After the End

Leth forgot the apocalypse again today.

When I come down, he’s already shuffling through the cupboards, looking for the coffee. I tell him we’re out. Never mind that it’s been forty years since either of us has had a cup. I offer to make tea, but he just laughs and says he’s not that desperate; he’ll stop on his way to work.

He likes the chicory tea. He used to hike out to the Goddard’s farm for it special.

We survived the fires and the smoke. We survived the coup. The plague in ’56 and again in ’58. But it’s this, this slow vanishing of our life together that’s going to kill me.

By the time we finish breakfast, Leth’s forgotten his intention to go to work. To the school that doesn’t exist anymore. Leth’s outlived most of his students. I don’t know whether to call it a good day or a bad one when he remembers this.

We take ourselves out to the garden, Leth settled in the Frankenstein chair he salvaged together from a rocker, a barstool, and an end table back when his hands didn’t shake so much. He has a new crossword. The girl doing her best to teach the few kids in town makes them for him. He can’t remember the collapse of modern civilization, but he can remember a twelve-letter word for unruly pupils.

I have weeds to pull. Always more weeds, flimsy green shoots that belie their strangling roots. I yank them up, turning the heavy soil to be sure I’ve captured every thread. The tomatoes are racing up their trellis and the string beans are coming in fat, but I’m worried the cucumbers and melons aren’t getting enough water.

“I miss the snow,” Leth says, tapping his pencil.

“It’s summer,” I say, carefully.

He frowns like he knows that. “I wish we’d ended up somewhere with proper seasons is all.”

I’m not sure if he remembers where we are, so I just nod, the trowel dragging my arm down.

“We can’t have Christmas now,” he says, and I burst out laughing.

“You don’t need snow for Christmas.” It’s sheer relief, this old familiar argument.

He looks at me pointedly. “Yes, you do.”

“What about Hawai’i? Mele Kalikimaka?”

“That was the one exception.”

We’d married in December, so we could spend our honeymoon in Hawai’i over his Christmas break—Spam and snorkeling and tangled white sheets.

“Well, if you’re only going to make one exception,” I say, dusting the dirt off my knees and perching on the arm of his chair. “That’s the one.”

He wraps an arm around my waist and leans against me. He’s still warm and solid.

“It’s all under water now,” he says, sighing.

“I know.” And in that horribly selfish moment, I’m glad he remembers and we can grieve together.

* * *

Leth got confused and tried to call his mother today.

He tears all over the house looking for his phone, accusing me of hiding it. Of reading his texts. Of searching for dating apps.

“Why don’t you trust me?”

I do. I try to tell him. I’ve trusted him with my life more times than I can count. And he’s trusted me. It’s how we made it this far. Trust and silence.

But now he thinks I’m isolating him. Cutting him off from friends and family. “A textbook toxic relationship,” he calls it.

I don’t cry. I haven’t cried in years. Crying would only make him say I’m manipulating him.

Instead, I tell him he lost his phone.

“Don’t you remember? You left it at the bar last night? We were going to go back for it when they open later.”

He pauses mid-rant. His chest is heaving, lungs hardened with age and wild smoke. I wonder if he notices. If he just thinks he’s hungover. He drops the tomatoes he’s been hunting through back into the bowl. The skin’s split on one, pulp oozing out. I can smell the pollen from a broken stem, sharp and dusty.

“Oh, right,” Leth says.

So then we have to go to town. Before we arrive, he’s forgotten about the phone, which is just as well; it’s not like there’s cell service, all those satellites floating like dead eyes around the earth.

At first, I tried to hide what was happening from everyone in town. It was a lesson worn too deep—never to show weakness. And I wasn’t depriving him of care. Our resident doctor was in his first year of medical school when things went south. He never got to neurology or geriatrics.

I shouldn’t have worried. Everyone loves Leth. Everyone always has. I was the corner clinger with the nervous laugh and the sharp, boney jaw. The one who needed Leth to ease the world and me together.

“You should’ve been a cult leader,” I used to tease him.

And he’d deadpan back, “What makes you think I’m not?”

