BARREN STREETS

The sun wakes me up, and I find myself wishing, again, that it hadn’t. Every morning, without fail, the sun climbs laboriously over the horizon with weak arms of brilliant orange light and fingers that scratch the faded window of this basement. One solitary window about ten feet up, yet somehow managing to let the sun in, right into my eyes as I try to sleep and forget about what I am waking up to. 

It’s hard to forget, though, when the next feeling I have is my empty stomach. 

Wiping the sleep from my eyes, I take a deep breath of the stale, hot air and slowly climb out of my sleeping bag. My bag sits slumped against the wall. I half walk half crawl over to it and dig through its pockets. Of course, I find nothing. I ate the last of my food the previous night even though I swore to myself I would make it last until I made it to the countryside. Some promise that was. Another broken promise, added to a bucket of billions. 

I sigh. For an instant, the malaise of the morning turns to anger in my belly and I think about throwing my backpack against the wall and storming off. But I restrain myself. I shut the bag, shoulder it, and climb the stairs to the first floor of the hotel. 

The sun is stronger here of course, with more windows. I see its orange yolk spill over the harbor and reach me, embracing me with its warmth. I take a moment to close my eyes, to forget where I am, to remember easier days when the sun shining on me meant I was resting by the beach with a book or stopping to admire the scenery on a hike. When I open my eyes again (mainly to the rumbling of my stomach) I am disappointed to see that I haven’t moved. I’m not in some chosen solitude; I am in an emptiness not of my own making. 

Slightly trembling, I step outside. My fleeting hope wants me to muse about food in the first drawer I rummage through, though I unfortunately know better. 

Seagulls fly and caw overhead, gathering over on the harbor dock, crowding over some black mass that I cannot see from this distance despite the clarity of the sky. Envy snakes through me. Those flying rats can find food quite easily, huh? If only I could fly. Then I could just leave. Why don’t they? They have the means and choose not to use them. I shake my head, turning to head down the street and deeper into the city. 

The city. It used to be noisy. Almost unbearably so. Likely when I say city, you think of bustling streets filled to bursting with traffic and buses. Sirens, horns, people shouting at others to take that damn right turn, planes humming overhead, the occasional beating of helicopter rotors thrumming at the air and catching the eyes of thousands upon thousands of people on the streets. These people all have their own conversations with one another about any one of a million different topics. They crowd around coffee shops in the early morning, sprint through crowds in suits to make it to work on time during the week, or rouse late on weekends to prepare themselves for a night on the town in the many hundreds of bars dotted throughout the city like freckles on a vibrant and blinking face. The traffic and people create a symphony of sounds that weave through the towers stretching for the sky, looming over everything, visible for miles and miles outside of the city limits. Not a minute would go by without hearing some kind of sound. The mind dulls against it. Accepts it as easily as it would accept trees blowing in the breeze in the forest, or waves crashing on the shore at the beach. 

Now, not so much. 

The streets are empty. Anyone with a car took it and left as soon as they could, leaving behind the nonessentials and taking everything else (unfortunately for me, and anyone else unlucky to remain here, that meant food). The sky, save for the occasional cloud and that beating hammer of a sun, is empty. No plane or helicopters and no one left with eyes to look up and see. If there are still people here, they’re either trying not to be seen or dead. Bars remain closed and coffee shops sit empty. Those buildings so full of people are no more than glorified concrete and steel stumps, towering over with glassless windows staring down at the street. Wind, if it blows, whistles through the cracks like a giant playing the flute. Some of the buildings have started to tilt or sag with no one to maintain them, like flowers with no rain to water them. 

Yet, that’s the funny thing. In the eight years since the Fall, there is far more grass in the streets, far more animals roaming the sidewalks, far more flowers weaving their way up through the cracks. I pass by a small park that was a blip of green in a sea of gray in my youth. Now, the central tree has extended its branches far beyond the steel fence built around it in a vain effort to maintain the foliage. Grass and dirt crawls between the fence and empties onto the brick sidewalk surrounding the park, reaching out to the nearest tower where those vines will crawl and climb until reaching the top, eventually suffocating the tower and bringing it down. It might take a hundred years, but will anyone really be around to stop it? 

Fascinating. I once thought that the irreparable damage done by the cities would remain forever. I never counted on mother nature striking back with such force. It had struck back before, but never in this way. Like it was waiting for humanity to lose the war it waged upon itself. 

Which, of course, it did. 

A shadow moves across my vision. I stop and duck behind one of the few cars left abandoned on the side of the road. I kneel down and watch ahead quietly, and was fascinated by what I saw. 

A person. 

Their gender was indistinguishable from this distance, but the movements were unmistakable. They dug through the garbage can right outside the small coffee shop on the corner, nearly up to their waste, throwing out old wrappers and other garbage right onto the ground. 

I have a hopeful thought as I climb out of my hiding space and inch forward. I had no weapon, no means of defending myself but to run. And yet I feel like I don’t need to. Nor do I want to. There’s been too much death up until now, right? Surely this person must feel the same way.

I pause when they come up from the garbage can. Now I can see: a woman with long hair, unkempt and down to her waist, dirt covering every inch of exposed skin—which wasn’t a lot, as she swam in a winter coat that looked a size too big for her. She was shaking her head, thinking, facing me but not seeing me quite yet. Too lost in her hunger, by the looks of it, but she did hold something in her hand. 

A rat. A dead one, half decomposed. 

I breathe in deeply. Perhaps…

“Excuse me,” I say, sheepishly, still keeping my distance. 

The woman gasps and takes a step back, coveting the dead rat in the belly of her coat and producing a pistol with her free hand, cocking the hammer back. 

“Back up!” she says, her voice echoing above the buildings. I cringe.

“I don’t want…I just—”

The gunshot sucks the air from the city, and at the sound I dive to my right. The bullet didn’t hit me—striking the pavement a few feet from my legs—but the sound certainly did. The crack of a whip magnified by a thousand. My ears ring and for the next few moments, I forget where I am. 

When I get my bearings and look up, the woman is gone. Her sprinting footsteps echo in the middle distance, then they fade into obscurity, lost to the barren streets. 

I stand there in that solitude, my head to the sky, and I sigh once more. Her reaction to the rat told me everything I needed to know, perhaps everything I already knew. 

This city, at least our time in it, was done. Gone. Never to return. And here I am, still drifting, hoping to find something more appetizing than a half-decomposed rat. 

Maybe I should see what those seagulls were eating back on the dock. At least then I will feel something more than hunger.