Somehow, I knew the end would come slowly. The luxury and mercy of a catastrophic event that obliterated billions of years of evolution was too much to hope for. The end was the slow boil, the gaslighting of nations, cultures and individuals. It was rich people getting richer. It was the reality of no God, and the belief in one anyway, that ended it all.
I am walking with my dog, Ghost, through the former trails of Indian Hill; a wooded path that extends about 15 miles through horse farms and tract homes. She is a Siberian, found along with 4 others, under a black Ford F150 that had been overgrown with tall grasses and moss. It looked like it had been fairly new upon its abandonment, but nature took over, as it always does. I could hear squeaks, mouse-like and weak. I was starving and thought a meal was making itself known. I walked towards the sound, and hence, the truck. I squatted down and peered underneath. The undercarriage of the truck set unnaturally high and I could easily see the old Pampers for Newborns box. When I pulled at it, the weight indicated something alive, and I worried it may be an actual newborn ironically indicated by the package. To my relief, it was four Siberian puppies. They were thin and dehydrated. They peeped and wiggled all the same. I surmised that they were born, and the heart of the human couldn’t bear to take them as much needed sustenance so they left them to nature, or to others that didn’t lack the stomach to eat dog.
My backpack on my back and my walking stick were heavy for my wiry 50-year-old frame, so I put them down and wiggled the box, half sunk in the mud, free. I had a decision to make. Take all or just the most viable. Their blue eyes stared up at me; one had an eye so milky and infected that it was just about to fall out. I couldn’t choose one over the other. I was unlikely to be the survivor in my family, who was I to choose in this one? I took them all. I would give each pup equal care and what nature wanted back, it could have. Two years later, only Ghost is left. She has been my sixth sense as I walk along these trails alone, day after day, through the dead and blinding winter, and the humid and disease-filled summers. She barely makes a sound. Sometimes a lone howl when I trek out alone to the bathroom hole. That is why I call her Ghost. It is as though she sees them, too. She alerts; I alert. Most of the time, I can’t see what she sees. Something is there, though, and she knows it for me.
It is, right now, winter. I have lost count of the specific days, but I can tell the time of day in a general way and the season. With hunger always gnawing at your stomach; who knows the exact time? With no urgent need to gather ‘round the tube and watch the latest in the dalliances and the made-up drama of real-life debutants, each day is dictated by the sun, or shadow. Time, as a rule, has ceased to matter. We have all ceased to matter.
The snow is deep but the tracks of my boots have worn a path in the areas I can safely inhabit without fear of detection. I remember wanting to be noticed. I remember the posts on Facebook that showed my filtered face gazing dreamily into the future. I posted about my children’s accomplishments like they were my own. I posted about anniversaries and memories. People ‘liked’ them. They liked me. Or so one would think considering there was a social contract that demanded cooperation. But here I am and I haven’t seen or spoken to any of those 900 friends I once had.
I have a suspicion my children are all dead. All adults and scattered about the former United States; when communication ended, I couldn’t get messages to them. I didn’t dare venture out on foot. I had to stay in familiar territory where I knew the lay of the land. I was sure they’d find me since they grew up here and would feel compelled to come home like stray dogs. They didn’t. I can only assume they are doing what I am doing or dead. Maybe they assume the same. Their father was gone before the first raids. He took his own life in a field behind our house. In his note he told me he loved me, and that there was a bullet left in the gun had I wanted to take my own life as well. He “saw the writing on the wall.” He wanted to end his life on his terms with all the good times intact in his mind. He didn’t want what we had built to be taken. He wrote, “Life with you has been all a man could ever want. I will see you in the next life.” Believe it or not, he was an optimist. Me, I had other plans. “Fuck these people!” I had screamed at my husband after an argument about ‘next steps’. I am a runner. I am not someone who just sits and waits to be a victim. I thought I could get away. Maybe move to another country. This was rash, shortsighted and proved impossible. No flights allowed in or out and crossing the Canadian border; well, that was an unoriginal idea. The quota for refugees was capped and met. Then of course, once America fell, like dominoes, everyone else descended into chaos. I catch myself wondering if Venice is still a thing.
