by K. Patrick Glover

The silence is deafening.

It’s been nearly two weeks since “It” happened. Since everybody disappeared. I may not have noticed right away, If I hadn’t been in town.

See, I needed supplies. Ordinary things, water, cereal, toilet paper, toothpaste. A couple bags of Doritos. Seemed important at the time, those damned Doritos. The shelf was empty of the kind that I like, the spicy nacho ones. So I asked the stock boy to check in the back for me.

He never came back.

I waited. I waited at least twenty minutes. Then I stuck my head through the double doors, the big ones that say Employees Only on the outside. I know I was breaking the rules, but I only stuck my head through, I didn’t actually go back there.

I didn’t see anybody, so I called out. No answer.

I shook my head, figured the stock boy had snuck out on break and forgot about me. I decided to forgo the Doritos and headed for the front.

It was very quit. No other customers. I could hear something in the distance, very far away. It sounded like a woman screaming.

I hurried to the front, my nerves getting the better of me. The checkouts were as empty as the aisles had been. The front door was propped open and I could feel the breeze coming in.

I left my cart and walked around the registers. Two of them were open, money in the drawer. I looked around, and I almost took it, after all, it was just sitting there. But broke or not, I wasn’t brought up to be no thief.

I pulled my cart to one of the open registers, tallied up my merchandise and paid for it, making sure I took the proper change.

Then I bagged my things up and walked outside. The street was just as empty as the store. I felt, well, kind of like I was walking through a movie set and all the actors had gone home for the day. Like nothing was real, just facades.

I walked across the street and into the bar.

No one.

The radio was on, but only static came from it’s speakers. A cigarette, burned almost to the filter, sat smoking in the ashtray. There was a nearly full glass of whiskey beside it.

I drank it, but I didn’t leave any money. I figured the fella that had been here had probably already paid. I wondered where he went. Where everybody went.

My next stop was the sporting goods store. I rarely stopped there, no reason for it. Until today.

I could still hear that poor woman screaming, off in the distance. So that’s where I was headed. And I thought I just might need a gun.

by Elana Steingart

I could have lived anywhere in the city. I could have gone down to the Eaton Centre, slept on a different bed in the Sears every night, diverting myself by playing with all the department store makeup that I could never afford. It’s probably warmer there too, a giant air pocket, all four levels of insulation, no windows to let in the draught. But I stayed in my shitty one-bedroom, with its shitty windows and shitty insulation. And I actually washed the dishes, with the water left standing in the sink. Before, I’d go weeks with dirty dishes. I lived in filth while the city outside went about its tidy business. I had carved out a little niche of filth, I said, this is my filth, this is my ineptitude, this is me stagnating. That was my defiance.

And now, my city, my beautiful city is crumbling, stagnating. Now, the whole city is my niche, because there’s no one filling the streets anymore. The filth isn’t generated by me, it’s generated by time and abandonment.

Serves me right for not rejoicing in humanity, for not being a part of it, because now I’m the custodian of the world I rejected.

I had to be the last person on Earth before I would clean my fucking apartment.

After I tore down the bird netting on my balcony, after I stared down the paltry three storeys that I thought of jumping, after thinking about lying mangled on the street without even a car to come by to finish me off, that was when I decided to break into the maintenance office and steal all the keys.

At first, I only opened the apartments with dogs howling in them, cats meowing and scratching at the doors. They weren’t hard to find. And soon I was the Pied Piper, jingling my keys with a troop of quadrupeds. Non-human creatures, domesticated and wild, were spared on this Earth, including me.

I tried sitting in the chairs of neighbours I’d never met, but I didn’t like it very much. Ikea shit with other people’s assprints in the seats. I just grabbed their cat food, their multivitamins, bottled water, and cookies, and brought it to the apartment next to mine, which I had turned into my little storage facility, my little shit hoard.

I collected Bibles and holy books of various kinds from every apartment I found, and used them as doorstops. The third floor is now one massive suite. “Open concept.”

Although I still close my front door. Sometimes I even put the chain-lock on. The one habit I couldn’t shake, the one terror that didn’t vanish in obsolescence.

