues struggle to smile. When they do it’s usually accompanied by gallows humor or a tone of desperation.

The Federal government turning my workplaces into potential war zones may have been the last straw for me. The psychological impact of Operation Metro Surge won’t be fully understood for years, but those of us who walked past SUVs full of anonymized, masked immigration agents with giant guns on a daily basis, wondering if today is the day they bring those guns into the building, understand quite a bit.

The student posted a heart emoji on the last message I sent. I closed Zoom. I closed Moodle. I ate my sandwich. And then I realized I had another conundrum.

I teach students about language. I try, sometimes successfully, to teach them about time management. I teach them the definition of semiotics.

I also teach them how to be in the world. That’s part of the job too. How could I write those words to my student and not practice them in my own life? What a hypocrite I’ve become.

I walked down the hall to my next classroom and wrote a letter I will never send. It’s addressed to the student I text-chatted with this morning. I tell him the truth. I tell him I’m sorry I couldn’t cut it, that I’m going to have to bail on this education thing. I tell him there are limits to a person’s emotional capacity. I tell him about the ICE agents outside my house in February and how after that day I keep flashing back to the gun I was threatened with 2 decades ago, when it seemed anomalous to have someone point a gun at you. I tell him I can’t ever feel secure because my employers don’t pay me a living wage and I’m scared all the time. I tell him I’m turning into a person I don’t want to be: angry, bitter, sad.

And then I tell him I forgive myself.

I could teach him that, I suppose. Once I’ve figured out how to not be a teacher, maybe I’ll send the letter. But neither of those things will ever happen.

Adjunctified

Introduction: Contingency

I took the signs off my office door when the erratic Minnesota temperature fluctuations and my building’s decrepitude conspired to weaken the 3-M adhesive holding them to the wood, one of the signs sagging, the frame bending against gravity. The struggling sign was the one telling students that my own education, at their very institution, this very building, taught me the administrators were lying to them.

The failing adhesive was developed at a Minnesota corporation, presumably by people with good educations. Education is transformative, but it can’t control the weather.

I hadn’t brought myself, after more than half my life, to commit to the university fully enough to fill the wall-length bookshelf in my office. At some point, I had committed partially, bringing in enough of my library, acquired over decades of single-minded commitment to a scholarly life, to fill half the wall. The remaining blank shelves seemed a better place to put the signs than the garbage. They had clung to the door for several semesters, so they had earned a rest, not destruction.

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My headphones were on, so I barely heard the knock on my office door. I didn’t hear the whistles either.

My husband and I generally do not enter each other’s work-from-home spaces. When we’re in our offices, we try not to disturb each other, communicating via text message with a person who might be mere feet away but isolated by the sacrosanct door.

He had texted me, of course, but I was busy wiping the floor with anonymous online gamers, my Mad Max-costumed Waluigi speeding along Rainbow Road, clearly on the verge of victory.

I eventually did read the texts, after the chaos subsided, after the whistles fell silent and the pressure in my head normalized. There were two: “Ice/cops” and “Guns.” But I wouldn’t see those words until after the secret police had left. He had to tell me himself, with his voice, because I was preoccupied after my Waluigi avatar got smoked by the blue turtle shell I knew was coming.

When he got my attention by opening the sacred door, I left Waluigi stranded like a ghost car in Minneapolis and ran to the bedroom window to see what was happening. Guns, indeed.

I couldn’t see clearly from the window, but I could tell the agents were all along the block. Several SUVs had apparently boxed in a sedan—later I saw they had also done it to a minivan—but I needed a better angle.

Many of my neighbors—and my husband—are people of color for whom these masked bullies are a clear and present danger. I’m not, so I put on my coat and joined a swiftly growing group of observers, some shouting at the anonymized posse of overcompensating failures-to-launch, but most just holding up their phones to document whatever madness was transpiring. Many had whistles in their mouths, the shouting largely drowned out by the pulsating shrieks.

Several agents did not have masks. One, in particular, made my skin crawl, made me feel the blood thrumming in my temples. He was quite proud of what he was doing and was happy to show his face. He swung his rifle in the manner of the sexually repressed or poorly endowed. The rifle looked like a toy, fake, though I know it wasn’t. It looked plastic.

That’s the gun that will sit in my head, probably forever. I disregarded all the other guns, and there were a lot of guns. I suppose I focused on his gun because I could see his face, his hatred and frustration. His desperation to shoot it, to feel like a man, get his rocks off.

And his preening looked so pathetic. Flimsy, limp, weak.

I walked to the edge of our property, my husband filming me from the house to verify and record my position. If they assaulted me, they’d have to do it on land that we own. Neighbors gathered on our yard and all along the sidewalks on either side of the street, staying back, recording among the cacophony and adrenaline.

One agent just stood and stared at me. I tried staring back at her, but the deadness of her eyes, the only uncovered portion of her face, the only indication there was a human in there, spooked me too much. I wanted to say something to her. Her stare-down created a terrifying closeness, the intimacy of violence and hatred.

It felt like I should talk to her. My husband later told me, from his vantage point in the second floor window, it looked like she was there just for me.

But I couldn’t make sounds come from my throat. I’m a singer, a trumpeter, a teacher. I don’t have a problem projecting. But sounds couldn’t come from my body, which was numb. In a sad attempt to get healthier, I had been lifting weights earlier that morning, and now the arm holding my phone was shaking, fatigued. I couldn’t feel my body and I couldn’t make sounds. And I might drop my phone.

Other observers made sounds. The agents also made sounds, hurling insults back and forth with the observers. I think that part is getting missed in some of the media coverage of the occupation. They yell back, shouting slurs, clearly enjoying themselves as they play brownshirts because somehow, some way they think the brownshirts were the good guys and the murdered had it coming. They incite.

One agent—I believe he’s the one who identified himself as a “commander” and then started laughing for a reason that I don’t know but chills me to the bone—told the driver of the sedan, a commuter, that next time there would be no talking. An explicit threat to murder them. The scene slowly and strangely dissolved, and ICE left, apparently without kidnapping or murdering anyone, just terrorizing the neighborhood and wrecking Waluigi’s rocket car.

A neighbor from down the block, the mother of a former student of mine, emerged from the alley in her car, hand slammed on the horn, following the last SUV, the one carrying the unmasked man masturbating his rifle, with an expression on her face that carried all the words I couldn’t say. I need to buy her a beer the next time I see her.

These people accomplished nothing but terror. That’s what they are doing. The United States government contains a terrorist organization.

But Minnesota contains neighborhoods.

While commuters continued to wherever the gestapo cosplayers were heading next, neighbors lingered, spoke to the people in the formerly besieged cars, wandered aimlessly, tried to be helpful in a helpless situation. I said hello to a neighbor who had invited us to a Super Bowl party later that day. The look in her eye was both grief and rage. But I managed to make the sound come out of my body.

“Hello.”

Vacation.

We were both flying away from our home as our home exploded. Seeking escape. Trying to take a break any reasonable person would think we deserved.

Renee Good will not have any more vacations. Her partner won’t either, really. Nor will her children.

I’m still here. She isn’t.

When I can’t process the world, I often listen to very old music.

Franz Schubert’s Winterreise begins with a man leaving a reality he knows because the reality he knows is intollerable. He had been an interloper but thought the fantasy he discovered might last. For him, the problem is mostly that his girlfriend doesn’t love him anymore (or her family doesn’t), which might not seem like a big deal when considering the destruction of representative democracy or masked men murdering people in the street, but it matters to him.

The poetry is by Wilhelm Müller, but I know it only through Schubert’s music.

Schubert was economical. Every note he wrote meant something. To a strict, serious music theorist, many of his compositional choices seem cheap or lacking. His reputation has been dogged by that kind of criticism, often presented in gendered terms. His music is often considered weak or effiminate by the classical music community, but that community is wrong.

He was angry.

Shocked into apathy upon yet another brutal murder by the hands of authorities in my community, I listened to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau sing “Fremd bin ich eingezogen, fremd zieh’ ich wieder aus/A stranger I arrived, a stranger I depart” (from “Gute Nacht,” the first song of Winterreise) on repeat until I felt I would throw up.

I was in Savannah, Georgia, when my Minnesota home—with its 40-degree temperatures that the brainless Secretary of Homeland Security, a woman from South Dakota and therefore familiar with how snow works, used to justify her goons’ murder of a woman—needed me. Federal agents got stuck in the barely existent snow, apparently. Having been stuck in the snow many, many times in my life, I can promise you none of those stressful situations required me to murder someone. Also, the inch of snowcover in Minneapolis that day wouldn’t require a lot of arm strength. ICE should hit the gym.

But I was in Georgia, so I had no shovel to help those high-testosterone, low-efficacy men out. Good thing they had guns with which to murder women.

Winterreise ends with the saddest, but most empowering moment of revelation I know of in European culture (“Der Leiermann”). Our depressed, kind of pathetic protagonist, a man who revels in self-pity, encounters a man who is actually destitute, homeless, and in danger. The protagonist’s sudden surge of empathy might seem trite, but it is also powerful because it requires the listener to consider their own position. Who is this new character, this homeless, strange, foreign character? Might I not know everything? Might I learn something from someone different from me? The Winterreise protagonist is an incel suddenly discovering the world doesn’t revolve around him (take note, my MAGA boys).

That’s too much musicologizing. It’s innappropriate today. I do this, sometimes, when I can’t find a way to express my emotions fully.

Renee Good is dead.

She was shot at least three times (that I counted based on the videos) by an ICE agent who couldn’t immediately be identified because these impotent warmongers wear masks (he’s been identified now).

My friends and family often talk about living in unprecedented times. It’s understandable. Law enforcement officers murdering civilians is hard to process.

But these times are not unprecedented. In Schubert’s Vienna, people disappeared from the street, never to be seen again. Schubert and his closest friends spent a disproportionate amount of time encountering Klemens von Metternich’s goons given their short lifespans. The Viennese secret police in the 1810s and 1820s didn’t wear masks, as far as I know, but they could still be your next door neighbor without you knowing.

Musicologizing again. I should take a walk.

On his random, pointless trek, Wilhelm Müller’s sad man is accompanied by a crow (“Die Krähe”). It’s disturbing, and the wanderer seems to want the crow to stay with him until it can pick his dead flesh from his body (“lass mich endlich sehn treue bis zum Grabe/let me at last see faithfulness to the grave”).

Alan Menken explicitly stole Schubert’s crow theme when writing the music for Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. Even though I tell my students that Schubert is my dead boyfriend, the theft doesn’t bother me. The theme, especially played on a spare piano, evokes unreallness, a consciousness that reality has shifted (remember, the Disney prince was “spoiled, selfish, and unkind”). I wish we could have a cartoon ending. We won’t.

Reality has truly shifted.

I’m sure Klemens von Metternich was smiling in Hell as Donald Trump’s secret police shot a woman in the face.

Renee Good is dead. She will not have another vacation, nor will her partner, really, nor her children, really.

Müller and Schubert’s wandering sad-sack does change as he travels. The homeless hurdy-gurdy player makes an impact, and the wanderer seems to want to wander with him. He sees a human without facade and it makes him think a bit about his own experiences.

Last night I saw Kristi Noem, a woman with nothing but facade, lie to the world about something that happened down the street from my workplace.

Renee Good is dead. A man murdered her with the blessing of the leader of the free world. Reality has shifted. Metternich is smiling in Hell. The crow is waiting to pick the flesh off of the corpse of someone, but it will not get to because the crux of Winterreise is that the wanderer, who arrived as a stranger and left as a stranger, learns to love people who are not him. That will never happen while Donald Trump is in power.

Renee Good is dead. A man murdered her. I saw it happen.

This month, Project 365 has a show to celebrate a year dedicated to making things, not breaking things. A year ago, Sara Witty challenged us to make something every day, a commitment that, for me, turned into a series of rituals helping me cope with the daily garbage that characterized 2025.

The work is incredibly varied, some artists focusing on what they do best with others venturing far afield of their experience and expertise. To me, the project is a powerful expression of resistance to the silencing and squashing of creativity that accompanies the slide into authoritarianism. Regardless of the bigger meaning, I feel privileged (and intimidated) to be included next to folks who have skills I could only dream of.

The show will open January 16-17 (while my stuff will be there on the 16th, I will likely only be there on the 17th) and will also be open January 22, 23, and 24.

One night, I told Frank he was my role model, and for a moment, I thought he was going to punch me in the nose. The tension in his face morphed from potential rage to an eyeroll and a subject change. I was drunk and so was he, so the circumstances fostered a sense of precarity, but we dodged it by talking about attention spans among young people, why they’ve gone away, and who’s to blame. He knew of a poem by a poet I’d never heard of—a poet he assured me was an important figure to him in his younger years—that contained insight into youth nihilism. He pulled it up on his phone and handed me the device, while I masked my mild amazement that a man my father’s age could operate a touchscreen.

“So, you’re saying, maybe the kids are alright?” I offered after reading the poem.

He looked at me with eyes that were clearly searching for evidence of intelligence on my face.

“I mean, adults always think young people are degenerates, right? Always have. This was written when old people were terrified of their children. Teenage hellions or whatever.” I was trying to salvage something, but I wasn’t sure what.

“That’s not quite right,” he replied, disappointingly.

At least he had forgotten that I just called him a role model, old. Or he was pretending to forget. Or he wasn’t making the connections I thought I was making. I often get confused about what is happening in his brain, which makes me worry about what is happening in mine.

He shifted on the barstool, reaching into the right pocket of his jeans. He produced a folded piece of scrap paper and opened it on the bar, flattening it with a sweep of his hand, holding a stubby pencil. I saw what appeared to be a shopping list next to an architectural sketch of some project he was working on in his front yard. Doodles and words without context littered the page.

Locating an open space, he began diagramming. He drew a line with three circles equally separated along its span.

“I didn’t think we were getting so serious,” I tried to joke, recognizing the beginnings of a visual representation of some quantum physics conundrum, before he finished. “Have you been reading science fiction, now?” I asked.

“No. This is real and very serious,” he replied.

There comes a time when one must learn to engage with old people. Not Great-Grandma on her bed, propped up uncomfortably upon lumpy pillows next to a tray of uneaten, inedible nursing home food. Not grandpa in his wheelchair staring out the window toward invisible antagonists. One must converse with the old people who share the perceptible world. Who are present.

Frank’s face holds memories, cliché as it sounds, many of which he has shared with me. But the mention of science fiction seemed to erase all of them. He looked blank, suddenly smooth, impenetrable.

“Look closer,” he said, and I looked down toward the drawing, feigning more interest than I had.

“Closer.” I leaned in a little, thinking a more physical response might end the conversation.

“What am I looking for, Frank?”

“Never mind.” He sounded exasperated, but in a way that felt like it could be a put-on. Sometimes his wooden face betrayed multiple motives.

“The point is balancing perception,” he said, leaning back with more theatrics than were necessary. “That’s the only way to see clearly. Balance.”

“I suppose,” I said, not seeing anything about this conversation clearly. “Send me that poem.”

Years later, when Frank and I return from our trip, he will insist I was the one who brought the poem that started the conversation that sent us away. He will be lying to boost my ego, and I’ll let him do it because we’ll both know that we both know the truth.

As I climbed the industrial back stairs to my apartment, I pulled out my phone to double check if Frank had texted the poem to me. The back stairs echo, no matter how hard I try to muscle-control my steps, but I don’t like walking in the front door. I don’t need people knowing my comings and goings. I confirmed the existence of the poem link in my text app as my boots clunked the treads, the metallophone vibrations seeming to propel me toward one last beer from the fridge and a chance to read in silence.

The poem still seemed uninteresting when examined at my kitchen table, a hand-me-down that would always look wrong anywhere but my dead Grandparents’ house. The Formica was chipping and the poem was as bland on my laptop as it was on my phone. I tried to reconcile my incomprehension with how animated Frank had become at the bar. I was missing something, or Frank was in worse shape than I thought.

I’d think about it after sleep and alcohol metabolization. I poured myself a glass of water, sat on the couch in the little corner of my roomless apartment I had delineated as “living” space, and grabbed the Xbox controller, which was wedged between the X and Y axes of the couch cushions. I was asleep before I could remember which region of Hyrule I was going to next. I was getting too old for late-night drunk gaming.

But the next morning was Saturday, so my excess was less consequential than it would have been some other evening. I stumbled out of bed and through a shower while I thought about Frank’s three circles and his cryptic rambling. I don’t know physics, but the issue he was describing seemed like the premise of a famous novel that had to do with something about gravitational pulls competing and unpredictability and imprecision. It seemed to have nothing to do with the poem, which I took as having to do with death and the burden of being aware of it. “Wretched mortals” pondering their fragility and so forth. Bleak and bland. Predictable.

My hangover was lingering, so I pulled on my clothes from last night, splashed water on my hair to rein in the fly-aways that always greet my first morning mirror encounter, tromped down the noisy stairs on the opposite end of the building from the front door, and stumbled drowsily down the alley to the coffee shop. “Frank left this for you,” June, the usual morning barista, said as I opened the frayed wooden door, careful to lift it a little so it didn’t get stuck in the doorjamb. She slid me an envelope across the counter before turning to steam the milk she needed for the latte she knew I’d order.

“He was a little worked up last night,” I said, picking up the envelope from the counter. “I wonder what this is.”

June smiled and rolled her eyes as she negotiated the steaming nozzle into the metal milk pitcher. “A Frank thing.” She meticulously, intricately poured the milk, concentrating on her art.

I pulled the poem up on my phone as I waited for my caffeine. Frank had been to my building countless times, so for him to rope June into delivery duty was a little unsettling. I didn’t want to open the envelope yet, but June held my latte ransom, pulling the newly completed rosette of foam back from my hand after she set it down. “What is it?” she demanded with an annoying lilt to her voice.

I sighed, “private correspondence,” but I stuck my finger under the envelope’s flap anyway. I guess June’s indifference to the old man has its limits. At any rate, it was Frank. How personal could it really be?

On our trip, Frank will talk about obligation. He will show me the street corner in Boston in the 1890s where the Poet’s lover was hiding in the back room of a bar that no longer exists so he could avoid a police raid. The lover will avoid the raid, while most of the men in the building will not. We’ll watch the Poet get manhandled by cops and hauled out the front door, and we’ll see the lover calmly gather his coat and leave once the commotion subsides.

“It’s just a bunch of numbers,” I told June, handing her the notecard.

“Huh. Frank’s a weird guy,” she replied. “Some kind of puzzle? A code?”

“Beats me. I guess I’ll ask him when I see him.”

“If he remembers,” she replied with a little laugh, handing the card back to me.

“He’ll remember, June,” I said, my voice a little sharper than intended.

I took my latte and found a table. The coffee shop was virtually empty, and I didn’t know anyone in the room aside from June, which was rare. I put the notecard on the table next to my coffee and stared at the numbers.

Frank knows I’m not mathematically inclined. That must have been part of it. He knew I wouldn’t decode a decontextualized equation, especially without some kind of instruction. I wasn’t supposed to perform functions on these numbers because I wouldn’t know how to begin to do that, and Frank was communicating with me, not someone else. The envelope had my name on it. The numbers were for me.

He was messing with me.

