A List of Things That No Longer Exist

A List of Things That No Longer Exist:

Electricity

There was one stoplight in the center of the desolate little town, and someone had gone through the trouble of busting all the lights out, leaving behind the strange, rusting yellow shell, like an empty cocoon shivering in the winter.

“Why’d they do that?” she asked as they walked under.

“Hmm?” he grunted, inquisitively.

“The lights”—she pointed up—“are all broken.”

“Hmm,” another grunt, noncommittal.

“Do you think they shot it? Like target practice?”

“Waste of bullets.”

“Throwing rocks? That’d take some good aim. Or, like, a slingshot?” she speculated.

“Let’s hope whoever did it isn’t still hanging around. Come on.”

Coffee

Malls

Grocery stores

He silently held out a hand to stop her. Slowly, he reached into his tattered jacket and pulled out his pistol. A shopping cart covered by a blue tarp lay on the side of the road. She waited, tense, on the root-cracked and crumbling asphalt as he approached the shoulder. He kept a wide berth of the cart as he circled it carefully, but when he reached the other side, he put away the gun and whistled for her to come over.

It was a body, badly decomposed. A note in his lap read My name is Daniel, and it was clear he’d put a bullet in his head. He at least had the decency to leave what few provisions he had left stacked nearly beside him.

“Sunova bitch couldn’t’ve saved the bullet?” he griped as he stooped to pick up the cans and rummage through the man’s abandoned backpack. Finding nothing more of use, he walked on.

She crossed herself and said a silent prayer before following.

Cigarettes

Estradiol

Marta’s virtual library of music

One of the items the man carried was a radio.

In the beginning, most of the stations blared the same government warnings to shelter in place, conserve food and water, do not let unknown persons into your shelter, if you or a loved one begin to show symptoms do not attempt to seek medical care—Marta would plug her ears whenever he turned the radio on and squeeze her eyes shut and try to remember what song was playing at the last coffee shop she visited.

Then, one by one, the stations went silent, until all he could find was static. Still, it was like a ritual: every other day or so, he’d turn on the radio and carefully comb the frequencies for something, anything. Marta stopped plugging her ears, and she too listened to the empty static.

It wasn’t until the depths of their first winter that they heard something.

It was faint, so faint he skipped past it—“Wait!” she exclaimed, startling a few black birds from the trees. “Go back!”

He did, slowly.

And there it was, the orchestra swelling in great, staticy crescendo: Satie’s Gymnopedie No. 1—the first section, Marta’s heart leapt in rememberance, in D Major.

Acetaminophen

Mother Made Women’s Daily Multivitamin + Biotin

Antibiotics

He started coughing one day. “Just caught my breath weird, is all,” he said, but she knew better. They both did.

Internet

It had been on the periphery of her awareness for a while, but Marta didn’t pay much attention. There were people much smarter than her to solve the world’s problems, so she didn’t worry when she heard about it on the news or scrolled past articles or saw posts online from people in faraway places she vaguely knew existed.

Her world kept spinning.

Television

Birthday cards

The last birthday card Marta sent had been to her mom. The front had a watercolor drawing of a bear hugging her cub, flowers all around, and the inside read Happy Birthday to My Mama Bear! I think you’re grrreat! She bought it alongside a bottle of Riesling and a pint of Chunky-Dory Brownie Mint Explosion ice cream. The teenager manning the cast register, eyes bloodshot and heavy lidded, didn’t ask for her ID.

That night, alone in her apartment, when she’d finished both the bottle and the pint, she signed the card Martin, taped it shut, searched for a stamp, and set the envelope next to her keys to remember to mail it the next day.

Hangover cures

Some days were better than others. Some days, Marta would bravely venture to call good. They’d find a river with a nice, wide bank to spend the night on, and they’d wash up—he always insisted on Marta going first while he set up camp. At first, she thought it gentlemanly, but then she realized he had a bar of soap, worn down to a sliver by now, that he didn’t want to share, which was fine by Marta: she had her own plastic jar of coconut oil that she brushed through her hair with her fingers and rubbed on her skin when she was clean and warm and sun-dried.

