The following piece of short fiction is included as a part of 'The Elephant in the Waiting Room', a collection of short stories published by Baltan Laboratories.
“Did the stars shine brighter when they were still in the sky?” a boy asked his grandmother as they sat before a fire. The tent would’ve been warmer, with its hand-me-down cushions and many-layered quilts, but the child always insisted upon watching the world go by before bed. Above them, the night sky hung precariously, as if some great weight were pressing down upon it. She remembered the night being darker when she was younger, but now, the day only dimmed into some brown-grey haze when it came to an end. It was lit from below, rather than above, by fallen stars and fallen cities, still unable or unwilling to die.
“Lots of stars are still up there, my love. They’re just hiding,” the grandmother finally responded, unflinching as something burst into electric light far on the horizon. “Do you remember the story I told you a while back – about how we got here?” she asked with a tinge of bittersweet nostalgia. The boy smiled and shook his head mischievously because it was a good story, and he wanted her to tell it again.
“It began when the sky cracked. Believe it or not, there are all these invisible layers of gasses and armor up there. There was so much poison and garbage being pumped out into the world and into the air, the earth just couldn’t handle it anymore. The men putting all that crap up there, well, they saw this coming a mile away. And when the layers cracked, things got really bad for quite a while – bad for us, at least. The men making the fumes and the trash and the war burrowed in their hordes, like the dragons in your books, deep, deep underground. Their hordes were built on the backs of their workers, and by selling our privacy and dignity, and by scraping the bottom of the barrel for what little we had left when the world fell. Once the armor was gone, the sun was brighter and hotter than ever before. We couldn’t even go outside for a long time without covering up.” The boy’s eyes widened as he fell into a sort of trance, as he often did when his grandmother told her stories. “When all this happened, most people migrated further up north, tryna outrun it. That’s what the computers told them to do, but the computers belonged to those billionaires who saw this storm coming a mile away, who led it here. But we stayed, didn’t we? And there was a long time where I wasn’t sure if it was the right decision. For a while, food and water were hard to come by. The mangroves dried up, and all that was left was saltwater for a time, and since all the critters were just as hungry as we were, they either left or got a whole lot meaner. When the money stopped coming in from all the men in their high towers, the government began to collapse. They had taken our power and internet, and our ability to communicate with one another. They didn’t just control our things, they controlled our information, our identities, our bodies.”
The old woman doubled over, coughing. She had seen so many things. She didn’t really think any one person was meant to see that much, if she were honest with herself. Of course, it was much worse before the world went quiet – the famine, the war, the goddamn robot she lost her job in the factory to. But she couldn’t deny, the transition had been a dreadful one. She looked around as she took time to breathe the hot, humid air. The boy rubbed his hand in broad circles on her upper back, like he thought people were supposed to do when someone seemed in pain.
He knew better than to press her then, so he simply breathed with her and looked around. The Southern Expanse’s starfield was pulsing as usual, lights flashing in bursts across the wasteland, as if a toddler were controlling them with a toy piano.
When the boy was awoken by diffused sunlight, a light frost slowly melting from his hair, his grandmother was nowhere to be seen. This was no cause for concern, he knew. She tended to keep a strange sleep schedule in her old age, growing restless in the night, patrolling the camp’s perimeter or gathering various fruits and nuts in surrounding shrubs. Even though the world had long since settled, and their packs were ever full of food, she was unable to break these survivalist habits. Perhaps she still found some strange comfort in them or a certain relief in their present obsolescence.
And so, the boy awoke the fire from its dying coals, contented himself with oats and fruit she might have collected on her last late-night hike, and wiped away the morning dew from a small patch of grass to sit upon. On this vast plain there had once been an orange grove, his grandmother had told him when they first glimpsed light from the craters under the setting sun in the western sky. There were still many orange trees, but whatever seeds had taken root in the wake of the starfall were not yet mature, and only a scant few bore edible fruit. He imagined his grandmother might be picking some for them to take with them and wondered whether he should have waited for her to get back before he ate.
