David, But Inside

“Why won’t you go?!” I whisper-roared at the man in the pick-up as I shook the wheel in frustration. He was stopped, waiting on the minivan lady to load her bags into the back hatch of the van and drive off. She was moving so slowly I thought it might be just to spite him. I thought of pulling around him, but there wasn’t room. I thought of honking until he relented, but what if that’s not how it played out? I thought of jumping out and seeing how much of his MAGA sticker I could scrape off the bumper before he caught me.

            A few spaces behind me, a car backed out of its parking spot and, seeing me and the truck stopped in the middle, reversed course, driving the wrong way. Here was my chance. If I backed down the row, I could snag the spot. I put the car in reverse and eased it backwards a few feet as another vehicle—an SUV—pulled in behind me. I slammed the brakes, too hard for how slow I was going. The SUV whipped into the spot. My spot. “Shhhhiiiiit,” I growled, still whispering even though my windows were up, and shook the wheel again.

The SUV people—mother, father, and perfectly disinterested teenage daughter—were entering through the store’s automatic doors by the time the minivan lady pulled out of the space. The truck screeched its tires, pulling into the vacated spot, and I was finally able to pass on my continued quest for parking. My car’s engine had begun the ominous ticking noise that signaled its eminent overheating. I swung into the next available spot, an aisle over from the pickup truck and near the bottom of the lot, and shut the engine off. It rumbled for a few seconds after I pulled the key from the ignition before finally settling. I knew that I probably wouldn’t be doing too much driving after this but I made a mental note to add anti-freeze to my shopping list.

            Jesus, the lot was full. And on a Wednesday afternoon. Was everyone doing the same thing I was? News reports coming out of the rest of the world hadn’t exactly painted a rosy picture—borders closed, electrical grids down, bodies housed in gymnasiums and arenas—but so far, we had been spared from it. And most people thought it wouldn’t reach us here at all. Still, I thought it couldn’t hurt to be prepared. Maybe stay inside for a little while. I had already canceled my date with Amber. She had told me I was overreacting. I told her to look at the rest of the world and then tell me what she thought. She said she needed some space and I said, “That’s exactly what I mean.” But then I understood.

            I stepped from the car onto the cracked pavement and into the sweet smell of burned engine coolant. At the motion sensing doors, I put on some latex gloves that I had filched from work before I was laid-off and grabbed a cart. After a second’s hesitation, I grabbed a second. I had a little bit of money in my account, but this trip would sap all of it except for this month’s rent. I pulled a black bandana over the lower half of my face. This is a reverse robbery. Standing between them like the coupling of a train car, I maneuvered the carts into the wetly cool air of the store and down its too-narrow aisles.

            In canned goods, I filled the bottoms of both carts with everything from fruits and vegetables to tuna and beef stew. A couple of college kids passed by and I heard one of the boys mutter something about doomsday preppers. His friend laughed and eyed my carts. I thought about telling them that it wasn’t prepping if it was already doomsday. Instead I traded a dented can of peaches for a fractionally less dented one and moved on.

            I felt baffled by how many people were in the store but how few of them seemed to be taking the threat seriously. I passed a group of women carrying wine and beer and chatting casually about the party they were throwing for their friend’s birthday. And how, quote, that bitch is gonna be so surprised, end quote.

A few more stops and the carts were both filling up and had become difficult to corner around the narrow aisle caps. I almost ran my whole train into a young mother and her child. “Sorry,” I said, and felt a heat rise to my cheeks. And yet somehow a middle-aged white guy in khakis and a red polo found room to squeeze in between us and pass, carrying an armful of bread and deli meat. “What. the. heck?” the young mom said and rolled her eyes at me conspiratorially.

 I smiled. “Sorry, again,” I said.

The driver of the pickup stood before the meat with his arms outstretched as if in supplication. “Where’s the beef?” he called out to anyone who would listen. I approached with apprehension and began loading my carts with chicken and pork. I had planned on stocking up on ground beef but, as the man’s prayer suggested, they were out. I grabbed a couple packages of ground turkey as an afterthought and tossed them on top of the other meat in the cart. The man eyed me suspiciously. “Turkey’s for pansies,” he said and stormed off in a huff.

            The paper goods aisle. One final mission before I could decamp. As I entered the aisle, an older woman carrying three king-sized packages of toilet paper armed past me. “These’re the last ones,” she said with a mixture of shame and glee in a rictus on her face. Her forearm brushed mine as she passed and I shuddered at the thought of the sweat and the thousands of skin cells we had swapped.

Near the back of the empty rack, a four-pack of discount, gas-station-bathroom toilet paper sat abandoned like a child on a curb awaiting the arrival of her perpetually late parents. I tossed it into the cart, then added a pallet of paper towels to each and grabbed a few packs of wet wipes. I towed the teetering carts toward the front of the store, reading over my enormous shopping list to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything.

Shit. Anti-freeze.

Voices mingling into a dull roar issued from the crowded checkout area. The cacophony was peppered with the beeping of items being scanned. The checkout lines stretched into the aisles, blocking access to the aisles and making me rethink my need for anti-freeze. I parked myself and my two carts behind a flannel clad, elderly man who carried only charcoal briquettes, hamburger buns, and a single Old Spice deodorant stick. He held the charcoal like a bride and rested the bread and deodorant on the table it created. While the rest of the people in the store jittered and bounced with the kinetic energy of a crowd forced to stand still, the deodorant man seemed oddly at ease. I pondered what type of person would stand in such a long line for so few items. I had begun to build a character—grandfather to a dozen grandchildren who has learned a saintly patience over the years—when a commotion broke out near the front of the next queue over.

The man in the red polo was yelling at the young cashier—his voice distorted by volume and anger. I had just begun to crane my head around to get a better look when the deodorant man, he of saintly patience, yelled, “Shut the fuck up, ya nut! Leave that child alone!” The din of the crowd increased again, swallowing red-polo man’s continued screaming. An older woman, presumably a manager, approached and attempted to calm him. He turned his ire on her. Someone yelled, “Get him, girl.” The manager calmly spoke into her walkie-talkie, and seconds later, two large men in security uniforms approached and forcibly removed the man. As the three men neared the doors, the crowd blocked my view. The manager squeezed the cashier’s shoulder, whispered something to her, and pointed to the man’s abandoned shopping cart. The girl wiped at her eyes with the backs of her hands and began to push the cart back toward the aisles as the manager took over her cashier duties. Two packages of toilet paper sat atop the cart and a woman quietly scooped them off into her own as the girl passed. I wondered idly if there had been any ground beef in there.

The lines began to move again. When my turn finally came, what felt like hours later, I leaned my full weight into the lead cart to start it moving toward the conveyor belt. The cashier scanned my items then whistled as he read my total. On a whim, I threw a candy bar and a pack of gum on top of the pile.

“Take it,” he said. “End-of-days discount.”

Outside, I spared one last look at the store, marveling at the commotion that could still be seen through the glass doors and that I had escaped it unscathed. To be honest, that’s how I often felt after a trip to the grocery store but this time had felt different. More alive with ill intent. To the side of the building stood the red polo man, the hem of his shirt pulled out of its tight tuck, the security guards encircling him. As I watched, one of them punched him in the stomach. By the look of him, it didn’t seem to be the first time. I sped up my pace, struggling to keep control of the carts as I descended toward the bottom of the sloped parking lot, feeling as if I had escaped some terrible fate.

God, I hated public.

                                                                #

After I put the groceries away, filling the small kitchen until every opening of a cabinet or freezer threatened to brain me with falling food and loading some overflow—cereal and such, mostly—into the spare bedroom upstairs, I flopped onto the couch and flipped the tv on. I had recently reinstalled cable after years of streaming. I still enjoyed the convenience of Netflix and Hulu but live television had a presence that couldn’t be replicated by streaming. In it, I felt a human touch that was lost when you had your pick of whatever you wanted to watch whenever you wanted to watch it. Especially during the daytime. There was something about having to sit through commercials for Fleschner, Stark, Tanoos & Newlin and oh, God, I hate Hot Bench, that really reminded you that society still existed, that you don’t always get to make your own decisions.

I flipped until I found a rerun of Walker, Texas Ranger. Tobey Maguire was in it. Ridiculous. I couldn’t not watch. During a commercial break I grabbed a package—one of several—of off-brand sandwich cookies from the overflowing cabinet. I plopped back in front of the tv to commence eating a row—ok a row and a half—of the chocolate and cream cookies. A preview for the six o’clock news played. In it, the blonde woman standing in front of a grocery store—different than the one I had just visited—asked, “Is a food shortage coming to your area? News Channel 3 investigates.”

“Not here, it’s not,” I said through cookie-gummed teeth.

I must have fallen into a sugar coma sometime during Walker. I awoke to golden light falling sideways through the blinds on the front window. I heard music, just the bassline, coming from the neighbor’s car two doors down. The unit next door had stood empty for a while to the disappointment of my mom/landlord. I called her the mumlord. She did not think it was funny. She had shown the apartment a few times, had even forced me to show it once, but couldn’t convince anyone to bite. And then, after every meeting with a prospective renter that didn’t go her way, she would whine and complain about how lazy and entitled everyone was these days. As if being reluctant to spend $800 a month on a shitty townhouse was some kind of moral failure. “I shouldn’t have ever bought property in this neighborhood,” she would say while gesturing vaguely at the block of apartment complexes across the street. Occasionally, there would be a couple of families sharing a pot of stew and what smelled like homemade tortillas while traditional music blared from speakers wedged in their open windows. Sometimes the music was live and I would drag a lawn chair outside and drink beer while I listened to the musicians. “It’s all gone downhill since I bought these buildings,” she would finish. If that was what she considered “downhill,” I couldn’t see myself wanting to make the climb.

Perching on my knees in the armchair that sat below the front windows and resting my arms on its back, I parted the blinds and pressed my cheek to the window glass to get a look at what was going on two doors down. I could smell the dust on the blinds and reminded myself to clean them the next time I cleaned house. Greg, or possibly Craig—he lived with his mother and I had met the pair only once—was lying on his back on a blue tarp underneath his car, a rusted toolbox on the oil-stained concrete beside him. I thought about asking him if he would take a look at mine when he had time, but at that exact moment he started to curse and bang a wrench on the pavement. Also, I was supposed to be staying in. Gotta remember that. There was no movement at the apartments across the street. No families outside. No music playing. At least none that I could hear over the thump of Greg-Craig’s car stereo. Vehicles sat in the parking lot and lights burned in a couple of the units. I guessed they were staying inside too. I let the blind slide back into place with a soft shth sound and almost fell over trying to get out of the chair backwards.

I must have had the foresight to turn the tv volume down before I napped because I just then registered faint voices saying something about things popping off in New York.

It had officially come stateside.

I wasn’t surprised, but heaviness and lightness battled in the bottom of my gut. It felt a little like freefall. I turned the volume up, but the reporter had sent it back to the studio and they were talking about some local kid that made it to the national spelling bee but was knocked out in the first round. I went to make dinner.

Afterward, I covered my face with the black bandana and dragged my single trashcan to the dumpster at the corner of the property. I tried to peek into the other units near mine as I passed, but even though lights burned within, everyone had their blinds and curtains drawn shut. I wondered if anyone was taking care of Mrs. Thompson in number four. I set the can on the ground as I fought with the metal, sliding door of the dumpster. It always stuck, and this time was no exception. It eventually squealed open, and powdered rust fell in a slow shower turning my hand Flamin’ Hot Cheeto-orange. I dumped the two bags from my trashcan into its open maw then wrestled it closed. It almost ate my hand but I jerked away just in time.