The walk to town used to take ten minutes. It’s doubled now. The road’s more potholes than pavement. We navigate around each opening like kids learning to ice skate, gravel grinding underfoot, threatening to send us spinning down. Neither our shoes nor our balance are what they used to be.

Leth’s quiet; his earlier rage has drained him. His skin seems thin—translucent, like he’s already a ghost. It makes me dizzy to watch him from the corner of my eye, so I grip his arm and concentrate on the grass eating away at everything.

We stripped most of a long country road of houses and built smaller versions closer together. Easier to insulate, to make room for latrines out back, to pump water up from a central well. Easier to defend.

In the center is a one-room schoolhouse and a large hall for community gatherings. There’s also a small, flat structure—the kind of stand where we once would’ve stopped to coo over artisanal jam and raw cheese. Now it serves as an exchange for whatever bits and pieces people might have to offer. A hand-woven blanket courtesy of our two prized sheep or a belt buckle forged from melted-down quarters. The clear jars the brothers from Tallahassee call moonshine are best avoided.

I guide Leth in because it’s shady, and you never know when something really useful will turn up.

“This isn’t…weren’t we…?” Leth stoops under the low eaves, eyes slow to adjust to the murky interior.

I brace for a new accusation, but he only frowns. Lines seem to have etched his face all at once. Or maybe I was just distracted, smoothing my own crow’s feet with my fingers every morning, pretending for just a moment that I recognized the face in our mirror. The glass is old and speckled; it’s easy to see what you want.

I brace for a new accusation, but he only frowns. Lines seem to have etched his face all at once. Or maybe I was just distracted, smoothing my own crow’s feet with my fingers every morning, pretending for just a moment that I recognized the face in our mirror. The glass is old and speckled; it’s easy to see what you want.

“Hey, look. Chloe will love these.”

My stomach falls into the earth. Into a hole I’d thought I’d filled in ages ago.

He’s holding up a pair of butterfly wings. The kind of cheap kid’s costume piece that fluttered around at Halloween and backyard barbeques. Traces of pink and pale green. A few impossible sparkles of glitter still clinging in place. He’s peering at me through the gauzy fabric like he’s won the lottery.

“Put those down,” I say.

“They said she likes Tinkerbell,” he goes on. “She can be a fairy.”

“Put them down.” I’m not yelling exactly, but my voice cracks out like lightning. I can feel Janey who runs the exchange staring at me from across the room.

Leth tosses the wings down. “What’s your problem? You’re turning into one of those parents who doesn’t believe in fun.”

“I’m not.”

“Whatever. I can be the fun one. You can be the control freak.” He flicks a hand at me and moves away along the tables.

I’m frozen in place, pulse crashing like ocean breakers in my ears.

Chloe was our daughter, except she never was.

The adoption paperwork had all been filed, the home visits completed, everything finalized. For weeks we’d been filling the house up with things “Chloe would love.” We had six days to go, a big countdown to her arrival on the fridge. And then the world came apart at the seams. We never found out what happened to her.

I drag myself across the room because I can’t look at Leth right now.

“Sorry,” I mutter to Janey.

She gives me an uncomfortable smile. “Don’t worry.” She waits a beat too long before adding, “It must be hard.”

I’ve heard that a lot recently. Sympathy carefully measured, like a precious teaspoon of salt. I understand. No one can spare much these days.

“Where’d all that come from anyway?” I ask. I only noticed a checkered mailbox and a pair of brass doorknobs before Leth picked up the wings, but it’s not the usual homemade goods.

“Viv’s kids got that truck running. They’re moving down the road,” she raises one shoulder. “Maybe further.”

There’s another town about fifty miles away—a blink of a distance before, a three-day gulf now. Sometimes our people go there, sometimes their people come here, especially the young ones. The reasons are always vague. Neither place seems better supplied or protected. There’s been no violence that I’ve heard of. But people are still people, gazing at the horizon.

I wonder what it’d be like, starting again in a new house. A house without Leth’s chair. Without the scrape of his pencil on the crossword or the smell of his socks. Without a patch of snarled, wrinkled vines in the garden.

Why stop at the next town? Maybe further, she said. I could find the new edges of the map. Breathe different air.

