Young Writers Society

It’s been getting lonely lately. I’ve been working on the same project for what seems like decades. There has been no radio signal, no knocks at my door. When I look out my window, all I see is the rotting remains of another. Its house is crumbling, small plants blooming in the cracks in the roof.

There used to be a girl who would sit at that window. There was always something in her hands, whether it be a book or a paintbrush or a guitar. Her name was Chiara, that girl. One time I called out to her, stuck my head through the window. When she saw me, her eyes glancing up from a ball of homemade clay, she gave a quick wave, but it was more like her lifting up her hand and stretching her fingers out.

“Nice day, no?” Chiara said. She always had a single thin braid in her hair, like the braids the Vikings would make, tied with the same orange ribbon. I didn’t really know Chiara, past seeing her making art in the window. Of course, I knew her from being neighbours, but nothing past greetings and fruitcake.

“Yeah, nice day.” It was March. Must have been. The nicest days of the year, weather-wise, were in late March. “What are you making?”

“A bowl for my father.” Chiara continued to pinch the clay into perfection. “I’m going to paint sunflowers and lavender onto it. Those are the flowers my father likes.” I wanted to tell her that I also loved sunflowers and lavender, because those were the flowers my father always brought for my mother. But I kept my mouth closed. “What have you been up to? You haven’t seemed to leave the house too much, only to go to the market.”

“I’ve been working from home, recently. I’m trying to re-work the cables here.” I shrugged. “It’s a bit frustrating knowing that this all really outdated.” Chiara’s eyes darted up to mine.

“Are the wires from the Divide?”

“Before that, probably.”

“The Divide...my father never talks about it.” I glared at Chiara.

“As he should,” I said. “It was a terrible, terrible time. I would trade the world and more to be like you, too young to remember it.”

“You’re not that much older than me, are you? I’ll be seventeen soon.”

“I’m twenty six,” I scoffed. “That’s a little over a decade’s difference.” Anger bubbled within me. Chiara, even though I barely know her, seems to be one of those people who want to know too much.

“So you were, what, twelve at the time of the Divide?” Chiara asked. This irritation, most likely due to my lack of human interaction for the past God-knows-how-long, finally reaches its boiling point.

“Yes, I was twelve at the time of the Divide. I was twelve when everyone on the block had a raging fever. I was twelve when I watched my entire family die in front of me. I was twelve when I watched the world crumble around me.” I snapped. Chiara looked a bit disturbed, but nevertheless, opened her mouth.

“Tell me more.” Damn crazy girl. I sighed in defeat, softened my expression, and started talking.

The leaves continued to grow back and the cherry blossoms bloomed. This street was named for the cherry blossom trees, more pink filling the air each year, slowly taking back the abandoned Earth. I go for a walk every day so I can get at least a little bit of sunlight before going back to huddle beneath clockwork and wires. Lately, Chiara has joined me. The kid won’t shut up, but hey, I haven’t talked to many people since the Divide, so it was an interesting change that I wasn’t terribly opposed to. We became friends of some sort. Chiara would also come with me when I went to the market, tugging on my sleeve, pointing out fruits.

“You should buy those blackberries. Blackberries are one of the best crops,” she would always say.

“They’re very expensive.” That was my common response, and Chiara would then pout and continue to talk about all the other fruits that I would never buy. Today, however, she continued to try to persuade me.

“So? We all might die tomorrow.”

“Oh well,” I said. Chiara shot me a look.

“These days you can’t joke around just like that. You need to be positive.”

“Being positive won’t save me from getting sick and dying two weeks later.”

“Well it won’t kill you, either,” Chiara said. “Maybe it would be nice to make someone smile for once, rather than just filling them with despair and going on with your day?” She looks at me with her eyebrows raised. “You might feel guilty after you realize that you have nobody left on Earth to be nice to.” All I did was laugh back at her. I was sure I would be dead way before humanity went extinct.

I should have listened to Chiara. Now here I am, with my head out the window, waiting for someone across from me to look out at me, to wave and say hello. Waiting for that someone to never come, that pit in my stomach becoming wider and deeper each day. I never learned how to not take things for granted.

