My limbs still ached from a day of battling against the current, but every moment had been worth it. Increasingly, Matthew's thoughts had been turning dark at every turn, and I had hoped that dropping the rosary would release a weight of sorts, like an old hot air balloon dropping ballast.
Hot air balloons: I dearly missed them. Living after almost everyone else has passed was tolerable most days, and I eased into the lifestyle a little more each day in a trancelike oblivion (a pleasant oblivion; a timeless one), but small things would bring pangs, like loved ones who died long ago but who still drifted through my thoughts from time to time, leaving ghosts in their wakes.
I missed the barges that used to drift by east end; I missed the Strand on a busy day, when the haze was nonexistent and vacationers and tourists walked side-by-side, enjoying the sun on their faces and the unbounded feeling that would settle in the chest on a lovely summer day like a silk cloth. It had been years since my last milkshake; my last carefree stroll; since the last time I bought a little trinket—a postcard for a friend I'd met in those two years in college or a shiny plastic crab with the island's name on it to sit on the windowsill next to a mound of dead black flies—and the last time I felt the soft paper money in my fingers, back when it stood for something in my mind. I felt the weight of all that had been lost.
Can all souls be saved?
What an odd question, I'd thought. He'd ask these things, sometimes, but it had been awhile since the last burst. The bridges broken, this was almost certainly the last body to be found, and then perhaps the questions would taper off forever. Survivor's guilt, I'd said once. But he'd shaken his head, like he always did when I smoked.
We watched the next blushing sunrise together, the smoke floating up from the cigarette between my fingers to form a crescent around the sun. With my other hand, I tapped the clear yellow lighter against the deck.
"It's a shame that more people can't see this," I said.
Matthew leaned into me, saying nothing, but I felt his breath catch.
"What is it, love?" The air around us was pastel-hued, the fog as thick as it was for the last burning.
"Nothing. I was thinking about the desalinators. We need another one, a backup in case the one we have quits working. Or for spare parts..." The were fluff. He knew it. I knew it. There was something else that lingered, but he either didn't have the words or the heart to tell me. "I'll go back to the university today or tomorrow, to see if I can find another."
"Yes," I said. "We have time."
"Of course."
The sun rose and the air grudgingly shifted back to its usual soft grey blue. A few hours later, after we both ate and talked about a book I'd scavenged and read from the old bookstore—a rather cinematically-written apocalypse story about a world on fire and its doomed inhabitants—Matthew finally departed for the university, briefly cleaning the bike with the 90% isopropyl alcohol that I'd found in the abandoned pharmacy so that the plague from the corpse would not spread to him. I had to remind him to do this, and in response he smiled and nodded sheepishly, as if he'd already forgotten about the illness that had killed everyone we'd known. It was possible to walk to the university, but Matthew always said that he felt an almost visceral freedom when he was on that bike; it worked as a resting place for his mind.
I felt a similar feeling around noon, when the sun was invisible through the kitchen window, Matthew had been gone for a few hours, and I had started and stopped a painting with the few acrylics that we had left. It wasn't a feeling of freedom; something ate at the back of my mind, and, try as I might, it slipped through my fingers when I tried to identify it. I held the brush between my fingers as I would a cigarette, tapping it against the table. I could make pigments from the plants in the garden for the future, I mused, but my creativity would have to return first.