“Hey, David,” Craig-Greg said from directly beside me.

“Jesus Chri—” I said, clutching at my chest. The sound of the dumpster must have covered his approach.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare ya,” he said. “Hey, so, what’s your mom gonna do about rent if we all end up outta work? You know, like they have in other countries?” He sipped from his 20-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew. Swallowing and pointing to my face covering, he said, “It’s not here, yet.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and took a drag from his cigarette.

“New York, today. And we don’t know that. It doesn’t hurt to be safe.”

He shrugged. “So, what about your mom?” Christ, I didn’t even know the guy’s name and he’s name-dropping mumlord.

“I have no idea,” I said, trying to keep the interaction as brief as possible.

“But, like, do you think she’s gonna be chill about it? Or, you know…” I heard the unspoken B-word that was just dying to come out and play. Then, epiphany lit his features. “Do you even pay rent?” he asked.

I had, up until that point, attempted to breathe as shallowly as possible through the bandana but when he asked if I paid rent, I practically guffawed. “Yes, yes, I absolutely pay rent,” I said. Oh, to live in a world in which she gave me anything. He looked confused as to whether he should laugh at a joke he didn’t get. I saved him the choice. “Listen,” I felt the empty space where his name should have been as a physical presence but chose to carry on instead of taking a stab at which egg name belonged to him, “I don’t know what she’s gonna do. But, if I’m being honest, it probably won’t be good. I gotta get back inside,” I turned to walk back to the apartment, but stopped. As an afterthought, I said, “And you should too. Maybe think about staying in for a while.”

“Yeah, I’m not going out this weekend,” he said. I had just enough time to think, “Oh, good,” before he continued. “Some of the boys are coming over for the game. You could come if you want.”

The head inside my mind was shaking emphatically but I said, “No, thanks. I’ve got some stuff going on this weekend.”

“That’s cool. Maybe later,” he called as I walked back up the parking lot toward the apartment.

                                                            #

A black expanse. A voice, deep, from below the void. A rumble. And underneath, words ground to pulp between shifting stone. Juiced for their meaning. “We are coming,” overlaid with, “I am here.” Both sentences spoken by the same deep voice from the same dark well. My vision flared white then orange and inside the colors, becoming one with the flames, a retinue of screeching forms writhed. 

“I send them for you,” the void purred.

The screeching intensified, then syncopated before suddenly being replaced with a beep. beep. beep.

          Metal scraping heavy across concrete and a truck wailing its warning, “Backing up! Backing up! Backing up!”

            Fucking trash day.

            I used my shirtsleeve to wipe saliva from the corner of my mouth and rolled out of bed.

            I did my morning business and eyed the shower warily. I jerked the curtain back as the memory of the dream asserted itself. Empty, of course. Breakfast then shower. Maybe.

Two Kellogg’s Jumbo Assortment Packs, a full sixty days’ worth of cereal, sat atop the central pile of unpacked cardboard boxes in the spare bedroom. I broke through the plastic covering and rested my hand lovingly on the top flaps of a Froot Loops box before grabbing some Corn Flakes instead. Gotta save the best for last.

            Downstairs, in the kitchen, I popped the box open and reached for a bowl. I had seen people pour milk directly into the carton of cereal and had always found the act to be both barbaric and genius. I put the bowl back into the cabinet. If now was not the time to be a genius barbarian, then when was? I sprinkled some sugar into the box— ‘cause, you know, Corn Flakes—and poured the milk in. Leaning over the cereal, spoon in one hand and phone in the other, I scrolled Twitter.

Richard Marx was scorching some toady of the administration.

Michael Harriot had posted a new thread about historical wypipo. I skimmed it and made a note to read it later.

Charlotte Clymer was being snarky with some transphobic trolls.

But in between these, I had begun to notice a trend: low follower accounts posting nightmare images of the new normal in their cities. Mostly these came from New York, but some were from the West Coast also. A new front, and not even a full day had passed. And in all of them, the disaster was already in full swing.

            Mostly the images consisted of bare store shelves and scared-looking people in masks and gloves. But one, from a retirement community in…shit, Florida, a three-pronged attack, showed what appeared to be a rec center, filled wall-to-wall with black pillows. Nope, body bags. A whole building full of body bags. Jesus Christ. The post above the image was, “There Lying To Us.” I clicked on the OP’s profile to see if they were real or a bot. Their previous posts were all over the spectrum from jokes to retweeted news articles to conversations with people that seemed to know them. Real then, I guessed.

            Back to the photo. I skimmed the comments to see if anyone had any additional information. Some asshat commented that Florida was, after all, God’s Waiting Room, as if somehow elderly people shouldn’t be counted as regular deaths.

            I came across some Breaking News account whose MO reminded me of the old supermarket tabloids. An interview with someone who claimed that his father had come back to see him after he had died. “Oookay,” I said to my empty apartment. I finished my cereal, shrugged since no one was there to judge me, and drank the milk from the box. I turned my phone off and laid it face down so as to be less tempted by its call.

            I needed a shower after all.

            After another Walker, Texas Ranger cookie nap (this one was planned, so I had an alarm set and everything. Yay, me), I made a cup of coffee, turned on some music, and began to pace. And sing. But no one was around to hear it, so did it really happen? Ask a tree, I don’t know. I did a couple of Footloose barn scene moves to get my blood pumping. I felt loose. And more or less awake. I downed the last of my coffee in one gulp and carried the empty cup to the sink.

            “Hey, David.”            

Greg-Craig stood directly outside the window above the sink and though his voice was muffled by the glass, I still almost jumped out of my skin. “Hey, sorry to startle you,” he said but looked less sorry than amused. “Hey, you wanna come over? None of the bros can and I got some beers.”

            “Sorry, I’ve got some stuff to take care of here,” I said, just starting to catch my breath. I didn’t know how long that excuse would work. And also, it was a lie. I don’t know if that’s apparent or not. I mean, the only things I had to take care of here were the eating of junk food and the watching of bad tv.

            “Ok, then, maybe later,” Craig-Greg said. Naturally, I expected him to take his leave. Instead, he just stood there like he thought I might have a change of heart and come over after all. The ringing of my phone couldn’t even save me. I pulled it from my pocket and looked at the screen.

            “It’s my mom. I need to take it.”

            “Oh, hey, ask her about the rent!”

            “Yeah, ok,” I said. I wasn’t going to do that. I waved to him and he reluctantly sauntered back down to his apartment.

            I watched the screen until the call ended then put the phone back in my pocket. It buzzed against my thigh. Voicemail. I lacked the bandwidth for that at that moment. Later. I’d listen to it later.

            One of the perks of living alone, and having an unoccupied unit next-door, was that I could be as loud as I wanted. I spun the TV to face the kitchen and turned the volume way up so that I could watch it while I cooked dinner. I had become obsessed with the local news. The wild tonal swings between the local human-interest stories and the death and destruction in the wider world lent an absurdly manic energy to what was otherwise a gloomy endeavor. It was like a dark comedy. I always expected that when the anchor threw it to the weatherman or the sports guy, I would see Bill Murray, or maybe Adam Sandler in one of his dramatic turns. But it was always Heather Hunter and her Storm Hunter Team! or Scott Giles with Sports!

            As I caramelized onions for patty melts (where’s the beef), I learned that the weather was fair but sports maybe weren’t so much. Several associations had put their leagues on indefinite hold. I guess that’s why Greg-Craig had been so jazzed to get me to come to his place: no bros over for sports and beers.

            “That’s wild,” I said to the empty room.

            I transferred the brown, sticky onions to a bowl and deglazed the pan with some butter before throwing the turkey burgers in to cook. They sizzled and hissed loudly enough to drown out the voices on the tv. When the burgers were done, I removed them from the pan and placed them on a plate to rest while I buttered the bread. I pushed the pan off the eye with the front of the spatula, the grease slowly settling into a quiet hiss.

            “…leading some to argue that it could be airborne.”

            I turned to face the tv, the burgers momentarily forgotten.

            “That’s right, Shelly. While no deaths have been officially reported as of yet,” Tell that to the folks in bags down in Florida, I thought, “the number of infections has jumped considerably in the past 24 hours. Numbers that, some experts say, are inconsistent with community spread. Leaving us to wonder, are we safe even in our own front yards?

            “Next up, have you heard the joke about the Priest, the Rabbi, and the Minister? Well, what these three have to say is no laughing matter.”

            I looked to the front door where light seeped in around the edges. I thought about how drafts could be felt on particularly windy days if I sat in the chair beside the door. I quickly covered the burgers with a second plate to keep them warm.

            In the laundry room, little more than a closet off the kitchen, I kept some random supplies in a caddy hanging from the back of the door. From it I took the duct tape. There was a cartoon duck on its packaging and, like, why would you want to make that more confusing for children? And probably also for Greg-Craig-style adults. I grabbed some scissors from beside the microwave and began taping the edges of all of the windows and the two doors that kept the outside out. I eyed the vents suspiciously and decided that since it was springtime and not particularly hot, I could do without those too. I wish I could say that I had worried about the oxygen levels, that either there wouldn’t be enough air inside or, if there was, it would mean that I had not successfully kept the air out. Sometimes, we’ve got a little Craig-Greg in all of us.

The job done, I went back to making dinner. The burgers were surprisingly good.

                                                            #

Two weeks later and I was struggling to remember what day it was. A reek from the kitchen. It had been growing for a couple of days. And that’s when it dawned on me, a full eight hours after waking, that it was Wednesday. Thursday—tomorrow, tomorrow—was garbage pickup. But how was I going to get the trash outside? I had thought that I would just let it pile near the back door until all this was all over. I had taken care to put all my food scraps down the disposal but I guess the packaging from the meat—probably last Sunday’s(?)chicken—was enough to start a righteous stink. Death finds a way. It was bearable at that moment, but what would I be enduring a few days on?

I gingerly pulled the tape from around the kitchen window, careful of the paint. There wasn’t a screen on that one; it had been missing when I moved in, and the mumlord hadn’t bothered to replace it. After I had removed the tape, I hauled the two swollen garbage bags up onto the counter. God, they stunk. If I was going to do this, I wanted to do it as quickly as possible.

I threw the window open and my skin goose-bumped at the breeze. No time to enjoy it. Enjoy it and die. I could hear sirens in the distance. I shoved the first bag through the window and heard it flump onto the concrete slab that passed for a patio. It had stuck briefly, but with a slight push it slid through. When I picked up the second bag, I was reminded of old cartoons in which the…let’s say larger character is expected to fit through an opening that the other, uh, smaller characters had already gone through and we all laaauuugh ‘cause there’s just no way, and also fat-shaming was funny I guess.

The second garbage bag was that “larger” character.

The top went through with no trouble, but about midway it stuck. I pushed the sides of the bag in to try to mold it into a shape more pushing-it-out-the-window friendly. When that didn’t work, I pushed from the bottom.

And inserted my arm up to my elbow.

Like I was inseminating a cow.

As I pulled my arm out, the bag fell from the window, toppling onto the bag below. I slammed the window, shutting out the breeze and the sirens. But, now that I had heard them, I noticed that the sirens could still be heard, faintly. Hm. I wondered how long they had been going, unnoticed.

