Life In Pause Read online

Life in Pause

  By: K.E. Rodgers

  ***

  Published By:

  Copyright © July 2010

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to persons living or deceased is coincidental and should be seen as such.

  Some time, not so far from now…

  My mailbox is hungry for new mail. It’s been starved for so long and it needs more nourishment if it is to survive – so do I.

  Pause…

  I keep looking at my messages on my cellular, each time hoping to see those golden words. You have 1 message. Even just one would be enough for me; satisfying.

  No New Messages… Empty…

  The battery is low. The bar has already turned that hateful color red. In a few days it won’t even be there to remind me of what it once was. In its place will be a black emptiness, an empty void where once a piece of my soul existed. I’ll turn it off now, hoping to prolong the inevitable.

  I need more batteries.

  It’s usually so quiet during the daylight hours. That annoying hum of silence drumming endlessly into my brain, so much so that I’m convinced it’s my brain trying to compensate for the change in my world. It buzzes like a bee trying to distract me.

  ….Buzzzz….Buzzzzz….Mmmmm….Buzzzz…Mmmmm….

  At night it’s different. At night I listen to the symphony created by the generators set up around the city. They whine and moan endlessly into the night lulling me to sleep until the wee hours of yet another day.

  It won’t last. Every night I can hear the change, one instrument at a time dropping out, fading into endless bars of rest. A solo will start one night and then it too will reach its final closer. I’ve heard people say: ‘If only I had known… or ‘Why did we not see?’….’No’….’It’s better this way’.

  I feel it happened rather quickly when in fact it wasn’t fast going at all. It took a long time and only when the final piece fell away did it seem that the process had sped up. It would be redundant of me to speak the obvious. We took too much, too fast, pushed too far, distorting and manipulating until all the fractures and slivers of a slowly crumbling infrastructure was totally compromised. Then bit by bit it all fell away.

  Once there’s a break it’s never quite so easy to fit the remaining pieces back together, as if they’ve just given up and decided they’re not comfortable being a whole again. It could only be a microscopic change, but even still the entirety won’t adhere to each other like it once did. That broken vase you pushed the ends back together with tacky glue, it won’t ever look the same no matter how off center you look or how many ways you squint your eyes. But who gives a shit about broken vases – I don’t. I need batteries.

  Pause…

  A man blew himself to high heaven – or where ever he thinks he’s destined for in the next life – while mixing together some extremely volatile chemicals within the tight and secretive confines of his basement. I think he was making a form of petroleum. Either way he thought he was being innovative. He was he found a new way to quickly roast a thanksgiving bird, because in the end his goose was cooked; fried to a crisp and sticking to every available surface in his basement.

  Note to self: Don’t’ talk about birds – too damn delicious.

  When I hear, usually from word of quick flapping mouths, that a neighbor of mine has passed or disappeared my mind immediately jumps to thoughts of batteries and fuel that person has likely hoarded away in their basements and locked closets. I’d list food along those thoughts if it has been a particularly long dry spell.

  When the papers were still in circulation I’d instantly flip to the obits to find new targets. Then I’d go through the phone book to see if they had a listing. Calling up several wrong numbers would eventually lead me to the right house where I would instantly push some condoling words through to the other person. Perhaps inquire where the services would be held. Most of the time it would be in the home as the funeral parlors were more than overcrowded; churches too.

  While I picked out my best suit I thought up the usual places people would store their hoarded rations. Basements and pantries and kitchen drawers were the usual first stops, an attic with a pull down ladder and a padlock. Then there are the paranoid and resourceful ones who put extra time into securing their valuables. Doors set seamlessly into walls and dark underground chambers with homemade booby traps.

  If there were cars, all broken down hunks of metal and fiberglass, I’d siphon out their tanks into a container I always carried with me in a basket I secured to my bike. With the cuffs of my pants rolled up to my knees I’d pedal my way over to the house with directions given to me by the grieving person I spoke to over the phone. I have the gift of having a voice that makes people believe the bullshit that comes out of it is the truth. No one ever thinks I’ve come to divest them of their goods; ill-got or not.

  I’d say don’t judge my practices, but at this point I don’t care. During my high period I was collecting from a tri-county spread. I did good work and I rarely ever got caught. A few minor injuries and several ruined suits later and I was at professional level. Yet my high streak didn’t last me long and as the power surges continued and loss of communication became the norm I knew I couldn’t last forever. Now I’m scavenging blind, my source of information cut to the quick and my world bleeds from the loss.

  Pause…

  Conspirators will tell me – most of the time shouting it – that the government is hoarding all the energy. They’re keeping it to themselves and like selfish children they’re refusing to share. It’s total bullshit, but then they got to have something to hold onto. Some days when I’m feeling particularly belligerent which means I’ve likely been swilling back the concoction of liquor I brewed up in my basement with a guy I used to go on raids – ‘used to’ means he’s dead - I’d say to these plotters of anarchy:

  ‘What government?’ I’d throw my arms out from my body for effect where it would make satisfying contact with a disgruntled face. ‘You mean those men and women who stand outside on the darkened steps of the political houses, shouting to mobs of the deaf and blind, that government?’

  Then I’d say in all seriousness though it never came off with quite the right effect with the stupid grin I’d wear on my drunk-of-my-ass face. ‘There is no government’.

  Without the light there is no order and this is a cold, dark world we’re living in.

  ‘No,’ I’d continue as I swung myself around in a poor rendition of a ballerina spinning on her dainty toes. I tell these paranoid fools, disillusioned souls, sad sacks of last year’s left over’s that would do well to find the next open grave and dump themselves in, ‘There is only us now. No’ I’d cry to the mass of slack jawed chimps ‘There is…only….You.’

  Pause…

  The hum is gone and my own deafness seems to have set in. It was my birthday the other week – can’t remember how old, but doesn’t really matter - long as I’m still alive, I’m doing better than most. I wanted to treat myself. Sitting in my garage, the padlock in place on the inside so I wouldn’t be disturbed I turned the key in the ignition and watched as my baby came alive. I don’t drive her but I made sure she had a full belly just to keep her satisfied.

  Though I’d never admit it to another soul, living or dead, the noise of her frightened me at first. That’s what I get for going so long without hearing the purr of her voice. The static of the radio crackled and grated my nerves until I turned it off. I put the air on, a cold blast that put goose bumps all over my skin. It was her way of saying ‘Hi, sweetheart’. Then I turned on the heat, a dry burning blast that dries out all the moisture in my eyes. I flipped the interior lights
on remembering how easy it was to have magic come out from a touch of my finger tips. I enjoyed myself for those brief and all too fleeting moments and for awhile I could pretend it was like it used to be.

  When I turned the key, watching as the lights inside of her eyes fade back to a darkness I was all too familiar with, a piece of me faded with it as I once again returned to the quiet. The deafness returned to me all too soon for my tastes, making my world small and tight.

  Pause…

  There’s a woman who sits behind a homemade stand in town selling underfed fruits and malnourished vegetables. It’s the kind of homemade stand that looks like it’s held together with three nails, a half gallon of glue and a well thought out prayer.

  She arrives every morning pushing a wheel barrel with a pronounced shake in one of its wheels followed closely by a Neanderthal of a man with two rucksacks slung over his beef cake arms. I find it