How many years could I keep Leth alive out there? The Leth of my memory. Young and fast and smiling? How much easier would it be to hold on to that man without this one in front of me? I close my eyes and I can almost feel his hand in mine, tugging me up some mountain I never wanted to climb where the view will be worth it. He was always right back then, and I was always glad.

“I want to go home,” Leth says. He’s drifted up to my side without me noticing, and his fingers on my elbow make me flinch. The musty air of the exchange comes rushing back. Janey’s sunburnt nose and the chicken-scratching sounds of the town.

I want to tell Leth to wait while I go have a quiet word with Viv’s kids. They won’t question me. If no one has much sympathy to spare, they also don’t have much judgement. We’ve all done things. We’ve run out of stones to throw.

I guide Leth a few steps away from Janey’s table. His eyes have always reminded me of summer rain, but when I meet them today, I just see clouds.

“Leth—”

“I’m sorry. Let’s just go home.”

My breath goes out. Once. Twice.

“Okay,” I say, not knowing what home he thinks we’re going to. I’m not sure it matters. There’s only the one, after all.

* * *

Leth asked me to marry him again today. I said yes. Of course I did.

He’s so happy making plans. He wants to have it at the fancy hotel they restored downtown. The one with the gaslight chandeliers. We’ll make it a 1920s theme. Force the whole wedding party to take swing dancing lessons.

I stand in the kitchen washing dishes, listening to him tick off a hypothetical guest list and I hate him. Hate him for still living in a world where all those people are alive. Where they’ve yet to dance at our wedding. Where that fancy hotel is still standing, demanding exorbitant security deposits.

I hate him for having all of the for better and leaving me with the for worse.

“Would nips in the favors be classy or trashy?” he asks.

I nearly throw the plate I’m washing across the room. Something needs to shatter, but plates aren’t easy to come by anymore. I place it carefully on the counter and reach for the towel that used to be Leth’s shirt.

“Let’s sit out back,” I say. “It’s nice out.”

It’s not. I saw the yellow flag go up in town—air quality dicey. We can’t smell it, but there’s that thick feeling, the one that sticks in the throat and lets you know somewhere, not too near, somebody’s world is burning again.

He sits in his chair, and I sit on the rough porch planks. He runs his fingers through my hair. I wonder if he feels thick brown curls or the thinning, gray strands.

“It’s going to be amazing,” he says.

“It’s going to be on a budget,” I say, trying to play the game. To remember what it was like the first time.

He laughs, flicks my ear. “Not the wedding. Being married. Being married to you is going to be the best thing I ever do.”

Being married was fleeing across lines even as they dissolved off the map. It was the starving people he stole from. The teenager I stabbed in the thigh for a bottle of antibiotics because I’d lost everything else, I wasn’t going to lose Leth. The look in Leth’s eyes when he saw the bloodstains on my shirt.

“Yes,” I say, reaching up to weave our fingers together, holding our joined hands against my shoulder. “It’s going to be amazing.”

“Are you happy?” he asks. His tone has changed. Maybe he’s drifted further away, to a life where we’ve retired to the country. Or maybe the truth has caught him like a door cracking open in the night, a thin streak of light lancing across the bed.

“If I wasn’t, you’d know,” I say as brightly as I can. Teasing him like I always used to.
My throat is starting to burn. We really should go in; this air can’t be good for either of us.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“For what?” I can hear the frown in his voice, though I’m staring straight ahead at the dead patch of cucumber vines.

“You’ll think of something,” I say.

“Nah. You’re perfect.”

I’m not. I’m angry. I’m scared. And I’ve killed those poor cucumbers somehow. I didn’t mean to, but I’m going to have to pull them out all the same. I don’t know where I’ll find new seeds.

I tighten my grip on Leth’s fingers. Both our hands are cracked and scarred. But he only seems to feel smooth, firm skin. He’ll die like that, not knowing he’s lived his whole life. Not knowing that I was there with him for most of it.

I’ll be left, sitting on this porch, breathing the air of a ruined world, remembering for both of us.

“Wildflower seeds,” I say.

“What?”

“For the favors. We’ll give them each a packet of wildflower seeds.”

Leth smiles. “I like that. Let’s remember that.”