When the old woman returned, it must have been midday already. The boy, not knowing what he was meant to do, had resorted to drawing animals in the sandy Myakka soil, as his investigation of a nearby crater was not nearly as magical in the daytime. He had seen her silhouetted against the sky from a mile away and watched as she zig-zagged back and forth along the paths between craters. On her back, she bore a pack of brightly colored oranges. She told the boy she had a surprise for him as well, as if the oranges were not surprise enough. Her joints made an audible “pop” as she sat, but no pain showed on her smiling face. That was the sort of thing that happened when you got old. From the bottom of her bag, to dramatic effect, she produced a mason jar filled with golden honey. "It’s orange blossom," she told him, and he nodded even though that meant nothing to him. "Where did you get it?" he asked her. She told him to be patient and asked for his help packing up the tent.
They called the horse Jacque, after an inside joke they can no longer remember in its entirety. He was well taken care of, and thus well behaved. And like the boy, he did not remember when the stars fell. The hand that held his lead asked, "How much longer?" for the fourth time this hour, though he certainly knew the answer by now. "Not long," the old woman would say – same as last time. The distant city grew closer, slowly, with each step.
Most of the remaining cities were empty: streets littered with cars like pawns on a chessboard, the occasional well-tended house, brimming with life, the all-but-abandoned high-rises and apartment buildings. “Who wants to walk up ten flights of stairs every day?” Grandma would say, on cue. She didn’t like cities very much – not because they were dangerous or impractical, not even because the air was fresher in the countryside, but because she wanted to see the world as it was now, remade. “There’s no point dwelling on the past,” she would say.
The old woman had expected disaster for a long time. As far back as she could remember, she was scared. Scared of war or disease or famine, criminals and communists and immigrants. But when it all ended, it was none of those things that did it. She held her grandson’s hand tightly as they walked.
"Would you like to hear more of our story from last night?" Grandma asked gently. The boy shielded his eyes with his hand to look up at her and nodded excitedly. “By that time, most people had returned to their homes or tried to find new ones. The north was very populated at this point. It was a good way to drain the last pennies out of people too desperate to know the difference between hope and a good marketing campaign. But even so, sooner or later we had some folks moving back down south to take advantage of all those empty houses and land. After years and years of heat, most of us adapted. People got sick, but we found new ways to treat them. There were wildfires, and water was hard to come by, but we built back better and found ways to live, though it took so painfully long that, at times, it didn’t feel like progress at all.
“Now of course, since good things can’t exist in a vacuum, this was when those very powerful men had just about run out of folks to lord over. They came back, in their shiny plastic and metal bodies, though they weren’t really inside. They were still just hiding. I remember when I saw one walking through town one day, half-melted and stumbling. They had no idea what the rest of us had been living with down here, and yet they still wanted to own us. When they realized there was nothing more for them to take from us, they turned on each other, peeking out from their holes, in and out, like soldiers in their trenches. If we hadn’t been already, we were certainly ants to them after that.
“I remember the night the stars fell so clearly. I was sitting with your mother on the porch, and we were drinking coffee even though it was nearly midnight. Your father was away, and we were a bit antsy since things were a bit more dangerous in those years. She was pregnant and had these awful migraines, and I… well I haven’t been able to sleep through the night since I was nearly 40. That was when I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a shooting star – a fine sight on normal occasions, but I hadn’t seen one in nearly a decade, what with the pollution and smog hanging over everything. I blinked, and then there was another! There was an awful crash in the forest and then the splash of some swamp oaks tossed aside into the muddy soil. It looked like shooting stars at first, but so, so many in all directions, all ‘cross this side of the globe – such that the night sky looked like a staticky television, all lit up black and white and flashing for all of an hour. Felt like the end of the world."
She paused for a moment as she readjusted her pack. They were almost out of the starfield now. It wasn’t easy to navigate. Like acrobats on tightropes, zigzag-ing along the outer rims of the craters left by the starfall. It was particularly hard on the horse, whose heavy saddle bore down on stick-thin legs. Oftentimes, they found themselves slipping down either side of a crest at the same time and sinking in the ashy sand.
