The Shape of a Heart

Blake awoke gradually behind the comforting shelter of his eyelids.

The nice thing about acceptance was that there was no longer the moment in which he realized that everyone he had known, all of his friends and family, coworkers and acquaintances, was now dead. He had accepted that fact, and so it no longer had the power to jump out at him from behind a corner unexpectedly and hit him in the forehead with a hammer blow of reality. No more did it come at him as the third or fourth thought of the day. He didn’t have to relive it every morning anymore, and that was something. The world had ended, past tense, and he’d accepted it.

Murky sunlight filtered in through the window, and he stretched a hand out across the hotel room mattress to feel for Roxanne. He felt only bare sheets.

Like a rock thudding into a raw steak, he felt the hammer blow of reality fall in his mind after all. Roxanne was gone. Not “out to get croissants for breakfast” gone, either. The fight of the previous night filtered back into his mind. He couldn’t remember what it had been about, specifically, because of course it hadn’t been about any one thing. No, this had been a long time coming. She had said she was leaving him, they’d both screamed for awhile, and then they’d gotten into bed, made love, and fallen asleep as usual after a big blowout.

He opened an eye and looked at the nightstand on her side of the bed. He saw what he expected to see. Looking was just a formality, like having the old car towed to the mechanic’s shop for a second opinion instead of the junkyard after one too many breakdowns. He closed the eye again and rolled over, hoping for the sweet embrace of oblivion to take him for a while longer. No such luck.

He got up and padded to the bathroom. The toilet was starting to smell a bit ripe. It would be time to move on today, even if just to the next room down the row in this seedy roadside motel. Without running water, things tended to get a bit stale in the bathroom department. What I wouldn’t give for a hot shower, he thought for the ten thousandth time in the past two years. The bathroom was dim, but there was enough light to catch his own reflection in the mirror and see that his eyes were leaking.

And why not? Roxanne had been with him--or was it he with her?--for eighteen months. Since not long after their new way of life had emerged from the wreckage of the old. They had been born again together into a world of perpetually brown-clouded skies and a sudden excess of everything. Now there were plenty of houses, plenty of cars, and more food and consumer goods than he’d ever imagined. Every TV show he’d ever seen set in a world of zombies or plague was always defined by shortages, with roving gangs of leather-clad murderers ready to do you in and steal what you had in order to get by. He couldn’t see how. If ninety-nine percent of everyone was really dead in those movies, as they were now in his real life, there should be enough canned beans and Twinkies in one grocery store to keep a couple of survivors alive for months. The fresh fruit and meat didn’t last two weeks without power, of course, but if you skipped the fresh or frozen foods and went to the cracker aisle you were good to go. No shortages. He didn’t even carry a gun anymore.

He stepped out of the bathroom and his eyes avoided the nightstand. They saw the dresser instead, devoid of her belongings, which wasn’t much better. She’d left him the crank-operated handheld radio, which was thoughtful but ultimately pointless. He assumed that the President was still conducting his fireside chats, playing house in Washington and somehow running an AM transmitter once a week, but it didn’t matter. At first it had seemed terribly important that the government not “fall,” and that they all “keep a sense of unity,” but after awhile it became clear that a government that didn’t know how many people lived under its jurisdiction, let alone where they were located or what their disposition was, was really just a thought experiment playing out in real time. The United States of America had been an idea held in the minds of a lot of people who lived in close proximity, but Blake had an inkling that it had never really spanned the gaps in between individuals all that well to start with. Everyone had their own thoughts of what America had been or hadn’t, was now or wasn’t, and should or shouldn’t become. Often those people congregated together in like-minded groups, but even within states, counties, cities and neighborhoods, hell, even within homes, those ideas often didn’t translate so well from one person to the next. When ninety-nine out of every one hundred people were gone, then what? Then the idea starts to dissipate like so much dust in the wind, as the poets say. America was dead, and from what he saw before CNN went off the air permanently, there was no nation or continent on Earth that had fared any better.

He wiped his eyes again, and then his nose with the back of his hand. Amazing how much snot the human body could make. He had wandered over to her side of the bed and sat down, just to see if it still had any of her essence in it. They’d only been in this room two days. Nothing had lingered, it seemed, except for what lay on the nightstand. He put a hand over it, and touching the cool metal did as he feared. It gave shape and form to the dawning reality.