After leaving my home abandoned for about two weeks, I returned to find that it had been confiscated by a group of young men. I had snuck around the back and saw grey soled tube socks on a make-shift clothesline and realized another loss. It is the way things are, and I took that chance when I left the house unoccupied for so long. Finders' keepers these days, you know? I made it back down the driveway just before they could see me. I was stuck without my home in the hills of the former New York State all by myself. I had smartly taken the gun my husband put to his temple and found a small, uninhabited shed, and set up a shelter. I broke into homes, stores, unexpected places like abandoned landfills. I did okay.
My feet are heavy as I trudge up the side of a hill; the chains on my boots weigh about 5 pounds each. I lift my legs dramatically to take the smallest step forward. Ghost is ahead of me and on a lead. She stays on that lead for fear she will be shot if she gets too far ahead. She looks like a wolf from a distance, and wolves make a meal for a family. Hell, dogs make a meal. So, she stays right where she is at the end of that leather leash. She tugs and pulls sometimes when I am too slow up the hill and she just wants it over with. Sometimes she’s too nimble for me and I fall and tear my clothes on the ice or jagged rocks. Duct tape and ragged stitches map across my pants and jacket. I make haphazard repairs. My husband was the sewer in the family. On one trip to California, our last trip in actuality, I dropped a button off of a jacket I wore to a winery. I had that jacket for 15 years. I didn’t notice the button had popped off but he did. He picked the button up and put it in his pocket. I woke up the next day to him sewing it on my jacket with his portable sewing kit. He did things like that. He tended to the small things.
I make a way to the shed. I enter and drop exhaustedly to the ground to take off my boots. My day’s haul has amounted to nothing. I have left over rabbit in the snow box outside. I can have leftovers in the winter because the frigid air and snow make it possible for me to store things outdoors. My son used to force me to watch YouTube videos about the most mundane things, like the History of Ice making. I scoffed at these seeming wastes of time. I now can keep ice throughout the summer. Rest in Peace YouTube. Come summer, fresh fruit and vegetables are plentiful. Sour apples, cherries, and wild carrots and lettuces make their appearance. I am tired already of tough rabbit and squirrel and I am ready for the succulent duck. I will share my meals with my skinny dog. She has stopped begging. There comes a time when even a dog understands that times are tough.
The only light I have during the short winter days is the light from the cooking fire. I stir the melted snow and frozen rabbit in the pot. I hum to myself a song stuck in my head. It’s “Judy Blue Eyes” by Crosby Stills and Nash. This time It’s the “doo doo doo” part; my favorite part of the song when I was just a toddler. My father told me a story of when he and his friends, stoned and drunk, would put that song on and watch me dance and spin like a whirling dervish. They would laugh, so delighted by my delight. He said my face was like a shiny, smiling moon. Apple cheeks. It was the 1970’s. The world’s chaos was just a dream to me. I can conjure up that joy, sometimes without the specter of despair looming around every corner.
I hear remnants of this song that I recall from times before these. I hear the songs fully produced in my ears. I used to walk around the world with headphones stuffed in my ear canals, listening to mixes and podcasts. I was in a state of constant aural stimulation. I tuned out the world and my children. Now, I am hyper-tuned in to the sounds around me. A twig breaking sends my heart racing. Food or foe? Both require my immediate attention. You can try to tune out the birds or the far away gunshots, but they intrude. They niggle their way into the core of your brain like earwigs. With nothing to drown out the reality, there is nothing but.
I think I have forgotten some of the lyrics to this song that springs up in my down time now and again. But the instant images, and times they bring back to me in my isolation, tell the stories of my past and the collective past of the world that has vanished. I look down at Ghost and give her a piece of my rabbit. She almost takes the tip of my finger off with her fervor. I reach down to her repentant eyes and clean the goop from the corners, letting her know I am okay, and that I am grateful for her. I wonder what the point is for the tenth time today. I chuckle and the sound is as though it’s from a far-off place; a place where I danced wildly and had an audience. I am still spinning.
When I am done, I put the dirty bowl outside in the snow. I don’t have the energy to clean up. I will wrap the chain around the door of my makeshift shed and settle off to sleep. Ghost and old moldy blankets keep me warm. Maybe I will wake up in the morning. Maybe I will die in my sleep. Maybe someone will overtake me in the night and Ghost won’t have enough energy to protect me. I can’t hope for any of these outcomes. As I drift off, I can hear the Middle Eastern musical patterns of the song and as I fade into the unconscious. I see myself as a little girl…
And I hear it…
“What have you got to lose…”*