I Am Alive and I Remember

Sometimes, in that hazy, uncertain no-man’s-land between sleeping and waking, I can hear the sounds of summer. Crickets sing and frogs croak. The soft wind sighs through boughs heavy with leaves. Music plays low and sweet from the radio of my first boyfriend’s car. It was a rusty bucket with bad shocks and a muffler that was hanging on for dear life, but for a golden summer it was ours. He is with me and we are young, so young and so fierce and so in love. And then I wake up.

I have not heard a frog croak in years. I don’t even know how many. Frogs and crickets do not live in the world as it is now, gray and burnt and empty. I would say that it’s a miracle people have endured, but miraculous is not the word I think of when I contemplate the survival of my species. Those who will carry the human race into the future fled to the stars, oh, years ago. Those who could not afford to blast off this ruined rock were left to bear witness to the slow, harrowing death of our mother soil. It seems to be taking an awfully long time.

I never stay in one place for too long. Just like any animal, I go where the food is – not that there are many animals left. In the years since the last star-bound vessel punched through Earth’s atmosphere and shot down the dark throat of the universe, our planet has gone through what some dead scientists once called a mass extinction event. After the firestorms of the last war filled the atmosphere with soot, the world was cold and dark for years. Most who survived the final conflict of the nuclear age died of starvation when the crops failed and the animals which relied upon them died.

Food dominates my thoughts during the day – if you can call a dim, lusterless twilight day. I have eaten rabbit, dog, cat, rat, and more insects than I care to recall, but I have not dined upon the most readily-available game in the woods. I tell myself that I will never know what my own kind tastes like, no matter how hungry I get. So far, that’s a promise I have been able to keep. It has been years since I have seen a stray dog or cat. Rats and carrion birds were plentiful for a while, but even those resourceful scavengers are getting scarce. Not enough corpses to go around.

Most of my food comes from raiding abandoned houses for canned goods in whatever small town I happen to be in at the time. I avoid large urban areas even though the likelihood of finding food is greater. The broken cities of a bygone era in human history are the playground of the young and strong. An old woman like me would be corralled off with the rest of the weak human stock to be butchered like animals when the need arose. The greatest cities are nothing more than piles of irradiated rubble. Rome, leveled. London, demolished. Paris, obliterated. Washington D.C., annihilated. Too bad the politicians were already gone by then.

In the beginning, just after the final departure, it was easier to find clothing, food, and supplies. After all, there was an entire world of grocery stores, shopping malls, and mom-and-pop businesses to ransack for supplies. There were more material goods than there were people left to claim them. But the supply was not infinite. After the first year, there was nothing left to steal from your local Target. I moved on to the houses of people who were long dead of radiation sickness or starvation. I sometimes come upon the previous owners of the houses I loot, but they don’t have much to say. The dead seldom do.

I pick through the bones of civilization and chuck anything of value into a wheelbarrow I found outside of Poughkeepsie. She’s a steady old girl I call Doris. We have been from coast to coast, Doris and I. She’ll carry my scant belongings for a hundred more miles or so before I will have to retire her. The cracked and degraded roads which crisscross the face of America’s corpse have wreaked hell on poor Doris, but for now she persists.

When I have either found more canned beans to toss into Doris or (more and more often) given up for the day, I find a place to hole up for the night. The crawlspaces beneath porches with latticework or decorative deck skirting are my favorite. I remove the access panel, drag old Doris in, and replace the panel with myself inside. Cobwebs and piles of dead leaves are typically the most unpleasant things I encounter beneath porches. No one goes poking around in crawlspaces in the middle of the night.

Properly concealed before the meager light of day fades, I am alone with my memories and my arthritis. Hauling old Doris around is hard on my joints, and by the end of each day, I’m burning alive in a soft inferno of pain from my toes to my shoulders. I do my best to ignore the complaints of my aged and abused body, but when the pain is particularly bad, I allow myself two Aspirin from my dwindling medical supplies. I chew them, the acrid taste no more bitter than life itself. If I’m lucky, the pain dies down enough to allow me to slip into dreams of summertime and stolen kisses in the backseat of a car.

