Atrophia

The end of the world was wholly, completely, painfully mundane. The preppers prepped, the religious prayed, and the larpers polished their collections of assault rifles and played a lot of Call of Duty. Only they did all those things over the span of decades, not weeks, like all the movies had predicted.

Now we’re all just tired. I do my best to keep my little apartment tidy, but I feel the crushing pointlessness of it every day. Like so many things, it’s only the force of habit sustaining empty rituals.

It’s morning so I make my bed. The weak gray sunlight limps into my room through the window, and in the soft illumination I spread out my blankets over my mattress. I layer them in the same order as always; the black and white one, then the red throw, then the gold blanket, then the pink.

Before, I would have called it opulence, indulgence, to have so many. A younger me would have run her hands over the soft fabrics and sighed happily. I always loved beautiful things. The blankets aren’t beautiful now though, and I don’t keep them out of indulgence.

I could maybe afford a blanket, if I really tried. My apartment is cheap; it teeters too close to the new waterline for them to rent it for more. Most of us don’t have to worry about paying for utilities now, either. It’s not worth it to pay for the intermittent, fizzling power, and the tap water hasn’t been drinkable for years. And I, unlike many others, have access to food that’s not from the grocery store.

I don’t have a garden, of course. Only the last few holdouts in downtown can afford to grow anything, but I work for one of their restaurants, and I’m able to take home some of the scraps. I joked, years and years and years ago, that I always felt like a raccoon, taking little bits of unfinished food from a plate as I ran it to the back.

Back then it was only impulsive mid-shift hunger that drove me to it. What can I say? Chef makes good food, even better in those days. It was frowned upon, of course, but they let us get away with it. Now the process is formalized; no food ever goes in the garbage. It piles up in the back until end of shift, and then gets distributed among the staff.

Now, though, it’s been days since I worked, and my fridge is empty. The light doesn’t turn on anymore, since I’m not connected to the power grid, and there are no windows into my kitchen, so I grub around and check all the shelves just to be sure. It’d be easier to store things in my empty pantries, but the fridge is the only place safe from the rats and the roaches.

I briefly think of going to the grocery store, but I’m not that desperate yet. I have a shift coming up on Thursday, and that’s only three days away. So, no breakfast. The horrifying expanse of an empty day stretching out in front of me.

I could go visit Steph; a woman in her building actually had a baby a few months ago, and it’s still alive. It was funny, in a dark way, how quickly the hottest black market commodity went from baby caskets to coat hangers.

Instead I decide to go watch the ocean. I grab one of my sketchbooks, every inch already crammed with drawings, but it's another empty ritual. I even bother to take an empty pen and tuck it behind my ear.

When I reach the stairwell I have to suppress a groan. Another one of the steps has collapsed, and it’s right in the middle. I tuck my sketchbook tightly under my arm, and begin to shimmy down the iron railing.

I remember the day that the management company stopped taking maintenance requests. Things had been slowing down for a while, so none of us paid too much attention when the windows stayed broken for a week after the superstorm passed. At two weeks, people were a little disgruntled. At three, concerned. It wasn’t until a month had gone by that we realized they were never getting fixed.

There was nothing to do but accept it at that point. You could move, sure, but by then the housing market had quietly deteriorated into a duopoly, so you’d either move into an apartment owned by the same management company, or the other one that was just as bad.

Of course, the downtowners were different. Things hadn’t changed much for them. Sure, I overheard them talking about how much harder it was to buy fruit these days, but then most of us hadn’t tasted a fruit in a decade. None of them had cardboard over their windows, or holes in their clothes, or rats in their homes.

I used to cry a lot at work. I mean, we all cried sometimes; it was always a terrible job. Before, though, you’d cry about cruel customers or the being on your third double this week. Eventually though those things didn’t matter; I’d cry just from seeing them. I would see a woman, clean and pretty in a beautiful dress and jewelry, and the bitterness would swell up so violently in me that I’d start sobbing.

These days, I’m not hydrated enough to cry.

It still made me sad, though, when I thought about it too much. I existed, sure. I survived. I could afford my own coat hanger. But I had loved beautiful things. I had loved makeup, and dresses, and books, and furniture, and pretty houses and music and birds and sunlight and trees. I wish I could still weep for the trees.

It was funny--or maybe not, maybe I’m just fucked up now--that the ancaps and the doomers and the preppers all thought that we could make a new, better society when this one collapsed. They thought they could learn woodworking and actually rebuild things. The joke was on them, though, when we ran out of trees.