I hoped that even though the window was open for longer than I had intended, the bag’s girthy blockade had protected me. As is the way of going elbow deep inside a trash bag, even though it had mostly been paper, plastic, and cardboard (who was I recycling for there at the end of the world?), my arm was covered in gore. Holding it aloft, I walked toward the half-bath in the weird under-the-stairs section of this luxurious apartment. My phone began to buzz from the end table beside the couch. Arm still held up and out, I went to look at the screen. What can I say? I was addicted to it back when it worked. Phone trumped arm-gunk, I guess.

It was my mother again. I should answer, I thought. Then: I should call her back after I’ve cleaned this off my arm. To the half-bath I went.

Sitting on the couch, so fresh and so clean, I went to the Recents tab on my phone and let my finger hover over Mom. Before I had steeled myself to press the button, the phone began to ring. Not vibrate. Not ding. Full-blown turn-of-the-21^st-century ringing. The screen was still on recent calls. Then it turned black as it went to sleep.

But the ringing continued.

In the kitchen, on the wall next to the refrigerator hung a phone. It was an eggshell color, almost tan, that clashed with the lighter eggshell of the wall. It had a large number pad beside the receiver above which was a caller ID. I had not installed the phone. The phone just…existed. It was there when I moved in and I had left it where it hung out of some vague sense of irony.

The ringing, bleating really, issued from it.

How. The hell. Was that phone ringing? I had lived here for three years and that phone had never rung. Never.

I sat immobile for I don’t know how long, waiting for the ringing to cease. But it just kept going. I remembered—hazy, but it was there—the days when phones didn’t go to voicemail after five rings or so. If you hadn’t set up an answering machine, and if the caller was particularly persistent, a phone could ring all day. The ringing was boring into my head. Nothing like the gentle vibrations or digital tones of the cell I clutched in my hand.

Recognizing that it may never stop ringing on its own, I crept toward the telephone, conscious of the absurdity of approaching an inanimate object with such trepidation.

The ID read Private. I braced myself, said, “Don’t be an idiot,” and jerked the phone from its hook. Dial tone. A nostalgic sound but not soothing. My blood chilled as, within the beeping, the static hum seemed to hold the memory of the eldritch voice from the garbage truck dream.

Stupid, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had just barely avoided something sinister.

My cell phone buzzed in my hand and I threw it across the kitchen. It skidded over the countertop and landed in the sink. Its continued buzzing rattled silverware like metal popcorn in a stainless-steel pan.

“Shit,” I said. I lunged to the sink and grabbed the phone, answering it to make sure it was still working. In the confusion I forgot to actually say hello.

“David?” My mother’s voice. Shit.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Where. Have. You. Been?” I could feel each angry/disappointed period separating those words.

            Missed you too, mom. “Home, of course.”

            “Pshaw,” she said the sound like it was a word, Puh-shaw, like she was born during Prohibition, “I can’t believe you listen to those hucksters.” That was her word for anyone who suggested she should be doing something other than exactly what she wanted to do. She was one of those people who had a playground understanding of the word freedom; it did not hold within it an accounting for other’s freedoms. It was always my rights! and never their rights! She really put the I in bad ideology.

            “Well, I actually started staying in well before they told me I had to. Because it seemed like the right thing to do,” I said. “So, I guess I’m one of those hucksters?” I had learned long ago that I didn’t need to monitor my language or my tone for her. Mostly because there was no telling what would set her off or shut her up. No way of knowing if some innocuous thing was going to start her screaming. Or if some jab would be completely passed over or comically misunderstood as kindness. I couldn’t even pretend to predict it, so why even try. I suspected that she never actually heard what anyone else was saying, only what she thought they would say.

            “I’ve been worried about you, you know?” Apparently, that one was going to be passed over.

            “Yeah, sorry. I’ve just been doing my thing here at the house. It’s all gotten a little weird. Speaking of, did you just call me on the landline?”

            “What?”

            “This landline here,” I pointed toward the kitchen phone like she would be able to see me. “It started ringing a minute ago.”

            “Well, no, I uh, didn’t know you had one,” she said. I braced for wrath. I fully expected her to be angry that I had a phone that she didn’t know about. Then: maybe I should get a phone that she doesn’t know about.

            “I didn’t either. I mean, like, I knew there was a phone on the wall but I never got it hooked up or anything.”

            “That’s strange,” she said.

            “Yeah, very. It kinda scared me.”

            “You know you start to get jumpy when you spend too much time inside. You did that when you were little too. You’d spend days in front of those video games in the summertime and then you’d get weird and mopey. And twitchy.” I knew where this was going. “You really should get outside. It’ll do you some good. And find a new job. Rent’s due in a couple of days.” Yup, there it was.

            “You know no one’s working, right? And companies are shutting down left and right. What exactly is your plan when folks stop paying their rent?”

            “Same as it ever was, David. I’ll kick those bums out on their bums.” She had used that “joke” for as long as I can remember. It had always struck me as callous, even when I was a little kid. I understood the concept—she owned the buildings and the tenants paid her for access, and when they didn’t pay, they broke the contract—but it sometimes seemed like she enjoyed kicking people out.

I knew she enjoyed it more than she enjoyed paying for maintenance.

“Well, your father and I are about to go out to dinner—it’s his night to choose,” she said instead of goodbye.

Business as usual, I guess. I shook my head but kept my mouth shut. Not because I was afraid to argue but because I was ready to be out of that conversation. I had heard that some folks liked talking to their parents but I had never gotten the appeal. I always felt drained after our conversations like my mother was a vampire, her words were fangs, and my will was blood.

I said bye, hung up, and leaned back into the couch. I turned my eyes back to the phone on the wall. And my mother’s reaction when I had mentioned it. Something about the whole thing gnawed at me. Was it possible for her to have activated the phone without me knowing, so that she had another way of getting in touch? You may ask why, if she lived just across town, she didn’t just come check on me. And that would be a valid question. But the truth was she only ever came to her properties to show them to potential renters or to evict people. I suspect that she thought herself too good for some of the neighborhoods in which she owned apartment buildings, not too good to profit off of them, just too good to be in them.

The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that she had something to do with the phone. It was unlike her to lie about her heinousness though.

I turned the TV on hoping to clear my head, but it was too staticky to watch. I flipped channels trying to find one that had good reception, but the best I could find was an episode of Family Feud whose video quality was still so bad it looked as if Monet had pivoted to making game shows. I switched to Netflix.

It was struggling too. The internet was slowing, and any scene with too much action blurred, but it was still better than the cable.

I watched one of their unintentionally dystopian reality shows until I couldn’t quite hold my eyes open. Because of the phone call, I had missed my post-lunch cookie nap and was feeling its absence.

I slept.

I had been sleeping a lot.

When I woke it was dark out and the living room was lit only by the glow of some black-and-white movie that had autoplayed while I slept. I peeled myself from the couch and fumbled around for the cup of water I remembered having set on the floor. The back of my hand found it before my palm did and sent it rolling across the carpet, leaving a semi-circle of soaked shag behind it. “Shit,” I said and rose the rest of the way.

I opened the laundry room doors and removed a roll of paper towels from the laughably large stash. I unrolled the paper, letting it gather around my hand like a boxer wrapping his knuckles.

“We are coming,” said a warbling, overly-trebled voice from the tv.

I stopped unspooling the paper towels and gripped the roll between my hands. Wasn’t that what the voice in the dream had said?

The camera lingered on the man who had just spoken. He was dressed in all black with a cowboy hat pulled low over his brow. I was just about to write it off as another coincidence when the camera switched to a second man, resplendent in white with a large, shining star on his chest. “Well, I am here,” he said.

What?

The man in black sat atop his black horse, who raised its front hooves skyward. “I’ll be sending them for you, Sheriff,” he yelled before galloping off. The camera zoomed in on the Sheriff’s face showing a flash of the fear he had managed to hide from the man in black.

His expression was mirrored on my face.

A mechanical buzzing issued from the console. It grew from a hum to a shout before cutting off abruptly. The black and white image cut and suddenly the tv showed only an info box reading No Input over a blue screen. A light but unnatural scent filled the room. It took me a moment to place it.

Shit, electrical smoke.

I dropped the roll and rushed forward to pull the console’s plug from the wall, but my hand was still swaddled in paper towels. I slung them to the floor and jerked the plug out of the wall. Soot smudges were visible in three lines arcing out from the outlet.

“What the—” I said. Fuck? Hell? I didn’t know. I let the cord slide into the electronic purgatory behind the tv stand.

It joined the collection of Schrodinger’s Cords. Which ones were connected to something and which ones weren’t? Which ones worked and which ones didn’t? I wouldn’t know unless I pulled them from the nowhere space and observed them.

Was it possible that Schrodinger was just too lazy to open his box and find out for himself?

I felt rattled and needed something else to focus on. I turned my attention away from the TV and knelt with the wad of paper towels in my hand. The water had almost fully soaked in but I dabbed at it anyway. The whole thing had felt like a dream. I kept waiting to wake up. But if I did, which pieces of this day would be part of the dream? There were too many mundane details linking it all together to really believe that I had dreamt it all.

The glow from the tv cast everything in middle-of-the-night mystery. I needed to replace the blue glow with something brighter, more comfortable. I walked the length of the open living room/kitchen, flipping every light switch—the overheads and the lamps—that I came across. I even turned on the light in the small aquarium between the tv and the bathroom door. I looked at my phone. 8:11. Too early for this spooky bullshit.

Feeling better with all the lights on, I cooked dinner. At the best of times, I found the small, round dining-room table set in the no-man’s-land between the kitchen and living room to be a sad place to eat alone. Right then, it was downright demoralizing. I carried my plate of spaghetti to the living room and set it on the end table. I searched for the Xbox plug behind the tv and surprisingly I found it. I plugged it in, bracing myself for the rising scent of smoke. Smelling none, I turned the console on and to my surprise, it powered up.

Still on the screen, however, was the close-up shot of the fearful face of the Sheriff. I tried to back out and when that had no effect, I pressed the large home button on the controller. Nothing. It was as if the image had frozen on the screen. It made me think of video game pause menus burned into old tv screens after having sat idle for too long. It seemed the console was dead after all. I studied the expression on the Sheriff’s face for a moment, wondering what plot information I had slept through that could have caused such emotion. The coincidence—that’s what I had decided it was, a coincidence—of the dialog from the old Western and the words spoken by the voice in my dream still tickled at my brain. I would have to do some googling after dinner to figure out what movie it had been. I unplugged the console again, hit the Source button on the remote and, spaghetti in hand, settled in for some fuzzed out cable.

The sirens still screamed outside.

                                                            #

I stayed up late searching for any proof of the existence of the movie what had murdered my video game console and when I finally gave up—having found nothing—I went to bed without setting an alarm. It was garbage day again, and I figured I would either sleep in or the sound of the eldritch truck would wake me. Either way was fine.

The quality of the light—bright and clean—coming through the bedroom window suggested that I had done the former. There was a knocking sound coming from downstairs. After the ringing phone and the telepathic Western, I was reluctant to face any more weirdness. I lay in bed, hoping that whatever was making the noise would just stop on its own. After a moment, it did. But it was quickly replaced by a pecking, no a tapping, on one of the downstairs windows. If that’s Greg-Craig asking me to come over again…, I thought. I rolled out of bed, plucked a wrinkled, plain white t-shirt off the floor, and pulled it over my head as I walked to the wide, front-facing upstairs window. I pulled the blinds up just in time to see a rock barreling upward in a face-smashing trajectory. Instinctually, I ducked. The rock bounced harmlessly off the window. Slowly, I rose from my position of heroic cowering. Craig-Greg was standing in the parking lot in front of my unit wearing a bandana around his face (Good for you, Greg-Craig!) another rock at the ready. I held up a hand in the universal gesture of Stop, You Fucking Maniac.