I put the notecard in the front pocket of my backpack and pulled out my laptop. Technically, I didn’t have to work today. Practically, I did, as my productivity had been slipping the last few weeks. Saturday or not, I had to catch up. Deadlines are deadlines, and time doesn’t wait for the depressed.

Frank will tell you about the Poet’s Daughter because he thinks she’s important. I disagree, but I will let Frank explain his theories about how her refusal to learn the violin protected the Poet in his old age. She played the piano. Frank thinks the piano’s fixed pitches in contrast to the violin’s sonic unruliness fueled the Daughter’s intransigence and, somehow, Frank thinks that reined in the Poet’s impulses. Kept him from feeling either powerless or too powerful.

Frank goes too far, in my opinion, but as he accelerates his philosophizing, I rest in his voice. I pull it around me and over my head and release my neck muscles to the warmth.

Frank was at my apartment building when I returned in the mid-afternoon. I hadn’t invited him over, but he was leaning against the wall by the alley door when I returned from the coffee shop. He knew I never came through the lobby. I swung my backpack off my shoulder and pulled the notecard out. I made a production of rolling my eyes. “What the hell is this?”

“Hello to you, too,” he replied.
“You’re acting strange. Hi. What is this?”

“Those are the figures you need to make the diagram make sense.”

“Oh Jesus. Come again?”

“Don’t get you panties in a twist. I just thought I should give you the answer key.”

“I think I’m just failing this one, Frank. I’m going to take the L.”

“Eh.” I could see he was trying to squash his smile. The numbers were meaningless, or else he would have pushed it. “What do you think of the poem?”

“It’s a good poem.”

Frank waved his hand toward my face, dismissing my disinterest. “You busy today?”

“Not particularly,” I said, happy to be moving on to something else. “I’m pretty worn out, though. You’re a bad influence.”

“Let’s go,” he said, standing and pulling his jacket more tightly around his shoulders.

I went. I could have gone upstairs. Instead, I went.

The Poet isn’t the point of the trip, nor is the time period or the Daughter or the bar or even the Lover. The point of the trip wasn’t to watch one man’s life, as interesting as it was. The point is that the Poet was invisible, which made his sight exceptional.

To reach our destination, we had to go to Frank’s duplex down the street. There’s a closet in the basement of his unit where he keeps his artifacts and photographs, plastic crates full of evidence of his own past as well as those of many others. What he pulls out of a crate could determine what kind of a day you will have. To my knowledge, he doesn’t show the objects to anyone except me, a privilege I was bestowed because, as Frank said, I looked at the front of his eyes not the back of his skull. I’m not entirely sure what that means, but I think he’s saying I pay attention.

I don’t remember where he took me the first time we traveled, a few months earlier. The objects from Frank’s closet permit access to knowledge across time, but the experience is fuzzy. Frank says, on that first trip, we just went to the creek down the street from the house where he grew up. Only back 50 years or so, so he wasn’t even a kid while we watched his younger adult self as he sat on a park bench, reminiscing in his thirties about something that happened in his teens. The Frank who brought me narrated the thoughts of the Frank we observed because his objects don’t let you into a person’s brain. It seems absurd to me that Frank’s magic would be limited in this way, but as he explained when I ribbed him about it, perception is a one-way street. “You can never see your own face without intervention,” he told me. “Mirrors and cameras can’t perceive.”

Anything I observe while traveling with Frank evaporates from my mind the moment I observe it. Therefore, Frank and I must reconstruct it in retrospect. In that way, I will never know the experience in its full truth, or more to the point, my perception of the truth at the time of the perceiving. It is another limitation of Frank’s magic, though he’ll tell you it’s actually the point.

When we watched the Poet’s Lover return to the pub to get his coat after the raid, a dog was whining in the alley, starving and cold. A mutt of some kind, with scraggly black hair that must have been straight once, when it wasn’t covered in the muck of late-nineteenth century urbanity. The Lover saw the dog and pitied it, scratching its head and taking it home. The Poet’s Lover could see the animal’s suffering while the Poet suffered far from the Lover’s view.

Frank won’t take me to see the Poet’s Daughter in her own life. That is something he will only relate to me in person, without the magic. To Frank, her piano was enough magic, and it was controlled, not chaotic like a violin would have been. He didn’t want me to see her power in person. It could limit my view, my potential, despite my forty-five years arguing against the possibility of potential in the first place.

The Poet’s Daughter’s music would break my brain, in Frank’s estimation. I try not to be offended, but both he and I know that I am. Both he and I know a lot of things we don’t say to each other. I sometimes wonder if that’s part of the magic of Frank’s objects, but it isn’t. It’s something else.

“She didn’t know her piano bench was a throne,” he said one day when I asked why she was so dangerous. “The powerful lack the capacity to see their power clearly.”

The Poet’s daughter was famous, more famous than her famous father. She played Rachmaninoff for politicians, Liszt for the rich. And she was sad and famous and brilliant. “You can’t see the future and the past simultaneously and not lose control,” Frank said. “Forcing that kind of knowledge into a fixed system will break anyone. She couldn’t hear the notes between the piano keys.”

The Poet’s daughter is important, in Frank’s estimation. I don’t know what question we are trying to answer, so I disagree, but that might be because I don’t understand.

I just know a pendulum swings in an orderly fashion as long as it is left alone. Fulcrum and bob are simpatico until another fixed point is introduced. Frank calls the third point “reality.”

Here’s where I’m supposed to reveal that the Poet (or maybe the Poet’s Lover) was Frank’s grandfather or something like that, so maybe the pianist daughter was his mother. I won’t tell you that because it’s not true and I already told you neither the Poet nor the Poet’s Lover nor the Poet’s Daughter is the point of the trip.

I went back to the coffee shop because I always go back to the coffee shop. June was working again. Apparently she needed to pick up some hours. Money is like that.

“Did you talk to Frank? What was all that bullshit about?” she asked when I came through the crooked, failing door.

“I did,” I responded, realizing I didn’t know what to say next by way of explanation. “It’s fine.”

“What were the numbers about?”

“I don’t know,” I said, grateful for the opportunity to be honest.

“Weird guy,” she said as she tapped the espresso filter against the waste bin.

“Not really,” I said, waiting for my coffee, eyeing the bar across the street. Later tonight, I knew Frank and I would talk about the Poet with the clearer eyes provided by alcohol.

“Not really.”

Etching 33

I write to you, though I know you do not exist. I suppose it is boredom that compels me to write. Boredom and meaningless obligation.

Writing has no utility now. Truly, utility no longer exists, except perhaps for cockroaches or something else more resilient than humans, but I haven’t seen any of them either. Perhaps I am not just the last of a species. Perhaps I am the last of the things that can be categorized into species. Utility is now a concept, not a truth.

Writing has no meaning without a reader and I will have none now. Neither reader nor meaning. So, instead I am bored and will write for the empty air, the streets and structures that will disintegrate, the river that will carry the asphalt away with the remnants of my history.

Because it now is my history. Mine alone. It belongs to no one but me. Countless souls emerging over countless years, countless conflicts and loves, countless boring days and exhilarating adventures, all leading to this. My pen and my paper. My history.

My memoir is the last history.

Or not. Maybe it is your history, non-existent Earth-companion. I also write for you, Survivor, Reader. I can conceive of you even if I know you never will be. And that conception at least relieves the boredom. But it offers no utility.

When you—who do not exist—find my notebook, will the walls of this warehouse still stand? I have found a metal desk in a room. The room was once undoubtedly the office of the manager of some business that existed here. I pushed it out to the open floor, where people labored, because I choose to spend what time remains laboring. The desk looks stronger than the walls of the warehouse.

I sit at the desk now, and I will leave the notebook in the drawer when I am not writing. If the walls of this warehouse collapse before you stumble upon my desk, You Who Do Not Exist, I hope this notebook remains protected in the drawer. It might not survive, but believing it will provides me with something to hope for.

I hope for your existence and my notebook’s survival. These are concepts, not truths, but that has always been the nature of hope, even when it was prevalent and common. When people used the words “progress” and “tomorrow” unironically.

I have imagined utility as a solution to boredom. As it always was.

***

The warehouse I’m sitting in was once home to dozens of survivors. Time took some from me. The world took others. Our resources were limited, so we established a process by which small contingents, volunteers at first, ventured into town or into the fields beyond the industrial park to loot or forage, depending on which direction they walked.

At first, we sent only one group at a time, 3 or 4 people. Volunteers were either noble or desperate. It’s a matter of perspective. Some, I suspect, were deluded about their roles in the greater group. Walter Grindholm was one of those people. I disliked him, a perspective I now feel guilty about, as after 5 relatively successful expeditions, his sixth never returned. There were 4 people in his group, total, though to observe them was to conclude he considered the other 3 to be expendable.

That’s my perspective. It’s the only perspective left, so I suppose it must be correct. When other people existed, they might have disagreed with me. But there are no other people, so my opinion stands. Still, I am open to the possibility that I was wrong, that his demeanor was a product of his efficiency, strategy, or some kind of brilliance I didn’t perceive.

It doesn’t matter. He didn’t come back and there is no one to argue with about it. So history shall reflect that Walter Grindholm was an asshole. It doesn’t mean he deserved whatever happened to him on that sixth expedition into the city.

Reader-Who-Doesn’t-Exist, I’m mentioning this just so you know I am aware that I am inadequate. I am sometimes inadequately understanding of people like Walter Grindholm. I am inadequate to the task of history.

But my view is all that matters now, so we need to put that on the table and move on. A planet of 1 is not a democracy.

Walter Grindholm’s sixth expedition was just over a year ago. I should start setting timelines and terms, contexts and conditions.

I know it was over a year ago that I last saw Walter because we started keeping track of sunrises. When our little warehouse community started cohering a bit, Evelyn Forrester began marking each sunrise by scratching a line on an interior wall. It became our imperfect but clarifying version of a calendar. Imperfect because we did not know the date when Evelyn took the broken concrete block and etched her first line in the wall. Clarifying because it allowed us to restart the counting of history.

Evelyn’s first etching simply became “1.” Evelyn died 32 etchings ago. I know because I scratched a new line the day after I buried her, and I’ve scratched a new sunrise every day since. I restarted the count.

Even with everything that has happened, I still know how many days are in a year, and Walter’s group has been gone for 387 etchings.

I hate that I hated him. Evelyn I loved.

The expeditions were crucial to our community, which we never named. People who arrived at the warehouse often had some supplies with them, food, weapons, tools, but were often hesitant to share. That resistance was certainly understandable, so we needed communal resources. A few people were capable hunters, some had medical knowledge, a handful had mechanical skills, but our confines were, well, confining. We had to venture forth to gather what we could.

The warehouse seemed protected, though that was probably always a foolish assumption. What it did provide, though, was borders. A defined community. A shared location in which to re-establish something that might approximate a society.

It worked for a while. Societies are temporary, though. I don’t think I ever even considered that while the society into which I was born existed. I thought about it a lot as we constructed a new one.

Our new society had both Walters and Evelyns.

***

Etching 34

There is a big, broken sign outside of the warehouse. It fell from its intended location at some point during the turmoil and now sits broken in front of what was once the main entrance to this building. It is made of wood. It is enormous. It is heavy.

It lies face-down on the shattered asphalt of what was once a parking lot. When the first small group of survivors, myself included, came upon this giant, rectangular shelter and decided it was as good a place to hunker down as any other, we attempted to flip the sign over. It seemed important to know what this place was in its previous iteration. The heft of the thing proved too great. We could not reveal the text of the identity-marker.

Inside, of course, hints of the building’s purpose emerged, followed by confirmation in the form of letterheads and various plaques and paperweights expressing corporate appreciation. But the big sign, the external notification of the warehouse’s identity, remains obscured, broken, no longer signifying anything, just present. I was tempted to propose naming our little community after the building’s previous moniker, but the logos and acronyms, the job titles and anniversary signs on desks, felt too small to adapt to our group. Our collective remained nameless.

Our initial group included Evelyn—a former teacher I met while rummaging through dumpsters in an alley in town—Jeremy and Fred—a father and his 12 year-old son who had constructed a lean-to next the highway out of town, and Haley—a 20-something woman whom I was shocked had survived so long.

Haley wasn’t stupid. She was just disinterested. She hadn’t processed the changed reality, so she always appeared to be in a state of confusion. Shock, I suppose.

I am evaluating Haley, now, just as I did with Walter. I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t do that. I need to record the facts, just the facts. For history.

You don’t exist, though, Reader, so I am struggling to understand my obligations. I will try to do better.

***

Evelyn and I had been traveling together for a few days before we came upon Haley. She was sitting on a park bench staring at nothing in particular. Her gaze pointed limply toward the vacant buildings on the other side of the park, as if her glance had a vague intention of pulling her toward shelter but lacked the requisite ambition. As a result, the young woman sat in a strange stasis, her eyes registering reality but failing to operationalize it. The world was occurring without her participation.

I would have kept walking right past Haley. She was hardly the only broken person I had seen in the previous days, and sentimentality and compassion needed to be rationed. Evelyn and I had elected to go east, scavenging and looting as we made our way through empty streets and broken storefronts. Our objective had been to reach the highway and travel south toward what once was considered the Big City. It would take us days on the highway to reach our destination, where we hoped resources would be more plentiful, but at least we would know where we were. Much had changed, but we could still be confident in the interstate’s location and that it would lead to the city it had always led to.

I would have kept walking, but Evelyn wouldn’t have it. She went straight to the rickety, wood picnic table and sat directly across from Haley.

“Are you okay, dear?” she asked.

Haley did not respond, nor did her gaze change, despite Evelyn’s head now blocking whatever it had been directed toward before.

I remained standing, hoping Evelyn would be quick. I had come to prefer standing near buildings. Their brick solidity felt protective. I wasn’t looking forward to the open highway in my near future, so I definitely didn’t need the precursor of an open park. The trees weren’t as comforting as the broken yet human-built shells of commerce and residence.

Evelyn sat for an uncomfortably long time, just staring into the young woman’s vacant eyes. I distracted myself by listening to the crunchy rustle of the few leaves that remained on the trees. The wind was still blowing.

Eventually, Haley made a sound. “Can you take me home?”

“Yes,” Evelyn lied. “Come with us.”

So Haley did as instructed, joining us on our eastward trek. Her company was welcome, despite my initial hesitancy. She didn’t speak much or, frankly, help much, but more people was better than fewer, I ultimately decided.

As we walked and scavenged, Haley slowly revealed bits and pieces of her story. By this time, I knew Evelyn’s story fairly well, and I suppose Evelyn knew enough of mine. It was a relief to have a new story to accompany us.

***

Haley remained fairly quiet until we approached the highway. The park where Evelyn and I found her was up the hill from the modest commercial district of our town. In past years, the neighborhood where we found Haley would have been considered affluent. It was old, old enough that brick walkup apartment buildings co-mingled with homes that would accurately be described as mansions by anyone except the wealthy but progressive-minded or -perceived people who owned them. Those people are mostly gone now, but their ownership remains. There’s no one left to buy those houses, even if the owners were alive to sign the paperwork.

That architectural co-mingling was a vestige of an even earlier period, when streetcars and politeness enabled department store owners to live near, and commute with, department store workers. Perhaps Haley’s dazed demeanor was a symptom of her location. The neighborhood displayed the physical remnants of a social reality that was out-of-time, the living ruins of an ancient civilization ripped from existence by epic cultural and political forces around the middle of the 20th century. We were walking toward another physical manifestation of those forces, the highway, a marker of the new civilization that made co-mingling defunct, along with the neighborhood. After a time of economic decay, the inevitable consequence of the collapse of civilizations, the neighborhood on the hill had been revitalized by money and well-meaning, destructive displacement.

The Epic of the neighborhood concluded, just as all Epics have now concluded, leaving behind configurations of bricks and concrete that once served a purpose. Now that all stories have ended, staring into the distance in a place like that park seems as good a response as any. Perhaps Haley’s consciousness had been sucked into the vacuum of the empty history surrounding her picnic table.

Perhaps Evelyn’s attention helped put Haley’s consciousness back where it belonged. It took some time, though, for the consciousness to feel secure. It took a while for Haley to speak, release her hold just enough to let some of herself back out to the world. It took seeing the highway.

“I used to play in that park every day as a kid,” she said. Evelyn and I had been vaguely chatting about our strategy for when we finally got to the Big City.

“What’s that, sweetie?” Evelyn asked.

“That park. There was a swing set when I was little. They took it down a few years ago. Dangerous, I guess.”

“Did you live near there?” Evelyn followed up. Good ol’ Evelyn. I’m glad she was there to carry the conversation.

“Yes. On Livingston. About two blocks down.”

Evelyn looked at me, just for a second. A few days scavenging with her, and she was already reading my mind.

“Sweetie, you asked me to take you home. You were right by home.”

“I don’t know why I asked that,” Haley said. I was worried for a moment that she was going back inside her mind, returning to whatever mental world she had constructed before we saw her at that picnic table. Only for a moment, though, as I remembered that Evelyn was better at this than I was.

“It’s alright. You’re with us. We’ll find a place in the City and build a new home. Some place where we can be stable. We’re going to make something new.”

We were getting close to the highway entrance ramp, which split off of 4th Street right past the bank I used to drive through every other Friday. The idea of walking up the ramp, traversing a path I had travelled countless times in a vehicle, putting my feet on a road meant for tires, was strangely disconcerting.

“My Grandmother supposedly grew up in a house right there,” Haley said, pointing at a spot about halfway up the entrance ramp.

“Really? How do you know?” I asked, somewhat surprising myself. I hoped I didn’t sound aggressive. I hadn’t really spoken to Haley before that moment.

“They knocked the house down when the highway came through. They knocked down the whole neighborhood. My Grandma had a picture of the house. I don’t know where it is now. My mom probably has it in the attic, so I guess it’s still there.”

“Do you want to go back and take anything from the house? We can go back,” Evelyn offered. I rolled my eyes a little but managed to stop myself before it was noticeable.

Haley stayed quiet for a few seconds, though we kept walking forward. Finally, she said, “No. Let’s keep going.”

Evelyn looked relieved, though I would never mention it. “How long has your family had a house up the hill? I’ve always loved that area,” Evelyn inquired. Apparently we were going to keep talking about this.

“It was my grandparents’ house, my dad’s parents. He grew up in that house, too, so it’s been in the family for a long time. My dad’s family is rich. My mom’s family is a little trashy, to be honest. My dad’s parents never liked them. I always thought they were kind of fun, though.”

Haley stopped talking, as if she had let out too much of the precious consciousness she had regained in the park.

I looked at her, trying to figure out what was going on. Her brow seemed a little tight, not pained, but slightly tense, her eyebrows scrunching toward each other, almost imperceptibly. Her mouth was also tight, expressionless, almost frozen.

“I never lived anywhere else,” she said, releasing her mouth muscles just enough to get the words into the world.

“Where would you have wanted to live?” Evelyn asked. It felt like dangerous territory to me, but this was clearly the Evelyn Show.

“I don’t know. Somewhere. I’m an adult. I should have lived some place I chose, at least once. Doesn’t it seem kind of pathetic? I just never did. I could have. It just made sense to stay in that house.”

“Well, now you’re going to,” Evelyn said. How did she do that? How did she make things seem better? Things were not going to get better. Was she just that good of a liar, or did she know something I didn’t know?

