Chapter One

 

 

    When you’re here, there is nowhere else.

    When you’re now, there is no before, no after.

    You are here and you are now and you are gone and you are everywhere.

 

​

 

    I remember running, carrying a fight in my chest. Little child, long limbs, running running running. There is no feeling like it. Flight. Fire. Freedom.

    Always a crash, though, when my broken heart cried, No more! 

    “Friday,” says a sharp voice. 

    No one calls me Theodora anymore. I shed that child like a snake sheds a skin, finds new colours underneath.

    “Friday,” she says again. 

    I’m very still, and my body is pressed against cool sheets. I try to open my eyes, but they’re still dreaming.

    Running, even in my dreams. A beautiful whole heart that never gives up beating. Tickticktick like a tireless clock, like the even drum of the earth’s molten soul.

    We live here, I guess. It is no home I ever wanted or imagined. We are a family of two, thrown together by the terrible things. I don’t know if there are any other people. 

    There’s you, but like I said, you’re gone.

    We used to live in a green place, touched by papery sunlight. I went running on the Old Burry Road, past stunted orchard trees and cows with black eyes that followed me uphill. I stopped to stretch, hanging my arms and head down over my legs and looked through. That green world upsidedown, that sea of coarse grass, that haunts me at night. I ran to the end, where someone’s driveway started, did a turn in the muddy circle, came back. Saw everything again backwards. Sometimes the mosquitos were so bad I had to sprint the whole way. Came back gasping for breath, fell sweaty into your arms. You didn’t care. 

    Eltie gets angry. Throws things. “Everything’s broken everythings broken everythingsbroken.”

    I know. Shhhhh.

    I don’t know if I love her or not. I never got to ask myself that. 

    Today is 206. I don’t know if it’s a Monday or a Tuesday or a Saturday. Those names belong to an old world, old as the Burry Road. Old as you. Old as me, an old woman, 27 years old. I have a name that seems to belong to that disappeared world. I have a number. Two, if Eltie’s one. One if she’s two. 

    “Do you remember the Burry Road?” I want to ask.

    “Stop it with the Burry Road,” she will say without looking at me. On her back with her arm over her eyes.

    Is it all gone? Is it burnt up? I want that green back. I want it back.

    I want it like you wanted me once. I was in love with that green world. I imagined a golden green future for us. I wanted to be your wife. 

    It took me 200 days to know I miss the world more than I miss you.

    Now here is all there is.

    “Friday.”

    I say her name back: “Eltie.” And it’s like the password my eyes were waiting for; they pop open.

    Eltie’s pretty face is leaning over mine. She smiles. “You were out a long time. Thought you were a goner.”

    “Sorry.”

    When I return home (if it is home) each day at sunset, my skin is oiled with ash. It is the colour of dirty water. I open the round metal door, muscles working past the heaviest point, when its own weight slams it open on the grass. I descend, pulling the hatch over my head with great effort. 

    Why the hill? Why the hill everyday? Because you said you would meet me there. If I stop going to the hill, it means I believe you will not come. It means I believe you are dead.

    There are no birds, but there are insects: grasshoppers, crickets, cicadas, all manner of singing things. So song is not gone from the world, and this is a comfort.

    We eat things out of cans. Fruit, vegetables, beans, fish. I didn’t eat meat before, and I saw no reason to change this. Eltie eats the tins of meat and fish. To eat meat now would be an act of greatest desperation. I know the animals in those tins died long ago. It would be understandable, given hunger, to eat those animals. To me the idea is as unthinkable as ingesting my own flesh. It has become a symbol of myself. I am still who I was. In this small way, I am the same. There used to be cows here, along both sides of the road. Once I leaped over the fence and stood like a statue, staring into their kind black eyes until they accepted me as part of the landscape and came to put their noses on me. Their bodies were warm and huge, their tummies like hairy massive balloons. They had warmth that came off them and hung in the air around my own body. I read that cows have best friends.

    We live in semi-darkness. Sunlight permeates the top six inches of our underground home. I wake with the sun still. The instinct is buried deep. Morning is forever a ceremonial pattern. Wake, groom, dress, eat, step into the perilous world. This has not changed since my small years. Newly added is to go to the meeting place. By the warm afternoon, ascending to the hilltop crowned with light, I am awake and ready. 

    Some days, there are no sounds except for the sounds of my being alive: breath, heartbeat, footsteps. These three are bound together, one breath per heartbeat, one heartbeat per step. Everyday I walk to the hill, look beyond, walk back. This process reminds me of a childhood song:

 

    The bear went over the mountain to see what she could see.

    But all that she could see was the other side of the mountain.

    The other side of the mountain was all that she could see.

 

    The other side of the hill is all I can see. The stretching yellow light, unbroken until the ragged horizon, the fangs of trees. I could go beyond but I would not return by dark. This is unthinkable. In darkness awake all the things you imagined. 