“Hey, David! Come down! I need to talk to you,” he yelled loudly enough for the whole neighborhood to hear.

The whole neighborhood. Christ, it looked as if a literally dirty bomb had gone off. Many of the apartments had trash collecting under their windows—and I suddenly felt both less clever and less alone—but our dumpster and the one at the building next door were both overflowing. The trash in the one at the other building was still being held mostly inside by its half-closed sliding door. In ours, however, the trash had long since broken through its barriers. Bags had been piled at its base and some animal, or animals, had strewn the innards of several over the parking lot and into the street. Pushed by the breeze, paper towels, plastic cups, and chip bags marched in stuttered hops and leaping bounds across the pavement and into a yard down the street. Was there someone lying in that yard? Surely no one would just be lounging in their front yard during all of this. Whatever it was remained immobile as the blowing refuse butted against it. It must be a pile of trash or maybe someone had gotten their shit thrown out on the lawn. Bad time for that.

There was no one in sight, my eyes lingered on that rumpled pile.

“Are you coming down?” Right. No one other than Greg-Craig.

I held my hand up and mouthed, Wait. I closed the blinds, and put on some joggers and my house shoes before walking down the carpeted stairs. I forgot to step over the loosening staples in the third riser from the top and felt one of them stab into my shoe. The rubber sole was too thick for the staple to reach my foot. I really should pull them out or hammer them down, I thought. Lord knows the mumlord wasn’t going to do anything about it.

At the front window, I stopped and said, “Go around back!”

“Yeah, man,” Greg-Craig said. Muffled, but audible.

I saw him through the window. He looked rough. His eyes were watery and ringed with dark circles that made me picture him on all fours, rummaging through the trash outside. He pulled down the bandana in order to use the hem of his Dance, Gavin, Dance t-shirt to wipe freely running snot from his nose.

“Hey, David,” he said again as he approached the kitchen window, toeing the trash bags out of his way. He was suddenly racked by a coughing fit. He doubled over and saliva trailed from his mouth stretching toward the concrete.

“Are you ok?” I asked, seriously concerned and suddenly conscious of the thin plane of glass separating us.

He used his shirt to once again wipe snot and saliva from his face. “Can you turn on your light? I can’t really see you and I feel weird talking to shadows,” he said, snapping his head back toward his apartment like someone had called his name. I hadn’t heard anything except for the sirens but they had become a constant soundtrack. Even though they sometimes grated my nerves, I knew that the day they stopped would not be a good one. I flipped the switch for the small florescent bar above the sink, illuminating myself in nauseatingly stuttering white. Its high whine concealed the distant sirens.

“That better?” I asked. I felt the need to comfort him. He was clearly sick and suffering under some delusion of…being followed? I don’t know. He kept glancing back down the narrow alleyway created by the back of the building and the retaining wall behind it.

He nodded, still looking toward his apartment.

“What’s wrong, bud?” I asked.

“I, uh, I think my mama died,” he said. He scrunched his face to blink away tears. They spilled over onto the bruise-colored skin below his eyes and ran down his cheeks disappearing behind the bandana that hung just below his chin.

“Oh, shit, I, um, I’m really sorry. What happened?” I mean, she got sick obviously, and now he was too, but it’s just what you ask. In the beforetime, I would have initiated some sort of physical touch meant to soothe. Instead I just stood there awkwardly on the other side of the window while he said,

“She got sick.” He gave up on the bandana, untying it and using it instead of his DGD shirt to wipe his face. “I guess everyone’s getting sick.” He looked at me as if he was waiting for me to say told you so. When I didn’t, he said, “I thought she was gonna get better. Last night, after a few days of laying in bed, in the dark, I heard her up and messing around in the bathroom. It was nighttime but I didn’t think anything of it, ‘cause she had slept some fifty hours or more. Later, I heard her downstairs and I got up to check on her. She was sitting on the couch watching some old Western.” What? “I asked her if she was ok, and she just pointed at the screen like to say, leave me alone I’m watching.” A guilty look washed over his features. “So, I did. I went back to bed.”

“What happened?” I asked. My voice wavered; I still felt the chill and wondered if she had been watching the same movie. I thought of asking Craig-Greg if he knew what the movie was but it wasn’t the time.

“You’re gonna think I’m crazy,” he exhaled deeply, “but I swear I heard her messing around this morning. But when I went into her bedroom to check on her, she…she wasn’t moving,” his breath hitched, “I touched her arm and it was ice cold. I tried to turn her over but she had already stiffened up.” He shook his head as if to rid himself of the image.

“How long does it take for the stiffness to set it?” he asked. I didn’t know but I was sure that it was longer than a few minutes.

“A few hours?” I said. “I’m not really sure. I can look it up if you want?”

The pleading in his eyes was enough to make me tear up. “Please,” he said.

“Yeah, ok. Hang on a minute.” I left him standing outside the window and went upstairs, careful to avoid the carpet staples this time, and grabbed my phone from the nightstand.

One bar beside the AT&T logo. Where the bars indicating Wi-Fi service should have been, it read only LTE. Shit. I googled how long till rigor mortis sets in and watched the blue bar fill about a third of the way. Then it stopped. I went to my phone’s settings to see if perhaps I had accidentally turned Wi-Fi off. Where there would have usually been a list of all of the neighbors’ networks—MomAtHome2 and ATTuY9sJJa—there was nothing. I went back to Safari and hit the x in the search bar and typed the question again. And again, the bar filled about a third of the way and stopped. Shit.

“It’s not working!” I yelled from the living room, walking toward the kitchen window.

“What?”

“Internet’s out. Cell service, too. Or at least it’s so overloaded it’s not responding.”

“Ours…mine too. I thought maybe yours wouldn’t be.”

“Oh! Wait! Here it is,” I said. The Google page had loaded finally. Luckily, the information we were looking for was at the top so I didn’t have to try to load another site. “It says three to four hours.”

Greg-Craig looked confused. “That would mean she died right after…no that’s what I thought. That doesn’t make sense.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was about four o’clock when I saw her watching TV. It was seven when I found her.”

Three hours to go from fully alive to rigor mortis. “Well, maybe it just happened faster than normal. That’s probably not unheard of.”

I could see him working this over in his mind. I’m sure it was difficult trying to process everything that had happened. “Yeah, probably. Probably, you’re right,” he said.

“Did you call anyone? An ambulance or anything?”

“Couldn’t get through.” As if on cue, a siren blared from across the block. “Can you come help me?” he asked. That was the question that I had feared throughout our whole conversation.

“I’m sorry. I can’t.” His face fell, but he nodded as if that’s what he had expected me to say. The fierceness with which my heart clenched told me that I was doing the wrong thing. But there was no right thing.

“Ok,” he said, dejected, and trudged back toward his apartment.

Hoping to be able to do something for him, I dialed 911 on my phone and got a crackling busy signal. Even if someone were to answer, I doubted the call would hold. I eyed the phone on the wall. Quickly, like swatting at a fly, I picked up the eggshell receiver, pressed 9-1-1 on the large number pad, and held it to my ear.

And got only the nothing-sound of a dead line.

                                                            #

The next afternoon arrived before it dawned on me that the garbage had not been picked up the morning before. It still sat spilled across the parking lot and street. It even appeared that someone had added more to it, though I hadn’t seen anyone other than Greg-Craig in weeks.

I guess that part of our lives was over. The part where someone comes and cleans our messes for us.

I thought of Greg-Craig alone in his apartment with his dead mother. Was he ok? And what had he done with her body? I couldn’t even imagine having to deal with that during everything else that was happening.

I had sat down for an afternoon snack and some fuzzy TV, when the answer came. I heard a clanking from out back and rose to peek out the kitchen window. Greg-Craig, stripped down to the waist, pale and pouring sweat, stood in the dirt beyond the retaining wall, shovel in hand. On the concrete at the base of the wall laid a bulky roll of blue tarp. A hole was quickly forming as he stuck the shovel into the rocky soil at a quick, rhythmic pace. Clank, toss…clank, toss…clank, toss. Some of the dirt showered down onto the tarp and the concrete. He turned with each toss, so that I was able to see his face in profile. He looked even sicker than he had the day before. His eyes more sunken, his skin sallower. I marveled at his ability to keep standing, much less to be shoveling with such speed and determination.

He was saying something.

I strained to make it out. “If I do this for you, will you finally be quiet?” Followed by, “Please. Please. Please.” After each shovel strike, Greg-Craig said, “Please,” until it formed a strange rhythm in my head.

I backed away from the window. The stress had clearly broken him. And I had no way to help.

The phone rang—the one in my pocket and, thankfully, not the nightmare phone on the wall. I looked at its screen. Mom. Shit, rent was due yesterday. I had the money for it—barely—I had just forgotten. More pressing matters. If I ignored the call, she would just keep calling until I either answered or paid the rent. Maybe I should just pay the rent.

I answered the phone. “Hi, mom.”

“You missed rent.” Her voice was hoarse and phlegmy.

“I didn’t miss it. Maybe it just didn’t get posted yet.” She hmphed and the sound carried with it the implied endurance of a lifetime of lies. I would pay it as soon as I was off the phone so it wasn’t so much of a lie. “Are you ok? You sound sick.”

“I’m fine. I just got a touch of something. A few days ago, we went to that little Chinese place your father likes, and I haven’t felt right since. You know how dirty that place is…” She fell into a short fit of coughing. “Tell your neighbor that I haven’t seen his payment either,” she said.

“Yeah, he’s been dealing with some other stuff,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“His mother died. And he couldn’t get anyone to come get the body. He’s burying her behind the retaining wall. As we speak.”

“Oh, Good Lord, that’s disgusting. It can’t be as bad as all that. They said on the news that a lot of this is just exaggeration.”

I couldn’t contain it. “Exactly which part of this is exaggeration? There are body bags filling up parking lots. The internet is practically gone. Cell service is practically gone. The sirens never stop. And my neighbor is burying a body in the backyard because emergency services can’t keep up with demand enough to answer the phone calls. So which part? Which part is exaggerated?” I felt the anger heating my face and could not stop its boiling. “And you want me to bother a grieving man about the rent money he owes you. You want your money, come get it yourself.”

“Calm down. You always get so worked up. Always have. I just wanted to remind you of your responsibilities and to see if you could do your mother a favor. But I guess that’s too much to ask.” She began to cough again but this time it didn’t taper off after a few seconds. It continued until it seemed as if it was coming up from the depths of her lungs. I was reminded of the abyssal voice. It seemed to be following me.

When it had subsided, I said, “You need to see a doctor if you can. You’re obviously sick and it sounds like the virus.”

“I’ll just go lie down. It’s only a cold. Stop getting so agitated over every little thing.”

“Alright, bye then, I guess,” I said, but she had already hung up. “Jesus Christ.” I sent the money from my bank account to hers and returned to my post at the kitchen window.