It doesn’t really matter. At this point, I’m alive and Evelyn is buried outside the warehouse. I’m not sure if that means she’s a liar or I am.

Well, there are Evelyns and there are Walters. And there are Haleys. I wish more Haleys had Evelyns to talk to than they had Walters to talk to. Maybe some of this could have been avoided.

It’s a moot point. Haley wasn’t quiet anymore. We were adding again, after so much had been subtracted.

***

The afternoon we reached the highway, the sun or something else had heated the pavement sufficiently to feel tacky under our feet. The entrance ramp had been repaired a few years earlier, so the road still felt cleaner and newer than the city streets it emerged from. Those repairs were completed prior to all the turmoil, fixed up just in time to lose its function.

The soles of our shoes made smacking sounds as we walked on the hot surface of the entrance ramp, up the incline to the raised highway. It wasn’t too steep, but the stickiness of the surface, coupled with gravity, seemed to add resistance, as if the materiality of the town itself wanted to hold onto us, prevent escape. I was panting more than I wanted to admit, but I didn’t try to hide it. Shame, like a lot of things, had become frivolous.

“It’d be nice if it rained a little,” Evelyn said.

“I’m not sure I want anything falling down on us right now,” I panted.

“To cool us off. This humidity needs to break,” she said, as if it were two years ago.

“You confident it won’t be fire and brimstone?”

“You need to grow up, kiddo,” she said.

Haley chimed in: “There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound.”

“What?” I asked. Evelyn looked amused.

“It’s poem. My mom had a book of poetry I used to read when I was little. I don’t know why I remember that one.”

“What is it?” Evelyn asked.

“I think it’s from World War I. It’s about how shitty people are, I guess. I think I just liked the sound of it.”

“A lot of poetry is about how shitty people are, if you think about it,” Evelyn said.

“Really?” I asked. “I think of nature when I think about poetry.”

“Sure, I guess, but why do you think people need to write about nature? They can just look at it.”

“To make a record, maybe. To remember how a flower or whatever made you feel,” I said, ready to drop the rain conversation already.

“I think that’s right,” Evelyn said.

Haley piped up, apparently not letting the rain conversation drop: “Poetry makes me think of music.”

“Me too,” Evelyn replied, while I walked a little quicker.

***

Etching 35

You-Who-Don’t-Exist, I’m out of sorts today. I woke this morning to a shuttering, banging sound against the big metal walls of the warehouse. It rattled me awake as its sound reverberated mostly unencumbered through the vast room.

As I’m the only one left, I pulled my bed to the middle of the warehouse. I don’t need privacy. I sleep on a makeshift bed mattress, piles of towels stuffed in several big canvas mailbags lashed together with rope. You’ve probably already seen it. It’s that mess snuggled up against this desk.

Just after we arrived and chose our new home, Jeremy located a stack of cots in a back room, but they are just short enough to annoy me into sleeplessness. So, I prefer my jerry-rigged bed. I’ve gotten used to it. I usually sleep pretty well now.

I was sleeping pretty well last night, just not long enough. The banging woke me up before dawn, judging from the lack of light entering through the skylights high above my head. Or maybe the sun went out during the night.

At any rate, I wasn’t well rested, so the sound not only woke me but set my heart into a wild rhythm and my brain into frenetic overdrive. It must have been a storm, but a violent one. It lasted a while, and my elevated heartrate lasted even longer.

So, I want to keep writing my history, but you should know I’m unsettled as I do it. I was writing about Haley when I stopped last. I’ll get back on track.

I wanted to make good time down the highway, both because I knew the Big City would be a better place to establish a home in our new reality and because I was finding it difficult to hold a conversation with Haley and Evelyn. They were both very nice people, and I’m grateful to have had them in my new, convoluted reality. But until we were secure and had a longer-term plan, I didn’t want to chat.

I didn’t get my wish for silence though, as after what I assume was a mile or so, we saw Jeremy and Fred’s little lean-to shelter, just a few 2X4s and a dirty tarp. I saw their truck first, though. Along the highway, we had seen a few cars that had run off the road or had simply been abandoned, but even in the sun and heat I could see that the Jeremy’s red Ford was strangely clean. Most vehicles we had seen were dented and beaten, by what force I don’t know. But Jeremy’s truck was in pristine condition, parked on the shoulder. In a different time, I would have just thought it was having mechanical problems and the driver had pulled over. In this time, however, the driver was living next to it, just on the other side, down the road, in a rickety structure he shared with his little boy.

Jeremy spotted us while I was still looking at his truck. The first I was aware of him was with his yelling voice:

“Hey! Hey! So glad to see you!”

This seemed foolish to me, even though I was glad to see him, as well. Given the circumstances, it struck me as a bad idea to just shout out to a group of complete strangers who outnumbered him. Haley ran forward, “Oh thank fucking God, Hi!” she called to him, but then she saw the child. “Oh, hi there. I’m Haley.”

I thought the boy looked elementary-school age, but he later confirmed to me that he was a middle schooler. That wasn’t better.

I wasn’t happy to see the child. I admit it. I didn’t want more complications. His able-bodied father was a welcome addition, but the kid was going to require attention. The adults had enough to deal with, what with the world ending and all.

But Haley found him amusing, so we added another source of interest for her. A font of new, more irritating conversation. I thought Jeremy would be useful, and we weren’t going to just leave them to rot, so they gathered their things, leaving their terrible shelter in hopes of a more solid one.

The truck was dead, despite its pristine appearance. It had seemed so promising, but it wouldn’t start.

“We were trying to get out of town, and it just stopped. It’s got gas. It just won’t go,” Jeremy explained.

“Why is it so clean? Every abandoned vehicle I’ve seen on the road looks like a shitshow,” I asked him.

“Beats me. I noticed that too. We holed up in the house when everything went down. We were prepared with food and stuff. When it seemed like we should go, we hopped in the truck and went.” He paused for a moment, thinking. “There wasn’t any traffic.”

“Just cars on the side of the road,” I finished his thought.

“Yeah. Weird.”

***

Upon our first meeting, I found Jeremy to be a decent guy, and Fred was nice enough for a kid on the cusp of puberty. One of them would be useful, and the other one would be a burden. At the end of the world, I suppose you have to take both and hope one outweighs the other.

Jeremy was a teacher, or at least he had been before recent events. He taught high school social studies at the school I hadn’t attended. I was a proud Titan, an alum of the other high school in town. He was an Eagle. I was willing to overlook that, at least mostly.

Had Fred been old enough, he probably would have been an Eagle, too. That made me a little envious of the kid, not for being a potential Eagle but because he wouldn’t be a Titan either. He’d be something else.

That was upon our first meeting, though. Now, he’ll be nothing more than Fred.

Fred really liked Haley, probably because Haley really liked Fred. There could be any number of reasons, I suppose. Haley was closer in age to Fred, child though he was, than she was to Evelyn. She didn’t seem particularly fond of me, and I hadn’t given her much reason to be. Maybe there really is some kind of maternal instinct. Haley’s chances of being a mother had been obliterated by our circumstances, so maybe she was drawn to the boy.

Maybe Fred’s puberty had kicked in after all.

Whatever the reason, the moment Haley and Fred locked eyes, they were a pair. I assume that was a relief to Jeremy, but what do I know? I don’t have kids, and like Haley, now I never will.

As we made our way down the highway, Jeremy, Evelyn, and I led, trying to make whatever small talk entails when every topic is big. Smallness had ceased to be interesting. Or maybe it had become so interesting we couldn’t see the bigness surrounding us. I’m not sure.

But we talked about high school. Evelyn had moved to town with her husband, so she didn’t know the subtleties of local teen sports rivalries. She didn’t know why it was important that Titans went to the McDonald’s on Spring Street, while Eagles went to the one on Darcy. She didn’t know where the bussing demarcation lines had been drawn decades ago, or why those lines meant knowing if someone’s dad worked at the Northside Bottling Company or the Riverview Plastics Plant could tell you everything you needed to know about their home life.

Evelyn was born on the coast, far far away from here, where her friends’ parents didn’t work in manufacturing. Her father had run a supermarket, and her mother was a journalist at a well-known and, according to her, well-respected newspaper. She met her husband in college and they moved to the middle of the country so he could pursue his career. He was a business guy. Our city allowed him to be a big fish in a small pond, rather than drowning in the ocean he was born into.

He died many years ago, long before he had to witness what his wife witnessed. What I witnessed, and Jeremy and Haley and Fred, too. By Evelyn’s account, her husband had a good life in management. I wonder if he’d be able to manage anything these days. He’d be an old man, and the world has either extended or shrunk beyond managing.

Haley and Fred seemed to do just fine behind us, chatting and goofing, occasionally laughing at some inside joke about something they saw along the road. I could hear them, but I didn’t pay much attention. Haley could take care of the kid.

I like to think Haley and Fred were together when the end came for them. I don’t know, Reader Who Does Not Exist. I don’t know what happened to them. But I can like to think whatever I want to think. That’s my prerogative, as the remaining historian.

***

Etching 36

The 5 of us—me, Evelyn, Haley, Jeremy, and Fred—made our way along the highway, fleeing our Small City not due to immediate danger, but to avoid more long term danger. The resources in town felt limited. The resources in the Big City seemed plentiful.

That was our motivation. It might have been possible to rebuild in the place we were when the world ended. I admit it might have been.

But catastrophe so often spurs migration. Famines, fire, despair, war. These things prompt movement, change, disruption of the norm. We weren’t so different from other refugees. The precipitating tragedy was novel, but maybe there are some things that don’t change.

The certain had become uncertain, so we opted for the unknown. We didn’t truly know what we would find when we got to the Big City. We just hoped and, I suppose, assumed there would be more. Of everything.

That might be another side effect of catastrophe: hoarding. The lumber in the back of Jeremy’s truck haunted me the entire walk. He said the wood was meant for a deck-repair project he just hadn’t managed to start. That was weeks ago, but the wood stayed in the truck. Now, the deck project was pointless, so the lumber would keep on sitting there unless we came up with a way to transport it. Wasted.

We saw more trucks and cars along the road as we walked. They were like the others we had seen, dented and dirty. Windows shattered, bumpers on the ground. Jeremy’s truck was an anomaly.

“You think the battery’s dead?” I asked him as we walked.

“Maybe, but I tried my portable jumper. I guess I should have tried taking a battery from one of those other cars.” He was blaming himself.

“Nah,” I said, though I had thought the same thing. “Let’s just get situated. We can come back and try to fix it later.”

As the blazing sun became a purplish sunset, we walked down an exit ramp Evelyn had pegged. She had spotted the road sign indicating truck stops on the side of the highway and wisely suggested we stop. My skin had been crawling for hours, agitated by the long walk out in the open, far from buildings and protection. My discomfort masked fatigue, and I wasn’t sure what happened at night in this new reality, so I concurred with Evelyn.

Jeremy hadn’t mentioned anything strange at night, and he and Fred had slept in their flimsy roadside shelter for days. Depite seeming more comfortable with the open air, they would welcome real walls and a real ceiling. Haley had spent her time since the disaster in her childhood home, only leaving to scavenge. She wasn’t keen on sleeping outside, either.

The exit ramp intersected a county road, where a sign indicated gas stations in either direction. “Are we Richardson’s or Global Petrol people?” I asked.

“Global Petrol,” Haley responded immediately.

“Huh. You seem convinced. GP it is then,” Jeremy volunteered. I didn’t bother to ask for a vote.

It was a good choice, regardless. The front door was smashed, so we had an easy entry. I pushed an ice cooler against the door when we were all inside. Fred immediately began ransacking the food aisle while Evelyn peered at the diner attached to the convenience store.

“Think we can get a stove to work?” She asked.

“We can try,” Jeremy said, and they disappeared into the kitchen.

Haley walked toward Fred. Her expression looked like it did when Evelyn and I had first seen her in the park, as if all the muscles in her face has suddenly relaxed. Her eyes seemed blank.

“Hey, Haley, are you good? I’m going to see about the plumbing,” I said.

She was silent for a moment, but then replied, “Yeah, I’m fine,” a tiny speck of energy seeming to animate her, just for an instant, before her face went slack again.

“Ok. Grab some water from the cooler. I’m going to see if the showers work.”

The GP had regular, gendered restrooms, and attached to each was a shower facility. In other times, truck drivers and road trippers could sign up for shower time and wait for a voice on the PA system to tell them it’s their turn to get clean.

I went to the men’s room. I’m not sure why. Social convention was no longer salient, and I still went to the men’s room automatically. The comfort of normalcy, I suppose.

I suddenlly had to shit and found myself speed-walking to reach a stall. I hadn’t felt the need to shit moments before. Seeing the appropriate place, my intestines came to life, convulsing, dropping their pretense.

Outside, on the side of the highway, would have been an equally appropriate place now, but my body hadn’t adjusted to new social expectations.

The toilet flushed. I was relieved. I wasn’t sure it would. It indicated functionality in plumbing.

I washed my hands, noting the brownish sheen of the water, but disregarding it. There was soap.

I badly needed to clean my body, so I turned toward the shower area. It resembled, in arrangement if not aesthetics, the shower at the gym I went to in the pre-catastrophe world. Five tiled shower stalls with ragged curtains shared a drain in the center of the room. The floor was caked in dried soap and human dermatological matter, clearly not having been cleaned when the calamity struck. A white/gray sheen covered the tiles and the drainage grate.

I went to the nearest stall to test the water, mindful of the dirty water from the sink. I turned the knob to the left, and the shower head sputtered for a moment before bursting forth, like my intestines minutes before.

I was instantly covered in a fetid black mess of thick, viscous fluid. Not the brownish tint of the sink. A tacky, sticky tar-like substance, indefinable in the moment, but resembling what I imagined crude oil might look like. Feel like. Sticky, slick, warm.

I bolted back, out of the stall, leaving the shower running. The gunk hadn’t gotten into my eyes, but it had drenched my torso and legs. I reached for the towel cabinet and grabbed a pristine white terry-cloth towel. I wiped myself down vigorously, violently, getting as much substance off of me as I could, but truthfully just rubbing it into my t-shirt, jeans, and skin.

I dropped the towel, now black and slimy, and ran back to the sink, splashing the brown water on my face, my arms, my legs, leaving me a drenched, dirty disaster.

***

My commotion must have snapped Haley out of her weird trance. She and Fred came running into the men’s room, social convention be damned.

“What the hell? What happened?”

“Fucking shower,” I growled, presence of a child also be damned.

Haley ran to the men’s shower room, while Fred looked at me slack-jawed. I stripped and pulled a new shirt from my backpack. I threw the old one in the garbage can and tried wiping my jeans with paper towels, which proved equally ineffective.

I heard the shower turn off and Haley emerged from the shower room. I spotted dark wet spots on the sleeves of her shirt, but otherwise it appeared she had avoided too much contact with the sludge. She had been more careful than I had.

“Ugh. What the hell is that?” She said as she washed her hands.

“No idea. But I think showers are out,” I answered.

“I’ll check the ladies’.”

The women’s restroom was no better. A strange black gunk came through the shower heads. The sinks produced grimy water, but it was still identifiably water.

It was a mystery, but I didn’t want to think about it too hard. We’d wash with bottled water. The plumbing was somebody else’s problem. Which I guess means it was nobody’s problem.

***

The hygiene facilities may have been insufficient, but there were coolers and aisles full of edible things to consume and other things to shove into every remaining space in backpacks, duffle bags, and pockets. Food wasn’t our biggest concern. Jeremy and Fred had brought grocery bags full of granola bars and non-perishable food in the cabin of their truck, which we had carried with relative ease down the highway. Jeremy could have packed more food if he had removed the lumber from the truck bed, but I was doing my best not to criticize him. I couldn’t relate to pressure of processing all of this with a kid to deal with.

At any rate, the truck stop provided what we needed. Except for cleanliness.

Evelyn and Jeremy hadn’t had much success in the diner. The appliances seemed functional, but the walk-in freezer didn’t reveal anything more appealing than what we could get by opening a bag of chips or a pack of jerkey, and there was more of that than we could use.

Jeremy thought we should investigate the shower situation—fix it—but he had shown little skill as either an auto-mechanic or a chef, so I didn’t have much faith in him as a plumber. Also, we were tired. Sleep was a bigger priority.

Evelyn said a prayer as we made ourselves as comfortable as we could, heads on backpacks and bodies on tile. She had said a prayer every night since I met her. I never listened, so I can’t comment on the prayers’ content. They were important to her, so I kept quiet as she mumbled, meditating in my own way, remembering the day my wife and I got lost in the woods.

My version of prayer was my favorite memory of my Frankie. It wasn’t a remarkable day, but it was the day I realized I actually loved her. We had been camping for a long weekend, doing little but hiking and screwing and cooking over a fire Frankie had made. She was the camper. She had the experience and skills. I was along for the ride.

The day we were to pack up and hike back to our car, which was parked a little over a mile away at the State Park ranger station, a storm rolled in. Had we been checking the weather reports, we would have known it was coming, but we were busy hiking and screwing and cooking.

The rain came suddenly, followed by an undulating darkness, a squirming wall of black that dropped the temperature by dozens of degrees. It came so suddenly that Frankie got turned around and we hiked away from the ranger station for half an hour, sopping wet and sore, before she realized her mistake.

“We should stop here until it passes,” I said as the thunder sounded a particularly deep crash.

“No, we need shelter,” she said.

She knew as well as I did that by the time we found shelter, the storm likely would have passed, so we stopped where we were, in a muddy, pine needle covered alcove under precariously swaying trees. We didn’t pitch the tent. We just laid next to each other, her arm around my torso, getting so wet that we sank into the soil.

The memory of Frankie in the rain was my prayer. Evelyn’s involved Jesus, but I didn’t listen enough to tell you more than that.

Evelyn finished her prayer and we slept as best as we could.

Etching 37

Imaginary Reader, the warehouse walls shook last night again. The wide open space surrounding this desk and my bed amplifies sound too much. I can’t sleep with the banging and rattling.

I don’t know if I should open the door and look outside. The last time I left the warehouse was to bury Evelyn. The sky looked darker than I’d like that day. I didn’t say a prayer for her after I piled the last of the dirt upon her body. I should have said a prayer, or at least tried. She would have wanted that.

I don’t know if I should open the door. The sky looked frightening that day, 37 etchings ago. Something is coming for me, and it is outside. I shoudn’t open the door. So, my prayer for Evelyn will need to be done inside, not at her grave. I don’t know how to pray.

These storms are increasing in frequency. All of the destruction of the last years must have changed the atmosphere. I suppose this is what climate change produces. Storms with terrifying frequency.

The throngs of humanity caused this, but I am alone to see the effects. I think I lived responsibly. I recycled. I took the bus when I could. I walked. I am not the culprit. The villains are all dead. I am just the witness.

I should pray for Evelyn.

God: Please protect my friend. She deserved better than she got. My understanding is that you reward good people for being good people. She was a good person. She cared for the people around her. She had a bad husband, but she maintained her goodness. Why did you give her such a bad husband, God? Sorry. You have reasons, I’m sure. Maybe her bad husband was necessary to make her a good person. I don’t want that to be true. Why would you do that? You are not a very nice god. Sorry. I don’t mean that. I think I don’t understand. If you exist, please be understanding of me. But, I mean, look at all of this shit. Why did you do this to us? This is not a good prayer. Sorry. Please protect my friend Evelyn.