"There was a long time where we didn’t dare go anywhere near the craters. Back then they were still on fire, and I’m not sure you could have even looked into them without going a bit blind," the old woman continued. "And I don’t envy the folks caught in the wrong place at the wrong time when it all went down. They would’ve lost their homes, even if they were still intact after everything. It wouldn’t have been safe to stay. Even those of us far enough away waited, day after day, terrified that there might be more, but the crash never came. Now of course there’s no way of knowing what caused those stars to fall, whether it was a freak disaster or someone trying to play God with powers far beyond their control, but your father always believed it was a part of the wealthy men’s game, and I certainly wouldn’t put it past them. Regardless, harm’s already done – done and long over since. If the stars weren’t them, the rest of it certainly was, and regardless, nowadays, there ain’t any of ‘em left to bicker, least none who’ve shown their faces in a long, long time. So, I say problem solved.”
The three were nearly upon the edge of the city now. As they had drawn closer, the boy had the creeping feeling that this city was different from the others, though from a distance it was completely indistinguishable. Invasive kudzu had invaded the unpopulated areas of the town just like all the others down south. It had blurred the telephone poles into soft-edged crucifixes and re-formed the suburbs into a series of hills and valleys. Towering billboards rarely held the obscene advertisements that had once adorned them. Some daring artists had painted hypnotic patterns and shapes on their faces instead. In one, barely readable graffiti letters welcomed travelers. Others were more spiteful, mocking corporations and politicians who had once elevated themselves above the rest of us just to tell us what we wanted.
Their sandals crunched along the road into town. The asphalt, never meant to last, had degraded significantly, but the boy noticed that someone had planted wildflowers in the cracks. He kept walking. A highway overpass led them into the inner city, and as they crested the peak, a familiar scent called to him like home. The boy’s father loved to cook on an open flame. He would’ve bartered the shirt off his own back for a good cut of meat. His father is gone now, though. One is not reborn without fire, such is the way of life. And so, the boy carried with him no necklace or ring, no knife or hat, but rather a pouch of spices, in his father’s memory. His grandmother had smiled, mournfully when the young man rushed to the supermarket as the world was crumbling, not to buy water or toilet paper, but dried rosemary, curry, and cinnamon.
As the boy inhaled, he felt the city come alive around him, he felt the memory of war fade with a sigh of relief and good fortune on the coastal wind. He inhaled love and joy and gratitude and a world with so much left to give. He felt loss, gain, grief, and acceptance in the sand in his shoes.
"I remember the day you were born, my love. I remember the meal your father cooked for your mother as she held you close to her chest. I remember the first time I heard you cry and the first time I heard you laugh. I remember when you first walked down the path to the road in the searing heat, completely unaware that the world had never felt any different than it did that day, and because of that you were content with it.
“Things calmed down in the years since the starfall. The asteroids shot tons upon tons of dust into the sky, and that won’t likely settle in our lifetimes. It’s harder to breathe sometimes, but it covers up the sun and hopefully will let the earth and sky heal in the meantime. In spite of it all, when everything settled, things were a tiny bit better, and then you were here, and your parents were gone, and it was just us in that big empty house, and despite myself, I was satisfied with the way that things were – I still am. I miss them, your parents. I know you do too, Baby. But they’d want us to find a place for ourselves, and I’m just thankful the world is kinder to us now than it was when it took them."
Jacque tried to keep walking and felt himself stopped by the boy and his contemplative pause. The old woman had stopped as well. She had smelled life too, in the aroma of a well-stocked market and a well-loved kitchen on a neighboring street. She smelled it in the mango trees growing in the backyards of people who never would have owned a home if the world had continued in the direction it was going. She saw clean water in a clear river and manatees unafraid to rest in the shade of the bridge. And in the tall apartment buildings, she heard the flap of drying clothes in the wind as a woman sat on a balcony reading. And for the first time in a long time she thought there might be a world worth looking down on from way up there.
Feeling her age, she straightened her back with all the effort she could muster, and led her grandson forward.