Greg-Craig had finished digging the hole and was attempting to lift the tarp over the wall, grunting with the strain. He shuddered with a coughing fit, and I thought he would drop his parcel. But with one last growl, he wrestled the tarp onto the ground beyond. He pulled himself over the wall, rolled the tarp into the hole, and began to fill it in. I heard music and realized that he was singing quietly as he worked. When he finished, he hopped down from the wall and disappeared into his apartment, alone for the first time ever.

I walked solemnly to the couch and turned on the TV. Nothing but snow on every channel. The cable had finally given up. I turned it back off.

I opened the blinds to look out at the neighborhood. At one of the apartments across the street, the door opened and a figure emerged—a small, round woman in a plain, purple t-shirt and pajama pants. It had been so long since I had seen anyone other than Craig-Greg that her sudden appearance startled me. The woman tripped over the threshold and fell to the concrete outside her door. She raised her head and attempted to get up, but gravity dragged her slowly back down. A second figure appeared in the murky shadows of the doorway. I couldn’t quite make them out. Instead of rushing forward to aid the woman still sprawled on the parking lot, they remained behind the threshold. The woman reached out her hands and tried to pull herself forward. She seemed to have no strength left and I realized she must be sick. After a few attempts to right herself, the woman fell still. The figure in the doorway shut the door.

A chorus of voices inside my head screamed that I should run out and help the woman. It took everything I could muster to shut them out. She had clearly had the sickness. And now, she was dead. There was no help to be given.

What the hell had I just seen?

I pulled my phone out and dialed 911 again, but instead of a busy signal, I heard a dead line.

That evening I sat down to dinner. Eggs and bacon. Time no longer mattered. Since there was no television, I scrolled Twitter on my phone. It was slow to load and there were very few people posting. Mostly bots and promoted tweets. Regardless, my mind was occupied by the events of the day and was increasingly drawn to the memory of the rumpled pile in the lawn down the street. I feared that my first impression may have been correct. Eventually, I gave up and grabbed a book from the small shelf by the couch. I owned exactly eighteen books and had read all of them, but still, I thought it would be enough to drown out the silence while I ate. Silence.

The sirens had stopped.

                                                            #

On the morning the phone rang for the last time, I was upstairs in the spare bedroom counting cereal boxes to determine what day it was. I had once measured the days by the weekly trash pickups on Thursday mornings, but those were over. I hadn’t seen any neighbors—after the death of the woman across the street, a relief—including Greg-Craig, for days. Not since he buried his mother behind the building. No one silhouetted behind drawn curtains. No cars up and down the street. The cable had gone and stayed gone. Same with the internet. The body of the woman across the street still lay where she fell. The rumpled pile was still on the lawn down the block.

Twenty boxes of cereal left. Out of sixty. It would be my first Apple Jacks day. Ten more days and I would get to have Froot Loops. Forty emptied cereal boxes plus two days skipped equals forty-two days. Quick finger math. Tuesday. Today was Tuesday again. I rubbed the remnants of sleep from my eyes, took a box from the package, and walked downstairs. I poured some reconstituted milk into the box and ate leaning against the sink.

“Hey, David.”

I jumped away from the sink, clutching the cereal box tightly enough to send milk arcing into the air and onto the tile around my feet. As I recognized the voice for what it was, I spun back to face the window.

There was no one there.

I set the cereal on the counter and leaned over the sink to peer out the window. I turned left and right, trying to catch a glimpse of Greg-Craig. Nothing. I looked down to the concrete, thinking he may be playing a joke, expecting him to be cowering there, partially out of sight. I thought I saw a hint of dark gray t-shirt peeking out below the window before realizing that it was only a shadow cast by the roof of the building on the trash that had accumulated below. I had just enough time to wonder if I had been hearing things when the phone rang. Not the brick that I still held in my pocket like some kind of high-tech security blanket, but the eggshell dinosaur on the wall. After having just heard my name called by a shadow, I wasn’t sure if the ringing was real either.

The second ring sent me moving toward the phone. Private, the ID said again. I don’t know why, I don’t know if fear had given in to determination or if I was just desperate to hear someone else’s voice, but I jerked the phone off the hook and said an eager, “Hello.” I had expected to be greeted with a dial tone or a dead line. Instead,

“We are coming.” It wasn’t the high treble of the Western but the low growl of the voice of the void. A crackle on the line, then: “Are you there, David?” My mother’s voice.

“I’m here,” I said.

More fuzz, a pop, and then the yawn of an open line. I was about to hang up when I heard my mother’s voice again. “…I’ll send them for you,” she said before the line was cut for good.

Those words again. Each time, they had been slightly altered, but they were the same. I had even added my own voice that time, like I had been fed a script. I didn’t know what they meant, but the thought of them made me want to run out of the apartment. Just fling the door wide and flee. I smashed the hook switch and dialed mom’s landline number on the oversized pad.

It rang and rang.

I tried several more times before I gave up, wondering if she had been calling me while I had been calling her, still telling myself that it had been a bad connection and nothing more. Maybe she would be able to call back if I stopped.

No longer hungry, I poured the soggy remains of my cereal down the drain, tossed the box in the trash, and went to the couch to await her call. It wasn’t coming. I knew it wasn’t coming. But to keep myself grounded, I had to pretend. As much as I tried to keep it leashed, my mind kept wandering back to the other voice on the line. The abysmal growl that rattled eardrums and broke thought. Each time I thought of it, I tried to remind myself that it wasn’t real, but I think I knew better, even then.

Were these hallucinations? And were hallucinations a symptom of the virus? I wasn’t sure which thought was worse: that I had the virus and was seeing and hearing things that weren’t there, or that my mind was intact and these things were really happening.

Writing had been helping to sort through thoughts like those. And to pass the time. Most of the books on my shelf were sci-fi or post-apocalyptic horror, and trying to suspend my disbelief enough to read hopeful “we can reach the stars” bullshit or end of the world fiction here at the actual end of the world had proven too difficult. So, a few days ago, I had pulled out my laptop, which without the internet was just a glorified typewriter, and began to write. And found that I liked it. 

The laptop still sat where I had left it the night before, on the floor with a dirty plate on top. I set the plate on the floor, promising myself that I would do the dishes later, and picked up the computer. I stared at what I had written previously in an attempt to regain the thread, but I couldn’t get back into the headspace required to write. I closed my eyes and at some point, fell asleep upright in front of the blue light of the screen.

The phone never rang. My mother never called back. But I would eventually speak to her again.

                                                            #

Flickering light and a noise from the kitchen. I lifted my head from the arm of the couch. I had slumped awkwardly in my sleep and could already feel the beginnings of a crick in the space where my neck met my shoulder. I stood and absently massaged the soreness. The lamps in the living room flickered again. What would I do if I lost electricity, I wondered. I still had canned and dried food both of which could be eaten straight. And I guess I could live without showering if the water went.

Then, another noise. A shuffling followed by the light knocking that knuckles make when dragged across a wall. The sound seemed to come from behind the drywall archway that pretended to separate the living room from the kitchen. Shit, I thought, has an animal gotten in somehow? Then, can animals carry the virus? I hadn’t seen an answer to that question before the internet died.

A louder thump like the noise the fridge makes when its weight gets shifted. Whatever the animal was, it was no mouse. The baseball bat that I used for protection (that I would have used for protection had I ever needed to) was upstairs in my bedroom. Too far away. I would lose the element of surprise if I started making too much noise, and the creaky stairs would surely give me away. I ducked quickly into the half-bath and procured some spray cleaner from under the sink. Not exactly bear mace, but it would have to do. I cornered out of the bathroom with the spray bottle held in both hands like a pistol.

More shuffling. I steeled myself for what I would find on the other side of the archway and began to tiptoe forward.

And kicked one of the dining room chairs as I crossed into the kitchen. The low wooden thud alerted the hunched form that stood in the shadowed corner where the fridge and the wall met.

It was no mouse, no raccoon either.

The figure turned to face me.

Greg-Craig.

I lowered the spray bottle and let it dangle at my side. “Dude. What the hell?” I said. “How’d you get in here?”

He stepped toward me, and I instinctually lifted the bottle again. “Whoa, stay back. You look awful, man.” His skin was tinted the gray of spoiled meat and his eyes were glazed. Snot and saliva had mixed and dried under his nose and at the sides of his mouth. Something that resembled blood—check that. Was blood—streaked and spattered his DGD shirt and gym shorts. He stepped toward me again.

“Greg! Please, stop.” He shuffled forward. “Craig! I said stop.” I leveled the Clorox disinfecting spray at his face, and with a pleading note in my voice, said, “Greg.”

Then I pulled the trigger.

It passed clear through him and speckled the textured surface of the fridge door. Greg-Craig continued to shuffle forward. I bolted for the front door.

I ripped strips of tape, and along with them, long peels of paint from around the door frame. Glancing over my shoulder as I worked frantically to free myself from the apartment, I saw that Greg-Craig had stopped at the threshold beneath the arch as if blocked by some invisible force. I wouldn’t take any chances with that though. Once I had removed enough tape for the door to open, I swung it wide and ran into the bright afternoon. The sun stung my eyes and I blinked away blue inkblots.

Greg-Craig’s body was slumped in the piled bags outside the dumpster. Aside from the darkened skin and blood spatters, he gave the impression of someone nestled in a beanbag chair. I don’t know how long he had been there but he had not somehow magically sprinted past me from the apartment. I knew that. I pulled up short. Greg-Craig was out here. Greg-Craig was dead. Whatever was in the apartment was not what was out here.

Shit, I can’t be outside.

I pulled my shirt up over my nose and mouth, turned on my heel and sprinted back toward the door, bare feet slapping hot concrete.

Greg-Craig (or what was once Greg-Craig) was no longer under the archway, and the lights had stopped flickering. I quietly shut the front door behind me and crept toward the kitchen, listening for any sounds that may signal the presence of…I don’t know, the presence of something. At the bathroom I jerked the door open and leaned into the whoosh of wind it created. Nothing inside. I turned the light on and left the door open.

At the threshold of the kitchen, I craned my head around the archway and checked both sides. Nothing. I could not bring myself to step over the line between the carpeted living room and the tiled kitchen. Could not bring myself to occupy the same space that…whatever it was, had occupied. I went back to the living room, leaned around the stair railing, and looked up toward the landing. I didn’t see anything from that angle, but I continued to listen for any movement from upstairs. Once my heartrate had settled somewhat, I climbed the stairs one at a time, pausing after each creak to listen for any out-of-place sounds. I heard none.

On the wall at the top of the stairs was a plate with two light switches. One controlled the light above the landing, the other the light above the landing and the bathroom light. I flipped both. I could see straight into the bathroom, all of it visible except for behind the shower curtain. I hoped, like I did every 2 a.m. when I needed to pee or grab a glass of water, that there was nothing behind it. And like every 2 a.m. I couldn’t know for sure unless I pulled the curtain back and looked. But unlike every 2 a.m. it was the middle of the afternoon and I knew for certain that something was in this apartment with me. Or at least had been.

Before I could lose my nerve, I took six loping steps across the landing, through the bathroom door, past the sink, and threw the curtain back.

Nothing.

Suddenly, I felt keenly aware of my exposed back. I could practically feel Greg-Craig’s dead breath on my neck. I wheeled around, ready to either bolt toward the landing or cower in the empty tub. But once again, there was nothing there. I ignored the voice in my head that repeatedly told me to run—blindly and forever, just run from all of this—and continued to search the upstairs. Both bedrooms and all of the closets. Plus, under the bed like I had when I was ten.

