Two Bits Production

Fifty-six miles west of Bloom Hill lies Whitesboro, a monument to middle-class malaise. It’s midday and the sun has baked the good intentions out of people. For those that aren’t plundering the dead hoping to find food or water, the easiest answer to the heat is to sit in the shade and pretend that it isn’t slowly killing you even though you watch everyone and everything around you die slow, awful deaths. There were reports that those left in Bloom Hill have rigged up contraptions to circulate cool air for small areas, but it’s mostly speculation heard from unreliable drifters looking to trade false information for food and shelter. Cool air will never happen here again. Acceptance of an unavoidable fate eases the anxiety of it all in some, but not much. For others denial helps. They know they’re doomed. Rumors that the crisis has been averted used to come through town too, although not now. Nothing much comes through this town.
The heat has never been this potent and it will only get worse. Daily it’s harder to breathe. Mr. Johns leans back in his whicker chair on the back porch fanning himself with a once-yellow-folder while he works his left leg around to avoid the sharp parts of the chair that have broken. The sweat from his fingers has stained both the back and the front of the once manila folder to an almost translucent state. There is a newspaper at his feet that tells of the numerous heat-related deaths around the county, but the newspaper is old; there hasn’t been a newspaper for years now but there’s no reason to throw it out. There’s no place to throw it out, garbage pickup has been suspended indefinitely. He used to look down at it and think that they were the lucky ones; she was lucky. They escaped this amplified eternal summer, now it’s a reminder of what’s coming. The paper memorializing them has yellowed on the outside and is bone dry and fragile to the touch. The heat has been here for years now. He now finds time to laugh at how much he hated winter: the shoveling, the ice, the bad driving conditions. Now he’d give anything to remember what a slight chill in the air felt like. He closes his eyes and finds a temporary respite in sleep. Soon he is breathing deeply and the minutes move by quicker; the discomfort of this life temporarily removed from thought.
“Martha!” Adam Johns shouts to the girl in the car. She is young, so young, and vibrant and so is he. The curls of her hair draping one side of her face and she smiles at him. That crooked smile where her lip curled up one side of her face and causes him to lose his stoic control and smile like a kid in a toy store. For years he would always reflect on her ability to pull emotions out of him regardless of how he wanted to act. The dream is partially black and white. Her blonde hair is still in color; always in color, but the landscape loses the deep greens and rich browns more every time. He’s reflected on this often and chalked it up to not remembering those colors anymore, not having seen them in years. Secretly he thinks that it’s a defense mechanism to not torture himself with what will never be again. His mind’s way of being nice to an old man.
When he wakes up he’ll tell her about his dream. He still converses with her. The beautiful thing about being with someone so long is that you know what they would say to you. People called it monotonous and boring, knowing someone so well that nothing surprises you, but for Mr. Johns it meant life. But it doesn’t replace the feeling of being next to someone. Intertwining fingers and entangled bodies is a younger man’s fantasy. But now, he was just lonely. More than anything that he was suffering from the end of the world, he felt the stab of loneliness every day worst than any hunger pang. Their bedroom lay abandoned. He couldn’t bring himself to go in there anymore. The day she died he boarded up the door. An empty gesture performed of grief. The porch had been where they sat and now he mostly just sat on the there with his left arm extended, imagining she would take his hand at any moment. He was so used to being a “them” that he couldn’t remember how to be a “him” anymore. Truthfully he didn’t want to.
The once yellow folder slips from his ancient hands and opens upon the wooden floor. It holds no secrets. The sound of the makeshift fan sliding across the floor interrupts the silence of stale air and wakes him. His pale blue eyes stare daggers at no one in particular and Martha’s name escaping his cracked lips one more time in a dry whisper. For a moment he was in another life; a younger life where he could could afford to be idealistic. Both he and Martha were in their forties and staying in the hospital when reports started flooding the televisions. Black and white pictures showing what smarter people than he called an anomaly, a rip or a tear in our reality; something that shouldn’t exist, but did. Something without explanation. When the anomaly opened to its current size it sent a shockwave around the world. Literally. Power ceased to exist everywhere, gasoline fueled objects exploded and the heat…my god the heat. No one of intelligence thought it was an aggressive attack on us. Just a byproduct of an unfortunate accident. But it didn’t take the sting out of the fact that humanity had just been sentenced. Medications that were abundant before became precious and then became distant memories. Martha lived comfortably for years. Then the medications ran out. Then she lived painfully for a few months.
His breathing had quickened its pace while he dreamed. Awake he takes smaller breaths. He reached down with shaky hands to retrieve the folder from the porch and managed a sliver for his efforts. He was sure that his cursing the floor had taught it a lesson as much as the sliver taught him the same lesson every time he touched the porch. Then again, maybe he just needed to swear at something. It had been three weeks since the last person had gone by. The last wildfire had damned this city to a hastened demise. All the wildlife that had survived up to that point were too exhausted to escape. Most of the city had burned with it and for weeks there was a false snow that wouldn’t melt. Grey ash fell on his porch for days after the fire ran out of things to burn. Now there was only a blackened landscape imprisoning him to starvation.
