Survival Skills
I promised myself, as I watched it all burn on television, that if the world did in fact end, that I would tell her that I loved her. I would strip off my shame as the chemicals in the air melted our skin away. My voice would crack and I’d break out in a sweat, hormones flushing through me, but at least she would know the truth. As the Capitol came down and the skies lit up with the farewells of civilization, as everyone’s heads swam with the bending of the truth, as the sound of explosions mixed with the incessant hum of regurgitated video footage, my words tumbled through the phone — It’s crazy, but I think I am in love with you. Drawn like magnets, she flew down the highway towards me, the interstate rolling up behind her, curled like a shed hair. We came together with a rabid intensity, fearing our time was limited. We spent our last shaky breaths of normalcy sweating in tangled sheets, a crash course in each others’ bodies. Things escalated quickly. After the power grid was wiped out and the water supply poisoned, we didn’t look behind us as we headed for the hills. I know a place, she assured me. The ravaged environment made everything black and sick, so that rocks and leaves and dirt were nearly indistinguishable. It pained me to watch her nails press back as she scratched at the bark of trees, desperate for sustenance. We broke our teeth by accidentally eating stones. They cracked along the same lines where they had been glued back together so many times before. It was like they remembered how it was done. We slept huddled together in the dirt, our bones clinking against each other like pottery shards waiting to be covered by layers of earth, the effluence of years. There were no stars — maybe they obliterated those too. In these circumstances, it felt sacrilegious to make love, so we just pressed our bodies together for warmth; didn’t even kiss. The sky glowed with the constant orange of far-off destruction, dawn to dusk. In the dead of night, when the forest was still, we could hear the distant screams of a dwindling population, carried through the sullied air like the howling of wolves. I know a place, she kept saying. I sensed she didn’t even believe herself anymore, but I nodded along and stroked her hair, pieces of it falling out in my hands. I didn’t know where there was to go, but we pressed forward, obeying momentum. One day, after hours of hurling through the woods, her fingers gripped in mine, forging our path, we came across a body. Chalk white skin, waxy with death, bearing the insignia. The black blood that leaked from a bullet hole between the eyes was crusty with time. She looked at me with a conspiratorial fervor, a joy I hadn’t seen in days. We hadn’t eaten for so long. If it came down to it — she said. If it was life or death — I knew where she was going, and I had no room to judge. We were so far past morality. We were so fucking hungry. And remember — I loved her.
She smiled through broken teeth.
We feasted.