Back on the landing, something on the ceiling caught my eye. It was shaped like a small door with a round pull handle on it and even though I had seen it countless times, I had never really noticed it until that moment.

The apartment had an attic.

But if there was anything up there, it could stay there. No way was I about to climb that ladder into darkness.

Downstairs, still no sign of Greg-Craig.

I spent the next few hours huddled on the couch alternating between writing and staring into the kitchen—nervous, paranoid. I was hungry but I couldn’t quite bring myself to go back in there. Eventually I would have to.

            Later that evening, the lights began to flicker again. The phone in the kitchen made a dink sound, and I tensed and waited for it to ring. But after that initial sound, it stayed silent. The lights, however, continued to gutter.

            And, under the flickering and tinkling of the bulbs, stood Greg-Craig.

                                                                        #

            I climbed backward over the arm of the couch and slinked silently into the corner between the couch and the Ficus, careful to not rattle its leaves as I situated myself. Greg-Craig had his back to me and stood slumped and unmoving. I watched him reluctantly. Either he was a figment of my damaged imagination or he was a goddamned ghost in my kitchen. Regardless, I didn’t want to look upon him, but I had no other course of action. So, I watched as he stared silently out the window, motionless. I had reacted naturally, with no planning, and now I felt the wall at my back. Where could I go if he came for me?

            I crouched in the corner with my head lowered as far as my cricked neck would allow for so long that my legs began to cramp. The time between flickers grew until the dark lasted longer than the light. I was sure the power would go. Earlier, the sunlight filtering through the blinds had been enough to see by, but now that the sun had gone down, the room was plunged into darkness. Could I live in this apartment in the dark knowing what dwelt here with me?

God, this leg cramp. I lifted myself just enough to scoot my right foot out from under me. The lights went out. My foot brushed against the wicker base of the Ficus sending its leaves shivering. The lights came on. The thing in the kitchen turned toward the sound of the leaves and started toward me, slow but it would reach me faster than I would be able to climb out of this corner. I hoped that the thing was only reacting to the sound and that it had not yet spotted me. The lights went out, and I lost sight of it completely. The lights flickered on then back off. It was beneath the arch. I positioned myself to run and hoped that my leg cramp wouldn’t send me sprawling.

The lights came back on and stayed on. The Greg-Craig thing was gone. This time, however, I knew it wasn’t somewhere else in the apartment; I had watched it disappear. It wasn’t a blip and then gone situation, either. I was reminded of the video quality of the TV as the connection had begun to weaken. It was like there had been a separation between the pixels. The Greg-Craig thing had looked like that, but then the pixels were blown away as if by the same unseen wind that had spread the trash about the neighborhood.

I stood, slowly and quietly, and waited for the cramp to subside. When I was sure that the lights weren’t going to start stuttering again and the blood flow had returned to my lower extremities, I climbed over the arm of the couch and sprinted for the kitchen. I grabbed an empty garbage bag from the box below the sink and began to fill it with canned goods and any dry stock that could be eaten without being cooked—cookies and crackers mostly. I deposited the bag in the center of the living room floor and began to fill a second one, working as quickly as I could so as to not be caught in the kitchen when the lights began to switch on and off again. It had happened both times the being formerly known as Greg-Craig had shown up, and I just couldn’t write that off as coincidence.

Second bag filled and dropped in the living room, I went to the laundry closet and grabbed a couple packages of paper towels and the roll of duct tape. Plus, the can opener. Can’t forget the can opener. Jesus, David. At the archway, I removed the first roll from its plastic and began to unspool it until I had about eight feet of choose-your-size sheets laid out on the carpet. I duct-taped one end of the length to the left side of the archway then ran it along the carpet until it touched the other side. Duct tape again. I unspooled another length of towels and made another row above the first. I repeated the process until the kitchen was sealed off. It was a spontaneous thing, irrational I suppose, and it wouldn’t actually hold anything in but I hoped that it would, nevertheless, keep the Greg-Craig thing from venturing out. It couldn’t hurt to try. The flickering lights would warn me of its presence and the paper towel screen would keep it from seeing me. All I would have to do was stay quiet for the duration. I could do that.

The added benefit was that I wouldn’t have to see it, either.

Shit, I had left the kitchen light on.

But, if I was going to use the lights as my alarm system, I would do well to have all of them on for as long as their bulbs lasted. After I had made the rounds, turning on all of the lamps and overheads throughout the whole apartment, I slumped into the couch, physically and emotionally exhausted, with a can opener in one hand and a can of tuna in the other. I eyed the spaghetti-o’s with desire as I tucked in.

Later. Gotta save the best for last.

“This will work,” I said aloud to my hopefully empty apartment.

                                                            #

The space beyond the paper towels had acquired the quality of a holy site. Behind them lay a land of mystery that must remain untrodden by mortals. Plus, I was super scared of going in there. The lights had flickered several times over the few days since I had sequestered the Greg-Craig thing and once I had even heard his low breathing. Like, why ghosts gotta breathe? It was creepy AF.

I did not want to go in there. I would not. But I had forgotten to grab any extra garbage bags and the living room was strewn with empty cans and wrappers. It was beginning to smell. The door to the half-bath stood open. After a moment’s hesitation, I dumped the remaining stock out of their bags onto the floor. Then I gathered the empty cans and tossed them in the newly emptied trash bags. After I had filled the first bag and part of the second, I threw them into the bathroom. I took the air freshener from the back of the toilet and sprayed liberally around the living room. Problem solved.

I opened the blinds to let in some natural light and wished that I could open the window and air the place out. When I sat down on the couch to write, Greg-Craig’s corpse was directly in my line of sight. I moved to the chair, but the thought of having my back turned to the window and the bodies outside unnerved me. I closed the blinds and moved back to the couch. Surprisingly, I was able to clear my mind enough to write for a couple of hours. At dinner-time, I checked my stock of canned food and picked up a can of beef stew, although what really sounded good to me was cereal. The next day was to be my first Froot Loops day, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to wait. It’s the little things, ya know? I tossed the can up and down in my hand while I contemplated. Letting the beef stew roll out of my palm and back onto the floor with the rest of the supplies, I stood and headed for the stairs.

The plastic from the variety packs lay across the tops of the unpacked boxes like shed skin. The contents, ten lightly dented boxes of Froot Loops, spilled out from the cardboard display. I plucked one and started to read its ingredients list as I walked back to the stairs, a habit picked up while eating nothing but non-perishables. I had learned that most of this food, no matter how different it seemed, was largely made up of the same handful of chemical compounds and not insubstantial amounts of wood pulp.

I am become termite, destroyer of woods.

I was still reading the back of the cereal box when suddenly I couldn’t see the text. As the reason dawned on me, I stopped in my tracks, hoping that Greg-Craig hadn’t heard me stomping around. I stood completely still and slowed my breathing until the only thing I could hear was the rhythmic da-doomp from inside my chest and temples. My eyes adjusted to the lack of light, and the landing bloomed with a dawn-like gray.

I looked to the bathroom as something caught my eye. Some shifting of shadows from its shallow but darkened depths. Two towels, one clean one not so clean, hung on a rack beside the shower and cast inky blackness on the curtain. I watched the blackness begin to spread. What would make the shadow seem like it was moving? There was no light source shifting, only the constant, ambient gray from the blinded windows in the bedrooms. And then it hit me: The shadow wasn’t what was moving. The growing dark was accompanied by the metal-on-metal clink and plastic on plastic whoosh of the shower curtain opening. A hand, pale, reached out of the dark and wrapped around the curtain as it was opened wide. The figure stepped from the tub and began to stumble toward the doorway.

There was something familiar about its movement.

I, on the other hand, found that I could not move at all.

Paralysis had taken over my limbs, and even though my brain told my legs to move, I still found myself standing immobile on the landing as the figure in the bathroom grew closer. As it passed the sink and I saw its reflection in the mirror above. I couldn’t make out any more details from its reflection—it was still too cloaked in darkness—but I thought for the first time that a broken psyche was probably no longer on the table as a cause of the things I had been seeing. I didn’t think that my addled brain would know to give the figure a reflection if it was a figment of my imagination.

The figure stepped from the bathroom onto the landing. Maybe three feet from me.

The lights flickered.

On.

A figure, gray-hued and black-slacked with an untucked and rumpled white button-down, came within inches of my face.

“Dad?”

Off.

My eyes needed time to adjust. Time that I did not have. I felt the minor disturbance of air as my father lifted his arms. I did not take the time to find out what he planned to do with them. The lights began to flash rapidly. Dad moved in manufactured slow motion under the strobing whites and yellows. And my legs finally got the message from my brain. I bolted for the stairs. I don’t know what my plan would have been for dealing with Greg-Craig if I ran into him downstairs but as it turned out, I wouldn’t need one.

As I descended, my foot connected with the staples sticking out of the third riser, forcing them deep into the meaty ball just below my big toe, and I sprawled in the air, flying headfirst for the front door. Time stretched and constricted curiously as I rag-dolled, seemingly miles above the carpeted stairs, the surface of each riser like patchwork farms seen from 30,000 feet.

My shoulder smacked the wall beside the doorframe and my head followed quickly after. I fell in a heap in the small, square foyer. A faint rustling from beyond the paper towels. I struggled to get up and couldn’t, instead I settled for lifting my head.

My father descended the stairs. Slowly, but inexorably.

Greg-Craig’s shuffling silhouette moved behind the paper towels.

As my vision began to gray, the flickering of the lights slowed and just as the gray changed to black, they came

On.

                                                            #

Whimpering.

Me.

I was whimpering.

I probed my crown lightly with just my fingertips and winced. They came away tacky with half-dried blood. I appraised my shoulder and found it wanting. It had taken the brunt of the impact and while it was not broken or dislocated, it was deeply bruised and strained. I managed to get my other arm under me. It was an awkward maneuver but, I was able, eventually, to push myself upright. Lights pulsed in my vision and my body swayed, like a dance party but instead of music, pain.

In the half-bath, I kicked the trash bags out of my way, closed the toilet lid, and sat down. I pulled open the drawer closest to me and located a hand towel. I turned the faucet on, let the towel soak up the cold water, squeezed it out, and began to dab at my head wound. Within minutes, the towel was a deep pink. None of the blood seemed fresh. I didn’t know how long I had been out, but it had to have been long enough for the bleeding to stop. Good?

The headache was a killer. I sat on the couch with the cool towel on my head and closed my eyes. I knew I shouldn’t let myself fall asleep and tried not to. I really did. But I failed.

When I woke it was dark out. But it was light inside and that’s all that really mattered. That, and that I had woken up at all. The towel had formed a bond with my scalp—I guess the wound hadn’t finished bleeding after all—and I peeled it off, wincing at the bright fire that lit across my skin. When it was over, I actually shivered from the pain.

In the bathroom, I filled the little mouthwash cup with water and downed it. I repeated the process several times until finally my tongue felt like it was made of something other than sandpaper. My head still throbbed but, within the pain there was some room for other pains. I remembered for the first time since the fall why I had fallen in the first place. Obviously, ghosts. (But I tried not to think too much on that. If I did, I would have to admit that it meant my dad was dead and it was easier, at the time, to continue believing that something else was going on.) I meant the staple in my foot.