He takes his time getting up from his ancient chair. Each creak of the chair is echoed by creaks in his bones. Years of sweat leaves a silhouette of his body on the back of the seat. His hand find the railing to assist and a grunt escapes his lips, although he doesn’t remember doing anything that required a grunt. His old body mocks his young mindset and he curses its decay through gritted yellow teeth. His form is emaciated. Food stopped being scarce a few months ago, now you ate whatever you could. His bare feet brush against weeds that have crept up through the wood and died. They crunch less and less every time he steps on them and he is saddened by the thought that they will soon cease to make any distraction from the quiet. He slowly moves down the two stairs, guided by the metal handrail, his hands no longer feeling the burning heat of it until he reaches the barren backyard. He makes his way across the lawn where no grass would grow ever again. There is no color left in the world. There is a giant tree at the end of the yard and like the rest of the earth it had died. But it too was still standing, too stubborn to fall down. Underneath the withered tree is a grave and this is Mr. Johns destination. Slowly he finds his way to her and stands before the marker showing the birth and death of Martha Johns. He holds his hands in front of him as if in prayer, but instead of praying he mimes dropping flowers at the grave. She loved roses so much. He used to think of new ways to surprise her with flowers, but never did he think both he and she would have to use their imagination to see them. He places his right hand on his right leg and uses it to help himself down to one knee. His eyes are wet as if to mock the dry land. He wipes a tear from his eye and presses it against her grave leaving a thumbprint that evaporates immediately. “Soon.” he says. Below her name is his. His preparation has been months in the making. Even the dates are completed because he knows he won’t survive much longer. No one will. But at least he could control this aspect of his death. His only regret is that he won’t be buried next to his Martha. Unless some stranger finds his body and digs him a grave, but he didn’t believe anyone would be through this way. He doesn’t have it in him to dig his own grave.
The wind is dry and hot and void of distractions. It blows his hair forward. Birds were the first noise he noticed were missing. Birds couldn’t survive the heat. They flew off to find cooler air and never came back; probably never made it to where they had hoped. The crickets had died out taking their nightly symphony and leaving an empty stage. The chill that is associated with it doesn’t give a welcome relief to the heat. It just makes it worse.
With the death and desolation of the planet came the creatures. Specters is what people were calling them, when there were still people left to give names to new things. They appeared some time after the tear had formed just wandering around the new wastelands. They looked human, and yet not. The best we could guess is that they were from the other side of the tear and they were trying to “look” human or as some of the folk began hypothesizing was that they were actually ghosts of everyone who died. Mr. Johns just thought they were figments of everyone’s overactive imaginations in the face of an imminent demise. People need to have answers, especially when there are none. But then they started appearing in the streets of Whitesboro and John’s opinion fell apart. Then again there were not many people left to call him on it. The ability of these Specters to interact with the world would seemingly disprove the people thinking they were ghosts, but then again, who knows what a real ghost can do?
He reaches up to his face absent-mindedly and tries to adjust his glasses to see better but quickly remembers they aren’t there anymore and haven’t been for awhile. He gets himself back up to his feet and slowly finds his way to the porch. The fence surrounding his backyard is chest high in the areas that the heat and wind hadn’t destroyed. There never seems to be the time to fix it; too much restin’ to do now. The days of movement were over and the white picket dreams curled up and died with the paint. Their hands shake visibly, like the horizon shimmering in the distance, as they grasp the top of the gate to swing the gate open. No one has figured out why they shake and it frankly doesn’t seem to matter once they show up on your doorstep, but it was damned unnerving to see.
Johns didn’t figure he could outrun them or hide behind the dead tree and hope for a salvation. He learned early in life that you don’t run away from the bullies, he guessed now that that meant the boogieman too. He had resettled into his chair when they made their way in. To see them move up close made him dizzy. Their spasmodic movements were compounded by the fact that if you blinked, they were closer to you than you though although their legs didn’t really move. It was as if they were being projected onto his backyard. He stopped blinking and they stopped moving. He glanced to the makeshift tombstone he had erected for her and their heads followed his gaze down to the ground where Martha slept eternal. “I’d appreciate it if you’d get the hell away from it thank ya very much.” They understood him. They moved. They were nothing if not compliant and cordial. Death always wore a salesman’s face. He let a laugh escape when he thought about how often he imagined what his tombstone would say; something funny or profound he’d hoped, never did he imagine he would make his own and only write his name and a couple of dates. The laugh felt awkward and it flitted away in the heat when he realized there would be no grand grave to mark his passing. He would not rest for eternity next to his wife who had waited patiently in the ground for him. Today he would surrender the life he knew and he would do it gratefully. The beings appear to be communicating with each other. It was unsettling the peace he felt when they did that. They each placed a hand on his shoulder and he closed his eyes. Their hands began to vibrate and soon so did he. Feelings of anger and shame were replaced by halcyon days of past. Martha and he were sitting in his car at a drive-in movie theater. She smiled that ever more beautiful crooked smile at him. A cool breeze moved over and through him.
The chair is empty but rocking vigilantly in the eternal summer breeze. A silhouette is stained on its back. The once yellow folder left on the chair falls to the ground and closes.

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