They were all property now; the midwesterners, who were just the ultra-wealthy folks who bought up the midwest when their coastal mansions became aquariums, owned all the remaining forests. They built walls around them, electrified and guarded better than a prison. Any tree that wasn’t owned had been cut down for wood a decade ago.

There was a botanical garden here in the city. It was downtown, and the fee was more than the cost of my apartment for a year, but I suppose that made sense. It must cost a lot to keep everything watered and artificially pollinated. And, of course, it has to be expensive to keep the poor people out.

I’d been saving, though, and I thought that maybe someday I would go. I could buy a piece of paper, and maybe a bit of ink, and I would go and wander for hours and hours and hours. I’d draw everything I wanted to and not worry about saving any of the page for later.

After all, who wanted to worry about getting old? As I step out into the morning sunlight, I can already feel my skin start to burn. The heat is blistering, and I know I spend too much time outside. But skin cancer is a problem for an older me, and I don’t think I have to worry about her.

The upside to all this is I can already hear the ocean. Instead of driving hours, I only have to walk a few blocks before I reach the blue-green waves. Sometimes I think it’s the last truly beautiful thing in the world; every other beautiful thing belongs to someone now, but no one owns the ocean.

I settle down on a concrete slab that’s shaded by a crumbling overhang, and close my eyes. The steady rhythm of the waves reminds me to take deep breaths, and I gratefully suck in the clean ocean air. I’m so used to the sourness of the air that the cool salt breeze is like a luxury.

At some point I must doze off, because I’m woken by a sound. It’s only a small, feeble little buzzing, but it’s so desperately familiar that I jolt awake immediately. I find it on the ground and I almost can’t believe my eyes, but I look again and it’s there; a honeybee.

It’s tiny, and delicate, and it makes my eyes sting with tears. I hurriedly lay down with my belly on the concrete to look at it closer. I can’t help but to laugh in amazement. The bees weren’t owned by anyone; they died out before anyone thought to buy them, and I always thought that was admirable.

But here one was, alive, and moving. As I look closer though, I see he’s injured. Or perhaps just tired, like the rest of us. I dimly remember that you could give a tired honeybee sugar-water to perk them up, something I must have learned a long time ago. It would cost me a lot to get, but it would be worth it. After all, if this little bee perked up, maybe I could follow him back to his hive.

Quickly, I unclasp my necklace and open the locket charm. It was an old and tarnished metal heart, not particularly beautiful, and not even sentimental, but now I’m glad I picked it up. I lay it on the ground in front of the little bee, and nudge him to crawl inside.

Slowly, begrudgingly, he complies. When he’s all the way in, I close the heart protectively around him, adrenaline sparkling in my veins. I grab my sketchbook and make sure I still have my pen, but as I turn to leave, I’m stopped short by a terrible thought.

This doesn’t matter.

One bee, one hive, even a million bees wouldn’t be enough. Bringing back the bees wouldn’t recede the oceans, or make the sun less blisteringly hot. It wouldn’t solve the droughts, make more food grow, or unkill billions of people. The bees couldn’t give ordinary people access to clean water, or gasoline, or the internet.

All I could do would be to rob the bees of their dignified extinction, turn them into just another resource for the Midwesterners to own.

A dry sob wrenches out of me. It’s been years since I’ve thought about the dreams I used to have, but now I can’t help but imagine how it all could have been different. My kneecaps crack and begin to bleed as I fall hard to the concrete, but the weight of the grief is crushing me. I open the locket and look at the little bee. How did it come to this? What justice was there in a world where the only hope one could have was for a dignified death?

Suddenly the idea of paying the downtowners to walk through their garden is repugnant to me. A reckless fury possesses me, and I make a decision. I’ll die with this last little honeybee, free, unowned. I begin stuffing concrete rubble in my pockets like a poet, and when I feel heavy enough, I walk towards the waves.

The water greets me like a cheerful friend, the little waves lapping over my feet. I take my shoes off to feel it better. I keep the necklace held gently in my hand, the little bee inside. I wonder briefly if it's cruel to take him with me, but I don’t want to be alone in the end.

We wade out further into the water, and I begin to feel the weight of the stones dragging me down. I’m not afraid; this is my choice, and it feels like rebellion, like freedom.

I take one last deep breath of air and decide to dream of a better world.