Writing by Matthew Thompsen
Today wouldn’t be much different from any other day; it never was. Time had blurred so much that he could no longer tell what year it was. The weather had become so erratic that seasons no longer had any meaning. He got out of his bed with mechanical efficiency and checked his food stores. Today would be a grocery day. He needed a special suit the government had issued to protect against toxins to go outside. The government was long gone, and he didn’t know if the suit worked anymore. Perhaps the aches in his body were from age, or perhaps they were from a creeping poison.
He prepared himself a spare breakfast, just some canned sausage and a few slices of tomato from his garden. He mostly maintained the garden out of boredom. There were still plenty of canned vegetables at the local supermarkets, but if he didn’t have the garden to work on he’d just end up sitting around the house doing nothing. He’d moved into a nice, big apartment building after everything had collapsed that had a decent-sized courtyard that he grew things in. It didn’t yield him much food, and he could feel his motivation to maintain it slipping away.
He’d hoped the garden would keep his spirits up, but it just seemed to be the last thing to fall away. He had taken some efforts to keep his apartment clean when he’d first moved in, but he eventually figured that there wasn’t any point to it. No one left to impress. So, he’d just let the apartment get dirtier and dirtier. Whenever one room got too filthy he’d move to the next one. By now, however, he’d gone through all the rooms in the complex, so he just did his best to avoid it. He rarely took off his shoes because of how dirty the floors were.
He paused for a long moment in the middle of pulling his boots on, already a notable deviation from his routine, and he wondered why he bothered keeping himself alive. It was hard to say when the last time he had seen another person was, but it must have been years. For all he knew there wasn’t another person alive on the whole planet. It didn’t seem to matter much if he died today or ten years from now if he was the last person alive. He didn’t much like this train of thought, so he shoved it into the back of his mind where it could be safely stored for a certain amount of time, hopefully forever.
Once he was all suited up, he unlocked the door to the mansion he’d made his home and stepped outside. The scene outside had at one point been a suburban neighborhood, but was now so overgrown with ashy gray plants that it’d be hard to make out the houses underneath. A blood red sky, clouded by smog, hung overhead. The corpses of two creatures that might have once been dogs lay in a nearby alleyway, their throats torn out.
He couldn’t say when it had begun to go to shit. It had started so long ago that he doubted he could have done anything. Perhaps it had started before he had been born. It was unlikely that anyone could have said where it began with any confidence, and he vehemently believed that anyone who would claim to was either deluded or a conman. Pollution, natural disasters, wars both civil and otherwise. A web of causes and effects so complex that there could have been entire fields dedicated to studying it, if there was anyone left to do the studying. He’d never paid much attention to the goings on of the world before it had ended and it didn’t seem like there was much point in learning now. It was funny. Back in the day, everyone had been worried about nuclear annihilation, but the real apocalypse had been much slower and more insidious than a big bomb. It hadn’t come bursting in the room declaring its intentions for all to hear. It had been a patient predator, stalking them quietly for years, decades, centuries even until, by the time anyone realized it was there, it was already breathing down their necks. The world hadn’t ended so much as it had unraveled.
He didn’t enjoy going outside, didn’t like seeing the world’s dead husk, but he needed to eat. He had to make regular trips through the city to bring back extra food from the abandoned grocery stores. Most of it had rotted long ago, but the canned stuff was good practically forever. He was always shocked by how long a supermarket’s worth of food could last when it all went to feeding one person. Still, he’d been at it for a while and had emptied out quite a few of them. Only the marts on the far side of the city had anything left in them, and it now took him most of a day to make a round trip. He knew he’d have to make the move to the next city over sooner or later, but the effort of making it didn’t seem worth it. There was also the lingering thought that he might not like what he found. If he stayed hidden in his little corner of the world, he could maintain the illusion that there might be someone else out there. If he went out into the wider world and was unable to find anyone he didn’t know what he would do.
As he shoveled cans of food into the bags he had brought, he found his mind wandering. He usually tried to avoid that. Thinking didn’t do him much good. But now his mind went to how the world had gotten this way. Could things have been different? Perhaps. Perhaps if the government had been more willing to take action. Perhaps if corporations were a bit more compassionate. Perhaps if society had been structured differently. Perhaps if people had cared more. Perhaps if he had cared more. Perhaps if he’d been born earlier. Perhaps if he’d bothered to learn anything about the problem before it had gotten this bad. Perhaps if he’d done anything to prevent this.
He stumbled out of the grocery store, the ache in his arms was somehow worse, the weight somehow heavier. Just as he was exiting the store, the plastic bags ripped, sending his stockpile of canned foods scattering across the parking lot. He stared at the food strewn across the pavement for a moment before tossing the bags aside and bending down to pick up the metal cans. As he crouched over, he noticed some broken glass by the side of the road. He picked it up and examined it. He was going to die sooner or later. Might as well be sooner. It’d be messy, but it would do.
Just as he put the glass shard up to his throat, a hummingbird flew down and landed on a broken-down car right next to him.
“Hello,” he said. His voice was rough and scratchy from disuse.
It cocked its head at him. Its coat was shiny and pristine, full of vibrant color, as though it hadn’t spent what must have been its entire life in the hellhole the world had become. He wondered how it had survived. Hummingbirds needed to feed almost constantly; he was sure he had heard that somewhere. By all rights hummingbirds should have been some of the first creatures to go. Yet here it was, pristine and perfect as if it had been pulled straight out of the past.
It fluttered its wings and flew off into the smog-clouded sky. He took a few steps after it, dropping the glass shard, before stopping. He wouldn’t have been able to keep up with it, and even if he could, he didn’t have time to go running around after it. He looked over at the groceries he’d left on the ground and started picking them back up.
He was still thinking about the hummingbird when he got back to the apartment. He set down his groceries and looked at his bed, still unmade from the morning. He set about making it. It was a sloppy job, but he couldn’t help but feel a kind of satisfaction at having done it. Once he had done that, he decided to sweep the floor. He cleaned as best he could without a vacuum and threw out most of his rugs, and then decided that he would make himself a proper meal out of the food he had brought back. He hadn’t cooked anything in years. At most he just heated up some canned food soup in an impromptu fireplace he’d made. The meal wasn’t fantastic; there was only so much he could do with canned ingredients, but compared to what he usually ate it tasted incredible. He’d never really had the energy or the motivation to cook anything, but now he felt a strange energy pulsing through him. It was the hummingbird, he knew, that gave him this revitalization, but as much as he pondered it, he couldn’t figure out why. Perhaps it was that it had been a reminder of his previous life. Perhaps it was because it was that such a fragile creature had managed to survive in such a harsh world. Perhaps it was that he had survived, just like it. Perhaps it meant that there was still something out there in the world worth fighting for. Perhaps it wasn’t as dead as he thought. Perhaps this wasn’t the end he had thought it was. Perhaps.