Yeah, Chiara could be annoying at times, but we were friends of some sort. When summer rolled around, she grew out of the childhood tendency of asking too many questions and stopped begging for berries at the market, not to mention that she also turned seventeen. I missed that childhood innocence, sometimes. The heat dragged the market down. Some nights Chiara invited me to eat dinner with her and her father, which I would always decline.

“I wouldn’t want to be a burden…besides, I have to work. I want to see if I can reconnect cell service and make these damn phones work again.” I would lie. Chiara would then scrunch up her face and mumble an okay followed by something about how her father wouldn’t like a guest at dinner anyway and we would part ways. It’s not that I did not want to continue talking to Chiara, because she was an interesting person. She wanted to show me the records her father saved, pre-Divide, to remind me what pop music was like, as if she had a record player or anything to remember in the first place. It was because there was something off about her father. I never saw him, and I was too scared to accept Chiara’s dinner offer and encounter her father, who apparently didn’t want me there, anyway.

While waiting for nobody to call out to me, I thumb over the records. Chiara brought them over the day I got the radio working. There was a single radio station working, a broadcast from a safe haven in the city. Chiara sat in a chair, the radio in her hands, and played their broadcast for her as I started to work on a clockwork cat, a surprise gift for Chiara. I let the radio talk about how that safe haven had a population of one thousand and how they would help any person who would stumble into their refuge. Chiara listened as it looped over and over again. Then after what seemed like an hour, she put down the radio, turned to me, and told me she wanted to run away.

“Excuse me?”

“I want to run away. Come on, just you and me. Let’s go to this place. I’m tired of having to walk ten minutes to get to the next closest opportunity for social interaction. I want to not be bored for once. I want to live life.”

“And what about your father?” I asked. “You’re just going to leave him here, alone?”

“The man doesn’t talk anymore,” Chiara hisses. “Ever since I started to talk to you and he saw us walking together, he’s been avoiding me. If I mention you to him, he furrows his eyebrows and tries to change the subject. And always, whenever I ask him questions, like ‘what happened to my mother?’ and he just looks at me half-angry, half-sad.” I stared back at Chiara, who then leaned back and crossed her arms. “What?”

“I wonder about what happened to my father. He took off when I was nine.”

“Oh, well I’m so sorry about that, but you’re not the only one with a single parent. My father said my mother is dead.”

“So is mine,” I said. Chiara tilts her chin up. The atmosphere between us is different now. Chiara knew what I was about to say. So, carefully, she opened her mouth.

“My father tries to pretend I no longer exist.”

“So does mine,” I said. And then I locked gazes with my sister.

It was weird between us for a couple of days, but I knew that Chiara was just thinking everything over. I heard her yelling at our father in her house at least twice every hour. I just kept on working on this clockwork cat. It had a tawny pelt with clocks everywhere on its body, all aligned to a different time zone. It would be alive, but alive in the way a robot would be, powered by copper wires and a heart that cannot clot. It was an odd-looking thing, with three large clocks standing out among the rest. One clock, set to the local time zone, replacing its face, a clock on its chest, and another curled in its tail. In my opinion, it was my masterpiece. Once it was finished, I let it roam my house for a bit. I had just created a living thing. The thought that I had done that sent shivers up my spine, so I locked the cat inside a cabinet and hoped it would just disappear.

Eventually, Chiara stomped her way over to my house and said that she wanted to live with me, as I was related to her and therefore she could move in.

“Don’t do that. Don’t leave our father alone for the rest of his life.”

“Well, if you’re so worried about our father being alone, why don’t you go be with him?” Chiara asked. There was fury in her voice.

“Let me go talk with him.” I didn’t want there to be any problems with our father, so I took out one of the mediocre homemade whiskies I’ve made and dragged myself next door.

I knew something was wrong the second my father opened the door. He had heavy, dark circles under his eyes, and he was all slumped over. Then again, I haven’t seen him in eighteen years, so the possibility that this could just be how he looks like now slipped through my mind, yet somehow, I knew that this wasn’t normal. My father, no matter how wrong he felt, smiled at me. Before he could say hello or try to explain or whatever he was about to do, I cut him off.

“I don’t want to ask for too much, but why?”

“I’m sorry.” That’s all my father could say. “I’m sorry.”