The first night I spent in my old bed surrounded by rescued dogs and cats was the first morning I woke up without screaming. You have no idea how important it is to the psyche to hear something else breathing, slow and deep and calm. You need to feel heartbeats that aren’t yours once in a while. You need to look into living eyes. I’d had my fill of that, before. Just walking to get groceries, I’d get my fill of human contact, of people who don’t get out of your way when you’re walking, people on their fucking cell phones talking in my ear in Korean, psycho homeless people muttering nonsense at me. They looked me in the eyes when they talked psycho talk at me. That was plenty of eye contact for me then. I’d mastered the set jaw, the downcast eyes that say “I am too urban to talk to anyone”.

I got to name all the animals whatever the fuck I wanted. I didn’t even look at their kitschy little engraved collars before dumping them down the garbage chute. All the secret names I had in my heart, ideas for babies I dreamed of having with some man I hadn’t yet met, now they’re incarnated in cats. Because even the sperm banks must have gone rotten by now. The dogs, I named after superheros. It still makes me laugh, to call that little chihuahua thing “Spiderman”.

They all pile around me in my bed, and I’m curled in the middle, Lady Food Provider, with the softest of the cats positioned right against my nose. It must be -25 degrees Celsius outside today, and this – in bed, with the beasts – is the only chance I get to take off my winter coat. I lost track of the days so early in all this, I have no idea how much more winter I have to endure.

One time, I heard someone shouting. I have no idea how far away he was; sound carries so differently now, without the white noise of traffic, the buzz of electricity everywhere, without the background music of thousands of conversations. I really wallow in the memories of lost noise. Sometimes I sing to myself the sound of car alarms.

It was so funny, his shouts were bilingual. He’s looking for survivors in our broken city, our broken country, and he’s alternating, “Hello? Bonjour? Quel-qu’un est la? Is anyone there?” His French is as crap as mine, but he’s making an effort, hanging on to our national values. He could be the fucking Prime Minister for all I know.

I sucked in a breath to call back, sucked in a lungful of frozen air, and I felt my heart freeze with it. I felt a total lack of feeling. I felt the imperative to respond drain away.

This dude, best case scenario, is my age-ish, and not annoying. Best case scenario, we find solace in each other’s arms. Best case scenario, we fuck and make some doomed babies, now named after cats. We carve out a resigned yet optimistic life for ourselves in the shell of Toronto. Our children see us as their whole world, live with some twisted sense of ethics that is devoid of the concept of ’society’.

I exhaled, long and slow, through my nose, and watched my frozen breath curl away like smoke.

by K. Patrick Glover

And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts
And I looked and behold, a pale horse
And it’s name it said on him was Death
And Hell followed with him.
Johnny Cash
The Man Comes Around

I always knew I’d be around for the end of the world.

Don’t ask me how. Its not like I’m a religious man, or a superstitious one. I didn’t sit around thinking about The Rapture or the prophecies of Nostradamus. I didn’t spend much time thinking about it at all. I just knew that I would be there for it, that it would happen in my lifetime.

I just didn’t realize that I would be locked in a padded room when it happened.

Of course some people would tell you that’s the reason I was in the padded room to begin with, but they’d be wrong. The real reason, well, I don’t want to talk about the real reason I was there. It doesn’t matter anymore, does it? Does anything from before matter?

Do you remember that old poem about the world ending, not with a bang, but a whimper? Locked in that room, drugged out of my mind, I didn’t even hear the whimper. Just a sort of piercing silence.

No one came that day. Not the nurse that usually brought my pills or the orderly that brought my food. I noticed. I wasn’t so far gone that I didn’t notice, but I didn’t care. I had been kept drugged for over a year, docile, pliant. That doesn’t wear off in a day.

Or two. Or three.

On the fourth day, when the haze was getting thinner and the hunger was almost unbearable, I heard noise outside my room. Doors opening and closing, things being tossed about, somebody singing. Actually singing.

I sat on the edge of my bed and waited. I knew that she’d (the singing voice was definitely feminine) eventually open my door. I wondered what I’d say to her. Wondered, not planned, because I didn’t think my conscious mind, still working its way through the Thorazine fog, had any hope of controlling my lips. I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to talk. It had been so long.

I told her, much later, that I had spent the time wondering what she looked like. If she’d be pretty. The truth is, it never occurred to me. She didn’t have that much reality in my mind. She was just a melodic voice that could open doors. I wanted her to open mine. That’s all that mattered.

When she finally did open it, and I managed to stutter a simple hello, she screamed.