“You probably don’t remember – you were very little – but we were sitting on the back porch, looking at the night sky, or what was left of it. It got darker without the moon or the stars back then, so we had a couple candles lit. I saw lights in the wood, torches, so many like a forest fire or the eyes of a pack of vicious creatures in the dark. When the torches reached the perimeter of our clearing, they didn’t stop. I saw the partially illuminated faces of two or three dozen people, walking slowly but fearlessly towards the house. They weren’t scared of me, with my gun and my snarl, but I was scared of them. I was so scared of so many things, even after I had nothing left to lose. When they got within earshot, they didn’t threaten me with their numbers or ask for anything, they simply offered food and asked whether I was safe and healthy – whether you were safe and healthy. They stayed the night on the front lawn. I should’ve asked some of them in, offered them a room, a drink – we had some to spare – but old habits die hard, and I do hope they forgive me.
“They moved on promptly the next morning, left us with some home-grown tea, wildflower seeds, wine, and a couple books, with the request that we pass them on to the next traveler that comes our way once we were done with them. I had a hard time pinpointing it, but I think that was the day when I realized that the world was different than I remembered it to be, that the sky and the stars and the bombs and the floods and the drought and the disease had led somewhere, for us and for others. Of course, you often don’t realize that a moment is important when you’re living it, but I think that was one of those sorts of moments.
We lived there a while longer, prepared. Do you remember how I asked you to organize all the canned goods about ten times over? I was so dang nervous to leave. But we packed our bags, and were on our way as soon as you were able to carry your pack. How many years has it been now?"
They were in the square now, freely brushing shoulders with the crowd. The boy didn’t know how to feel. He had only had brief interactions with lone travelers on the road and those ranged from somewhat pleasant to dangerously tense. His grandmother always reminded him of the good of people, but if that were always true, then what had happened to his mom and dad? He didn’t know where they were, if they were alive, just that they said they’d be back, and they never came. The old woman seemed content with accepting their loss, at least the way she spoke about it would imply as much, but how could you know what actually happened out there in the wilderness?
His grandmother had stopped at the base of the skyscraper closest to the central square. With the exception of a few short conversations with barterers and vendors offering treats as they had passed through, Grandma seemed to be beelining straight for the tower. The boy was confused. His grandmother hated heights, she wouldn’t even climb the ladder back when they were packing up back home. He remembered how nervous she was, holding her arms up to steady him as his tiny twig arms struggled to pass down the heavy canvas sheets from the highest shelf, knees buckled against the highest rung of the aluminum ladder.
"Where are we going?" the boy asked his grandmother amid the overgrown ruins of a long-fallen nation. "Up," she replied with the grin of someone 60 years younger. And so they started up the stairs. So, so many stairs: cracked in places, railings rusted and sharp. The boy thought there must’ve been a hundred floors to climb, and it might’ve been something like that. The old woman tripped more than a couple times but always caught herself, and the boy found himself becoming increasingly frustrated with the tedious pace of the ascent. In the years since they had begun wandering, he had noticed with a touch of sadness that as he became faster and stronger, so had her steps become slower and more painful. She had arthritis, or "old lady bones," as she liked to call it, but he didn’t really know what that meant, since he couldn’t feel it.
As monumental as it felt, no one really noticed them. The old woman would falter, and a carefree tenant might pass them on the way down with little ones or trash to dispose of and greet the pair with a curt nod or a smile. Someone invited them into their apartment for some water when they heard the old woman fall outside their doorstep. They spoke of how the water tasted, the roads, the starfields, and the singular vine growing through a crack in her floor that was tended daily. The grandmother asked about life in the city and said that she was considering staying, which was news to the boy, who hadn’t known a home with a roof thicker than canvas for a long time. He held his tongue. The host lavished praise upon their home, saying that it was safe, not too cold, nor too hot, no matter the time of year. Said that there was a makeshift elevator that allowed them to live so high up, even now, at the end of the world. This drew a laugh from his aching grandmother so full and joyful as to startle the boy.
The host accompanied them to the elevator. They thanked them for that brief moment of kindness and stepped onto the elevator platform. There was a metallic groan. The boy pulled, arm-over-arm, slowly winching upwards towards a distant, dim, grey sunlight, which, in the ten minutes it took to raise the platform to roof level, had bloomed into an apocalyptic red hue.