    Today, as I ran back from the hill, my heart did the thing it does. I collapsed in the tangled field, and as I rested on the hard earth, I had a dream:

    I held my ear to your metal chest, heard the tick tick tick of your cold life ongoing. You did not stir, but you were wakeful. I was filled with a terrible fear of you. I lived in your dry stony belly. If I breathed too sharply, I would wake you. You would open your horrible red clock eye. You would watch me with that eye. You would say, No!

    I woke from the dream with sweat on my face and neck, goosebumps lifting the fine hairs on my arms. I made a cup of my hands and breathed into them and my breath echoed onto my own face. My hands smelled like water. I lowered them and breathed deeply in the cold air. I drew my knees to my body and squeezed hard, and then I laid back down and stretched out. The stretch reminded my body that it was strong and alive. It reminded my muscles of their responsibility. I rose from the ground and took from my pack a bottle half-full of water. I drank it all. It tasted of minerals.

    I have a body made of wires, wires of muscle and tendon and nerve. My wires work in tandem to create a person in motion. My movements are long and easy. I see myself from far away and I see myself from close enough to hear my heartbeat. I was alone there in the field, and I had to get back to Eltie, who has medicine.

    I started to run again, imagining I was running out of darkness, out through the tunnel, given new life, born into light. Thrown into the sweet chaos of existence. Breathing and breathing and breathing. 

    I guess I passed out sometime after that, but I don’t remember. 

    Eltie gives me a china cup with more water. My arm is stinging where she injected the medicine.

    Eltie stopped asking about the hill, but she has not asked me to stop going. What else will I do? Shuffle through my old life, like it’s all going to be there when we stop pretending it’s gone? That’s what Eltie does. She goes to the big house every couple of days and caresses the old pieces of her life. Her heart breaks every time, and I think it’s so stupid, to live that grief by choice.

    But what am I doing, going to that hill day after day, looking for you?

    Eltie’s husband built the shelter before he died, because it was becoming so clear that a bad thing was coming, and he was smart. He stocked up on food, even though they told us not to, and he created a system of pipes and rain barrels to supply the shelter with running water. Solar electricity. He didn’t heat it, though. He was going to, but then he died. Got sick, like so many of them did. Like I did. Before you left.

    Eltie’s husband stockpiled medicine, too, in case either of them got it. He told Eltie to steal it from the hospital she worked at. At first she wouldn’t, she said. She didn’t want to steal it, but you couldn’t buy it. It was only for the sick. You couldn’t have it just in case. When things started to turn, she took two cases of medicine. Since she worked in the hospital, she was more likely than most people to get sick. She didn’t, in the end. Just carried the sickness home.

    “How do you feel?” Eltie asks.

    I shrug. She pulls me upright by my hand, supporting my back with her other arm. I feel dizzy for a second and then it passes. 

    She takes my blood pressure and then nods. “Good.”

    “Alive,” I say.

    What a strange thing to be.

 

​

​

    Another grey day. 209.     

    Eltie’s husband built his shelter so the sod roof protrudes half a foot above the earth. This entire raised section is windowed, and we try to keep the windows clean, but they are plastic, not glass, so they get scratched, and low to the ground as they are, they quickly become streaked with mud and grass.

    Still, it’s enough light to know what kind of day it will be.

    Eltie has risen early as usual (except on those days where she can’t move) and is sipping tea when I get up and wash my face.

    “Aren’t you going to eat anything? she asks as I tie my running shoes.

    “I’ll get an apple from the orchard,” I say.

    “One apple? That’s not enough for how far you’re going.” She gets up and puts a tin of beans in my pack. She fills my plastic water bottle and puts it in there too.

    “Thanks,” I say. I stretch my hips, quads, calves, but not too much because my muscles are cold.

    Eltie brings me my purple sweater from the back of my chair and I zip it up. The cuffs are frayed and dirty. There’s a faded print of a tree on it and faint, curly white letters spell out I’d rather be in the forest. 

    She leans in and hugs me. Her feet are a bit too far away from me, so she is off-balance while she holds me, and I wonder if she really meant to do it, or if her animal body just needed to do it.

    She pulls away and goes back to her tea. She keeps her back to me.

    “See you later,” I say. 

    The back of her head nods.

    I climb the ladder to the world, and open the heavy door to the day. It is a place full of insects this morning. I can hear them everywhere. The rain has brought out the thirsty creatures. Grasshoppers stir wherever I set my feet, and they throw off pearls of rainwater.

    I walk south through what was Eltie’s farm. There are relics of her family’s work: rotting wood fences that were once painted in vibrant colours, an overgrown stone circle where the herb garden was, a rusting piece of machinery that would till the earth for seeds that would never germinate now.

    I jump a fence that used to be sky blue. On the other side is an old orchard. The peach trees are dead, but the apple trees still give fruit. They are just coming into season, and I find two nice apples, one for me, one for Eltie.

    There’s a greasy grey squirrel sitting on its haunches on a hooked branch of one of the dead peach trees, eating a small underripe apple.

    “Don’t eat them all now,” I call. 

    Her tall ears move in my direction and she keeps eating.

    “Leave them to get sweet,” I say. 

    Ears twitch.

    “We’ll both be better off in a few weeks if you let them get ripe.”