I filled the small glass again and took a sip as I sat down on the closed toilet. I crossed my ankle over the opposite knee and pulled my foot up to inspect it. It was immediately clear that both prongs had skewered my foot. The holes gaped like the bite of a vampire with a foot fetish and the skin around them was red and raised. I had no disinfectant down here. All of my first aid supplies except for a few loose band-aids were in the upstairs bathroom. I couldn’t see myself going up there to get them.

I stood, turned the faucet on and stretched my leg well past the point of comfort until my foot was in the sink. Since, in that particular position and with my wrenched shoulder, it was not easy or, to be honest, possible to reach my foot, in place of scrubbing, I simply let the water flow over it. When I deemed it clean enough, I pulled my foot from the sink and turned the water off. I found two band-aids in the left-hand drawer and placed them side-by-side over the double holes.

I inspected my head in the mirror, pulling the hair apart to see the cut. It was cleaner than my foot wound but larger. I would keep an eye on it, but there wasn’t much to be done without first aid supplies.

Doctored up, I went back to the couch and slept, dreamless.

                                                            #

Thin light filtered through the blinds and painted a grainy, gray light across the room in a semi-circle that included a portion of the front door, the chair, the Ficus, and the upper half of my body. The rest of the first floor lay in shadow. My life came back to me a piece at a time. The sickness. The death. The things in the apartment. My injuries.

The lights.

Everything should be bathed in light. Not this pre-dawn film grain.

I sat up and the couch springs creaked.

Followed by a hushed shuffling behind the paper towels.

The double-ply barrier bulged outward as a hand pushed from the other side, the paper towels and the outline of the hand becoming visible as the parabola’s vertex bent into the thin light. The pressure was accompanied by the ri-ip of perforations slowly separating.

I went rigid and tried to will the lights back on. Tried to will the things away. The hand was removed and I thought—irrationally, briefly—that my will had won.

But the lights stayed off, and seconds later two hands pressed outward on the barrier. RRRIIIIIPPP. The towels separated in two intersecting lines. A mottled hand reached through, grasping, searching. The outline of Greg-Craig’s body became visible as it walked into the barrier. The duct tape on the right side of the arch gave way and Greg-Craig stumbled across the threshold. Wrapping itself in tangles of towels, it sprawled across the no-man’s-land between kitchen and living room.

I did not give it time to recover. Spinning in vertigo from my head injury and limping on my damaged toe, I scooped up my laptop and lurched toward the stairs. I used the banister to propel myself upward. Near the top, I hopped over the third to last riser, taking no chance of spearing myself again. More winded by the climb than I should have been—I blamed the injuries and my fear—I paused on the landing, dropped my laptop so that I could place my hands on my knees, and hung my head to catch my breath. The rush of blood pounded pain into my skull and blurred my vision with the rhythm of my heartbeat, but I held that position for a moment longer. Pain I could handle, but I couldn’t afford to fall out there on the landing.

Staring at the medium-shag carpet, my breathing returning to normal, I remembered that what was downstairs was not the only threat.

My reminder came creeping on bare feet.

I hadn’t heard him move. I didn’t see where he had come from. Was the bathroom his domain as the kitchen was Greg-Craig’s? Or was he free to move about? Or were they both now free to move about since the electricity had finally given up?

His gray feet stepped into my previously uninterrupted view of the carpet. They sank into the shag and my thoughts dwelled for too long on their material nature. When I had sprayed the bathroom cleaner in Greg-Craig’s face it had passed clean through. But the things seemed to be able to manipulate their surroundings.

The rules were frustratingly unclear.

I looked from my father’s feet, up his slacks-clad legs, and into his blankly staring face. He reached out his hand and clasped my bruised shoulder. I screamed and wrested away, sending my father stumbling toward the stairs. I bolted for the open bedroom doorway and the safety of the lightening room beyond. I slammed the door behind me and turned the lock on the handle.

The rising sun began to shine through the large, front facing window. The door shuddered in its frame as my father leaned his weight into it. Would it hold? I wasn’t sure, but I believed it would if he didn’t increase his effort. Just then I heard the telltale creaking of the Greg-Craig thing ascending the stairs. Slow. Inexorable. Plodding.

Free to move about, then.

What would happen to the door if Greg-Craig were to add his weight to my father’s? Would it still hold? For how long? And if it held indefinitely, how long could I survive in this room with no food or water? I could imagine a scenario in which, if my food stocks were still in their bags instead of strewn about the living room, I could move fast enough to run downstairs, grab the food, and then find somewhere to hide. But they weren’t. They were tossed about like so many bones in the cave of a prehistoric carnivore. How do you solve a problem like starvation? And besides, as I had recently learned, my injuries did not enjoy exercise.

I leaned against the window sill and peered through the sheer curtains at the early morning neighborhood. No lights burned. No cars drove the streets. No one walked the lanes. The end, as incredible—unbelievable, really—as it was, had turned into just another problem to solve. Mundane. I thought I had seen enough to accustom myself to it.

And then the closet door swung open.

                                                            #

She stepped out from blackness. Not the blackness of a darkened closet but that of an infinite void. A sense of unending space stretched behind her. Air was sucked out of the room into the vacuum of the closet. I felt the pull like a soft tugging, an undercurrent that would trap you under its surface if you let it. Instinctually, I gripped the window sill. As she stepped onto the carpeted floor, she shut the door behind her and the tugging stopped.

The brown of her blond-highlighted, angled bob matched the color of the ankle-length sweater she wore. The sweater covered the same outfit that she had worn on the day she gave me the keys to the apartment. The last time she ever came here.

The difference was the skin. Where before it had been an age-spotted tan, it was now the gray hue of water that had been used to rinse a paintbrush. She stood calmly in front of the closet door as if she hadn’t yet registered that someone was in the room with her. I was reminded of that first day with the Greg-Craig thing swaying in the corner of the kitchen. There was a sense that if there were never any outside stimulus, they would stand still eternally. I attempted to merge with the window and wall behind me.

I could hear my breath and tried to quiet it. Slow. Deep. But my mind was racing so fast that it had convinced my heart it needed to keep up.

 That was my mother.

Standing there, just feet away. And yet it wasn’t. My mother was dead. Along with my father.

It had always been the three of us. And even when I grew up and had less and less to do with them it was still, in my mind, the three of us. And now it was just me. Then I was struck by another blow. What if it was truly just me? The last. The Charlton Heston. The Will Smith. The Will Forte. Would that mean it was safe outside without anyone spreading the virus? Or did the sickness still live in the air? My access to information had ended too soon and too abruptly for any of my questions to have been given definitive answers. My mind was whirling through these thoughts while my mother, or the thing that was once my mother, stood immobile at the foot of my bed. If she were to turn her head or raise her eyes just slightly, she would surely see me.

Mostly what I felt was fear. Underneath, a current of grief threatened to crash waves into my thoughts but like the bodies of my parents, it was distant. Having not seen their bodies, I still held some—misguided though it was—hope that I was hallucinating. But when I thought of that last phone call, I knew better. When I thought of Greg-Craig slumped in the trash, the neighbors flung just outside their doors, I knew better. The proof was all around.

They were dead.

And yet they were in my apartment.

The bedroom door creaked in its frame as new pressure was added. Greg-Craig must have reached my dad. The Mumlord—I felt bad, guilty, referring to her that way now, but I required some contextual distinction between my mother and the nightmare form that stood mere feet away—nudged into action by the whining door like some automaton powering up, walked toward the sound with a willowy grace that she had never exhibited in life. If I had needed any other indication that this thing was not my mother, that was it.

She opened the door. Greg-Craig, standing awkwardly at my father’s elbow, spotted me at once and started forward. Dontfreezedontfreezedontfreeze, I mantra’d. The two men spilled through the doorway around the Mumlord and flowed clumsily toward me. The Mumlord was spun by their passing and faced me for the first time. Her eyes widened in shock.

“Here?” she asked. Her voice, the voice I had known since birth was mingled with another deeper voice. The voice of the void, a vast vacuum drawing breath, the rumbling stone of earthquakes ground between the infinite teeth of the universe. And lilting across the top, my mother’s nasally southern accent. “Go,” she said and the men sped their advance. But she had kept her eyes trained on me as they rushed forward, as she followed, and I was not sure whether she had spoken to her compatriots or to me.

I dove for the bed and clawed myself upright, running across its undulation, fighting against its threat to buck me. I leapt from the foot of the bed over its board and landed on my wounded toe. I cried out but didn’t stop moving until I was outside the bedroom on the landing. Just before I slammed the door closed, my father, Greg-Craig, and the Mumlord had course corrected. They were about seven feet from me and coming fast. I had only one move before they reached the door and opened it.

I leapt up and snagged the ring handle in the ceiling, pulling a rickety ladder down as I dropped back to the ground. I clambered up and pulled the ladder after me just as the bedroom door opened.

Still. Stay still.

The heat hit me, somehow both dry and humid, and I resisted an urge to wipe the sudden sweat from my forehead.

“Find him,” the Mumlord said. Creaking footsteps descended stairs. I realized that I had been holding my breath and let it out in a slow, shallow stream. I couldn’t be sure that all three of the things had gone downstairs. I continued to crouch silently just to the side of the folded ladder, my hand still resting on the spot that I used to pull it up. If one of them decided to pull at the ring, I would probably tumble down with the ladder.

My eyes began to adjust to the dark. Around me were some boxes from a previous tenant. Enough to have occupied my attention for days if I had found them earlier in my quarantine. No Walker, Texas Ranger or afternoon cookie naps for me. Just endless hours of rummaging through some stranger’s shit. Beyond the spread of boxes, I sensed an open space, wider and deeper than a single apartment’s attic could account for. I still couldn’t see beyond what was directly around me, but where there should have been a wall, my senses insisted that the attic extended. The thought of the dark void in the closet set my heart speeding and a clench of fear gripped my gut, but there were no voices and no air-stealing vacuum.

Was the attic space not separated by unit? An idea began to form.

                                                            #

It had been several minutes since I last heard any shuffling feet or barked commands, and I began to relax. The height of the attic did not accommodate my full, statuesque 5’10, and I found that it was quieter to crawl instead of crouch. On hands and knees, my shoulder throbbing, I maneuvered slowly around the first row of boxes then paused, waiting for any sign that my ambulation had alerted the intruders to my presence above.

Nothing.

A few feet away from the trapdoor, in the spot that I would have expected to encounter a wall, were two 2×4’s nailed together and nestled between the long pieces of plywood that made up the floor of the attic. They were the only attempt at separation between the two units. Beyond, the attic stretched in the thin sunlight that filtered through the wooden slats in the wall at the far end of the building.

Perfect. Badly designed. But perfect.

I crawled over the 2×4’s into the neighboring space, careful not to snag my pants legs on any of the nails that jutted from the wood. I thought of spiders and my lifelong fear of brown recluses. This was their playground, and if one of them bit me, I was shit out of luck. I absently probed the cut on my scalp and wondered what I would do if I was hurt in any major way. I hadn’t considered it before. The things that had taken up residence in my apartment had filled me with a fear that left no room for more mundane concerns. Dismemberment, a mundane concern, apparently. And my parents’ deaths had clouded my mind further. But what if? One thing at a time.