"You told the person downstairs that you were thinking about staying," the boy said, hesitantly. "Were you just making conversation, or did you really mean it?"
"I’m not sure myself, Sweetheart. It just felt like the right thing to say."
They weren’t alone on the roof – there were a dozen others scattered around the broad terrace, picnicking, running around, exercising, and tending to a remarkably large cage of plump chickens, though none of them seemed to make anything of new arrivals. The end of the world seemed remarkably unremarkable to the inhabitants of this city. Aside from the lack of 21st-century industry and infrastructure, one could hardly tell what unspoken tragedies and hardships the community had overcome. Maybe that was the natural tendency of things – to rebalance themselves, to build back. The earth had certainly done so where it could.
The dried, dead swamps had come back to life in the last few years. Grandma knew it because they could no longer walk over the hard, cracked mud like they would over a well-paved road. It made travelling through the south a whole lot harder, if you asked her, though she had certainly missed the abrasive quacks of the ducks that now returned to nest. The freshwater springs ran clear again too; that certainly took long enough. And as terrified as she was of it, there was some strange comfort in the knowledge that the native panther had found the young forest establishing itself around the old phosphate mines and crumbling suburban developments, abandoned long before the collapse.
The two approached the precipice at the very edge of the rooftop. There was a light sort of fog that draped over the skyline like sheer fabric, hot and vapid. It was hard to breathe. It felt like a hug from a distant relative you could never honestly say you looked forward to seeing, and yet, in that embrace there was familiarity, something close to comfort.
The boy was just tall enough to peek over the aged parapet along the edge of the terrace. The land he saw was flat, not a mountain for a thousand miles, and his grandmother hadn’t brought them anywhere near a building with more than two floors in his short life. When he looked down, he didn’t feel fear, for he had never fallen. His grandmother held one hand loosely on the back of his collar, like a scruffed kitten, out of some intrusive fear that he might slip or lean too far over. She breathed in and out to calm herself before joining him to take in the view.
The woman smiled to herself as she thought about her younger days, when she had refused to fly out of some primal fear. Perhaps something about flying wasn’t natural to her, for a person to be so infinitesimally small against the open sky. Maybe something about the concrete foundation beneath her feet grounded her when she looked down that day, or maybe it was just that she didn’t feel quite so small anymore. It was getting dark already. The red became pink, became nothing.
When they looked down at the city sprawl, half of it abandoned and overgrown, they wondered in some biblical sense whether mankind was ever meant to achieve any of this. Whether the collapse had been some kind of divine smiting for the sake of greed or cruelty or hubris. But it was none of these things, she knew, because she could see the remade earth with its remade people far beneath her. She could see the worker ants dancing in the square and swimming in the canal. She could see warm light in the windows of the monolithic buildings around her and feel the connection to the others on the rooftop, ever stronger for the struggle.
In the distance, she could just make out the path she had tread with her grandson earlier that day. She liked to imagine she could see their little old house too, a thousand miles away as the crow flies. She could see a starfield, one of many, scarring the earth like an artful arrangement of bullet holes. Its craters blinked softly, one by one, like a cat saying she loves you. She saw what used to be a movie theater, unlit and disappearing in the darkness, as a herd of whitetail deer left the highway at the exit – a well-coordinated caravan pulling in to rest for the night. She saw a family dancing on a riverboat further upstream, its hypnotic noise buzzing like the gentlest gnat in her ear.
Finally, she saw the boy. He was asking her if they could stay there. She said yes, of course, kissed him on the forehead and rustled his overgrown hair. He asked her whether his mom and dad would be able to find them there, and she told him that she was sure if they were out there, they would find the city too, because it was the kind of place people like them tended to find. He told her he hoped that was true, and she smiled a bittersweet smile, and kissed his forehead again, shakily.
And when the old woman looked up into his forest-green eyes, she saw reflected in them a bright, flickering universe settling into place ever so slowly, growing over itself again and again. And she knew, in that moment, that what was left of the world was worth rebuilding.
