moving through the streets: occasionally passenger cars, sometimes buses with a handful of riders staring hopelessly ahead.
“Where are you going?” Morris asks one day. The bus is straddling the broken yellow line. The driver stares at us expectantly and shrugs. He thrusts a thumb at his fares.
“Wherever they want to go.”
“Any place in particular real popular right now?”
He shrugs. “Airports, mostly.”
“What’s there?”
He looks at her like her brain just dribbled onto her khaki T-shirt.
“Birds. Big silver ones.”
“They’re still taking passengers?”
“Hell if I know. I just drive the bus. Nothing else to do except sit around and wait to die.”
The bus doors sigh and hiss as he eases his foot off the brakes and keeps right on following the yellow line.
“Oz,” I say.
Morris peers at me over the top of her aviators.
“
“Sure I did. Those flying monkeys freaked me the hell out. What about it?”
“Have you heard any planes lately?”
Head shake. Expectant look.
“Exactly. They’re all going to meet some wizard who doesn’t exist, in search of brains, a heart, or whatever it is they need.”
“Are you going somewhere with this?”
I turn and head back toward the old school. “Nope.”
“You’re losing it. You should go talk to —” She stops dead.
“Nick. Don’t be too much of a sissy to say his name. I can. Nick, Nick, Nick.” I hold up my hands. “See? I’m okay with it.”
But I’m not okay with it. My heart’s been bruised before, battered and bandied about by others. Boys at first, then Sam’s death. And now Nick. But this is different. Bigger, like a bubble of grief that holds me within its thin walls. No matter how fast I run, the bubble moves with me. Hamster in a wheel.
I take to walking the streets on my own. I have a gun. I know how to use it; Morris taught me. There’s a knife in my pocket and I know how to use that, too. Can I, though? I don’t know. But I have it—my cold, hard, metal insurance.
Other things go into the pockets of my heavy coat: food, money, and my keys. I can’t break that habit.
And Nick’s unopened letter. All I have left of him.
There’s treasure in this basement. Bars of gold wrapped in plastic, their crumbs packed tight around a chemical core. Their value is immeasurable. I open a box. Slip a precious bar into my pocket.
“You’re actually going to eat that?” Morris says behind me. “I quit them years ago.”
My body jerks with surprise, and the Twinkie falls to the ground with a shallow thump.
“Supplies,” I say. “I was on my way out.”
“Again? What do you do out there?”
“Walk. Window-shop. Go out for morning tea with the girls.”
She steps into the pantry. It’s a room the size of my apartment filled with food. Little Debbie’s entire line of food is here; good eats at the end of the world. Morris plucks a golden cake from the box, unwraps the confection, crams it into her mouth. And a second. When she’s done eating, she grins at me with cake-crumbed teeth.
“Damn, I forgot how good these are. Did you open Nick’s letter yet?”
“No-o-o-pe.”
“That’s mature of you.”
“Says the woman who just crammed a whole Twinkie into her mouth.”
“Two.”
“Ladies and gentlemen, Tara Morris, Twinkie-eating champion of what’s left of the world.”
We giggle like silly girls, carefree and alive, until reality begins to lap around the edges like a thirsty cat.
Morris turns grim. “Open the letter. Please.”
“I can’t.”
She shakes her head at me, her eyes forgiving though her mouth is not. “You’re scared, and for what? That fear buys you nothing except a whole lot of walking the streets with a pocket full of Twinkies, worrying yourself sick over him.”
“It’s just one Twinkie.”
It’s just one Twinkie
I’m in the library when it happens, the same one where my sister’s dreams died before Pope slaughtered her on an empty street. There are no new lists. The old ones flap with excitement when I push the door open. Look! A person! Then they fall still. The librarian is gone, her haughtiness relegated to the history books as a once-cliche. She’s no longer here to care whether or not I eat near the precious tomes.
I peel away the plastic wrapper.
Crumbs fall onto the pages of the atlas I’ve spread open. I press my finger to the page, then lick the yellow dots. The dry finger of my left hand traces an invisible line across the thick, rich paper, across the pale blue ocean —first the Atlantic, then the Mediterranean—from New York to Athens. From there I creep north, inch by colorful inch, across the splintered states that form the country of Greece.
The name, the name, what was the name? Nick told me the name of the village where his parents were raised, but standing here looking at this swath of unfamiliar places, I’m overwhelmed by their otherness. The names swim on the page until they’re meaningless.
My stomach lurches. The atlas swirls. The bright mosaic tiles rush up to greet me.
Thank God, I miss the books. The librarian would never forgive me.
I am dead and this is hell. Fire licks my face, dances with the shadows, forces its partners into the darkness before taking others. Light plays across the faces of sightless marble men, twisting them into fiends. Soldiers whip their horses,
