1.
now
I am walking back from the water when it happens. I am looking down at my hands in the late-summer sun. It is the time of day when afternoon slides into dusk. I am looking at them, thinking, these are my hands, that is so strange.
My hands are my hands. Like in kindergarten when you have to practice writing your name over and over again until it looks so weird. You start to wonder,Is this really my name? This can’t be my name.Like a straggle of string unraveled from a sweater, a trail made by a snake in the mud.
I am thinking that and then
I feel the world
empty around me.
Cicadas stop screaming.
Cars stop humming along the road past the edge of the wood.
My phone, which had been buzzing buzzing buzzing in my pocket, goes silent. When I pull it out, it’s cold and dead. When I turn it on, there is no signal.
In the distance, the water splashes over the spillway, but no one calls or cries out.
I know before I know
that everyone is gone.
2.
now
Just your mind,my brain says.Just your mind playing tricks on you. Everyone’s not gone. The world’s not empty. That’s impossible. Get in the car. Go home. Everything will be fine.
I’ve made it through the woods and I’m standing where we leave our cars when we go to the jump. Parked under a heavy-branched tree is my beat-up old Subaru. Silver. Long scratch on the driver’s side door and an old, peelingKEEP LITHIA GREENbumper sticker on the back.
But there is no sense of coming and leaving. No engines turning off or on, no crunch of footsteps in the gravel of the parking area, no people calling out to one another in greeting or farewell.
I unlock the car and get in and lock it.
The car is hot and muggy inside, an empty Gatorade bottle rattling around in the front seat where Sam or Sydney or Alex or Ella or Jack used to sit.
I hear my friends laughing. I see Sam turn his head to look at me, the lights from the dashboard illuminating his face. The air rushes in through the windows and it smells of summer rain.
I turn away from the memories and put my hands on the steering wheel. Then my forehead against it.
Breathe,I say.
Just your mind.
3.
now
I send a message to everyone in my contacts. The message says:
Hello?
I wait.
Nothing,no one writes back.
