Spoiler! :
Ashes to Ashes
The television went out. The man pushed a button, but the screen still said “No Signal.” Outside, the man could see the dish was intact. The blue light on the box that put channels on the flat screen was glowing.
Must be the storm, he said. That’s all. The clouds must be disrupting the satellites.
His neighbor concluded the same thing, as did the lady down the street. The old couple in the next town over decided that the wind must have knocked over a tower and that was why they couldn’t see their local news at 5:30 p.m., with the smiling anchors who reminded them of their own grown children living three states over.
Reason comforted them, those civilized minds.
#
The tribal leader in the jungles of South America didn’t notice anything amiss. He slept in ignorance, or perhaps bliss.
#
Morning came. Frantic phone calls to service providers left bitter tastes in the mouths of customers when a busy tone played without ending. “No Signal”, the screen read, with the black background unchanging despite the wishful thinking and fervent glances to see if in the second they had looked away the problem had fixed itself.
The power went out that evening.
The screen was black and dead. They cursed the disappearance of “No Signal."
Streetlights failed to penetrate the darkness of society. Earth was quiet and lonely in spite of the billions worrying and angry over the loss of their programs.
The man muttered a profanity and grabbed his cell phone only to find it said, “No Signal.”
His eyes narrowed and then widened. The whites were the only light in his unlit home. At that moment, he realized how alone he was in the world. So completely alone.
Without the noise and pulsing light of the televisions and the comfort of his technology, he was…
Stranded, he said. The word fell to the tiled floor and slithered into the darkness, around the corner of his perfectly straight wall, and out of his front door into the night.
It slid into the hearts of his neighbors, into the couple in the next town over, into the minds of the 5:30 p.m. anchors who were lost without a show, but the tribal leader remained untouched and still slept.
Dawn came. The pink light saw wide-eyed people roaming the streets, chasing down friends in their slippers, and hurried discussions of What do we do? Who do we call? What about the children?
The man sat and watched his neighbors in their pajamas and he didn’t move. He felt as if he had come out of a big sleep and was looking at the world for the first time in his life.
He saw the people. He saw the worry and the fear. He saw all of it and then he smiled. The smile turned into a chuckle. The chuckle transformed into a laugh. The laugh descended into hysteria.
#
The tribal leader woke to the same sunrise and started to organize his people for the day. Some were to collect food. Some were to tend the garden. Some were to hunt. He was to sit and watch until the day was done and he could sleep again.
#
People are fighting over canned beets. Neighbors raid friends’ homes for batteries.
Gasoline is the problem. There’s no more oil or coal! The government has special facilities with stores of fuel, but they won’t share it...
We need to do something. We’ve been without power and running water for two weeks! What will we do?
These things the man heard whispered in the street when strangers arrived to see if the people of his town knew anything that they didn’t already know, but he heard more clearly the growing desperation in their voices.
The whispers turned to shouts and angry judgments. Militias formed out of fathers and sons to keep their town safe. Everyone who had a gun either joined or hid themselves away in fear or mistrust.
The man witnessed death, not for the first time, when his neighbor killed a stray dog and dragged it into his fenced backyard with sidelong glances at the silent houses on either side of him. Smoke was visible an hour later and the scent of barbecue filtered along the cul-de-sac.
The man watched and then he shut his curtains again to ward away the fear he had witnessed in his neighbor’s eyes. But he couldn’t stop his mouth from watering.
One night, gunshots woke the man from his dreams of warm food and reality TV. He shuddered into wakefulness and gripped his covers tighter. The sound was too close for comfort.
He lay awake long after the shots were heard again, but further away as the looters traveled from dark house to dark house stealing what they could and taking what the owners would die to protect.
He saw the shadows of flames flickering along his ceiling and he imagined that the fires were consuming the entire world. The smoke would obscure the world from the universe, and his dreams were tinged with fire and loss.
The next morning dawned. The man looked out of his top-most window; saw the street as black and uninviting as death. They had burned the mayor’s house down the street. The once majestic antebellum mansion was scarred and scored with the hands of fire and men.
He faced himself in a mirror; the bare light of the rising sun lit half of his face in a rosy glow. He saw a man who could pass as anyone. The military haircut leftover from his time in the service was peppered with gray that he hadn’t noticed before. The man knew he was nothing special.
Without a second thought, he walked downstairs, grabbed his keys, rummaged in his hall closet until he lifted a long item out of the trap-door in the back of the closet. It was encased in soft leather, but he did nothing more than hold it for a moment to his face and smell of the brown suede before leaning it against the wall and gathering the other items he wanted.
Knife, matches, candles, tinder box, medical kit, and the other knick-knacks of a hunter who was used to camping beyond the edges of civilization went into a pack of tough waterproof canvas.
He locked his front door out of habit, checking to make sure the deadbolt that sometimes stuck was sent home properly.
The man drove down the empty streets. Cars were parked in crazy directions, fuel tanks uncapped, engines exposed and butchered, windows smashed. He saw a homeless man sitting on the side of the road staring at nothing and then with a second glance recognized him as the mayor, but he kept driving.
The town that he had grown up in since he was twelve was littered with trash and fired buildings smoked in the early morning light. He saw children with dirty faces running from what had been a grocery store carrying bags of cat food clutched to their chests.
He kept driving. His tires thumped over glass and cans and empty containers. A fine layer of ash covered his windshield and he had to turn on the wipers, the fluid making a paste that left streaks of black and grey on the glass.
As he turned the corner to leave town and head into the outskirts, he saw a deer paused on the side of the road. The doe’s eyes looked at the car, blinked innocently, and then the creature vanished with a flick of its white tail into the wild.
The man felt something stirring inside him upon seeing the creature. He couldn’t quite tell what it was, but it was akin to a type of pain.
#
The tribal chief chewed his hallucinogenic drugs and dozed into a dream state as he waited for his gods to show him the way to ensure prosperity. Sometimes the gods told him to go to war with his neighbors. Sometimes the gods told him to take another wife. Sometimes the gods were silent.
He thought he heard the beginnings of a song…but it faded. It was just another day of the same. No news from the gods. No important message to the chosen people. No change.
#
The world was silent outside of the town, but it wasn’t the silence that had filled the dark houses and minds of the owners.
The silence of the wild was peaceful and filling. It didn’t inspire fear in the man. Despite the strangeness of not having a solid roof over his head and four walls to contain his thoughts, the man slept deeply for the first time in weeks.
The only signals he had to worry about were those of the birds startled in the brush by a fox or a raccoon. Or the warning snorts of a russet deer as it scented danger in the undergrowth.
The spectral howls of the coyotes thrilled him and filled the man with a sense of belonging although he knew he was alone.
It is much easier to be alone in the wild, he thought, than to be alone in the world.
He did not care any longer about the state of humanity. He didn’t have a family. He didn’t have children. He was a bachelor.
For him, it was easier than a snake shedding too-tight skin. The man shucked off his old identity.
He returned to the Wild.
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