by Cara Coe
“My mom left when I was seven,” I started and I swear, I could feel him sober up on his end, knowing I was about to extend something fragile to him. “She just didn’t want a family anymore. I remember I was sent to the school counselor right after it happened to talk about what I was feeling. I talked about riding bikes and watching Wheel of Fortune with my dad and my friend Carla down the street who got a new hula hoop and let me use it whenever I wanted. I remember the counselor’s face the whole time, looking at me like I had a horn growing out of my forehead. And she said, ‘Why aren’t you crying? Aren’t you sad? Why aren’t you sad?’ and I didn’t know what to tell her. I felt like I was doing something wrong.
“But the truth is, the truth I know now, is that kind of sadness can drown you. And sometimes, you have to not feel it. When The Sweep happened and everybody around me died and no one was here, it was devastating. A normal person would be sad. But I wasn’t. And there was no one here to care that I wasn’t or say than I’m a sociopath or try to make me cry over it. I’m really happy that it’s okay not to be sad.”
He was silent for too many heartbeats and I wondered if I made a mistake with my honesty.
“I thought you were going to say your dogs,” he responded finally.
I pursed my lips. “I was.”
“I’m glad you didn’t, Evie.”
Chapter 8
Her
I painted.
After I came out of my prescription pill stupor, I realized I needed to do something or else I risked falling back into another one. I needed a purpose. A reason to live. Day-to-day activities with an end goal in mind.
That’s when I started “attending” the University of Arizona. Psychology became an interest of mine that was soon eclipsed by sociology. I started out trying to pick my own brain. Trying to cure my own depression. Trying to make sense of my new reality. But it spiraled into a major question: How does a person robbed of society function? I began to study the social science, finding it fascinating and horrifying at the same time.
By nature, humans are social. I was destined to wither away. I was unable to define myself because I had no one with which to measure that definition. I was nothing because I had no one to be something to.
I refused to believe I was it. I had to hope there was another lost soul out there or else what was the point of my existence? So before there were daily pop song phone calls, there was painting.
The dogs and I would canvas neighborhoods, scouting homes. When I found a safe one (meaning probably no rotting corpse to greet me inside), I explored its hearth. I learned about the occupants. I studied their last moments. One house had a box of Wheaties sitting open on the table with a bowl and two spoons. An untimely end most likely. Ran outside to investigate some funny business perhaps and got clocked by one of the gangs or received terrible news and never made it back home.
Another house had all the preparations of death in the home. Good bye letters, a rosary laid out on a pillow, everything tucked neatly into place.
I poked through personal belongings, read yearbooks, laid out outfits from their closets on the bed. I poured through photo albums and I sat in the driver’s seat of their cars. I spent hours, sometimes days in the shoes of their lives.
And then I painted.
I told their story in strokes of color, adding images that repeated in their mementos. Gloria loved daisies. I saw patterns of it in her wallpaper, they dotted her dinnerware, she doodled them in her journal. I wore her daisy barrette as I painted her life in loud blues over softer ones. She was a dreamer. She read stories about horses and falling in love, she worked as a graphic designer. She kept ticket stubs and flower cards from first dates with small notes on what she thought of them. Sadly, I didn’t see evidence that one of the men stuck. She loved her mother and her brother, both of whom lived in Seattle. Her friends were plentiful. Her refrigerator calendar had held a full schedule in the earlier months before the dates dropped off in all the melee of The Sweep. She even doodled daisies there, in the corners of February and March. Her journal revealed ambitions and what-ifs and happily-ever-afters. She was beautiful: late twenties, light blonde, a lithe figure that could’ve gotten lost in the chaos when the days were grim.
When I completed her painting, I hung it over the mantle of her fake fireplace in the center of her home. I stamped this place with her essence. I tried to do her life justice.
I felt peaceful. If anyone ever walked through this home again, they could see my interpretation of Gloria.
This is how I spent my days and sometimes I almost forgot I was alone. These people I experienced were so real to me, it felt like they were out shopping or at work and they could come home any minute and find me snooping. When the painting was done, I left and I never came back. It was for someone else to discover.
Chapter 9
Her
“I’m Picard, you’re Riker.”
I huffed indignantly. “Why can’t I be the captain?”
“Because you’re Number One.”
I scowled. Clever play on Picard’s nickname for his first officer. “Are you ready yet?” I asked, choosing to change the subject rather than concede that he had me stumped for a comeback.
“Wait. Got it. I have season three. Which one are we watching again?”
I could hear him shuffling around.
“The last one. The Best of Both Worlds part one.”
“Why in Zeus’ butthole are we bypassing the entire season and watching the finale?”
“You can’t mix The Rock quotes with Star Trek hour.”
“I can do whatever I want now. You’re still going to call me tomorrow. I got you hooked.”
“Whatever, P. This is my favorite episode in the whole series. The writer wrote it without an ending. He just decided Picard was going to be kidnapped, Borg-i-fied, and then he dropped the mic and said ‘Peace out!’ and left everyone else to figure out how to write a conclusion to that mess of problems.”