I reached the empty unit’s trapdoor and pushed and tugged trying to open it. It wouldn’t budge. I became suddenly aware of how much noise it was producing, banging in its frame. I listened for any sign that I had alerted the things to my presence, but I was too far away to hear anything. I hoped that the same could be said for them. I noticed the locking mechanism and sat back on my haunches in defeat. I hadn’t known that the attic existed until a few days ago and I definitely didn’t have a key to the locks. I had a momentary lapse in reason in which I thought, “I bet mom has the keys. I should call her.” And I bet she did. I bet she put this lock here herself to make sure that no one could squat in the empty apartment. And I bet the others, much like mine, did not have locks even though the same idea, that someone with malicious intent could drop into any of these apartments, held. It was a reminder that she cared about the property, not the people. It was an ungenerous thought to have about my mother who had so recently passed. But old habits and all that. Besides, I was sure it was true. To test my theory, I lowered myself back onto my hands and knees and continued my crawl across the rough attic floor.

At the next hatch, I unlatched the ladder door with no trouble—See? —and climbed down into Greg-Craig’s apartment.

The first thing I registered was the stench. Faint, but detectable. The La Croix of death smells. Greg-Craig was at the dumpster and his mother was in the ground out back. The scent was one of death removed. I tried to remember how long it had been between our conversation the morning he had told me she died and when I saw him burying her and couldn’t. The days had been hazy then and were downright meaningless now. It had been a while since I had even attempted to keep up. But it must have been long enough for a smell to catch hold and linger.

The second thing I noticed was the oddly tidy nature of the apartment. Aside from rumpled sheets on the beds—and a curious stain that begged an unwanted answer on the bed in the master bedroom where Greg-Craig’s deceased mother had lain—everything seemed to be in its right place. Animal print and faux-African masks decorated the master bedroom and maybe they could stay, but those sheets would have to be tossed. I couldn’t look at those every day knowing the origin of that stain.

Greg-Craig’s room was equally tidy but there lingered a smell of cigarette smoke clinging to clothes that overpowered even the death-smell that permeated the rest of the apartment. I found some incense on his dresser and lit it using the Bic lighter that lay beside it. I took another stick of incense, stuck it in the dirt of a small succulent, and carried it to his mother’s room before lighting it. From dead-shop to head-shop. I pocketed the Bic and several incense sticks and went downstairs.

In the living room the African safari theme persisted. From the black couch to the leather covered table to a zebra print rug, everything matched. On a small table near the door to the half-bath, a woven bowl sat full of mail. Nosy, I sifted through it. The majority was addressed to a Rita Wallace, whom I took to be Greg-Craig’s mom. A few however, were addressed to Brian Wallace. Did Greg-Craig have a brother that I didn’t know about? If so, he didn’t live here. He must not have left a forwarding address when he moved out.

Then it hit me.

Shit. His name was Brian. His name. Was goddamned Brian. I tossed the mail back into the woven basket, sick to my stomach.

In movies, characters were always dunking their heads or splashing their faces with cool water in order to collect themselves. Whether it was to sober up or to relieve stress, into the water they went. And I never understood it. I had never once in my life felt the need to wash my face when things got tough. Until then. Had I ever called him Greg or Craig to his face? The unknowing ate at me. Combined with everything else, the simple embarrassment threatened to send me to my knees. The last straw. The heat of nausea flooded my head and all I could think of was cool water.

I swung the door to the half-bath open and for a moment could not make any sense of what I saw. That moment of unthinking hesitation gave the thing that was and wasn’t Rita Wallace a chance to lunge for me. I jumped backward as her fingers grazed my chest, and I toppled over the arm of the plush, leopard print sofa chair. Rita fell onto me, her weight substantial but weirdly…imagined? I tried to fight against her clawing nails but my hands simply went through her. It was as if only her intent was registered, mine having no bearing on her. I rolled toward the floor out from under her clutching, scraping hands. She caught hold of the wound on my scalp and as I crumpled into the floor, the skin pulled back. My head thumped against the floor and I felt the concrete through the cheap shag, my vision flaring with floating lights. In my scramble toward the stairs, I had registered only the nauseating rip, like a torn stitch in a shirt or a hand through paper towels. Only when I pulled myself up the ladder back into the attic, did the pain hit, and along with it a new spell of dizziness and nausea. Blood flowed freely down my face and the back of my neck. I pulled the trapdoor closed and let the darkness envelop me once more.

                                                            #

Blood tacky on my head, hair pulling out at the slightest movement. I rolled onto my side and struggled to rise to the hands-and-knees position required to move through the attic. My head strobed with false light as I crawled toward Mrs. Thompson’s hatch at the far end of the attic.

Hers was my last option. She was in her early 80’s and my sincere, if totally awful, thought was that she couldn’t have possibly survived. I hadn’t seen anyone coming or going from her apartment and she lived on her own. And while I knew that without any outside support she had probably died, I also hoped it meant that she didn’t have anyone to, let’s say, come visit, and if she had no one or if everyone she had was elsewhere, maybe she would’ve had no reason to linger afterwards. The more I thought about it the more I realized that I should’ve tried hers first.

The sunlight that fell through the slats grew brighter as I reached the portion of the attic above Mrs. Thompson’s apartment. It was like opening a door and stepping into daylight. I took it as a sign. If there was no one in the apartment and she had a stock of food and supplies, then this would be the answer I had been looking for. If there were no supplies, I would have to return to my apartment to grab some things. The thought of venturing back into that nightmare made my chest tighten and my vision strobe again. But I could do it if I had to.

A few boxes were scattered about, blocking me from reaching the hatch. I leaned back on my knees and began to stack the boxes out of my way. Their shadow stretched and towered like that of a giant Robert the Robot until it was swallowed by the deeper darkness of the attic.

I opened the hatch and let the ladder unfold.

The apartment smelled of the accumulated scents of meals long forgotten, a pungent biological scent that could not be attributed to the human body but was also not recognizable as any particular food item. It did not smell of beef or onions or pizza, or beans or corn or curry or cumin. It was an All-Smell whose components could not be distinguished from each other. The hell did old people eat? It would take some getting used to especially since I lacked the ability to air it out but at least it wasn’t the dead-smell of Brian and Rita’s place. I should have known then. That should have given it away. But my mind was clouded by hope. And also, a concussion.

I stepped from the bottom rung and wiped the blood from my forehead and out of my eyes. Another identical apartment. The only thing that set this one apart from the others—besides the decorations—was a shorter pile carpet. I wondered, idly, how Mrs. Thompson had gotten my mom to shell out for anything new.

The master bedroom had been given over to a truly epic doll collection. They lined the walls on shelves and sat atop doilies on the room’s three sideboards and three corner tables. Aside from that on which the dolls dwelled, there was no furniture in the room. It seemed that Mrs. Thompson had chosen the smaller front bedroom for her own. Whether her reasoning was, like mine, because it offered better sunlight during the day or because she had needed the extra room for her doll collection, I didn’t know.

I peered into the front bedroom. Furniture—a dresser, a chest of drawers, and a vanity—all in a dark and decorative wood. The bed lay out of sight. I would have to enter the room to see it. And what would I find if I did? Had Mrs. Thompson crawled into it as she became sicker and sicker? Or would I find her sprawled downstairs?

I stood, indecisive, at the base of the ladder.

If I’m committed to this, I better commit myself fully, I scolded myself.

I strode into the bedroom, ignoring the wild swinging of my equilibrium.

Empty bed. Not only that, but it was made up as well.

Downstairs then. She must be downstairs.

I checked the bathroom before descending the stairs, just to be sure. The collection of  unrecognizable creams and salves of someone who grew up the child of austere wartime parents lined the counter around the sink of the empty bathroom.

My ears began to ring, a side effect of my concussion no doubt. But in the ringing, I thought I heard voices. Muffled. The ringing rose into a whine drowning out the other sounds.

I descended the stairs.

Four of them waited in the living room. I could’ve sworn it was four. They all seemed to be waiting on me. Mrs. Thompson sat on a pale pink, thinly stuffed, arch-backed love seat that sat between the living room and kitchen. Its placement was identical to that of the overstuffed chair that Rita Wallace had tackled me into. To her left were two tall young men—grandsons by the look of them. The skin that peeked out from short black sleeves was grave-gray. The broader of the two sported a few sparse tattoos under his sick pallor. To her right was a middle-aged woman, presumably the elder Mrs. Thompson’s daughter and mother to the two dead boys.

I had come this far. My fight or flight instinct had always hewn more closely to the flight side, but I needed this space. So, I hesitated. Instead of turning and running back up the stairs and up the ladder into the attic, I stood still. My eyes lingered on the tattooed grandson, awaiting any sense of movement. But it was Mrs. Thompson that came for me first. She was saying something, I think it may have been, “Go away!” but my head was concussion-clouded and fear-fogged, and I hadn’t had time to process the whole scene. I stepped to the side, but she was still able to grab me. When she clutched at my arms I shoved, the flats of both hands connecting with the bony ribcage above her breasts. A flat crunch accompanied her scream. Her legs folded awkwardly below her and then she was flying. Her back smacked into the TV stand.  Time doubled as I saw myself pushing myself. Myself flying down the stairs and crashing into the wall overlaid with myself smashing into the TV and its stand. I was the pusher and the pushed. But it was Mrs. Thompson’s head that smacked sickeningly into the corner of the TV stand. Blood immediately began to flow and pool in her pronounced clavicles.

She tried to speak. “They…They…,” she gurgled.

The scene restitched itself in time. The three gray-skinned beings began to mill about as if they weren’t sure what to do with themselves now that their mission had concluded. Mrs. Thompson, pink-skinned, I realized, but growing paler by the moment, crumpled into the floor. Blood drip-dripped into the carpet from the top of the stand.

I had so expected her to be insubstantial that I had pushed with all my strength.

I had so expected her to be dead that I had already laid claim to her home.

She gurgled again. I leaned in.

“They finally came to see me,” she said. Her breath hitched once and she fell silent.

“I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.” My voice choked with sobs. I found that it was difficult to breathe when you had just murdered someone.

I’m still struggling with it.

I gave no thought to where the others were. To whether they would attack me then or not.

I turned away from Mrs. Thompson and trudged back up the stairs.

Back up the ladder.

Back through the light shining from the wooden slats and into the dark of the attic.

Back to the ladder that would release me into my apartment.

My laptop awaited me on the landing. It seemed like it was from another time, another world.

                                                            #

Three days ago, I killed Mrs. Thompson. I can’t say whether the presence of her false family means that she would have died with or without my interference.

I can’t know that.

What I do know is that it was my hands that did it.

It was me that did it.

I did it.

After I climbed down the ladder into my apartment, I snuck, unseen, into the spare bedroom and shut the door. As quietly as possible, I stacked the unpacked boxes into a makeshift wall bisecting the room. Then, I lay flat on the floor below the back window. I pictured Brian throwing rocks up at it. He would have to stand beyond the retaining wall to achieve the right trajectory. He would have to be alive to achieve the right trajectory. My body craved rest but the wound on my head and the thoughts in my mind refused it. Eventually though, I fell asleep.

I had been sleeping a lot.

When I woke, I ate a box of Froot Loops dry.

I’ve eaten a few more since then.

The laptop only has a little charge left, but it’s enough.

I hear my mom and my dad and Brian out there, milling around. But they haven’t bothered me since I made up my mind. I even banged on the wall and yelled out just to see what they would do and they didn’t respond.

I guess they got their way.

There’s one box of cereal left. I saved the best for last. I’ll eat that and then I’ll do it.

I touch Brian’s lighter through the fabric of my pocket to assure myself it’s still there. Between my thumb and index finger I rub the curtain that hangs over the window behind me.

Mom always said I should get out more.

                                                            #