It’s not a good prayer. I’ll try again later.

I’m having a bad day. The banging on the warehouse walls is getting disconcerting. I should look outside. Maybe. I’m conflicted about it. It might be dangerous, and I’m the last person, so I need to write the history. I should stay inside and write the history.

The next part is important, too. When the five of us woke up in the truck stop, we were no longer five people, we were dozens.

Fred woke up first, screaming. His scream was unlike any scream I had heard before. He was at the age between boy and man, and at that age the voice gets weird. Pubescent boys have a lot of terror, but most of it is internal. They yell when playing sports or video games, but those are the creaky yells of tweens hoping for heroism. Fred’s scream was the scream presaging the silence of a hydrogen bomb’s aftermath.

We were surrounded. Grubby, dusty human figures stood around our little group of poorly-rested refugees. They didn’t look dangerous, despite Fred’s horrifying shriek. Haley held him in her arms while Jeremy lept to his feet, fists clenched at his waist, ready to murder the first person to approach his kid.

“Get out,” I heard Evelyn say quietly. Then louder: “Get out!”

I stood up, knowing full well I was not the leader of the group, but feeling a little insecure about that.

“Who are you?” I asked, possibly stealing Evelyn’s thunder. “This is our store. Leave.” I was suddenly feeling ownership of the Global Petrol and its evil, nonfunctional showers.

One of the grubby, dusty human figures spoke: “We saw there were people here. We need to stick together. Come with us. We’re going to the City.”

My read of the situation changed, but Evelyn was quicker than I was. “We are too. We need to know we can trust you, though. There are more of you than us,” she said, reasonably.

“You can’t trust us until you travel with us. We have no ulterior motive. We don’t. We aren’t going to steal from you. We have nothing, but we also aren’t taking anything. I give you my word, even though I know you can’t believe it right now. My name is Walter. I can vouch for these people.”

Walter Grisholm seemed like a good man when I first met him. To give myself some credit, Evelyn thought so too, and she had a relationship with God.

***

I heard Haley quietly speaking to herself, sitting on the floor in the toiletry aisle, away from our unexpected visitors: “And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild plum trees in tremulous white.”

Haley was strange. As I wrote before, she wasn’t stupid. She was just detached and possibly a bit unhinged. Something must have happened in that old house she was raised in. And survived in. Something was wrong with her. I’m not here to judge, though. She was a good person.

“Music,” I said.

“Huh?” She emerged from whatever reverie she had been stuck in.

“Music. You said poetry makes you think of music. Frogs singing.”

“Oh, yeah. I think those frogs die.”

“Kind of bleak,” I said. “Are you okay?”

“Yep.”

I wasn’t sure. We needed to get moving. Walter seemed to think he was in charge, and I was too tired and dirty to argue. Our band of survivors had grown substantially, unbidden. I figured I’d go along to get along. Evelyn seemed fairly confident in the new arrangement and I was fairly confident in her judgment.

Fred stuck by Haley as we continued down the highway. I started to suspect he liked her more than he liked his own father. So many new strangers had quieted the kid down. He was probably nervous. I was, so why wouldn’t a child be? The new people were not just strangers. They were strange, and not in a Haley way. They were frighteningly quiet, letting Walter speak on their behalf. A woman I assumed was his wife spoke occasionally, but even she mostly let Walter do the talking.

Walter mainly talked to Evelyn, not Jeremy or Haley or me. Her initial outburst might have impressed him or made him assume she was the leader of our little crew. If he assumed that, his assumption was right.

When the shit goes down, my first impulse is to be competent, or at least act like I am competent, but if I’m honest with myself, I didn’t have it in me that day. I’m not an Alpha. My father had made that apparent to me when I was Fred’s age. There’s a place, though, deep down in my soul where I guess I believed, then at least, that my maleness makes me some kind of protector. But my family is dead and no machismo will bring them back, so I guess I failed at that, too. I’m not cut out for heroism.

Evelyn was. Fred probably was, too, but he didn’t get the opportunity.

Etching 38

I’m better rested today than I was yesterday, Nonexistent Reader. The banging on the walls of the warehouse seem to have died down. I might go look outside. Whatever storm or atmospheric fluctuation has tormented me for the last few nights seems to have died.

I’m nervous to open the door, though. I haven’t left since I buried Evelyn. The storage room has plenty of canned food, the result of the expeditions our community sent out into the world when we actually were a community.

By the time we reached the Big City, we were a true mob of people. Walter Grisholm’s group numbered in the dozens when they came upon us at the gas station. When our suddenly bolstered group exited the shelter, heading toward the abundance of the City, we became like a magnet for stray humanity.

For days, people sightings had been rare. Evelyn and I had existed as a pair for days before seeing Haley and then almost immediately adding Jeremy and Fred. That pace of society building was already a little too fast for me. The sudden growth of our group caused by Walter and his orchestra of misfits glomming onto us made my skin crawl a bit.

The world had become unsettled. The world had become something different from the world as we had known it. My nervousness was justified, wasn’t it? How could I know who to trust?

Plus, Walter went from seeming like a good enough guy to being a good enough guy with a nevertheless irritating arrogance. Like I said, I’m not an Alpha guy. I didn’t assume I was in charge of the five-some. But Walter made sure I knew it. He clearly was the leader of the group who joined us. They deferred to him in a way I found unsettling, even as it made me question if I had behaved similarly to Evelyn and the other originals.

I tried engaging him in conversation, curious about how so many people had come together, where and under what circumstances they had chosen to coalesce into a community. He was cagey. “Here and there, you know. Strength in numbers.”

His tone and demeanor were dismissive. I’m not an Alpha. I don’t have the capacity for heroism. But I don’t like being dismissed.

I tried talking to others in the group, as well, but they were not particularly chatty. Some of it I chalk up to exhaustion. We had been through a lot. All humans, I mean. They must have been in shock. Still, their reluctance to converse felt abnormal.

There were no children for Fred to play with, either. That seemed strange. The entire group appeared middle-aged, lacking the age diversity that even our tiny original group had. Between Evelyn and Fred were a good 50-some years. The new people looked like they could have been in the same high school graduating class.

Maybe they were in the same high school graduating class. Who knows? I wonder if they were Titans or Eagles. I didn’t think to ask, but then again, they almost certainly wouldn’t have answered.

***

Had anyone still been alive to see us, we would have been quite a spectacle, dozens of human figures, some more animated than others, trudging down the middle of the highway, past broken down, dirty cars and the detritus left by mass exodus.

The quiet crowd accompanying Walter was disturbing. They looked like normal people, but they were so quiet. They produced perfunctory responses to direct questions on occasion. Usually, if addressed, they would look away and continue walking down the road.

At first it seemed to be some kind of collective trauma response. It didn’t seem to affect Walter, though. That was suspicious, but Evelyn told me to keep an open mind about him.

“We don’t know what these people have been through,” she said. “Don’t assume you know the answer.”

But I did know the answer. So many broken people and one unbroken one was impossible. He did something to them.

And yet, I couldn’t ask him directly. I hate myself for admitting it, but I think I was afraid of Walter. I am bigger than him, and I have no doubt who would be victorious if it came to violence. But I was afraid. Maybe, uneasy is a better description. I couldn’t have been afraid of that pathetic man. It must have been unease. Maybe it was fear, a little.

I guess I don’t remember how I felt toward Walter, after that first meeting. It was complex. Evelyn insisted he was okay, that the people were adjusting to trauma. Their adjusting seemed to cohesive and consistent. I am not a psychologist, but I don’t think it works that way.

***

Fred and Haley quieted noticably as we got closer to the Big City.

They had spent much of the journey in a joyful camaraderie, running ahead, playing tag or looking at garbage under abandoned cars. They dashed between Walter’s people as if they were slow moving obstacles in a real-life video game, not humans at the end of the world. The strange people barely acknowledged the young woman, the boy, or their energy. Jeremy stayed close to Evelyn and me, content to allow Haley to watch after the kid. Walter walked ahead of his people, behind Haley and Fred, both running back and forth across the highway like idiots. Jeremy, Evelyn, and I brought up the rear.

But as we got closer, Haley and Fred stopped running as much. They quieted. They must have been getting tired. Their rambunctious play had been a nice respite from the gloom, if I’m honest. But it was out of place and therefore unsustainable. As they fell back to the three of us, the air felt stiller, heavier, more appropriate to the circumstances.

“What kind of shelter are we looking for in the City, exactly?” Jeremy asked, implying that we were decision-makers, despite bringing up the rear.

“I’m not sure. We could find an apartment building or hotel, I guess. Maybe people want their own places, though. I think we should stay close to each other, regardless,” I said.

“Even them?” Evelyn asked, gesturing in front of us toward the Walter contingent.

“I suppose. Why?”

“They make you uncomfortable. I’m surprised you gave in so quickly,” she said.

“They do make me uncomfortable,” I replied, “but I think we’re all in this together now. Just keep your eye on Walter.”

“I am,” she responded.

Jeremy put his hand on Fred’s head, palming it to pull the kid into a hug. “Where do you want to live?” he asked his son.

“A big house on the lake. With a pool. And an elevator.”

Jeremy laughed, “I’m not sure we’ll find an elevator. If we do, we shouldn’t use it anyway.”

Fred was undeterred, “We’re going to find a rich guy’s house with an elevator.”

“Well, it’s possible,” Haley said.

“Don’t make promises,” I said, trying to sound like I was joking. “It’s a little cruel, you know,” I continued, the second half sounding less like a joke despite my sad attempt at being light and cheery.

“It all depends on what we find when we get there,” Evelyn said diplomatically.

“An elevator,” Fred said with a smile I wish I could have bottled and saved for today.

Walter was still at the front of the group.

The sun had not yet set, but it was preparing for the plunge as we arrived at the City.

***

The smell should have made us turn back. I suppose we were all committed to our objective, so the acrid stink, equal parts reminiscent of rotting citrus, feces, and gasoline, was ignorable upon our approach. The nasal warning proving insufficient, we pushed ignorantly forward toward the more concrete visual confirmation. The Big City was uninhabitable.

As we crested a suburban hill, the last incline before the first exit ramp into downtown, we saw the once-intimidating skyscrapers surrounded by muck. I had never liked going to the City. It was too big for me. I preferred the more modest Town we had left. In our previous version of reality, it provided all the amusements and resources of the City without its overwhelming obligation of anonymity. In this version of reality, the mass of humanity I associated with this place was gone, replaced by a lake of thick, dark brown, horrendously smelly muck.

It looked like the same substance that had shot from the shower in the gas station. Dried chunks of it still stuck to my clothing. The mess formed a lake in the center of the City. We could see from our vantage on the highway that the end of the exit ramp was submerged. We wouldn’t be going that direction.

I noticed Fred and Haley hugging. Evelyn stood next to Jeremy, her arms crossed and her expression blank. Jeremy was watching Fred and Haley.

Walter’s people chattered among themselves. Insular. Separate.

I looked at Walter, a strange instinct that struck me as wrong even in the moment. Now, it feels incomprehensible that I wouldn’t have spoken to Evelyn first. But for some reason, I asked Walter:

“What now?”

Thus, we ended up in this warehouse. We backtracked, on Walter’s suggestion, one highway exit. Walter had pegged the industrial park as we walked to the City. I figured we’d at least find shelter and space. I didn’t have any better ideas.

So here we were. Here I am, Non-reader. The last survivor of my community. The last survivor of anything.

***

Etching 39

The expeditions were Evelyn’s idea. The industrial park was between our origin and our imagined destination. The City was clearly unsustainable, so we were stranded between it and the Town we had left.

We could have gone back, of course, me to my empty house, Haley to her parents’ mansion, Jeremy and Fred to their backyard where I imagine them tossing a ball back and forth, Evelyn to her mid-century bungalow, Walter’s people to wherever Walter’s people came from.

Titans on the Titan side of town and Eagles on the Eagle side of town.

That would have been a reasonable, logical response to the realization that the City was functionally submerged and therefore not particularly useful. It had been a grand idea, and adventure with the potential to provide some level of hope among hopelessness. It hadn’t worked. We should have gone home.

I think we would have if it weren’t for one commonality among us. We had all watched people we loved die in our houses. Or, in my case, people simply vacated.

So we settled on the in-between, a shelter whose intended purpose was now obsolete. A big building not quite to our destination, but at least not where we started.

And what was home, anyway? What a distant notion.

Last night I had a dream of the last day. It was almost a real memory. It was almost true.

In my dream, the only building left standing in our neighborhood was the gas station. Everything else had crumbled in the tragedy, bricks and wood squashed like peanuts on a barfloor.

Whether the gasoline or the Red 40 in the junk food provided the building’s resilience I don’t know, but something protected it as the catastrophe unfolded. The storm was fast, appearing suddenly in a perfectly blue sky, raining down destruction and scattering the remnants, crushing the markers of commerce and security. Only fuel remained. And the sky returned to calm.

There were no injuries in my home, but everyone had changed. My wife was leaving. Everything had changed except the gas station.

Frankie had stared at the remnants of our home, her eyes too dry for the occasion. “I guess we need to go to my mother’s house,” she said. Her voice was gravelly. I always notice the condition of her voice. Gravelly meant she was thinking things she wasn’t saying.

“Yeah,” I said. “Do you want me to call her?”

“I’ll text her.”

Frankie didn’t seem upset. Everything we had was gone, and Frankie seemed fine with it.

We passed the gas station on our way out of what was once our town. It was creepy just sitting there like nothing had happened. Surrounded by the detritus of a community, empty buildings, some broken. Like it was a normal Tuesday.

Frankie drove, which was for the best. My eyes kept getting watery, a kind of pre-cry that never quite got there, a hazy blurring of light. I was strangely attentive to the condition of my eyes.

A lot of people were leaving town. I guess that makes sense. We all would need a place to regroup. I wondered how many people were going to their in-laws’ houses. I wondered what it would be like if I didn’t get along with my mother-in-law. What if the closest family was family you hated? We were lucky. I need to remember that.

Beth’s house was about 45 minutes away, so we had time to panic. I had time to panic, I should say. Frankie seemed calm. I couldn’t figure out what to say, what question I could ask to produce an answer that could slow the thudding in my chest. So, I closed my eyes and counted.

The counting became a rhythm. I needed to focus on the rhythm. A gasp of an upbeat and a hard pounding downbeat. Over and over. Up, down. Pounding, repeating.

Da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, pounding, repeating, moving foward. Da-dum, da-dum. Propelled, Pounding. Repeating.

A counter-rhythm emerged. I needed to focus on the rhythm, on the time, so I added new rhythms, filler subdivisions, adding. Repeating. Building.

Beth already had her laptop on the kitchen table when we got there. She shot up as we walked in the door, grabbing us both in a bear hug. “Oh god, guys. Oh, I’m so sorry.”

“Just things,” Frankie said, her voice sounding lower than it had an hour ago.

“Yeah, we’re safe. It’s okay,” I said. “Thanks for putting us up.”

“Give me a break,” Beth said, smiling a little. “You want a beer?”

“Correct.”

Frankie sat at the table. “Mom, can I use your computer?”

“Of course,” Beth said as she handed me a beer. “You want a drink, honey?”

“No thanks,” Frankie replied, her glasses reflecting the insurance company’s login page.

The internet was working, despite the calamity surrounding us. Frankie filed a claim, or whatever. I never understood the financial stuff and left it to her. She didn’t mind. Her brain was better with numbers. My brain wondered if there was anyone on the other side of the electronic communication. Frankie’s optimism was troubling to me.

Beth and I streamed news coverage on her smart TV in the den while Frankie worked in the kitchen. Destruction had been selective but overwhelming. It was bizarre. The meteorologists were perplexed. It was unsettling to see the weather lady seeming confused. Even when they’re wrong, they usually have some kind of rationale, percentages and probabilities. This thing had been inexplicable, sparing nothing but the gas station and some human life.

“It’s so fucked up,” Beth said. I didn’t really have a response. It was fucked up.

I was tempted to make the whole thing some kind of allegory of capitalism, the persistent durability of commercialism spitting in the face of human connection and safety. The pernicious, roach-like interminability of the fossil fuel industry. The apocalyptic consequence of our flippancy toward both nature and humanity.

It was probably just fucked up.

The next morning, Beth made pancakes. While she was cooking, Frankie checked email and I threw on my headphones. I had a weird desire to listen to Father John Misty’s “Buddy’s Rendezvous.” A compulsion.

The saxophone was like a warm drip of water on my spine. The piano massaged my brain.

“I kind of want to go to the gas station,” Beth said as she set down a plate of pancakes.

I pulled my headphones off. “I kind of do too,” I said. “I don’t really know why.”

“We can drive by, I guess,” Frankie said. She hadn’t cried last night.

It was almost 2:00 before we got it together to leave. It was always like that with Beth. She just kind of slowed things down.

Beth made sandwiches for the road and Frankie drove. We’d driven that route, the three of us, more times than I could fathom, going between houses. Now one of them was gone. The thought just kind of hung in the car, suspended from Frankie’s dreamcatcher hanging from the rearview mirror.

“I can’t fucking believe this,” Frankie said, out of the blue.

“I know. I know,” Beth said.

“No, like I really can’t fucking believe it. Fuck.”

My neck throbbed a little. I fondled my headphones in my hand.

“I just . . . I don’t know,” Frankie said. Her voice was quiet but clear.

“Yeah,” I said.

Traffic picked up as we got closer. People returning with their in-laws in tow, to survey the damage. FEMA. A few news vans.

Car upon car upon truck weaving around the Subaru, a fugue of anxiety. This is why Frankie drove. Weeks later, cars stopped running, leaving behind the automotive graveyard I would trudge through, later, along the highway.

The day after the event was weirdly windy. I’m not sure why the wind struck me as odd. It just seemed like the air should have run out of energy or something.

There weren’t as many people sifting through debris as I expected. That’s another weird thing. Maybe they’d come and gone. We only saw a handful of people digging through their former lives. Evelyn was one of them.

I stuck my worries about the absence of people in a secondary box in my brain. I have limits.

The news vans hadn’t faded away with the other vehicles, at any rate. They surrounded the gas station, a phalanx of information distribution pinning down the oddity. Like they could extract some knowledge from the grungy old place through sheer force of reporting.

“Why are we here, again?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” Beth said.

“I guess to see it,” Frankie said.

“So . . . we saw it,” Beth said.

“Come up short and end up on the news,” I sang.

“What’s that,” Beth asked.

“Song’s stuck in me head. Sorry.”

“No, don’t be sorry! Sing for us!” She insisted.

“I’m not going to do that Beth,” I laughed.

“You suck.”

“So, um . . . I guess we go back?” Frankie asked unconfidently, staring at the gas station.

“I guess,” I said.

“Should we go by the house?” She asked. Her voice was clear. She was calm.

“Yeah. I guess we should.”

Frankie sat on the concrete remnants of the porch. Beth stood in the street, her hands on her hips. I put on my headphones and walked to the lot line between our place and the Sullivans’. You used to be able to see into our bedroom from that vantage point. I always liked how the sun fell on that side of the house in the morning.