His laughter caused my stomach to do the somersault it always does when I hear that sound. I loved being the cause of it. “Didn’t he end up coming back and writing the season four opener anyway?” he mused.
“Yep. Which makes that episode my second most favorite TNG episode.”
“You are a piece of work, Riker,” he muttered affectionately.
“Do you have your popcorn ready?” I asked, ignoring the way my stomach knotted again nervously at the way his voice changed. Jeezy creezy, I was all over the place today.
“Yeah. A corner of it burnt though so the taste has polluted the whole bag.” His voice was normal again. “I haven’t popped a microwave bag in years.”
“Just hit the popcorn button on the microwave.”
“I did. It lied.”
I told him to hush and eat his burnt popcorn after that because the DVD started playing. But then I had to pause it and wait for his DVD to catch up and it took three tries of pausing and pressing play on “One, two, three, GO!” before we had our respective episodes as synced as they were going to get.
Even though I knew how every minute of this episode played out, it felt new as I watched it silently with him on the other end of the phone. His hitched breath I heard from moments he’d forgotten (I was the more avid Star Trek fan) were like sprinkling parmesan on day old bread. The experience was fresh and pungent with the addition.
When it ended, I eagerly asked him, “Best of Both Worlds part two?”
He sounded regretful. “Tomorrow. I haven’t been to the lab yet and if I don’t get my reluctant ass down there, I’ll have wacky readings on my results.”
I held back a dissatisfied grunt. I wished I had something more meaningful to spend my time on. I’d learned more about his research in our conversations. He was studying the different mutated viruses to find out how they changed so quickly and trying to develop a cure against future mutations. Suddenly, studying and painting peoples’ stories seemed pointless. My ears flamed at the thought of him c
omparing how we’ll be spending the remainders of our day. His trying to sort out the cure for The Sweep, mine picking through a stranger’s medicine cabinet and splashing color on canvases.
“Are you going to go paint?” he asked, breaking into my thoughts. Practically reading them, actually.
I shrugged with a sense of defensiveness crawling through my body. “Yeah,” I responded more forcefully than I intended. “Probably.”
“I’d love to see them one day.”
That took some of the edge off my defensiveness. “Maybe one day I’ll paint yours.”
“But I’m not gone.”
A low snort escaped me. “That doesn’t make me any less snoopy.”
“But that does set our names for tomorrow. Snoopy.”
“Okay, Woodstock.”
He laughed. “Talk to you tomorrow.”
Chapter 10
Her
I lived in Tuscon my entire life. It was always dusted in a dry heat and I loved it. My tan skin grew into a richer brown in the rays. Tank top season forged well into October. The sun shined for hours on end, uninterrupted and unwavering in its attention. Sure, the ground chapped and cracked with the constant heat and moisture evaporated from the air as quickly as it appeared but it was little bother to the natives. A little bit of central AC, some fine assemblies of rock gardens in lieu of lawns, and no one even missed the lack of water.
It was also believed that the vampire population was scarce in these parts. The southwest region of the United States provided little cloud cover, shade, or friendly terrain to the creatures. So we were apparently devoid of them and their vampy offspring.
Still, I’m pretty sure I came across a vamp once in The Before. I was at the Gail Spring Mall where I’d set up the domino extraordinaire before it was a ghost town of shoe shops and clothing stores. I was gnawing on a pretzel dog when I passed by a little square table. She was alone. Her hands were folded in front of her, not a crumb on her table, and her eyes were fixed out the window to the parking lot below. In the moment I passed her, she turned and we made eye contact.
She looked hungry. That’s the only way to describe it. The expression pounded in my head. I felt my adrenaline spike – my body knew I was within striking distance of a predator before my brain could sort out the facts.
The exchange passed in an instant. She got up and left and I continued walking towards my friend Tina who’d already secured a table several rows away. The woman looked like any other forty-something suburbanite. She could have been a soccer mom or a principal or an engineer shopping for a gift for her husband. She could have been anything, seamlessly fitting in with everyone else. The prickling of my skin was the only indication that she was different and even that faded as Tina babbled on about her GAP dollars and how she planned to maximize them.
Tina would later be the first of my friends to die. My sorrow would hang heavy for her because I hadn’t been inundated with death yet and I’d remember this exact conversation because it turned out to be our last. I had gotten busy with midterms and art classes after school and I’d started dating this guy Aaron who was taking up more of my time.
I mentioned the possible vamp sighting to my dad over preparations for a spaghetti dinner that night. As I slathered butter over a cut baguette for garlic toast, I casually dropped, “I think I saw a vamp today. At the mall.”
My dad was standing over the pot of marinara with the tasting spoon halfway to his mouth when he froze at my words. He lowered it and turned to look at me. My dad always made full eye contact when he had something serious to say.
“Did you call Containment?”
I fidgeted. “I wasn’t sure. I didn’t see, like, fangs or anything. I just had a feeling.”
“You have a feeling, you call Containment. Let them sort it out.”
I’d heard stories of how Containment “sorted it out.” Questioning. DNA testing. Loved ones, family members, friends who never came back. The government didn’t just kill vamps, they rounded up any citizens that aided in their hiding among us.
