by Dianna Sinovic
I found the rooftop garden because of Captain America. We’ve become close friends, he and I. He depends on me for fresh greens, and I depend on him to keep me from taking a step off the ledge.
It’s the silence that unnerves me. Not absolute silence: The city, even when vacant of residents, talks to itself with squeaks and thuds and pops. But when you’re used to the never-ending cacophony of car horns, delivery truck rumbles and the shrilling of cell phones, this new quietness gnaws at your soul.
Except for me and the Captain on the sixth floor, no one else is left in this building. I guess you could say I’m foolish. When everyone else was fleeing, I could have gone with them; followed them into the elevator, down the sidewalk, onto the M line, and eventually out into Jersey. I’d heard the announcement. The one that played over and over, blasting on the TV, our phones, through the streets: We needed to leave; it was critical to do so; the unthinkable had happened.
Instead, I watched the evacuation from my tiny balcony. The street was gridlocked with traffic, and the sidewalks packed. It was a slow-moving river of humanity flowing ceaselessly to the west.
Javier, from down the hall, tried to persuade me to leave.
“Dios mío, you’ll die.” He had two overfull bags slung on his shoulders and a third in his hand. “You can’t stay.”
When I just shook my head—I had no words to share—he shrugged and vanished into the elevator.
I couldn’t think about Brad. He’d been on a two-month tour across Europe. My last string of texts to him had gone unanswered.
Why did I remain? I’ve chewed on that one for the six weeks since, and I don’t have an answer, except that I don’t want to die. Or rather, I don’t want to die in some forgotten Jersey town where I know no one, versus dying here, on the sixth floor, where I know each crack in the ceiling plaster.
The electricity blinked off citywide six weeks ago, but the evenings aren’t as dark as you’d think. There’s the residual glow in the sky long after sunset, and the ants that crawl along the windowsill in the kitchen give off a greenish hue, like those plastic glow sticks kids wear around their wrists at birthday parties—or used to, before. The Captain is crepuscular, so he rustles around just at dusk, but then falls fast asleep as I watch the clouds on the horizon with wide eyes, such an unnatural pink against the faint sprinkle of stars. Stars that weren’t ever visible from my window, before.
Before, I sometimes had to turn on my white noise app at night to mask the street traffic and my neighbor Javier’s blasting salsa music. Now the few sounds are the distant whine of a massive piece of machinery spinning into oblivion, fed by its emergency generator, and the thumps and rattles of my building, trying to decide how much longer it will remain upright.
The evening is my favorite time of day now. Before, I lived for the morning, up ahead of the alarm, out the door, at work in my cubicle in the financial district a few minutes before eight. Daytime reminds me of everything I no longer have–that the city no longer has. Maybe even beyond? It’s hard to say. With no juice to charge my phone, it’s been dead for weeks. That hardly matters because I lost coverage within twenty-four hours. My parents live in Florida; maybe all is well there. I wish I could check, but there’s no way to know.
For some freakish reason, the plumbing still works. When life was normal, leaky faucets and cold showers were the stuff I commiserated about with my friends. Now, I wake each morning worried that the toilet will at last stop cycling or that my kitchen tap will run dry. But they keep on filling and pouring.
Once they do quit, I’ll need to leave this place. I’ve been living on canned food, heating it on my tiny balcony with the mini Weber grill I hardly ever used, before. Without electricity, my fridge isn’t much help to store perishables. In the beginning, I helped myself to the romaine and tomatoes and strawberries at the corner market; with no one around, there was no use letting it go to waste. But that has long rotted.
Yesterday, I ventured back out to forage for canned goods and charcoal; any food in packages not made of metal has been eaten or contaminated by rodents. The small grocery three blocks over has a decent selection of tins—but three blocks! It’s decidedly creepy to crawl through the debris of a dead city—no cars passing, no people yelling into their phones, no trucks groaning to collect the garbage left decomposing at curbside. I brought my cloth bags and cautiously walked the distance to the store. Sometimes I swear I can hear others’ voices nearby, and I turn eagerly, yet terrified. So far, no one has ever appeared, and I chalk up the sensation to a brain so used to—so starved for—sensory input, it manufactures the sound out of thin air.
The latest trip out will keep me going for a good week: cans of beef stew and chicken soup and jars of olives and roasted red peppers. Before, you couldn’t pay me to eat a bowl of beef stew or pick up a pickled beet. Hunger changed my mind with little coaxing.
As for the Captain, he isn’t mine. Captain America isn’t his real name either. He lived on the fourth floor, and I found him in the first few days after. Guinea pigs whistle when they’re hungry or need something, and he was setting up a racket I could hear from my sixth-floor window.
I went searching, taking the stairs, of course, since the elevators ran on the energy grid. Going door to door, I looked and listened. No one’s door was locked, an unthinkable circumstance, before. I could have looted any of the apartments, but what did I need with more gadgets and appliances that would just gather (glowing) dust as they sat on my shelves? I had that already.