When “Buddy’s Rendezvous” ended, I hit repeat before my phone could move to the next track.

“When can I see you again?” I sang. I didn’t know I was singing until Frankie asked, “What?”

“My destruction is an hour late,” I sang louder.

The song ends with fading strings. It should end with the saxophone.

The next day, Frankie was gone. Beth didn’t answer her phone. I was the last member of our little family.

***

Etching 39

I think I missed a day on Evelyn’s calendar. I forgot to etch the new day yesterday. I thought of marking two days today, but I decided if I missed a day, that day was missed. The lines on the wall are the only reality now, so if I fail to mark it, it doesn’t exist.

I’m glad Walter is dead. I’m glad he can’t see my mistake, losing a day.

This morning, I cleaned a little. The warehouse is vast and I haven’t accounted for, organized, closed-up everybody’s space. They disappeared or died in front of me. Either way, they left, and I haven’t been careful about negotiating what they left behind.

This morning, I cleaned up Haley’s spot. She slept in a corner of the warehouse. I insisted that the originals could choose their places, and Haley chose a place where there were two walls surrounding her. Not full protection, but something.

Under the pile of sheets Haley used as a bed, I found a crumpled piece of paper. Haley had notated, from memory I suppose, an old poem I had never read. I folded it and put it in my pocket. Haley wrote the poet’s name at the top of the paper: Sara Teasdale.

The poem reads:

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

I miss Haley. She was a bright spot. So much feels dark now. The swallows are dead.

***

Etching 40

Evelyn is gone. So is Walter. And Fred.

Will anyone know we were here? No one will know we are gone.

There is no one. Mankind perished utterly.

Last

Etching 33

I write to you, though I know you do not exist. I suppose it is boredom that compels me to write. Boredom and meaningless obligation.

Writing has no utility now. Truly, utility no longer exists, except perhaps for cockroaches or something else more resilient than humans, but I haven’t seen any of them either. Perhaps I am not just the last of a species. Perhaps I am the last of the things that can be categorized into species. Utility is now a concept, not a truth.

Writing has no meaning without a reader and I will have none now. Neither reader nor meaning. So, instead I am bored and will write for the empty air, the streets and structures that will disintegrate, the river that will carry the asphalt away with the remnants of my history.

Because it now is my history. Mine alone. It belongs to no one but me. Countless souls emerging over countless years, countless conflicts and loves, countless boring days and exhilarating adventures, all leading to this. My pen and my paper. My history.

My memoir is the last history.

Or not. Maybe it is your history, non-existent Earth-companion. I also write for you, Survivor, Reader. I can conceive of you even if I know you never will be. And that conception at least relieves the boredom. But it offers no utility.

When you—who do not exist—find my notebook, will the walls of this warehouse still stand? I have found a metal desk in a room. The room was once undoubtedly the office of the manager of some business that existed here. I pushed it out to the open floor, where people labored, because I choose to spend what time remains laboring. The desk looks stronger than the walls of the warehouse.

I sit at the desk now, and I will leave the notebook in the drawer when I am not writing. If the walls of this warehouse collapse before you stumble upon my desk, You Who Do Not Exist, I hope this notebook remains protected in the drawer. It might not survive, but believing it will provides me with something to hope for.

I hope for your existence and my notebook’s survival. These are concepts, not truths, but that has always been the nature of hope, even when it was prevalent and common. When people used the words “progress” and “tomorrow” unironically.

I have imagined utility as a solution to boredom. As it always was.

***

The warehouse I’m sitting in was once home to dozens of survivors. Time took some from me. The world took others. Our resources were limited, so we established a process by which small contingents, volunteers at first, ventured into town or into the fields beyond the industrial park to loot or forage, depending on which direction they walked.

At first, we sent only one group at a time, 3 or 4 people. Volunteers were either noble or desperate. It’s a matter of perspective. Some, I suspect, were deluded about their roles in the greater group. Walter Grindholm was one of those people. I disliked him, a perspective I now feel guilty about, as after 5 relatively successful expeditions, his sixth never returned. There were 4 people in his group, total, though to observe them was to conclude he considered the other 3 to be expendable.

That’s my perspective. It’s the only perspective left, so I suppose it must be correct. When other people existed, they might have disagreed with me. But there are no other people, so my opinion stands. Still, I am open to the possibility that I was wrong, that his demeanor was a product of his efficiency, strategy, or some kind of brilliance I didn’t perceive.

It doesn’t matter. He didn’t come back and there is no one to argue with about it. So history shall reflect that Walter Grindholm was an asshole. It doesn’t mean he deserved whatever happened to him on that sixth expedition into the city.

Reader-Who-Doesn’t-Exist, I’m mentioning this just so you know I am aware that I am inadequate. I am sometimes inadequately understanding of people like Walter Grindholm. I am inadequate to the task of history.

But my view is all that matters now, so we need to put that on the table and move on. A planet of 1 is not a democracy.

Walter Grindholm’s sixth expedition was just over a year ago. I should start setting timelines and terms, contexts and conditions.

I know it was over a year ago that I last saw Walter because we started keeping track of sunrises. When our little warehouse community started cohering a bit, Evelyn Forrester began marking each sunrise by scratching a line on an interior wall. It became our imperfect but clarifying version of a calendar. Imperfect because we did not know the date when Evelyn took the broken concrete block and etched her first line in the wall. Clarifying because it allowed us to restart the counting of history.

Evelyn’s first etching simply became “1.” Evelyn died 32 etchings ago. I know because I scratched a new line the day after I buried her, and I’ve scratched a new sunrise every day since. I restarted the count.

Even with everything that has happened, I still know how many days are in a year, and Walter’s group has been gone for 387 etchings.

I hate that I hated him. Evelyn I loved.

The expeditions were crucial to our community, which we never named. People who arrived at the warehouse often had some supplies with them, food, weapons, tools, but were often hesitant to share. That resistance was certainly understandable, so we needed communal resources. A few people were capable hunters, some had medical knowledge, a handful had mechanical skills, but our confines were, well, confining. We had to venture forth to gather what we could.

The warehouse seemed protected, though that was probably always a foolish assumption. What it did provide, though, was borders. A defined community. A shared location in which to re-establish something that might approximate a society.

It worked for a while. Societies are temporary, though. I don’t think I ever even considered that while the society into which I was born existed. I thought about it a lot as we constructed a new one.

Our new society had both Walters and Evelyns.

***

Etching 34

There is a big, broken sign outside of the warehouse. It fell from its intended location at some point during the turmoil and now sits broken in front of what was once the main entrance to this building. It is made of wood. It is enormous. It is heavy.

It lies face-down on the shattered asphalt of what was once a parking lot. When the first small group of survivors, myself included, came upon this giant, rectangular shelter and decided it was as good a place to hunker down as any other, we attempted to flip the sign over. It seemed important to know what this place was in its previous iteration. The heft of the thing proved too great. We could not reveal the text of the identity-marker.

Inside, of course, hints of the building’s purpose emerged, followed by confirmation in the form of letterheads and various plaques and paperweights expressing corporate appreciation. But the big sign, the external notification of the warehouse’s identity, remains obscured, broken, no longer signifying anything, just present. I was tempted to propose naming our little community after the building’s previous moniker, but the logos and acronyms, the job titles and anniversary signs on desks, felt too small to adapt to our group. Our collective remained nameless.

Our initial group included Evelyn—a former teacher I met while rummaging through dumpsters in an alley in town—Jeremy and Fred—a father and his 12 year-old son who had constructed a lean-to next the highway out of town, and Haley—a 20-something woman whom I was shocked had survived so long.

Haley wasn’t stupid. She was just disinterested. She hadn’t processed the changed reality, so she always appeared to be in a state of confusion. Shock, I suppose.

I am evaluating Haley, now, just as I did with Walter. I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t do that. I need to record the facts, just the facts. For history.

You don’t exist, though, Reader, so I am struggling to understand my obligations. I will try to do better.

***

Evelyn and I had been traveling together for a few days before we came upon Haley. She was sitting on a park bench staring at nothing in particular. Her gaze pointed limply toward the vacant buildings on the other side of the park, as if her glance had a vague intention of pulling her toward shelter but lacked the requisite ambition. As a result, the young woman sat in a strange stasis, her eyes registering reality but failing to operationalize it. The world was occurring without her participation.

I would have kept walking right past Haley. She was hardly the only broken person I had seen in the previous days, and sentimentality and compassion needed to be rationed. Evelyn and I had elected to go east, scavenging and looting as we made our way through empty streets and broken storefronts. Our objective had been to reach the highway and travel south toward what once was considered the Big City. It would take us days on the highway to reach our destination, where we hoped resources would be more plentiful, but at least we would know where we were. Much had changed, but we could still be confident in the interstate’s location and that it would lead to the city it had always led to.

I would have kept walking, but Evelyn wouldn’t have it. She went straight to the rickety, wood picnic table and sat directly across from Haley.

“Are you okay, dear?” she asked.

Haley did not respond, nor did her gaze change, despite Evelyn’s head now blocking whatever it had been directed toward before.

I remained standing, hoping Evelyn would be quick. I had come to prefer standing near buildings. Their brick solidity felt protective. I wasn’t looking forward to the open highway in my near future, so I definitely didn’t need the precursor of an open park. The trees weren’t as comforting as the broken yet human-built shells of commerce and residence.

Evelyn sat for an uncomfortably long time, just staring into the young woman’s vacant eyes. I distracted myself by listening to the crunchy rustle of the few leaves that remained on the trees. The wind was still blowing.

Eventually, Haley made a sound. “Can you take me home?”

“Yes,” Evelyn lied. “Come with us.”

So Haley did as instructed, joining us on our eastward trek. Her company was welcome, despite my initial hesitancy. She didn’t speak much or, frankly, help much, but more people was better than fewer, I ultimately decided.

As we walked and scavenged, Haley slowly revealed bits and pieces of her story. By this time, I knew Evelyn’s story fairly well, and I suppose Evelyn knew enough of mine. It was a relief to have a new story to accompany us.

***

Haley remained fairly quiet until we approached the highway. The park where Evelyn and I found her was up the hill from the modest commercial district of our town. In past years, the neighborhood where we found Haley would have been considered affluent. It was old, old enough that brick walkup apartment buildings co-mingled with homes that would accurately be described as mansions by anyone except the wealthy but progressive-minded or -perceived people who owned them. Those people are mostly gone now, but their ownership remains. There’s no one left to buy those houses, even if the owners were alive to sign the paperwork.

That architectural co-mingling was a vestige of an even earlier period, when streetcars and politeness enabled department store owners to live near, and commute with, department store workers. Perhaps Haley’s dazed demeanor was a symptom of her location. The neighborhood displayed the physical remnants of a social reality that was out-of-time, the living ruins of an ancient civilization ripped from existence by epic cultural and political forces around the middle of the 20th century. We were walking toward another physical manifestation of those forces, the highway, a marker of the new civilization that made co-mingling defunct, along with the neighborhood. After a time of economic decay, the inevitable consequence of the collapse of civilizations, the neighborhood on the hill had been revitalized by money and well-meaning, destructive displacement.

The Epic of the neighborhood concluded, just as all Epics have now concluded, leaving behind configurations of bricks and concrete that once served a purpose. Now that all stories have ended, staring into the distance in a place like that park seems as good a response as any. Perhaps Haley’s consciousness had been sucked into the vacuum of the empty history surrounding her picnic table.

Perhaps Evelyn’s attention helped put Haley’s consciousness back where it belonged. It took some time, though, for the consciousness to feel secure. It took a while for Haley to speak, release her hold just enough to let some of herself back out to the world. It took seeing the highway.

“I used to play in that park every day as a kid,” she said. Evelyn and I had been vaguely chatting about our strategy for when we finally got to the Big City.

“What’s that, sweetie?” Evelyn asked.

“That park. There was a swing set when I was little. They took it down a few years ago. Dangerous, I guess.”

“Did you live near there?” Evelyn followed up. Good ol’ Evelyn. I’m glad she was there to carry the conversation.

“Yes. On Livingston. About two blocks down.”

Evelyn looked at me, just for a second. A few days scavenging with her, and she was already reading my mind.

“Sweetie, you asked me to take you home. You were right by home.”

“I don’t know why I asked that,” Haley said. I was worried for a moment that she was going back inside her mind, returning to whatever mental world she had constructed before we saw her at that picnic table. Only for a moment, though, as I remembered that Evelyn was better at this than I was.

“It’s alright. You’re with us. We’ll find a place in the City and build a new home. Some place where we can be stable. We’re going to make something new.”

We were getting close to the highway entrance ramp, which split off of 4th Street right past the bank I used to drive through every other Friday. The idea of walking up the ramp, traversing a path I had travelled countless times in a vehicle, putting my feet on a road meant for tires, was strangely disconcerting.

“My Grandmother supposedly grew up in a house right there,” Haley said, pointing at a spot about halfway up the entrance ramp.

“Really? How do you know?” I asked, somewhat surprising myself. I hoped I didn’t sound aggressive. I hadn’t really spoken to Haley before that moment.

“They knocked the house down when the highway came through. They knocked down the whole neighborhood. My Grandma had a picture of the house. I don’t know where it is now. My mom probably has it in the attic, so I guess it’s still there.”

“Do you want to go back and take anything from the house? We can go back,” Evelyn offered. I rolled my eyes a little but managed to stop myself before it was noticeable.

Haley stayed quiet for a few seconds, though we kept walking forward. Finally, she said, “No. Let’s keep going.”

Evelyn looked relieved, though I would never mention it. “How long has your family had a house up the hill? I’ve always loved that area,” Evelyn inquired. Apparently we were going to keep talking about this.

“It was my grandparents’ house, my dad’s parents. He grew up in that house, too, so it’s been in the family for a long time. My dad’s family is rich. My mom’s family is a little trashy, to be honest. My dad’s parents never liked them. I always thought they were kind of fun, though.”

Haley stopped talking, as if she had let out too much of the precious consciousness she had regained in the park.

I looked at her, trying to figure out what was going on. Her brow seemed a little tight, not pained, but slightly tense, her eyebrows scrunching toward each other, almost imperceptibly. Her mouth was also tight, expressionless, almost frozen.

“I never lived anywhere else,” she said, releasing her mouth muscles just enough to get the words into the world.

“Where would you have wanted to live?” Evelyn asked. It felt like dangerous territory to me, but this was clearly the Evelyn Show.

“I don’t know. Somewhere. I’m an adult. I should have lived some place I chose, at least once. Doesn’t it seem kind of pathetic? I just never did. I could have. It just made sense to stay in that house.”

“Well, now you’re going to,” Evelyn said. How did she do that? How did she make things seem better? Things were not going to get better. Was she just that good of a liar, or did she know something I didn’t know?

It doesn’t really matter. At this point, I’m alive and Evelyn is buried outside the warehouse. I’m not sure if that means she’s a liar or I am.

Well, there are Evelyns and there are Walters. And there are Haleys. I wish more Haleys had Evelyns to talk to than they had Walters to talk to. Maybe some of this could have been avoided.

It’s a moot point. Haley wasn’t quiet anymore. We were adding again, after so much had been subtracted.

***

The afternoon we reached the highway, the sun or something else had heated the pavement sufficiently to feel tacky under our feet. The entrance ramp had been repaired a few years earlier, so the road still felt cleaner and newer than the city streets it emerged from. Those repairs were completed prior to all the turmoil, fixed up just in time to lose its function.

The soles of our shoes made smacking sounds as we walked on the hot surface of the entrance ramp, up the incline to the raised highway. It wasn’t too steep, but the stickiness of the surface, coupled with gravity, seemed to add resistance, as if the materiality of the town itself wanted to hold onto us, prevent escape. I was panting more than I wanted to admit, but I didn’t try to hide it. Shame, like a lot of things, had become frivolous.

“It’d be nice if it rained a little,” Evelyn said.

“I’m not sure I want anything falling down on us right now,” I panted.

“To cool us off. This humidity needs to break,” she said, as if it were two years ago.

“You confident it won’t be fire and brimstone?”

“You need to grow up, kiddo,” she said.

Haley chimed in: “There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound.”

“What?” I asked. Evelyn looked amused.

“It’s poem. My mom had a book of poetry I used to read when I was little. I don’t know why I remember that one.”

“What is it?” Evelyn asked.

“I think it’s from World War I. It’s about how shitty people are, I guess. I think I just liked the sound of it.”

“A lot of poetry is about how shitty people are, if you think about it,” Evelyn said.

“Really?” I asked. “I think of nature when I think about poetry.”

“Sure, I guess, but why do you think people need to write about nature. They can just look at it.”

“To make a record, maybe. To remember how a flower or whatever made you feel,” I said, ready to drop the rain conversation already.

“I think that’s right,” Evelyn said.

Haley piped up, apparently not letting the rain conversation drop: “Poetry makes me think of music.”

“Me too,” Evelyn replied, while I walked a little quicker.

***

Etching 35

You-Who-Don’t-Exist, I’m out of sorts today. I woke this morning to a shuttering, banging sound against the big metal walls of the warehouse. It rattled me awake as its sound reverberated mostly unencumbered through the vast room.

As I’m the only one left, I pulled my bed to the middle of the warehouse. I don’t need privacy. I sleep on a makeshift bed mattress, piles of towels stuffed in several big canvas mailbags lashed together with rope. You’ve probably already seen it. It’s that mess snuggled up against this desk.

Just after we arrived and chose our new home, Jeremy located a stack of cots in a back room, but they are just short enough to annoy me into sleeplessness. So, I prefer my jerry-rigged bed. I’ve gotten used to it. I usually sleep pretty well now.

I was sleeping pretty well last night, just not long enough. The banging woke me up before dawn, judging from the lack of light entering through the skylights high above my head. Or maybe the sun went out during the night.

At any rate, I wasn’t well rested, so the sound not only woke me but set my heart into a wild rhythm and my brain into frenetic overdrive. It must have been a storm, but a violent one. It lasted a while, and my elevated heartrate lasted even longer.

So, I want to keep writing my history, but you should know I’m unsettled as I do it. I was writing about Haley when I stopped last. I’ll get back on track.

I wanted to make good time down the highway, both because I knew the Big City would be a better place to establish a home in our new reality and because I was finding it difficult to hold a conversation with Haley and Evelyn. They were both very nice people, and I’m grateful to have had them in my new, convoluted reality. But until we were secure and had a longer-term plan, I didn’t want to chat.

I didn’t get my wish for silence though, as after what I assume was a mile or so, we saw Jeremy and Fred’s little lean-to shelter, just a few 2X4s and a dirty tarp. I saw their truck first, though. Along the highway, we had seen a few cars that had run off the road or had simply been abandoned, but even in the sun and heat I could see that the Jeremy’s red Ford was strangely clean. Most vehicles we had seen were dented and beaten, by what force I don’t know. But Jeremy’s truck was in pristine condition, parked on the shoulder. In a different time, I would have just thought it was having mechanical problems and the driver had pulled over. In this time, however, the driver was living next to it, just on the other side, down the road, in a rickety structure he shared with his little boy.

Jeremy spotted us while I was still looking at his truck. The first I was aware of him was with his yelling voice:

“Hey! Hey! So glad to see you!”