“So you just left me and my mother alone in the world and took Chiara with you? Why? What happened?”

“I’m sorry. It was all our fault.”

“You and my mother sent me away to a boarding school for two years to hide the pregnancy. Is that why you sent me away? So you could have Chiara and then take off with her? This makes no sense, give me an answer!” In my fit, I threw down the bottle of whiskey a few feet beside me, which made my father jump at the sound of the glass breaking.

“Yes, we sent you away for that exact reason,” My father said, his eyes still on the leaking alcohol. “Here’s why: You heard of that experiment they did, separating triplets, seeing if they would find each other? Your mother and I, we were psychologists. We wanted to see if siblings, born during different pregnancies would do the same. The plan was to put Chiara up for adoption, but your mother and I, we started to fight over this. So before she was born, we signed the divorce papers, I left, and when Chiara was born, I had sole custody over her.” My father started to cough, and small trails of blood were streaming from his mouth. “Get Chiara, please,” he said. “She’s the only one I have left.”

Furious that I never got to have a decent conversation, yet concerned for my father’s safety, I rushed back to my house to order Chiara to go home. I was so wrapped up in the panic that I didn’t even realize that my father had just cut me out from his life.

Chiara was gone again. She wanted to spend time with her father. I brought tea and fruits from the market for them. Chiara was panicky every time I opened the door to hand over the goods.

“He’s getting worse,” she would say.

“I know.”

People in the market were talking about death again. The sickness that had struck the world during the Divide was said to be back. Soon, less and less people were going to the market, and I would wonder if it was because they were scared or dead. I put on the radio again, to try to see if the safe haven had anything to say about it. When I set the dial to the frequency, nothing played. The radio would be eternally static, but I kept the volume as loud as possible to drown out the sound of the scratching from the clockwork cat still locked away.

The next day would feel like a different year each hour. The sun rose in all its glory, pink puffs wrapped around it, but by noon, the sun was gone and the powdery clouds were replaced with grey wool. Soon enough, a heavy downpour set in with the occasional thunder. By three, someone had walked into my house. It was Chiara. Soaked from head to toe, she collapsed at the door. I already knew what had happened.

“Chiara, you knew he was a lost cause. We both knew that it would be a matter of when, not if.” I reached my hands out to Chiara.

“Don’t say that! Don’t say that!” She howled as she clutched onto the cuffs of my sleeve as if they were the only things stopping her from her descent into the abyss.

By the time the rain stopped, it was night. The clouds had been pulled away, leaving the sky bare. I was on my roof, waiting for Chiara to come from my kitchen and join me. The death toll was so massive, light pollution had been virtually eradicated after the Divide. Stargazing was easier than ever, and had become one of my favourite activities. When Chiara finally crept onto the roof, her eyes were red and my homemade watch read eleven. Chiara glared at the starry speckles above us.

“You’re going to be angry at the universe?” I asked. Chiara nodded. “What do you think that will do for you?”

“I want someone to blame, so I figured that blaming everyone would be my best bet,” Chiara shrugged. “We’re all heading towards a dead end anyway, how much could it really matter?”

Now I was the one trying to drag away the despair. “Cut that out,” I said, not realizing how much I sounded like Chiara in that moment. “Things are bound to get better. We’ve hit rock-bottom, it seems. Now we can only go up.”

“You seem to be forgetting that at least this time, rock-bottom has a basement.”

“This may be humanity in its death throes,” I murmured. “But let’s go out on a positive note. Let’s hope that this isn’t it for us. We have fought so hard.” After I finished speaking, I turned my head towards Chiara. She was sobbing.

Sometimes I sit on my roof, just like that night, and try to look for anything in the night sky to prove that there’s someone else out there. Someone, anyone to come help me out of the grave I dug myself into.

Not wanting Chiara to be alone, I invited her to move in with me. Even though I knew that I should have her be separate from everything for a while, as she may be infected, I sat across from her when we ate and let her sit next to me and read as I worked on a new project. The day after she dragged in most of her stuff, I found Chiara in the kitchen dragging a string across the floor as a clockwork figure pounced along.

“You found the cat.” I didn’t know whether to be angry or relieved.