My dad still stared intently at me so I quietly answered, “Okay” and sprinkled garlic powder and Italian herbs over the bread.
My dad could not stand vamps. He watched the militaries all over the world, the different countries that used to fight each other, band together against vampires once the extent of their existence was discovered.
“Now there’s a cause worth fighting for,” he’d praise. “They think they can just feed on us. Serve us on a platter for their nourishment? Those vamps got another thing coming.”
As we sat down to dinner, my father sensed my unease and reached out to grasp my hand.
“They look like us, but they’re not us,” he said quietly and I nodded. He continued. “I know you have a big heart but you need a cautious one, too. You’re my baby girl. You’re all I have in the world. And I’m going to protect you from everything I can. Containment knows how to handle vamp situations. Next time, call them. These vamps need to be flushed out once and for all.”
When he was on his deathbed, witnessing all the horror unfolding around us, his vehemence for vampires and their hybrid offspring grew. Mine did too. I would watch the news footage while it aired sporadically, nurturing a growing hate for everything my world was becoming. The destruction and the death toll and the loss rained down on my head. I didn’t cry. I hardened.
Burying my father in the backyard took all day. I could’ve called Sweep Services but they had a tendency to take weeks to respond, if at all, due to the growing demand and the death of their own staffers. After I patted down the last of the dirt on his shallow grave, I shuddered with something that may have resembled crying except there were no tears.
There was only anger. It was an easier emotion to carry. But only when there was a target. And I had one.
Chapter 11
Her
He likes the Four Seasons and Led Zepplin and Modest Mouse. He used to watch crime
dramas like Law and Order and NCIS. Once, he found a cop car and spun out around corners with the siren wailing in a small town in Oklahoma. He can roller skate. He went to a zoo during the worst of The Sweep and regretted it when he saw most of the animals dead in their habitats. Unable to escape, they slowly starved to death. Except the tiger. The tiger was missing and he kept looking over his shoulder as he ran for the entrance. He never knew his grandfather and his father left when he was eight. He grew up surrounded by three generations of women: his grandmother, his mom, and his twin sister.
I soaked up these details as he talked, winding phone cords around my fingers and playing
with the shoelaces of my boots or carving my name in someone’s coffee table. Everyday I called him after I finished my morning chores. It’s unspoken, but two o’clock has become our hour. He always answers and I’m never late in dialing. I became things again I am not able to be alone. I’m funny. He laughs a lot at my quips. I’m annoying. I’ve learned to recognize the puff of air that he huffs out when he’s irritated. I’m important. He always picks up by the second ring, indicating to me that he was next to the phone, waiting for the call. He scheduled me into his day. He made deliberate decisions to ensure we have our hour.
I am something to someone.
It felt good.
Chapter 12
Her
I slept with Brock Olsen after dating him for three months. He was a senior in high school and I was a junior. Everything about him put him out of my reach: he was the power forward on the basketball team. He had a barely there afro cropped short on his head, biceps that could bench my weight bulged his arms, and he had a goatee he teased school administration with. He kept it just long enough to irritate them but not so prominent that it needed to be shaved to meet school dress code. Girls swooned in the hallways and I heart Brock was scribbled inside more than a few lockers.
It was a classic, story book pairing in Chemistry class. I was a year ahead in math and science so I sat in on the senior classes
. Alphabetical order destined us lab partners and by the beginning of summer, we were a thing. I was not as pretty as his former conquests but four months of my wit had me on his mind all day.
That’s what he told me.
“You’re on my mind all day. I’ve never met a chick as funny as you.”
Well, that’s basically poetry to a sixteen year old girl who’d never had a boyfriend. Landing Brock was like striking gold on the first dig. But he didn’t make his move right away. We lab partnered until the end of the school year and I left my junior year with a heavy heart knowing that our flirtatious friendship or whatever it was would never come to anything. He was leaving for college and I felt stupid for thinking that maybe we could have been together.
But that first day of summer, I got a text message from him asking to meet me at the mall. He bought me a sno cone. We shopped for shoes. We walked around in the small city park at the end of Restaurant Row which had scores of places to eat with their dining rooms spilling out onto patios between the park and the mall. He kissed me before helping me into my car and asked to see me again tomorrow.
For the rest of the summer, it was me and Brock. Mostly me and Brock. Maybe more like half the time it was me and Brock. I was one of those girls who didn’t drop all her friends because some popular boy batted eyes at her. Well, I hoped I was one of those friends. Truthfully, Brock had a lot of preparation to do before starting school. He had an out of state scholarship for basketball and he was still putting in a lot of practice time over the summer to keep his skills sharp.
On his last day in Tucson, about two weeks before I went back to school, Brock was in my room. My dad was at work and we had the day to ourselves. I was wearing a bracelet Brock had given to me for my birthday four days ago and I was feeling particularly smitten with him so I hadn’t minded when we left our usual perch on the living room couch to settle in my bedroom instead. Our make out session was spiraling quickly and Brock’s hand had found its way into my underwear. I felt one of his long fingers brush inside me and I pulled away from our kiss in shock.