This seemed foolish to me, even though I was glad to see him, as well. Given the circumstances, it struck me as a bad idea to just shout out to a group of complete strangers who outnumbered him. Haley ran forward, “Oh thank fucking God, Hi!” she called to him, but then she saw the child. “Oh, hi there. I’m Haley.”

I thought the boy looked elementary-school age, but he later confirmed to me that he was a middle schooler. That wasn’t better.

I wasn’t happy to see the child. I admit it. I didn’t want more complications. His able-bodied father was a welcome addition, but the kid was going to require attention. The adults had enough to deal with, what with the world ending and all.

But Haley found him amusing, so we added another source of interest for her. A font of new, more irritating conversation. I thought Jeremy would be useful, and we weren’t going to just leave them to rot, so they gathered their things, leaving their terrible shelter in hopes of a more solid one.

The truck was dead, despite its pristine appearance. It had seemed so promising, but it wouldn’t start.

“We were trying to get out of town, and it just stopped. It’s got gas. It just won’t go,” Jeremy explained.

“Why is it so clean? Every abandoned vehicle I’ve seen on the road looks like a shitshow,” I asked him.

“Beats me. I noticed that too. We holed up in the house when everything went down. We were prepared with food and stuff. When it seemed like we should go, we hopped in the truck and went.” He paused for a moment, thinking. “There wasn’t any traffic.”

“Just cars on the side of the road,” I finished his thought.

“Yeah. Weird.”

***

Upon our first meeting, I found Jeremy to be a decent guy, and Fred was nice enough for a kid on the cusp of puberty. One of them would be useful, and the other one would be a burden. At the end of the world, I suppose you have to take both and hope one outweighs the other.

Jeremy was a teacher, or at least he had been before recent events. He taught high school social studies at the school I hadn’t attended. I was a proud Titan, an alum of the other high school in town. He was an Eagle. I was willing to overlook that, at least mostly.

Had Fred been old enough, he probably would have been an Eagle, too. That made me a little envious of the kid, not for being a potential Eagle but because he wouldn’t be a Titan either. He’d be something else.

That was upon our first meeting, though. Now, he’ll be nothing more than Fred.

Fred really liked Haley, probably because Haley really liked Fred. There could be any number of reasons, I suppose. Haley was closer in age to Fred, child though he was, than she was to Evelyn. She didn’t seem particularly fond of me, and I hadn’t given her much reason to be. Maybe there really is some kind of maternal instinct. Haley’s chances of being a mother had been obliterated by our circumstances, so maybe she was drawn to the boy.

Maybe Fred’s puberty had kicked in after all.

Whatever the reason, the moment Haley and Fred locked eyes, they were a pair. I assume that was a relief to Jeremy, but what do I know? I don’t have kids, and like Haley, now I never will.

As we made our way down the highway, Jeremy, Evelyn, and I led, trying to make whatever small talk entails when every topic is big. Smallness had ceased to be interesting. Or maybe it had become so interesting we couldn’t see the bigness surrounding us. I’m not sure.

But we talked about high school. Evelyn had moved to town with her husband, so she didn’t know the subtleties of local teen sports rivalries. She didn’t know why it was important that Titans went to the McDonald’s on Spring Street, while Eagles went to the one on Darcy. She didn’t know where the bussing demarcation lines had been drawn decades ago, or why those lines meant knowing if someone’s dad worked at the Northside Bottling Company or the Riverview Plastics Plant could tell you everything you needed to know about their home life.

Evelyn was born on the coast, far far away from here, where her friends’ parents didn’t work in manufacturing. Her father had run a supermarket, and her mother was a journalist at a well-known and, according to her, well-respected newspaper. She met her husband in college and they moved to the middle of the country so he could pursue his career. He was a business guy. Our city allowed him to be a big fish in a small pond, rather than drowning in the ocean he was born into.

He died many years ago, long before he had to witness what his wife witnessed. What I witnessed, and Jeremy and Haley and Fred, too. By Evelyn’s account, her husband had a good life in management. I wonder if he’d be able to manage anything these days. He’d be an old man, and the world has either extended or shrunk beyond managing.

Haley and Fred seemed to do just fine behind us, chatting and goofing, occasionally laughing at some inside joke about something they saw along the road. I could hear them, but I didn’t pay much attention. Haley could take care of the kid.

I like to think Haley and Fred were together when the end came for them. I don’t know, Reader Who Does Not Exist. I don’t know what happened to them. But I can like to think whatever I want to think. That’s my prerogative, as the remaining historian.

***

Etching 36

The 5 of us—me, Evelyn, Haley, Jeremy, and Fred—made our way along the highway, fleeing our Small City not due to immediate danger, but to avoid more long term danger. The resources in town felt limited. The resources in the Big City seemed plentiful.

That was our motivation. It might have been possible to rebuild in the place we were when the world ended. I admit it might have been.

But catastrophe so often spurs migration. Famines, fire, despair, war. These things prompt movement, change, disruption of the norm. We weren’t so different from other refugees. The precipitating tragedy was novel, but maybe there are some things that don’t change.

The certain had become uncertain, so we opted for the unknown. We didn’t truly know what we would find when we got to the Big City. We just hoped and, I suppose, assumed there would be more. Of everything.

That might be another side effect of catastrophe: hoarding. The lumber in the back of Jeremy’s truck haunted me the entire walk. He said the wood was meant for a deck-repair project he just hadn’t managed to start. That was weeks ago, but the wood stayed in the truck. Now, the deck project was pointless, so the lumber would keep on sitting there unless we came up with a way to transport it. Wasted.

We saw more trucks and cars along the road as we walked. They were like the others we had seen, dented and dirty. Windows shattered, bumpers on the ground. Jeremy’s truck was an anomaly.

“You think the battery’s dead?” I asked him as we walked.

“Maybe, but I tried my portable jumper. I guess I should have tried taking a battery from one of those other cars.” He was blaming himself.

“Nah,” I said, though I had thought the same thing. “Let’s just get situated. We can come back and try to fix it later.”

As the blazing sun became a purplish sunset, we walked down an exit ramp Evelyn had pegged. She had spotted the road sign indicating truck stops on the side of the highway and wisely suggested we stop. My skin had been crawling for hours, agitated by the long walk out in the open, far from buildings and protection. My discomfort masked fatigue, and I wasn’t sure what happened at night in this new reality, so I concurred with Evelyn.

Jeremy hadn’t mentioned anything strange at night, and he and Fred had slept in their flimsy roadside shelter for days. Depite seeming more comfortable with the open air, they would welcome real walls and a real ceiling. Haley had spent her time since the disaster in her childhood home, only leaving to scavenge. She wasn’t keen on sleeping outside, either.

The exit ramp intersected a county road, where a sign indicated gas stations in either direction. “Are we Richardson’s or Global Petrol people?” I asked.

“Global Petrol,” Haley responded immediately.

“Huh. You seem convinced. GP it is then,” Jeremy volunteered. I didn’t bother to ask for a vote.

It was a good choice, regardless. The front door was smashed, so we had an easy entry. I pushed an ice cooler against the door when we were all inside. Fred immediately began ransacking the food aisle while Evelyn peered at the diner attached to the convenience store.

“Think we can get a stove to work?” She asked.

“We can try,” Jeremy said, and they disappeared into the kitchen.

Haley walked toward Fred. Her expression looked like it did when Evelyn and I had first seen her in the park, as if all the muscles in her face has suddenly relaxed. Her eyes seemed blank.

“Hey, Haley, are you good? I’m going to see about the plumbing,” I said.

She was silent for a moment, but then replied, “Yeah, I’m fine,” a tiny speck of energy seeming to animate her, just for an instant, before her face went slack again.

“Ok. Grab some water from the cooler. I’m going to see if the showers work.”

The GP had regular, gendered restrooms, and attached to each was a shower facility. In other times, truck drivers and road trippers could sign up for shower time and wait for a voice on the PA system to tell them it’s their turn to get clean.

I went to the men’s room. I’m not sure why. Social convention was no longer salient, and I still went to the men’s room automatically. The comfort of normalcy, I suppose.

I suddenlly had to shit and found myself speed-walking to reach a stall. I hadn’t felt the need to shit moments before. Seeing the appropriate place, my intestines came to life, convulsing, dropping their pretense.

Outside, on the side of the highway, would have been an equally appropriate place now, but my body hadn’t adjusted to new social expectations.

The toilet flushed. I was relieved. I wasn’t sure it would. It indicated functionality in plumbing.

I washed my hands, noting the brownish sheen of the water, but disregarding it. There was soap.

I badly needed to clean my body, so I turned toward the shower area. It resembled, in arrangement if not aesthetics, the shower at the gym I went to in the pre-catastrophe world. Five tiled shower stalls with ragged curtains shared a drain in the center of the room. The floor was caked in dried soap and human dermatological matter, clearly not having been cleaned when the calamity struck. A white/gray sheen covered the tiles and the drainage grate.

I went to the nearest stall to test the water, mindful of the dirty water from the sink. I turned the knob to the left, and the shower head sputtered for a moment before bursting forth, like my intestines minutes before.

I was instantly covered in a fetid black mess of thick, viscous fluid. Not the brownish tint of the sink. A tacky, sticky tar-like substance, indefinable in the moment, but resembling what I imagined crude oil might look like. Feel like. Sticky, slick, warm.

I bolted back, out of the stall, leaving the shower running. The gunk hadn’t gotten into my eyes, but it had drenched my torso and legs. I reached for the towel cabinet and grabbed a pristine white terry-cloth towel. I wiped myself down vigorously, violently, getting as much substance off of me as I could, but truthfully just rubbing it into my t-shirt, jeans, and skin.

I dropped the towel, now black and slimy, and ran back to the sink, splashing the brown water on my face, my arms, my legs, leaving me a drenched, dirty disaster.

***

My commotion must have snapped Haley out of her weird trance. She and Fred came running into the men’s room, social convention be damned.

“What the hell? What happened?”

“Fucking shower,” I growled, presence of a child also be damned.

Haley ran to the men’s shower room, while Fred looked at me slack-jawed. I stripped and pulled a new shirt from my backpack. I threw the old one in the garbage can and tried wiping my jeans with paper towels, which proved equally ineffective.

I heard the shower turn off and Haley emerged from the shower room. I spotted dark wet spots on the sleeves of her shirt, but otherwise it appeared she had avoided too much contact with the sludge. She had been more careful than I had.

“Ugh. What the hell is that?” She said as she washed her hands.

“No idea. But I think showers are out,” I answered.

“I’ll check the ladies’.”

The women’s restroom was no better. A strange black gunk came through the shower heads. The sinks produced grimy water, but it was still identifiably water.

It was a mystery, but I didn’t want to think about it too hard. We’d wash with bottled water. The plumbing was somebody else’s problem. Which I guess means it was nobody’s problem.

***

The hygiene facilities may have been insufficient, but there were coolers and aisles full of edible things to consume and other things to shove into every remaining space in backpacks, duffle bags, and pockets. Food wasn’t our biggest concern. Jeremy and Fred had brought grocery bags full of granola bars and non-perishable food in the cabin of their truck, which we had carried with relative ease down the highway. Jeremy could have packed more food if he had removed the lumber from the truck bed, but I was doing my best not to criticize him. I couldn’t relate to pressure of processing all of this with a kid to deal with.

At any rate, the truck stop provided what we needed. Except for cleanliness.

Evelyn and Jeremy hadn’t had much success in the diner. The appliances seemed functional, but the walk-in freezer didn’t reveal anything more appealing than what we could get by opening a bag of chips or a pack of jerkey, and there was more of that than we could use.

Jeremy thought we should investigate the shower situation—fix it—but he had shown little skill as either an auto-mechanic or a chef, so I didn’t have much faith in him as a plumber. Also, we were tired. Sleep was a bigger priority.

Evelyn said a prayer as we made ourselves as comfortable as we could, heads on backpacks and bodies on tile. She had said a prayer every night since I met her. I never listened, so I can’t comment on the prayers’ content. They were important to her, so I kept quiet as she mumbled, meditating in my own way, remembering the day my wife and I got lost in the woods.

My version of prayer was my favorite memory of my Frankie. It wasn’t a remarkable day, but it was the day I realized I actually loved her. We had been camping for a long weekend, doing little but hiking and screwing and cooking over a fire Frankie had made. She was the camper. She had the experience and skills. I was along for the ride.

The day we were to pack up and hike back to our car, which was parked a little over a mile away at the State Park ranger station, a storm rolled in. Had we been checking the weather reports, we would have known it was coming, but we were busy hiking and screwing and cooking.

The rain came suddenly, followed by an undulating darkness, a squirming wall of black that dropped the temperature by dozens of degrees. It came so suddenly that Frankie got turned around and we hiked away from the ranger station for half an hour, sopping wet and sore, before she realized her mistake.

“We should stop here until it passes,” I said as the thunder sounded a particularly deep crash.

“No, we need shelter,” she said.

She knew as well as I did that by the time we found shelter, the storm likely would have passed, so we stopped where we were, in a muddy, pine needle covered alcove under precariously swaying trees. We didn’t pitch the tent. We just laid next to each other, her arm around my torso, getting so wet that we sank into the soil.

The memory of Frankie in the rain was my prayer. Evelyn’s involved Jesus, but I didn’t listen enough to tell you more than that.

Evelyn finished her prayer and we slept as best as we could.

***

Etching 37

Imaginary Reader, the warehouse walls shook last night again. The wide open space surrounding this desk and my bed amplifies sound too much. I can’t sleep with the banging and rattling.

I don’t know if I should open the door and look outside. The last time I left the warehouse was to bury Evelyn. The sky looked darker than I’d like that day. I didn’t say a prayer for her after I piled the last of the dirt upon her body. I should have said a prayer, or at least tried. She would have wanted that.

I don’t know if I should open the door. The sky looked frightening that day, 37 etchings ago. Something is coming for me, and it is outside. I shoudn’t open the door. So, my prayer for Evelyn will need to be done inside, not at her grave. I don’t know how to pray.

These storms are increasing in frequency. All of the destruction of the last years must have changed the atmosphere. I suppose this is what climate change produces. Storms with terrifying frequency.

The throngs of humanity caused this, but I am alone to see the effects. I think I lived responsibly. I recycled. I took the bus when I could. I walked. I am not the culprit. The villains are all dead. I am just the witness.

I should pray for Evelyn.

God: Please protect my friend. She deserved better than she got. My understanding is that you reward good people for being good people. She was a good person. She cared for the people around her. She had a bad husband, but she maintained her goodness. Why did you give her such a bad husband, God? Sorry. You have reasons, I’m sure. Maybe her bad husband was necessary to make her a good person. I don’t want that to be true. Why would you do that? You are not a very nice god. Sorry. I don’t mean that. I think I don’t understand. If you exist, please be understanding of me. But, I mean, look at all of this shit. Why did you do this to us? This is not a good prayer. Sorry. Please protect my friend Evelyn.

It’s not a good prayer. I’ll try again later.

I’m having a bad day. The banging on the warehouse walls is getting disconcerting. I should look outside. Maybe. I’m conflicted about it. It might be dangerous, and I’m the last person, so I need to write the history. I should stay inside and write the history.

The next part is important, too. When the five of us woke up in the truck stop, we were no longer five people, we were dozens.

Fred woke up first, screaming. His scream was unlike any scream I had heard before. He was at the age between boy and man, and at that age the voice gets weird. Pubescent boys have a lot of terror, but most of it is internal. They yell when playing sports or video games, but those are the creaky yells of tweens hoping for heroism. Fred’s scream was the scream presaging the silence of a hydrogen bomb’s aftermath.

We were surrounded. Grubby, dusty human figures stood around our little group of poorly-rested refugees. They didn’t look dangerous, despite Fred’s horrifying shriek. Haley held him in her arms while Jeremy lept to his feet, fists clenched at his waist, ready to murder the first person to approach his kid.

“Get out,” I heard Evelyn say quietly. Then louder: “Get out!”

I stood up, knowing full well I was not the leader of the group, but feeling a little insecure about that.

“Who are you?” I asked, possibly stealing Evelyn’s thunder. “This is our store. Leave.” I was suddenly feeling ownership of the Global Petrol and its evil, nonfunctional showers.

One of the grubby, dusty human figures spoke: “We saw there were people here. We need to stick together. Come with us. We’re going to the City.”

My read of the situation changed, but Evelyn was quicker than I was. “We are too. We need to know we can trust you, though. There are more of you than us,” she said, reasonably.

“You can’t trust us until you travel with us. We have no ulterior motive. We don’t. We aren’t going to steal from you. We have nothing, but we also aren’t taking anything. I give you my word, even though I know you can’t believe it right now. My name is Walter. I can vouch for these people.”

Walter Grisholm seemed like a good man when I first met him. To give myself some credit, Evelyn thought so too, and she had a relationship with God.

***

I heard Haley quietly speaking to herself, sitting on the floor in the toiletry aisle, away from our unexpected visitors: “And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild plum trees in tremulous white.”

Haley was strange. As I said before, she wasn’t stupid. She was just detached and possibly a bit unhinged. Something must have happened in that old house she was raised in. And survived in. Something was wrong with her. I’m not here to judge, though. She was a good person.

“Music,” I said.

“Huh?” She emerged from whatever reverie she had been stuck in.

“Music. You said poetry makes you think of music. Frogs singing.”

“Oh, yeah. I think those frogs die.”

“Kind of bleak,” I said. “Are you okay?”

“Yep.”

I wasn’t sure. We needed to get moving. Walter seemed to think he was in charge, and I was too tired and dirty to argue. Our band of survivors had grown substantially, unbidden. I figured I’d go along to get along. Evelyn seemed fairly confident in the new arrangement and I was fairly confident in her judgment.

Fred stuck by Haley as we continued down the highway. I started to suspect he liked her more than he liked his own father. So many new strangers had quieted the kid down. He was probably nervous. I was, so why wouldn’t a child be? The new people were not just strangers. They were strange, and not in a Haley way. They were frighteningly quiet, letting Walter speak on their behalf. A woman I assumed was his wife spoke occasionally, but even she mostly let Walter do the talking.

Walter mainly talked to Evelyn, not Jeremy or Haley or me. Her initial outburst might have impressed him or made him assume she was the leader of our little crew. If he assumed that, his assumption was right.

When the shit goes down, my first impulse is to be competent, or at least act like I am competent, but if I’m honest with myself, I didn’t have it in me that day. I’m not an Alpha. My father had made that apparent to me when I was Fred’s age. There’s a place, though, deep down in my soul where I guess I believed, then at least, that my maleness makes me some kind of protector. But my family is dead and no machismo will bring them back, so I guess I failed at that, too. I’m not cut out for heroism.

Evelyn was. Fred probably was, too, but he didn’t get the opportunity.

Etching 38

I’m better rested today than I was yesterday, Nonexistent Reader. The banging on the walls of the warehouse seem to have died down. I might go look outside. Whatever storm or atmospheric fluctuation has tormented me for the last few nights seems to have died.

I’m nervous to open the door, though. I haven’t left since I buried Evelyn. The storage room has plenty of canned food, the result of the expeditions our community sent out into the world when we actually were a community.