“It was trapped in a closet! I wasn’t going to leave it there.” Chiara giggled. She tossed the string towards the cat now sitting on its haunches, its paws becoming a bronzy flurry as it tried to get hold of it.

“It’s nice to see you back in good spirits.” I said.

“I’m trying to enjoy whatever time is left.”

“Chiara. Don’t say that.” She pursed her lips.

“Has anyone been at the market lately?” Chiara asked. I scrambled through my thoughts, trying to remember what my last visit to the market was like.

“Not very many people were there last time, but still a few. I think I’m going to go again today. Would you like me to get you anything?”

“Blackberries,” Chiara said. “Blackberries. That is all I ask for.”

When I arrived at the market, it was dead silent. There was one person there. It was an older woman who is there every day, who sells leafy greens and apples. My stand, where I would sell things from firewood to small homemade air conditioners and water purifiers, was always next to hers, and sometimes we would trade goods.

“You haven’t been selling in a while.” The woman said as she handed me an endive.

“I’ve been tinkering with stuff. I made a radio, among other things.”

“Have you heard any signal?” The woman’s eyes glowed with hope and excitement.

“Not in a while.” I shook my head as the woman in front of me drained. “Am I the only one that came today?”

“Yes. You’re the only one who has come all week.”

“Are people sick, or are they scared?”

“They’re dead.” The woman said.

“I have to go.” I choked on a sob of horror and took a step back. I needed to think about whether I should tell Chiara.

“Good luck,” the woman whispered. “And goodbye.”

I was sprinting. Sprinting so fast and I didn’t know why. I needed time to think, yet I was making my already short journey even shorter. Panic was the only thing on my mind as I scrambled home with the endive in my hands. I must have looked so ridiculous, now that I look back on it. Being one of the last people on Earth, and I had tears streaming down my face as I was running with a vegetable. If Chiara saw me, she would have laughed.

When I got home, I stood in the doorway, folded at the hip, trying to catch my breath. The endive was almost flattened by my grip as I was sprinting, its leaves crumbled and loose. What a waste of food, I think as I close the door behind me.

“Chiara?” I called out to a seemingly empty house. “Chiara, are you there?” I heard a weak groan from Chiara’s bedroom upstairs, and I immediately dashed to the stairs and climbed two at a time. As I stumbled into her room, I saw Chiara on her bed. “Is everything okay?”

“I’m not feeling well,” she said as I came closer to her.

“Do you have temperature?” I put my hand over her forehead. She was burning up. “You need to stay in your room for the time being. I’ll bring something up for you to eat later. I think you might be sick.” Chiara just nods and closes her eyes. I went into the bathroom and washed my hands before drawing myself a bath to remove whatever sickness could be on me. I thought about how amazing it is that we still had plumbing, but then I remembered that there was probably nobody else left to use it.

While I was bathing, I thought about how Chiara was always with her father while he was sick. About how my father’s symptoms so closely matched those of my mother’s and neighbours during the Divide. I was worried. Was I watching Chiara’s last days? She and I were probably the only people around for a while, excluding the woman at the market and the other few specks of people that live alone in uncharted territories. If Chiara died, I would be alone. Alone in the vast universe, the last of humanity. And I would hate myself for eternity.

I spent almost every moment at Chiara’s bedside. If this sickness is going to kill my sister, it might as well kill me too. Chiara got weak, her coughs were suddenly accompanied with blood, and it became harder and harder for her to breathe. I would sit there, holding her hand, with the cat lying on her lap. I would always prop her up with pillows so it could ease her coughing and breathing. She wanted me to read to her as much as possible, so that when一Chiara would always say when, not if, when discussing her own mortality一she died, she would be in a faraway world, as someone else, who was maybe on an adventure, or happy with friends, and not sick, of course. I would cry in whatever time I had away from Chiara. I was devastated, but I did not want Chiara to know what pain she was causing me. If she were to go, it would best be on a high note.

I counted the duration of her sickness with small notches on the leg of a wooden chair. Usually, the sickness lasted a little over two weeks with the symptoms easing up towards the last few days, assuming it didn’t kill you during that time. After a week and a half, Chiara was still suffering with no end in sight. My hands, nimble from mechanics, would form her braid daily. As it slipped back into the cascade, I would notice her pale, thinning face, the lack of a glimmer in her eyes, and her raspy breaths.