The Captain wasn’t on the fifth floor, and he wasn’t on the seventh. But on the fourth, the search ended with the second door I tried. He was sitting in a 2-foot wire cage in a bedroom. He shrieked, looking at me with big, soulful eyes (and big teeth), and I picked him up, his tawny fur as soft as a kitten’s.
“Hello, there, Captain,” I whispered.
It was another living thing, not counting the immortal ants and roaches. I was still having trouble grasping that I now lived in a ghost town once home to millions of people. How could that huge exodus have been possible?
Cuddling the Captain, my delight of discovery was short-lived. What did I know about guinea pigs? My mother kept a parakeet when I was a child. When the bird was in a good mood, it would chatter “Who are you” over and over.
A city branch library is about five blocks from my building, so reluctantly I went looking for a guide book to small mammals, a tough hunt given that the online catalog was offline and the lights were out. If you need to know, guinea pig books are in section 636.9—along with books on other small pets like rabbits and hamsters. What I learned made my heart ache. The Captain was a vegetarian and thrived on fresh greens. Even a few days into the after, I knew I would soon run out of anything to feed him.
Desperate to find a solution, I worked my way through the building, starting at the ground floor. I don’t know what I hoped to find, but the search gave me something to do, something that took me away from his pleading eyes. And I did find several heads of cabbage on my rounds. When I reached the eighth and last floor, the entrance to the building roof beckoned.
As I popped open the steel door, the earthy scent of soil washed over me and there it was: Three long aisles containing flat after flat of lettuces, cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, and more lettuce. I stood for several minutes, not believing my find.
I stepped to the roof’s wall to peer over. Before, I liked looking out onto the courtyard between my building and the next one, where an older fellow named Pete raised tomatoes and squash and tried to keep the squirrels from taking bites out of them. The courtyard floor now lies abandoned. Pete and the squirrels had disappeared along with the pigeons.
I turned back to the flats, and pondered the yin and yang of the moment, or perhaps the absurdity. The wind picked up and a pelting rain fell, the first since before. I felt both drenched to the bone and refreshed, watching as the droplets ran down the lettuce leaves and dripped off the ends, exuding a faint bluish glow even by the light of day. My arms and legs—and likely my head—also glowed faintly in the dampness.
Later, with the Captain asleep and night descending, I pondered this new world where the sky was pink and the rain was blue. A line had been drawn for humanity. What would I find if the Captain and I finally struck out from the city? Would we meet masses of people who had fled … or no one? Or maybe, I thought, I’m crazy, and the world is still normal, but I just can’t see it.
###
It is now day forty after, forty empty days and forty empty nights. With my phone dead, I have no way to see Brad’s face, a memory that’s already dimming. We’d been together nearly a year, before.
The paper calendar I created in the first week after hangs above my bed, each day’s passage marked with a dark purple sharpie I found in apartment 3E. Purple, the color of repentance … or congealed blood.
I have a recurring dream in which I’m walking in a crowd, people in suits, in workout clothes, in high and low fashion, pressing at me. We are all walking together toward a destination, but I don’t know what it is. And the swell of bodies is so dense that I’m lifted off my feet and carried along with what feels like a swarm. There is laughter and conversation. Instead of my panicking, the energy coursing through the crowd fills me with such hope. I turn my head up to the sky and see that it is blue, the blue I remember, the blue of promise and peace.
And then I wake, alone in my bed.
On this day of forty, I am harvesting more romaine leaves and anxiously watching the new shoots I have planted poke out from the soil. The harvest will be bountiful; apparently I have green thumbs. Or perhaps lettuce needs little input from me to flourish. Now well-fed, the Captain seems content, which pleases me—there is little pleasure in each day beyond the fact that he and I are both still alive.
Then I hear someone. They are walking on the street below, whistling. Am I imaging this, as I often do?
I hurry to the roof edge to listen—it’s an old folk song, “For the Times They Are A-Changin’.”
Despite our catastrophic reality, a sense of humor. I haven’t laughed in such a long time.
“Hey,” I shout, but he doesn’t look up, doesn’t seem to hear me. I shout again, but hunger drives me to action. A hunger not sated by canned soup or crisp lettuce.
I run for the stairs—eight flights to street level—will I make it before he’s gone? I take the steps two at a time, then three. The Captain and I are not alone after all.
Dianna Sinovic is an author of speculative fiction, horror, and mystery, as well as a certified book coach and editor. Her short stories have been published in a number of anthologies, including those from the BWG, and her flash fiction appears monthly on the blog A Slice of Orange. Her paranormal thriller, SCREAM OF THE SILENT SUN, is slated for release in 2025. She’s a member of the Horror Writers Association, Sisters in Crime, and the National Association of Memoir Writers. In BWG, she serves on the executive committee. Connect with her via her website, www.dianna-sinovic.com, or on Instagram, @dsinovic94.