By the time we reached the Big City, we were a true mob of people. Walter Grisholm’s group numbered in the dozens when they came upon us at the gas station. When our suddenly bolstered group exited the shelter, heading toward the abundance of the City, we became like a magnet for stray humanity.

For days, people sightings had been rare. Evelyn and I had existed as a pair for days before seeing Haley and then almost immediately adding Jeremy and Fred. That pace of society building was already a little too fast for me. The sudden growth of our group caused by Walter and his orchestra of misfits glomming onto us made my skin crawl a bit.

The world had become unsettled. The world had become something different from the world as we had known it. My nervousness was justified, wasn’t it? How could I know who to trust?

Plus, Walter went from seeming like a good enough guy to being a good enough guy with a nevertheless irritating arrogance. I already said I wasn’t an Alpha man. I didn’t assume I was in charge of the five-some. But Walter made sure I knew it. He clearly was the leader of the group who joined us. They deferred to him in a way I found unsettling, even as it made me question if I had behaved similarly to Evelyn and the other “originals.”

I tried engaging him in conversation, curious about how so many people had come together, where and under what circumstances they had chosen to coalesce into a community. He was cagey. “Here and there, you know. Strength in numbers.”

His tone and demeanor were dismissive. I’m not an Alpha. I don’t have the capacity for heroism. But I don’t like being dismissed.

I tried talking to others in the group, as well, but they were not particularly chatty. Some of it I chalk up to exhaustion. We had been through a lot. All humans, I mean. They must have been in shock. Still, their reluctance to converse felt abnormal.

There were no children for Fred to play with, either. That seemed strange. The entire group appeared middle-aged, lacking the age diversity that even our tiny original group had. Between Evelyn and Fred were a good 50-some years. The new people looked like they could have been in the same high school graduating class.

Maybe they were in the same high school graduating class. Who knows? I wonder if they were Titans or Eagles. I didn’t think to ask, but then again, they almost certainly wouldn’t have answered.

***

Had anyone still been alive to see us, we would have been quite a spectacle, dozens of human figures, some more animated than others, trudging down the middle of the highway, past broken down, dirty cars and the detritus left by mass exodus.

The quiet crowd accompanying Walter was disturbing. They looked like normal people, but they were so quiet. They produced perfunctory responses to direct questions on occasion. Usually, if addressed, they would look away and continue walking down the road.

At first it seemed to be some kind of collective trauma response. It didn’t seem to affect Walter, though. That was suspicious, but Evelyn told me to keep an open mind about him.

“We don’t know what these people have been through,” she said. “Don’t assume you know the answer.”

But I did know the answer. So many broken people and one unbroken one was impossible. He did something to them.

And yet, I couldn’t ask him directly. I hate myself for admitting it, but I think I was afraid of Walter. I am bigger than him, and I have no doubt who would be victorious if it came to violence. But I was afraid. Maybe, uneasy is a better description. I couldn’t have been afraid of that pathetic man. It must have been unease. Maybe it was fear, a little.

I guess I don’t remember how I felt toward Walter, after that first meeting. It was complex. Evelyn insisted he was okay, that the people were adjusting to trauma. Their adjusting seemed to cohesive and consistent. I am not a psychologist, but I don’t think it works that way.

***

Fred and Haley quieted noticably as we got closer to the Big City.

They had spent much of the journey in a joyful comaraderie, running ahead, playing tag or looking at garbage under abandoned cars. They dashed between Walter’s people as if they were slow moving obstactles in a real-life video game, not humans at the end of the world. The strange people barely acknowledged the young woman, the boy, or their energy. Jeremy stayed close to Evelyn and me, content to allow Haley to watch after the kid. Walter walked ahead of his people, behind Haley and Fred, who running back and forth across the highway. Jeremy, Evelyn, and I brought up the rear.

But as we got closer, Haley and Fred stopped running as much. They quieted. They must have been getting tired. Their rambunctious play had been a nice respite from the gloom, if I’m honest. But it was out of place and therefore unsustainable. As they fell back to the three of us, the air felt stiller, heavier, more appropriate to the circumstances.

“What kind of shelter are we looking for in the City, exactly?” Jeremy asked, implying that we were decision-makers, despite bringing up the rear.

“I’m not sure. We could find an apartment building or hotel, I guess. Maybe people want their own places, though. I think we should stay close to each other, regardless,” I said.

“Even them?” Evelyn asked, gesturing in front of us toward the Walter contingent.

“I suppose. Why?”

“They make you uncomfortable. I’m surprised you gave in so quickly,” she said.

“They do make me uncomfortable,” I replied, “but I think we’re all in this together now. Just keep your eye on Walter.”

“I am,” she responded.

Jeremy put his hand on Fred’s head, palming it to pull the kid into a hug. “Where do you want to live?” he asked his son.

“A big house on the lake. With a pool. And an elevator.”

Jeremy laughed, “I’m not sure we’ll find an elevator. If we do, we shouldn’t use it anyway.”

Fred was undeterred, “We’re going to find a rich guy’s house with an elevator.”

“Well, it’s possible,” Haley said.

“Don’t make promises,” I said, trying to sound like I was joking. “It’s a little cruel, you know,” I continued, the second half sounding less like a joke despite my sad attempt at being light and cheery.

“It all depends on what we find when we get there,” Evelyn said diplomatically.

“An elevator,” Fred said with a smile I wish I could have bottled and saved for today.

Walter was still at the front of the group.

The sun had not yet set, but it was preparing for the plunge as we arrived at the City.

***

The smell should have made us turn back. I suppose we were all committed to our objective, so the acrid stink, equal parts reminiscent of rotting citrus, feces, and gasoline, was ignorable upon our approach. The nasal warning proving insufficient, we pushed ignorantly forward toward the more concrete visual confirmation. The Big City was uninhabitable.

As we crested a suburban hill, the last incline before the first exit ramp into downtown, we saw the once-intimidating skyscrapers surrounded by muck. I had never liked going to the City. It was too big for me. I preferred the more modest Town we had left. In our previous version of reality, it provided all the amusements and resources of the City without its overwhelming obligation of anonymity. In this version of reality, the mass of humanity I associated with this place was gone, replaced by a lake of thick, dark brown, horendously smelly muck.

It looked like the same substance that had shot from the shower in the gas station. Dried chunks of it still stuck to my clothing. The mess formed a lake in the center of the City. We could see from our vantage on the highway that the end of the exit ramp was submerged. We wouldn’t be going that direction.

I noticed Fred and Haley hugging. Evelyn stood next to Jeremy, her arms crossed and her expression blank. Jeremy was watching Fred and Haley.

Walter’s people chattered among themselves. Insular. Separate.

I looked at Walter, a strange instinct that struck me as wrong even in the moment. Now, it feels incomprehensible that I wouldn’t have spoken to Evelyn first. But for some reason, I asked Walter:

“What now?”

Thus, we ended up in this warehouse. We backtracked, on Walter’s suggestion, one highway exit. Walter had pegged the industrial park as we walked to the City. I figured we’d at least find shelter and space. I didn’t have any better ideas.

So here we were. Here I am, Non-reader. The last survivor of my community. The last survivor of anything.

***

Etching 39

The expeditions were Evelyn’s idea. The industrial park was between our origin and our imagined destination. The City was clearly unsustainable, so we were stranded between it and the Town we had left.

We could have gone back, of course, me to my empty house, Haley to her parents’ mansion, Jeremy and Fred to their backyard where I imagine them tossing a ball back and forth, Evelyn to her mid-century bungalow, Walter’s people to wherever Walter’s people came from.

Titans on the Titan side of town and Eagles on the Eagle side of town.

That would have been a reasonable, logical response to the realization that the City was functionally submerged and therefore not particularly useful. It had been a grand idea, and adventure with the potential to provide some level of hope among hopelessness. It hadn’t worked. We should have gone home.

I think we would have if it weren’t for one commonality among us. We had all watched people we loved die in our houses. Or, in my case, people simply vacated.

So we settled on the in-between, a shelter whose intended purpose was now obsolete. A big building not quite to our destination, but at least not where we started.

And what was home, anyway? What a distant notion.

Last night I had a dream of the last day. It was almost a real memory. It was almost true.

In my dream, the only building left standing in our neighborhood was the gas station. Everything else had crumbled in the tragedy, bricks and wood squashed like peanuts on a barfloor.

Whether the gasoline or the Red 40 in the junk food provided the building’s resilience I don’t know, but something protected it as the catastrophe unfolded. The storm was fast, appearing suddenly in a perfectly blue sky, raining down destruction and scattering the remnants, crushing the markers of commerce and security. Only fuel remained. And the sky returned to calm.

There were no injuries in my home, but everyone had changed. My wife was leaving. Everything had changed except the gas station.

Frankie had stared at the remnants of our home, her eyes too dry for the occasion. “I guess we need to go to my mother’s house,” she said. Her voice was gravelly. I always notice the condition of her voice. Gravelly meant she was thinking things she wasn’t saying.

“Yeah,” I said. “Do you want me to call her?”

“I’ll text her.”

Frankie didn’t seem upset. Everything we had was gone, and Frankie seemed fine with it.

We passed the gas station on our way out of what was once our town. It was creepy just sitting there like nothing had happened. Surrounded by the detritus of a community, empty buildings, some broken. Like it was a normal Tuesday.

Frankie drove, which was for the best. My eyes kept getting watery, a kind of pre-cry that never quite got there, a hazy blurring of light. I was strangely attentive to the condition of my eyes.

A lot of people were leaving town. I guess that makes sense. We all would need a place to regroup. I wondered how many people were going to their in-laws’ houses. I wondered what it would be like if I didn’t get along with my mother-in-law. What if the closest family was family you hated? We were lucky. I need to remember that.

Beth’s house was about 45 minutes away, so we had time to panic. I had time to panic, I should say. Frankie seemed calm. I couldn’t figure out what to say, what question I could ask to produce an answer that could slow the thudding in my chest. So, I closed my eyes and counted.

The counting became a rhythm. I needed to focus on the rhythm. A gasp of an upbeat and a hard pounding downbeat. Over and over. Up, down. Pounding, repeating.

Da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, pounding, repeating, moving foward. Da-dum, da-dum. Propelled, Pounding. Repeating.

A counter-rhythm emerged. I needed to focus on the rhythm, on the time, so I added new rhythms, filler subdivisions, adding. Repeating. Building.

Beth already had her laptop on the kitchen table when we got there. She shot up as we walked in the door, grabbing us both in a bear hug. “Oh god, guys. Oh, I’m so sorry.”

“Just things,” Frankie said, her voice sounding lower than it had an hour ago.

“Yeah, we’re safe. It’s okay,” I said. “Thanks for putting us up.”

“Give me a break,” Beth said, smiling a little. “You want a beer?”

“Correct.”

Frankie sat at the table. “Mom, can I use your computer?”

“Of course,” Beth said as she handed me a beer. “You want a drink, honey?”

“No thanks,” Frankie replied, her glasses reflecting the insurance company’s login page.

The internet was working, despite the calamity surrounding us. Frankie filed a claim, or whatever. I never understood the financial stuff and left it to her. She didn’t mind. Her brain was better with numbers. My brain wondered if there was anyone on the other side of the electronic communication. Frankie’s optimism was troubling to me.

Beth and I streamed news coverage on her smart TV in the den while Frankie worked in the kitchen. Destruction had been selective but overwhelming. It was bizarre. The meteorologists were perplexed. It was unsettling to see the weather lady seeming confused. Even when they’re wrong, they usually have some kind of rationale, percentages and probabilities. This thing had been inexplicable, sparing nothing but the gas station and some human life.

“It’s so fucked up,” Beth said. I didn’t really have a response. It was fucked up.

I was tempted to make the whole thing some kind of allegory of capitalism, the persistent durability of commercialism spitting in the face of human connection and safety. The pernicious, roach-like interminability of the fossil fuel industry. The apocalyptic consequence of our flippancy toward both nature and humanity.

It was probably just fucked up.

The next morning, Beth made pancakes. While she was cooking, Frankie checked email and I threw on my headphones. I had a weird desire to listen to Father John Misty’s “Buddy’s Rendezvous.” A compulsion.

The saxophone was like a warm drip of water on my spine. The piano massaged my brain.

“I kind of want to go to the gas station,” Beth said as she set down a plate of pancakes.

I pulled my headphones off. “I kind of do too,” I said. “I don’t really know why.”

“We can drive by, I guess,” Frankie said. She hadn’t cried last night.

It was almost 2:00 before we got it together to leave. It was always like that with Beth. She just kind of slowed things down.

Beth made sandwiches for the road and Frankie drove. We’d driven that route, the three of us, more times than I could fathom, going between houses. Now one of them was gone. The thought just kind of hung in the car, suspended from Frankie’s dreamcatcher hanging from the rearview mirror.

“I can’t fucking believe this,” Frankie said, out of the blue.

“I know. I know,” Beth said.

“No, like I really can’t fucking believe it. Fuck.”

My neck throbbed a little. I fondled my headphones in my hand.

“I just . . . I don’t know,” Frankie said. Her voice was quiet but clear.

“Yeah,” I said.

Traffic picked up as we got closer. People returning with their in-laws in tow, to survey the damage. FEMA. A few news vans.

Car upon car upon truck weaving around the Subaru, a fugue of anxiety. This is why Frankie drove. Weeks later, cars stopped running, leaving behind the automotive graveyard we had been trudging through along the highway.

The day after the event was weirdly windy. I’m not sure why the wind struck me as odd. It just seemed like the air should have run out of energy or something.

There weren’t as many people sifting through debris as I expected. That’s another weird thing. Maybe they’d come and gone. We only saw a handful of people digging through their former lives. Evelyn was one of them.

I stuck my worries about the absence of people in a secondary box in my brain. I have limits.

The news vans hadn’t faded away with the other vehicles, at any rate. They surrounded the gas station, a phalanx of information distribution pinning down the oddity. Like they could extract some knowledge from the grungy old place through sheer force of reporting.

“Why are we here, again?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” Beth said.

“I guess to see it,” Frankie said.

“So . . . we saw it,” Beth said.

“Come up short and end up on the news,” I sang.

“What’s that,” Beth asked.

“Song’s stuck in me head. Sorry.”

“No, don’t be sorry! Sing for us!” She insisted.

“I’m not going to do that Beth,” I laughed.

“You suck.”

“So, um . . . I guess we go back?” Frankie asked unconfidently, staring at the gas station.

“I guess,” I said.

“Should we go by the house?” She asked. Her voice was clear. She was calm.

“Yeah. I guess we should.”

Frankie sat on the concrete remnants of the porch. Beth stood in the street, her hands on her hips. I put on my headphones and walked to the lot line between our place and the Sullivans’. You used to be able to see into our bedroom from that vantage point. I always liked how the sun fell on that side of the house in the morning.

When “Buddy’s Rendezvous” ended, I hit repeat before my phone could move to the next track.

“When can I see you again?” I sang. I didn’t know I was singing until Frankie asked, “What?”

“My destruction is an hour late,” I sang louder.

The song ends with fading strings. It should end with the saxophone.

The next day, Frankie was gone. Beth didn’t answer her phone. I was the last member of our little family.

***

Etching 39

I think I missed a day on Evelyn’s calendar. I forgot to etch the new day yesterday. I thought of marking two days today, but I decided if I missed a day, that day was missed. The lines on the wall are the only reality now, so if I fail to mark it, it doesn’t exist.

I’m glad Walter is dead. I’m glad he can’t see my mistake, losing a day.

Etching 39

The expeditions were Evelyn’s idea. The industrial park was between our origin and our imagined destination. The City was clearly unsustainable, so we were stranded between it and the Town we had left.

We could have gone back, of course, me to my empty house, Haley to her parents’ mansion, Jeremy and Fred to their backyard where I imagine them tossing a ball back and forth, Evelyn to her mid-century bungalow, Walter’s people to wherever Walter’s people came from.

Titans on the Titan side of town and Eagles on the Eagle side of town.

That would have been a reasonable, logical response to the realization that the City was functionally submerged and therefore not particularly useful. It had been a grand idea, and adventure with the potential to provide some level of hope among hopelessness. It hadn’t worked. We should have gone home.

I think we would have if it weren’t for one commonality among us. We had all watched people we loved die in our houses.

So we settled on the in-between, a shelter whose intended purpose was now obsolete. A big building not quite to our destination, but at least not where we started.

And what was home, anyway?

It’s pointless to dedicate time to remembering. Especially when the things you remember are not simply past, but rendered to oblivion, absent, worthless.

Frankie, my wife, was dead before I got home. I didn’t see how it happened. I didn’t see how any of it happened, but it did, and nothing worth anything was left.

What was left was the strange group of people walking down the highway, then turning back, and then stopping because the old place was no place to return to. Our destination was worthless. Our origin was, too.

He tells us to back up. We need to be 50 feet from the building. A student asks him for free throw advice. I overhear him asking her about her stance, the roll of the balls of her feet, her posture. I’m only ever said hello to this man my students, at least the basketball players, admire so completely, whose history they seem to know and cherish, a coach.

A different student comes to me. “Don’t you know you’re supposed to wait for the announcement?”

I’m puzzled. “What do you mean.”

“We learned it in school. A shooter can pull the fire alarm to get people into the hallways and just gun them down. You’re supposed to wait for the announcement.”

There had been an announcement, but it came after I had already ushered my adult students into the hallway. I looked at the security guard, wondering if I had failed at practice. If at the crucial moment in the game, I had weaved when I should have bobbed. Pondered fire and smoke before guns and bullets.

The algae dissipated as the mayflies coalesced, changes of density driven by early morning rain. Jack swatted one of the familiar, triangular aliens from his sticky, sweaty face. It had landed by the inside corner of his right eye, next to the still-healing, still-crooked bridge of his nose. Too close to sensitive areas. It had to go. Jack tolerated mayflies, so long as they minded their business and knew their place, even if it was someplace on his body. His eye and his wounded nose weren’t their business.

The green flora was disappearing from the water, congealing into clumps of fuzzy filth and sinking away. Mayflies clung to Jack’s bare arms and stomach. Those could remain for now, not on his face. Not so close to his vision. Sun had replaced the morning rain, and Jack felt the heat of moisture swiftly evaporating from his skin. The green muck had begun clearing, and Jack could see the rocks, some smooth, some sharp, under the water, close to the shore. He took a careful step forward.

The rocks only hurt sometimes, when he couldn’t see them. Mostly, he knew what to expect from their contact with the soles of his feet, having first been introduced to the jagged entrance to the lake by his mother when he was 3. That was 8 years ago, so he was now adept at the complex process of walking into the lake from the shore. The rocks could be slippery, especially after an algae outbreak. Slippery and sharp. He walked tentatively, checking his balance, until the rocks gave way to sand and muck and the disintegrated, rotting remnants of bullheads, sunfish, and walleye. When the lake floor became squishy, it was easier to walk on.

He pushed forward, the water pushing back, and descended out into the lake until he reached the buoy Grandma had placed a few months ago, after Jack’s cousin Sydney had tried swimming to the opposite shore. Sydney’s dad dove from the dock when he spotted his only daughter, whom he should have been watching earlier, out where boats sped by and the water’s depth was three times Sydney’s height. He grabbed her before she sank and pulled her back to safety, but Grandma initiated a new policy: No one past the buoy unless they were legal adults.