“I feel as if there are flowers growing inside my lungs,” Chiara said. “Every time I cough, I imagine there are petals, instead of blood.” Chiara nodded off to a corner of the room that was shrouded in sunlight. “May I have my paints?” I nod and rushed to get them as Chiara sat up.

Chiara, with her shaky hand, slowly picked up a paintbrush. Her other hand held the large canvas in place. Everything was so silent in that eternity of a moment. And then she started to cough. She dropped the brush, but not the canvas, as blood started to stain its white flesh. I got up and pushed my chair back, horrified, as the cat scampered away. Chiara continued spitting up blood onto the canvas. When she turned to me, she let go of the canvas and grasped at her neck, choking. I was frozen in shock and fear, and even when she reached out to me, begging for help, I could not make myself move. And then it was over; The poppies and roses could now finally see the sun.

Out of respect and safety, immediately after checking her null pulse I gathered the bedsheets and folded them around Chiara, pausing before wrapping them around her head. I took a small cloth and wiped away the blood from her mouth. Before taking my last look, I took the ribbon from her hair and tied it around my wrist. Its orange stood out from my greying skin. Then I finally covered her face with the bedsheets. I picked up Chiara and took her still-warm body downstairs, to the table that was outside, behind my house. I picked up an axe I had made years ago and went to the nearby greenery to pick out fuel for a funeral pyre.

Ever since the Divide, many people have agreed that burning a corpse was better than taking the time to bury it. It was easier to keep a fire going and toss in the masses that didn’t survive, rather than burying mass graves that had a storage limit. I assumed that Chiara burned her father, but I wasn’t too eager to go make sure. As I laid down Chiara onto the bed of twigs and branches, I wondered if I should send her off by reading from a book of poems or from a section of the Old Testament, an old religious book that had gone out of style. I chose to read from a poetry book that I had seen Chiara reading a while ago, written by a Divide-era poet who loved to remain ambiguous, yet still writing poems that touched so many in a time where everything seemed worthless and futile.

When I lit the fire and watched the flames wrap their arms around Chiara, the poetry went blurry as tears started to leak from my eyes. I felt a weight on my feet, and cleared my face just to find the cat sitting upon me. I almost kicked it into the fire to burn with Chiara.

I was alone! I was finally alone. Anger and relief and sadness caused my body to be wracked with heavy sobs, the cat stepping towards my side as I sunk to my knees.

“So Chiara, happy now? You were right! I am sitting here alone wishing I was kinder. You pesky child, always getting the better draw of things. Because now I am alone and watching you burn and you got out of here at just the right time!” I screamed to nobody. I was jealous of Chiara. She no longer had any Earthly responsibilities, no longer had to drag a tired body anywhere. No more story to tell. How I wished I could be her.

After the flames had nothing left to lap at, they slowly retreated back into nothingness. I quietly went to go find a vase or some other urn-like creation. I then stumbled upon an old jar that Chiara had made with small, hand sculpted blackberries and sunflowers decorating the exterior. I carefully swept up the ashes into the jar and sealed it. I let the cat crawl into my lap, nuzzling me, trying its best to tell me everything was bound to get better.

The jar sits on a special spot on my work desk now, next to some other clay creations and the poetry book. The bloody canvas was stashed somewhere, deep inside the heart of the house. As the cat would come into my workspace, I would be reminded of how Chiara would always want to know what I was doing, how she always wanted to go for walks and trips to the marketplace, and how she would sit at the work desk I had made for her and work with clay or paint a bit before going home at sundown. I would close my eyes and imagine my sister smiling again, imagine a life full of joy.

That night, I went back up to my roof to stargaze. I took the cat and the jar with me. As I laid with the cat on my stomach, riding my breaths, a single thought came to me: It was now that I was most thankful for the end of humanity.

Now, my project is to record everything I can about life. Even if I am the last of my kind, I want to feel as if I had made an impact. Every day, I work with the radio, fix up lights, repair old inventions, and create physical proof that humanity一myself and Chiara included一once existed. I surprise myself every day that I still push on, even if it may never be appreciated.