She braided her hair while it was damp—it was vain and ridiculous given their circumstance, but she liked the way the soft, unbraided waves fell over her shoulders and spilled down her back—and watched him while he fished, stripped down to his underwear and waded in waist-deep. In the glare of the summer sun off the water, he looked radiant, his skin bronzed like a Greek god’s, his shaggy, mousy blond hair lightened by the season. Their fishing supplies were crude: a spool of fishing line, a few rusty hooks, lures made of downy feathers from pillows and shiny bits of plastic, anything he could scavenge for the task. Carefully, he unspooled a length of line and tied a makeshift lure on the end. Then he raised his arm above his head and, like a Cretan slinger, spun the line ‘round and ‘round until the momentum carried it to the middle of the river.

He tried to teach Marta the technique a few times, but she only tangled their precious line. The only experience she had fishing was with her grandfather one summer years and years ago. She remembered the day being hot and sticky and boring, floating across the steamy lake with nothing but their own thoughts and awkward half-hearted conversation to occupy them. She remembered crying when her grandfather gutted the one fish he caught, remembered him scolding her: “Are you a man or not?”

In the closing dusk, after they ate their roasted fish and a can of lukewarm beans, he pulled out one of his greatest possessions, a half-drunk bottle of whiskey. They passed the bottle back and forth as easily as they swapped stories still untold to one another.

“My cat, Frobisher,” Marta answered.

“Your cat?” he laughed. “Of all the people you knew—every single one—you’d want to know what happened to your cat?”

“Yes!” She laughed too. “He was the sweetest little guy. Never met a stranger. And he was the best at killing bugs! There were these big-ass roaches in our apartment complex, but I never had a problem with my Frobie on the prowl.”

“A cat,” he scoffed, taking a long drink.

“Alright, what about you? Since my answer’s not good enough.”

“My sister,” he said softly, then drank again.

“I didn’t know you had a sister.” Marta drank too.

“Yeah, my big sister Hadley. She was always dragging my dumb ass out of trouble.” He smiled to himself. “She was in Texas when it started. Last I heard, she was tryin’ to make it back to Alabama, to our mama.” He tossed a rock into the fire and watched the embers scatter.

“I’m sorry.”

“Thanks.” He wiped his eyes. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Well, did you just pop out of the ground? What about your family?”

“Oh.” She thought of birthday cards, of her father’s long work trips, of a big empty house with nobody home, of bottles and bottles of vodka, and said, “They weren’t really around much at the end.”

“Just you and your cat?” He took a swig. “That’s not bad living. Very…noble.”

It was Marta’s turn to be guffawed: “Noble?”

“Yes!” he laughed. “Like, very down to earth, one with nature, that type’a shit. Like you’re trying to leave the world a better place, one creature at a time.”

“I dunno about that,” Marta said, secretly pleased.

The night fell silent between them, the whiskey still flowing easily. The more Marta drank, the easier it was to picture a world that no longer existed: she was in the woods, at a bonfire, and she’d had too much to drink but it was okay, she was here with her friends, friends she can almost hear talking and laughing as she takes another swig, and they sound like people she remembered fondly. The more she chased the feeling, the easier it was to pretend.

And there was this guy who smelled nice, like soap and the ozone of the river. Marta staggered to her feet to dance to the music pounding in her head, and the guy laughed. His laugh sounded nice, too. Part of her brain was yelling at her to quit it, but the other part was feeling better than she had in months, maybe a year, so she pulled him unsteadily to his feet.

Tomorrow, she’ll wake up with a splitting headache and kneel in the detritus to vomit, and her limbs will be heavy and achy but he will force her to walk—“By winter,” they decided, “we have to reach the radio tower by winter.”—though not as far as usual. She’ll think of nothing but a cold, sugary soda to ease her nausea and a greasy plate of breakfast foods to sop up the rest of the alcohol’s poison.

But these were things for tomorrow. They danced, or tried to. They both always drank too much when he got the whiskey out, so it was all they could do to keep the other upright, but it was funny, and the world was ending all around them, so who cared? She held him as closely as he held her until they passed out beneath the stars with the lullaby of chirping crickets and screeching cicadas and katydids calling their own name.