    She leaves and takes her breakfast with her and I’m alone with all the insects. Grasshoppers keep hitting my legs. My pants go to just under my knees. I love to feel the browngrey grass on my skin.

    I eat my apple and keep going south. It’s a sour one. But there is nothing like fresh fruit. It gives me a rush, and I start to jog, just warming up my still-tired body. Out of the orchard, through a dead field, across an unpaved road and into another dead field, then a less dead field to the highway. As I get near the wide road, I slow down. There’s a trailer parked at the side of the road. This wasn’t here yesterday, and even though I’m dying to see another person who isn’t Eltie, the sight of the vehicle fills me with dread. I creep to the edge of the highway, crouching behind a high leafless hedge.

    The wind picks up, and a fine mist touches my face and neck. I shiver. 

    Waiting. Waiting.

    There is not a sound except for the wind, the insects, my soft breathing. I’m there for ten minutes while my leg muscles stiffen and begin to complain.

    I’m going to cross, show myself in plain sight, but demonstrate that I’m just passing by. I straighten up, move to a gap in the hedge, and walk across the four-lane highway.

    No sound from the trailer. 

    I get to the other side of the road. I’m now on the same side as the trailer, but a safe distance away. I wait. For something. But there is nothing.

    Finally, I turn away and start running again, through another dead field. The field after is full of poisonous wild parsnip that will burn my skin if I get the plant’s blood on me. I slow down and draw my arms in, respecting these guardians of the land that are now going to seed.

    A large swath of forest separates me from the the few fields, and my hill. Our hill.

    By midday, I’m nearing our meetingplace. I put my head down and climb to the top of the hill. I stand between the two trees like their third, alien friend. You are not here. Maybe your ghost is here, but I can’t see it. I close my eyes and see if I can feel it, like I thought I would be able to. 

    I can’t.

    You never should have left. But I was sick. I didn’t want you to get it. Contagious for up to four months. 16 weeks. 112 days. 2688 hours.

    You stood on the other side of the closed front door. Our hands held each other in our heads, but really I could just feel the clammy glass on my palm. I could read the lines on yours, but I didn’t know what they meant. I wanted them to mean long life and me. I wanted to be a line on your hand. Yes I did.

    I loved you through the door and your muffled voice said, “You’re sure? Are you sure?”

    I cried and said, “Yes, yes, I’m sure. I can’t breathe, my chest hurts, my head pounds. I have it. I’m sorry. I don’t know how. I’m sorry.”    

    You cried onto the glass, and your crying made me cry more, which made my breathing harder, and you said, “Stop, stop.” But we couldn’t.

    You took a deep breath, steadying. “Okay. I’m going to go.”

    A jerk went through my body.

    “No,” you said. “I’m going to go to my brother’s, like we said. But I’m going to come back. I’ll talk to you on the phone everyday until the four months is up. Okay? I’m going to go.”

    You didn’t move or speak for a few more minutes, and then you took your hand off the door and took one step away from me, practicing.

    “I’m going to go,” you said, one more time. “I love you, Theo.”

    “I love you,” I said, but my voice was so small and whispery, and I don’t think you heard me.

    You walked away backwards, down the front pathway, so I could see your face for as long as possible.

    Two days later, there was no phone service anymore.

    

 

​

    But all that she could see was the other side of the mountain. The other side of the mountain was all that she could see.

    I stay and eat the beans in maple syrup that Eltie packed for me, then I start for home, a light jog since my belly is full.

    My head is swimming with you, and so I am surprised when I come back to the highway and see the trailer again. I had forgotten. There is still no sound from inside. But it seems strange that someone would drive it here just to leave it. I watch it for a few minutes, but I’m getting cold and the light is going faster now that summer is fading.

    I take off my pack and rummage around until I find the apple I picked for Eltie. I leave it outside the closed door of the trailer, just in case. I take a big swig from the water bottle, stretch my legs and hips. Stretch my back by raising my arms as high as I can. Start running for home.

    Eltie doesn’t say anything when I come in, take off my grassy running shoes and my mist-dampened sweater. She’s reading something, but the cover is folded around the spine, so I don’t know what it is. There’s a line on her forehead between her eyebrows.

    “What are you reading?”

    “Heart of Darkness.”

    “Oh. Happy.”

    She looks up and smiles. “Raining?”

    “Yep.”

    “I could hear it all day,” she says.

    I go around the corner. The L-shaped space offers only a bit of privacy where the shower and toilet are concerned. Since Eltie was going to be sharing it with just her husband, I guess that wasn’t going to be an issue.

    I take a cold shower (there is no other kind) that smells of rain. At least the filtration system removes most of the grit and oil. I’m feeling fresh and new as I dry myself.

    While I was showering, Eltie brought me some clean clothes and left them on a chair by the shower. I pull them on, revelling in their relative softness on my dry, clean skin.

    She comes around the corner and stands watching me while I line up the buttons on my shirt.

    “You got a parsnip blister,” she says. She walks over and gently pulls my collar aside, touches a spot on my neck that burns when her finger grazes it.

    “The horror,” I say.

    She kisses me on my smile.