Lindsey Lee

Midtown Massacre

The two lay in bed, the blackout curtains giving the impression of late night, though she knew it was sometime in the mid-afternoon. Tuesday, she thought. Sandy lay with her head on his chest, her left leg entangled in his. They lay in a pool of stillness that might have resembled utter contentment. But there was something in the wideness of her eyes and the tension trembling in her hands that gave a sense of impending disaster. The room was scattered with bits of two depressingly normal lives. Bookshelves filled with remnants of college: Kierkegaard and Austen. A computer sat on the floor in one corner, covered in dirty laundry. Wires still crossed the room in awkward places, running under the door to the generator in the closet, though there had not been any gas for it, even on the black market, for months. The ceiling was blackened by the candle smoke. Sometimes Sandy would look around and she could see their life before the war under the pieces of their new half-life.