The day was one of the good ones.

Cold medicine

“I’m fine,” he insisted, like he hadn’t been coughing for weeks, sleeping propped up against his rucksack so he could breathe, sometimes getting hit so hard with fits he was left gagging for air. Like he wasn’t dangerously guzzling their water at any moment’s rest, half-drowning himself in every stream and creek they came across. Like Marta couldn’t hear him wheezing as they made their way along, like she couldn’t see how pale he was getting, how bony, how sunken and hollow his eyes were.

“Like hell you are.” She hadn’t been a nurse of anything before, but she had a vague sense of what to look for: something for the fever so clearly wracking him with sweats and chills, something for the wet, hacking cough that sounded like his lungs might come up with it, something, anything, to get his strength back.

“Look—” And to Marta’s point, a coughing fit interrupted him.

“There’s no harm in trying. We haven’t seen anyone in weeks, I doubt there’s someone dangerous there now.” She grabbed her coat and shouldered her backpack, then held her hand out expectantly towards him.

“Be…careful…” he wheezed. He handed her the gun.

Human decency

It happens at night, among the trees, where its quiet and still.

Marta wakes to the gunshot, echoing clear and final through the forest, but she doesn’t move. She lays on the cold, hard ground, staring at the sky as the horizon pinkened and the dawn chorus began their rehearsals until finally, the sun rose, orange and brilliant, on another day.

He leaves, in total: his pack, containing some sundries and foodstuffs, a map of the continental US, a map of the Deep South, a compass, and his pocketknife; two of his warmest flannels, both carefully mended, his thick wool jacket, and his darned socks and boots; and a note that reads I’m sorry, please forgive me.

Marta has never seen his handwriting until now.

Carefully, she folds the note and tucks it away in her rucksack. She packs away the map, too, and the compass, and whatever other supplies she can manage.

Marta pulls one flannel over her shoulder and ties the other around her waist. It’s warm and worn soft. It smells like soap and musk, like the winter chill that’s been creeping into the morning air, like the smoke and ashes from last night’s fire—all undercut by the stench of sickness. She pulls the jacket on, too. She stuffs the socks into the toe of the boot so they fit her better and leaves her own well-worn boots behind.

She finds the body a little ways from their camp.

She’s not strong enough to dig a grave; she stacks a cairn five rocks high, the only rocks she can find, and lashes two twigs together into a crude cross.

She should say something, but no words come. She should cry, but tears won’t come, either.

Universities

Once, at the beginning, they passed through a college.

Those early days were like a bad dream. They walked for days—almost two weeks straight, he told her, and she believed him because her own memories of the time were fragmented, distorted, brief moments of remembrance like a flash-bang in the numb haze she moved through—

—a car on fire, its occupants screaming—

—hot, muggy nights where she lay sleepless while gunshots rang out—

—a woman crying out in pain, begging for help, as he hurried her along, whispering, “Don’t look, don’t look, don’t look…”

—until they found themselves among old brick buildings with strange, old-sounding names: Tanager Science Building, Hennig Arts Center and Theater, E. S. Vang Library, the Chester and Cheryl Denman Humanities Building.

“Let’s stop here,” the man said when they reached a garishly modern quad of buildings called River Watch Dormitories. One of the glass doors had been shattered, and they carefully picked their way inside.

Then, they the stairs. The stairwell was encased in glass, and Marta could see, as they climbed, and climbed, and climbed, the total desertion of the campus.

Finally, when exhaustion threatened to overcome her, the man said, “Here.”

The room he chose was small, one lofted bed with a desk tucked under it, a wardrobe and chest and bookshelf against the opposite wall. It was decorated with posters for movies and bands, art prints, a whiteboard calendar marked with dates for tests and study hall and intramural soccer practice.

“Get some sleep. I’ll take first watch.”

The bed’s ladder was too daunting; Marta pulled the comforter and blankets down to the floor while the man settled in the doorway, one leg outstretched, the other bent with the pistol resting on his knee.

“Wha—” Marta’s voice cracked. She licked her dry lips and tried again. “What’s your name?”

Vern