Some nights, I wake up to the muted thunder of footsteps on the porch and house above me. Most often, it is a single pair of feet, no doubt belonging to another lost soul such as myself, but other times there are many. Hunters travel in packs. I have not been discovered yet, but there are times when I am certain I will be. Insofar, Death has passed over me, shriveled old thing though I am.

I am a gray, dying woman in a gray, dying world. I would have laid down and died a long time ago if the habit of living was not so deeply-ingrained. That other life – the one with crickets and frogs and kisses – is growing dimmer with each passing day. I try to think about something from that life every morning when I wake. The riotous color of a summer sunset. The plot of my favorite book. The shape of my husband’s eyes. The sound of our son’s laughter. I cling to these memories, but they are fading just like the rest of the world. Just like the rest of me.

When I feel that other life receding from my memory as the shore shrinks into nothing from the deck of a departing ship, there is only one reliable way to bring it back. It starts with retrieving from my pocket the small, cracked mirror I use to look around corners when I think someone dangerous may be about. With the deliberate care of the arthritic, I unbutton my topcoat, pull down the zipper of the windbreaker beneath it, and slide my left shoulder free of the threadbare sweater beneath that. The air – still so cold after years of nuclear winter – stings my exposed skin and raises goosebumps all over my body. I would not risk exposure for anything less than the moment when I angle the mirror to give me a view of my left shoulder and the tattoo that had been there since my eighteenth birthday.

I saw the beautiful heart-shaped locket in the display case of a jewelry store when I was a little girl. My father had brought me there to look for a replacement for the wedding ring my mother lost several months earlier. Bored as only children in adult venues can be, I wandered up and down the aisles of the gleaming establishment until something caught my eye. Lying upon a cushion of red velvet, with the last rays of the afternoon sun glinting off its polished surface, the locket was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. My childish imagination kicked into overdrive as I stood there with my hands and nose pressed against the glass of the display case. I imagined that it had once belonged to a princess of an impoverished nation, forced to pawn her greatest jewels to finance a coup to restore her family to power.

As much as I wanted that locket, I knew even at that age that it was beyond anything my father could afford. We were not destitute by any means, but like most people we lived from paycheck to paycheck. The ring he would buy for my mother that day was a plain gold band, used and slightly scarred. I allowed my father to lead me by the hand from the jewelry store and never laid eyes on the locket again. But I never forgot its simple, elegant beauty. In my mind, it became a symbol of all the things denied me and the rest of the people who lived hand to mouth. There were girls with rich daddies who could afford all of the silver, heart-shaped lockets they could want. Years later, some of them even escaped to the stars while the rest of the planet burned.

The day I turned eighteen, I strolled into a tattoo parlor, described the locket in loving detail to the artist, and surrendered my bare back to him. The pain was intense, but what I remember most from that day was the triumph I felt. I felt as if I had cheated the system somehow and gotten what I had wanted all along. Those girls could keep their lockets; mine would never tarnish, get lost, or break. Theirs were silver, but mine was flesh and blood.

Each time I see that faded, heart-shaped design on my shoulder, all of the horror and desolation of the years between that day and the present are burned away. In an instant, I am again that strong, defiant girl who kisses her boyfriend in the back of his car and feels as if she will live forever. I can hear the crickets and smell the sweet summer grass and feel that boy’s lips upon mine. In that moment, past and present collide, and I remember who I am.

And so, I continue. I will die someday, hopefully someday soon. Living is harder than it has any right to be. I pray that it will happen as I sleep, curled up beneath a ragged blanket on a pile of dead leaves with dreams of lost summers ushering me to my final rest. As anyone still alive in this sundered and poisoned hellscape knows, there are worse ways to go. However it comes to pass, I will die at peace with the knowledge that I am still me. My family is dead, my planet is dying, and my species has been flung out into the universe in search of a new home.

But my locket is still here. I am still here. I am alive, and I remember.