They had become fast friends when they met. Back then, the last vestiges of the survivor’s guilt had been clearing from the minds of most of the wandering survivors, and a bit of a mardi gras party atmosphere was emerging whenever they gathered in twos or threes. After all, everyone was gone, and there was nothing to be done about it. It was all over. In the wake of the passing of the materialistic age of capitalism into which the survivors had been born was all the free booze they could want and no work to wake up for in the morning. Older folks started gathering together to try and eke some sort of sustainable farming lifestyle out of the bleak ground that lay fallow under a besmirched sky, but for the young and dumb, every night was Friday night and the weekend lay ahead. There was always time to join a commune once there were no more cans of Hormel’s Original Chili laying around, but until then, party hardy amigos and amigas.

And party hardy they had. They had lived like a king and a queen, staying with any group of survivors they found agreeable and moving on when they felt like it. They stayed out of the cities, wandering for its own sake, taking any car that suited their fancy and driving until it wasn’t fun anymore. They stayed in the biggest and fanciest houses they could find, until that wasn’t fun anymore. They kept up the lifestyle itself until it wasn’t fun anymore, and that had taken well over a year.

But according to Roxanne, something deep inside of a human craves structure and routine. She had stopped taking joy in putting bricks through store windows when the doors could be pried apart just as easily and with less mess. She had stopped giggling when he wrote “Don’t” and “Believing” on the top and bottom, respectively, of every stop sign they passed, with a marker he kept in his back pocket for expressly that purpose. And worst of all, she had stopped drinking as heavily as he was drinking. Once they had sampled every kind of liquor in every store they passed, when all that was left was varieties of dull wine and the cheapest of beers, she had lost a taste for it. She never said anything about him stopping, or tried to change him in the least, and in a way, that ended up being the worst part. Her silence on that subject was louder than any of her screaming on all of the others.

He slid his hand off the nightstand and grasped the silver locket tightly. Of all the jewelry they’d found together, all the diamonds and pearls and ostentatious gold bangles he loved to surprise her with on those occasions when she woke after him in a new town, this is what she had really loved. A simple, heart-shaped locket with a small ruby in the middle. He saw through blurry eyes that there was a small, folded note that had been under the locket, now lying on the floor.

He dreaded that note more than anything he had faced in the past two years. More than burying his parents and his kid sister before leaving San Diego, more than the black Camaro that had nearly run them off the road outside of Dallas before speeding off, more even than the prospect of a life that would most likely end with some insignificant wound becoming infected and leading to painful death by sepsis or lockjaw. He dreaded it because Roxanne was insightful, intelligent, and at times, quite ruthless. She saw the bright, clear line from point A to point B, and if it wasn’t pretty, well, that was just too damn bad.

He saw his hand reach out to pick up the tightly folded note as if it was someone else’s hand. He felt like he was watching the world through a GoPro instead of his own eyes. He opened the note and stared at the short message, written in small, precise letters.

“Blake, I hereby break up with you. Please pay it forward. Love, Roxanne.”

He stared at the note. Then at the locket in his other hand. He blinked.

His eyes found a hole in the wall behind the lamp. It was about the size of a fist, punched cleanly through the drywall and wallpaper. As he looked at the hole, his mind flashed back to the look of rage and hatred he had seen in her eyes the night before, then his gaze fell back to the locket. He extended his arm--it looked like his again--and put the fist holding the locket through the hole. He held it a moment longer, squeezing tightly, and then let it go. It fell to the floor level with a small, insignificant whap.

He set the note on the nightstand, shaking his head like someone trying to get a troublesome fly from the tip of their nose, and rose to his feet. He stuffed what gear he had unpacked back into his bag quickly, leaving a couple of tall glass bottles full of amber liquid on the TV stand, and stepped towards the door. With a hand on the knob, he turned back one final time to look about the room, like any number of others he’d stayed in over the past two years. Maybe he’d put some miles on today instead of just moving to the next room down the line. Maybe it was time for a change, or even a couple of changes.

He had gotten dumped, that was all. It happened to the best of them. It hadn’t happened to him yet, but he was all of twenty years old. There would be other girls, statistically speaking. His girlfriend had dumped him. It wasn’t as if the world had....

He smiled through stiff facial muscles and red eyes, in spite of himself. The world had already ended. It wasn’t as if it could do it again.