As Jack pushed through the water, the mayflies disappeared from his body, flying away from the bottom up, the lake and algae remnants prompting their abandonment while the water rose. Or Jack sunk. He reached the buoy and stacked his hands on the top the slimy Styrofoam cylinder. His feet still touched the ground, though the water was splashing against his lower lip. A few feet more, he knew, was a drop-off where he’d have to tread water. But Jack didn’t break rules, didn’t go past the boundary. He did what Grandma said, even after the funeral, when he supposed her rules stopped applying.

He pushed down on the top of the buoy, propelling himself up and the buoy down, like pistons in the engine of the water. Bouncing up and down, the water providing a weightlessness he loved, he turned to look at the house, past the beach and the hill, where Grandpa was probably sitting in his chair. Or maybe he had gone back to bed. The wood of the house’s siding darkened when it rained, and the pine trees cast a deep, solid shadow over the modest structure. Jack saw the line where the shadow stopped and the sunlight began, the little house fading into the black.

Grandpa told Jack he wasn’t going to the water today. Jack could watch himself. Mom would murder the old man if she were here. Letting a little boy play in the dirty lake alone. Jack could hear her voice, “I should never trust you. Why do I keep trusting you?” Grandpa never responded when Mom yelled at him. Just sat in the ancient brown recliner with his Car and Driver and whatever was on the single channel the TV antenna could pick up out here.

Jack’s mother was a worrier and a shouter, but she needn’t worry about the water, and the lake was better when it was quiet. Jack was a swimmer immediately upon his emergence into the world, the latest in a multigenerational line of lake people. Swimming was a birthright and requirement for membership. No one in Jack’s family was in danger of drowning, not even Sydney. Adults overreacted to everything. Jack was happy alone in the water, playing on the buoy Grandma had placed for no reason other than anxiety.

Jack turned to see a red and white cruiser skimming the water from the direction of the little bar and marina around the peninsula where Grandpa’s inattention once beached his own speedboat, mechanical fluids flowing out into the water, Grandma screaming while Dad called the Sheriff from his cellphone and Mom lifted Jack and his sister from the boat, their oversized lifejackets hindering rather than helping the rescue.

The cruiser towed a water-skier who was blissfully swinging back and forth over the portside wake, subtly bouncing up and down as the rhythm of Jack and Grandma’s buoy matched his pace. Boat and skier whipped by the boy, their larger waves colliding with the tiny concentric circles created by Jack’s bobbing before pushing him and the buoy toward shore. Jack lost his grip on the Styrofoam and slid back toward the house before digging his toes into the filth of the lakebed, giving him leverage to push back toward Grandma’s boundary.

He wondered if Grandpa was in the living room or if he had gone back to bed. He’d probably grabbed a hyper-processed meat stick from the fridge, not having bothered to make anything for breakfast for him or his grandchild, but it was a toss-up whether he ate it in the chair or in the bed.

Jack’s sister Jennifer was at camp and Grandma was dead. Mom and Dad needed a weekend alone. Away from Jack. So, he was here, at the lake, Grandpa and the dead fish his only companions. That suited Jack, if he were honest. He liked the water and the solitude. The water-skier’s boat’s wake was enough commiseration for today.

He waded back to shore, Grandma’s buoy having outlived its capacity for fun. He tip-toed over the slimy rocks, trying to copy his entry-path. He looked up the hill, toward the cabin where Grandpa was either in bed or on the recliner—hard to tell which. It was dark, darker than Jack recalled it being the countless times he and Jennifer and various adults of various ages had played in the water. The woods were blocking the light at strange angles. The sun seemed to come at the trees from multiple directions, combining shadows in a matrix of darkness contrasting the hot brightness searing Jack’s shoulders.

His nose was feeling better. He was grateful for that. The top of his nose seemed to shift a little to the left on the way down, a slightly different trajectory than what he had been born with. The injury was the worst pain he’d ever had, and he wasn’t sure what happened after a part of the body went out of whack. Did things just move back to normal, or did they adjust to the new circumstance? He touched the bridge of his nose. He supposed he’d have a little lump for a while, and the cartilage seemed to move a bit where he didn’t think it should, but it wasn’t some giant protuberance he’d have to explain to people. It was just a change for him to feel, not for others to comment on.

He sat on the little beach. He hadn’t brought a towel, so it was just his swim trunks against the gritty, dirty sand. Some kind of fish was rotting by the dock, but it was too far gone for him to identify the species. Dead fish appeared here all the time, and no one ever removed them before the lake’s waves pulled their decomposing bodies back home.

He leaned back on the sand, feeling the rough wetness on his bare shoulders. He hoped Grandpa was laying down in bed. Grandpa needed to rest. It wasn’t good for him to be up and about, despite what Mom said. Grandpa should stay in bed. Jack lifted his arms above his head, stretching his back against the grain of the muddy sand, wondering what Jennifer was doing. She was probably in a canoe or doing some art project, something prescribed by a camp counselor. He smiled. He was laying on a fish graveyard with no one to watch over him.

Mayflies returned, attaching themselves to his stomach, his chest, his arms. They came quickly, suddenly, as if his return to land was a neon invitation for insects. He kept still for a moment or two, letting them rest, before standing up. A few of the critters stuck to him, but most disappeared as he moved.

He should go back to check on Grandpa. He looked down to see where his bare feet landed going up the rocky incline, careful of dog shit or snakes. As he moved up the hill, mayflies abandoned him.

As he reached the top of the hill, he looked up. He couldn’t see the house from here, though he should have. The darkness had absorbed it, the shadow from the woods coalescing into a deep, black cover.

He paused for a moment. He knew where the cabin was, but he couldn’t see it. He should just walk forward, but the shadows were so deep and dark. He should just walk to the house, where he knew it was, check on Grandpa, and get something to eat. He couldn’t see the damp wood delineating the place where his bed, the fridge, and Grandpa were. He knew where it was, but it wasn’t there.

His shoulders were still burning from the sun.

As he approached where the house should be, the spotty patches of grass among the dusty sand became denser. Tree limbs reached down in places they hadn’t before, spindly arms reaching toward what had been the house with Grandpa in it.

Jack felt his heart thump heavily against his chest and heard the blood jolting around his ears. His feet tingled, like he was starting to float away or at least losing contact with the ground.

There were no neighbors. He had no idea how far through the woods he would have to walk to reach the highway or a human. The cabin always felt remote to him. Cut off. It’s why he loved it.

But it wasn’t there anymore, replaced by an empty plot of nothing, and the woods, once comforting, suddenly felt threatening.

The ground where the cabin had been was dark, a black splotch of mud and rock that didn’t match the sandy yard around it. The yard itself was smaller, too. The green of the woods was closer, disorienting him, a new wide-open emptiness contradicting the encroaching forest.

What did he do? He had been thinking badly of Grandpa, and now he and the house he built long before Jack was born, before Jack’s mother was born, were gone. Did God take them? Should Jack have stayed off Grandma’s buoy? He felt the potential for tears, but he squinted his eyes and held them in. He took a breath.

Oh, God, what was he going to do? He didn’t know how to get to town. He didn’t know who to find or how to find them or what happened or which direction to go or if he should go anywhere anyway because maybe he was dreaming and the house would be back when he woke up. Maybe he was sleeping on the beach.

He ran back down the hill, too fast for the mayflies to collect on his skin. His heart was getting even faster and thuddier, and his ears were getting hotter and swishier. He couldn’t feel his feet as they slapped on the dirt and grass, more grass than had been there a minute ago.

Nothing. Just the rotting fish carcass near the dock. No sleeping Jack.

He saw the water-skier’s boat coming around the peninsula again and remembered the bar and marina. It was a new skier, not the one from before, so they must be having a party, taking turns. He waved his arms and yelled out, but the people in the boat, as well as the woman it towed were absorbed in their recreation and didn’t respond. Boat and skier skimmed past, their wake—but not their attention—approaching Jack.

He ran along the beach, toward the outcropping where Grandpa broke his boat. The marina was just on the other side, he thought, but didn’t know. He didn’t pay a lot of attention when he was on the water, usually closing his eyes, smelling the lake smell that he guessed came from rotting things and garbage. It was a smell he loved when mixed with water spray and the air cooling his skin. He never watched where Grandpa was taking him, preferring the ride over its direction. When Grandpa drove the boat, Jack felt like he was levitating, skimming the water while it tickled his nostrils. The air felt like a gentle, stinky cushion massaging his temple and ears.

The peninsula had a thin beach surrounding a dense wooden area. It was distant but felt close. He never walked along the beach far enough to reach the peninsula, deterred by a fallen log that reached from the woods across the 4 or so feet of sand to reach the water, a kind of conduit between water and trees, blocking his walking path. Instead, Jack walked toward the green center of the peninsula, trudging up past the spot where Grandpa kept the dock during the winter, right on the edge of the forest.

He cut through the middle of the peninsula, his bare, tingling feet navigating sticks and stones. He couldn’t feel the cuts. He just ran, pushing back against branches that blocked his way, ducking and climbing under and over old wood in various states of deadness or aliveness. He could feel the pounding blood in his entire head now and he struggled to pull air into his lungs while twigs smacked at his arms and legs.

He didn’t know how long it would take to reach the sand on the other side of the peninsula. It should be soon, he thought. The wooded land seemed bigger on foot than from the water or his dead fish beach. He couldn’t smell the lake smell here, just the odor of pine needles and damp wood.

He stopped clambering, his breaths getting harder to control, and sat on an old tree trunk. Just for a second or two. He just needed a few seconds so his lungs could calm down. He thought he should be able to see the other edge of the thin peninsula by now, should be able to see the sand and the drunk people.

A bird was chirping overhead somewhere, its song passing through the thudding in his ears. Jack tried to breathe how Mom taught him to breathe when he got panicky. Four seconds in. Chirp. Hold. Cheep cheep. Four seconds out. Chitter cheep.

Jack and the bird breathed in tandem while the boy tried to calm his body and his aerial companion hid away, out of view. He looked out in the direction where he thought the marina should be. All he saw were trees and bushes and their detritus. The water was hidden. The bird, his only companion, was hidden.

He, himself, was hidden, he reasoned. No one could see him here. Just him and the unseen bird.

In pausing his frantic trek, Jack suddenly felt the chill on his bare torso. The temperature had dropped while he was scrambling through the woods. The sun barely penetrated the dense foliage, denser foliage than he’d expected from how it looked from the beach. He could feel the cool air condensing, as if it were being squished around him by the trees, pushing inward against his throbbing ears.

It was darker than it should be, too. He needed to find someone, get out of the woods.

The bird seemed to follow him as he pressed onward, its cheeps and chirps accompanying the sound of his bare, bleeding feet crushing pine needles, acorns, and probably animal remains. Jack ran, smacking his arms against the branches accosting him, ignoring the pain in his feet, until, suddenly, he burst back into the sunlight. The trees gave way to the patchy green and tan of the lake’s shoreline.

A deep warmth overtook him as he emerged from the tight, cold woods into bright, post-rain sunlight.

He could see the marina to his right, distant. He didn’t really know the geography because Grandpa drove the boat over here, while Jack felt the wind, so he hadn’t pointed himself as directly as he had intended. Or his frenetic brain had led him off course. Either way, he could see the docks and the little bar up the hill. He could find people who would explain where the house and Grandpa had gone, could take him back to his mother, could end the turmoil, silence the bird, whom he still heard, cheeping in the dark forest.

He left red footprints as he walked toward the squat, green building. A white wood stairway led from the docks up the hill. He’d walk around, up the hill, along the tree line, so as not to walk on the bright stair planks, and instead listen to the bird, even as its song had lost its value. He wouldn’t be alone much longer.

There were a few docked boats. A few. A sailboat’s mast leaned against a wood post precariously, and a pontoon that had come in too fast was partially lodged under the dock. Several speedboats with faded paint, once flashy and now dull, red, purple, yellow. Nothing much else. Jack remembered this place busier when Grandpa stopped in to gas up. He wondered why the water-skier’s boat looked so bright and colorful when the rest of the marina’s boats looked so run down, dusty.

No people.

The wood siding of the marina bar needed to be repainted. The soft green had once blended into the foliage around it. Now, Jack could see the rotting gray beneath the peeling paint, its façade revealed. The exterior seemed all wounds and cracks and decay. Large branches and smaller detritus littered the path from the dock stairs to the front door, indicating a recent storm, though Jack didn’t remember any thunder or lightning last night, just the gentle drizzle of the morning.

He wasn’t sure if he should go inside. There was no one on the dock or on the deck, so he he’d have to go in if he intended to find somebody. He wished he were sleeping on the beach. He wished the water-skier’s wake would push the waves up to his absent body, the slimy cold splashing him back to consciousness. He wished the dead fish would wriggle over and poke him in the stomach with a fragile, bendy bone sticking out from its own.

He opened the screen door, its white interlacing aluminum browned from nature and neglect. The knob on the main door was cold in his hand, as he rotated it counterclockwise. It stuck a little, so Jack shoved his bare shoulder against its dirty, metallic surface, pushing it inward.

He’d been here with Grandma, too, a couple times. Sometimes they’d come inside for a sandwich, rather than sitting, docked, while the attendant filled the tank.

When Grandma drove the boat, it went faster. The water was mistier, and the wind whipped past more quickly, like Grandpa’s hand when he slapped him, causing his head to jerk to the side, slamming his face into the boat lift.

Inside, the marina bar was dark and cold. It looked long uninhabited, the sun sneaking through the cloudy windows reflecting cobwebs running from the bar’s surface up to the ceiling fan, rusty and covered in dirty grease that had melted upward from the cooktop years ago. Jack felt the last splash of hope evacuating his body. No one was here, and his bird was in the woods.

An old phone, the kind that plugged into the wall, sat on the back bar, sticky, dull gray. Jack could feel tears once again asking to wet his crooked nose, but he squinted and they went back. He searched for a light switch by the door, found it, and flipped it. A flickering fluorescence lit the floor, shiny, dirty black, and showed the path around the bar.

His bare, bleeding feet hurt now, as he traversed the filthy fake tiles. His legs were no longer numb, and he was suddenly aware of his wounds, gingerly walking around the bar to grab the phone.

A miracle, the first unexpected event to work in his favor today, the phone had a dial tone. He dialed 911, an action Mom had taught him to do, but one he never expected to put into practice.

A friendly voice asked about his emergency.

“Grandpa’s gone,” was all he managed to say, his voice thin and quavery.

“What did you do?” a raspy voice asked through the phone.

Jack sat on the marina dock, his bleeding feet oozing in the water. A few mayflies adhered to his sweaty arms. The water-ski boat zoomed by, and he waved, less frantically this time, the mayflies hanging on belligerently. He didn’t need the boat’s help. He just wanted to be friendly.

Mom would come tomorrow to pick him up on the way to Jennifer’s camp. She’d see the empty spot where the house had been. Or maybe the woods would have retaken it by then.

There would be consequences. For now, he’d let the lake heal his feet. There would be questions. The bird chirped answers, but Mom wouldn’t comprehend them.

He’d have to explain.

He heard the bar’s rickety door open behind him, up the hill. He turned abruptly, his bleeding feet lifting from the water as he spun on his ratty swim trunks.

The woman standing in the doorway was wearing a blue bathrobe like Grandma’s, but it wasn’t Grandma. It couldn’t be. She was dead. But maybe? He couldn’t see her face clearly. Her form was distinct, but her face was a blurry concoction of shades and shapes. Jack realized he had finally been crying.

“Jack!” the faceless woman called.

Jack pushed himself off the dock, his wounds hitting the slimy mud, and pushed himself forward, out toward the middle of the lake, aiming toward the distant point across the water, the place Sydney had aimed when she fled that day.

He swam like his heritage, away from the faceless dead.

He swam like Sydney but without an adult to stop him. He swam until he could see past the peninsula and it’s strange, cold trees. He swam until he could turn to look back and see Grandma’s buoy, holding steady against the calm lap of waves, gently pushing back toward the shore. Treading water, he felt his sunburned arms weaken, his bloody feet creating circles of red somewhere below him. He felt exhaustion creeping through his body.

He didn’t hear the red-and-white boat float up behind him, coasting, its engine off, no skier to tow.

“Hey, kid. You okay?”

He turned to see an old man, his face like the bark of a maple tree, his white, crinkled hair falling like rivulets of water over his forehead. He was standing at the prow, leaning down, his hand reaching out to Jack.

“Grandpa’s gone,” Jack said softly, as he waded toward the outstretched hand.

He wasn’t sure he should grab onto the man’s hand. He didn’t know who this man was. But he was looking for somebody, and this was somebody.

“Is that Grandpa’s dock?” the man asked once Jack was safely on board. The boat had red cushions and the hard surfaces were gleaming white. “Is Grandpa’s cabin the one up the hill, back in the woods?”

Jack nodded guiltily, looking down at a bloody footprint he had left on the pristine deck.

“Let’s clean up your cuts,” the man said, as he collected a first aid kit from a compartment by the pilot’s chair. The peroxide burned, as the man knelt down, washing Jack’s feet. The old man was hurting him, but Jack knew it was supposed to hurt. Mom would be mad that he got onto this man’s boat.

Jack looked back toward Grandpa’s dock and the house just sitting there, up on the hill, like nothing had happened.

He must have been going crazy, he thought. What did he do? The house was gone, he knew it even as he could see the window he had left open when he left this morning. He knew he had removed the house somehow, removed Grandpa. Removed Grandpa’s drinking buddies from the bar, removed all the people except the water-skiers.

“It wasn’t there before,” he said to the old man.

“Sure it was. What do you mean?”

“It was gone when I was done swimming. The boats at the marina are gone, too, and a scary lady is inside.”

The old man directed the boat toward Grandpa’s dock. He seemed calm, but Jack was worried he’d disappear.

“The marina’s fine. I’ve been taking people out skiing from there all day.”

He looked at Jack, assessing, “Do you feel okay? Did you get too much water in your mouth, maybe? It’s dirty.”

“No. I don’t know.”

The man helped lifted Jack onto the dock, no lifejacket to complicate things, like when Mom had lifted him out of Grandpa’s busted boat.

“I’m just gonna walk you home, okay?” the old man said as he loosely tied up the boat to a dock post. Jack nodded. The man looked closely at Jack’s face, his eyebrows squeezing together with concern. “What did you do?”

When Mom arrived to take Jack away from the cabin the next morning, Grandpa had taken a shower. It was the cleanest Jack had seen him since the funeral. Mom and Jack would get Jennifer from camp and go home. He watched Mom hug Grandpa.

“I love you,” he heard her say.

“I love you too,” Grandpa said, his voice clearer than Jack had heard it in days.

“I’ll look into a tree service,” Mom said.

“Okay. Thank you. It’s getting messy.”

A bird sang to Jack from the receding woods as he walked to the car, carrying the duffel bag containing his clothes, including a ripped-up pair of swim trunks he wouldn’t explain to Mom. As he trudged around the house, he looked at the ground, a black border framing the bottom of the structure. It seemed to be moving, contracting below the foundation, an abyss closing under the earth.

Mom came after him. “Hey buddy? How was your week? What did you do?”