a hungry beast.
But he turns a corner and there’s good news. Batteries, lots of them. Many are corroded but some are okay. It only takes a few tries before his big flashlight is working.
Torch,
he thinks, shining it down a long dark aisle, seeing piles of flour scattered across the floor.
The English call this a torch.
He balances the torch on the shopping cart and picks his way through the rest of the supermarket, finding some bottled water but not much else. Eventually, he realizes there’s going to be nothing much of use anywhere – not the loaves of bread shrunk to nothing inside their wrappers, not the unplugged freezer chests filled with a black mold that smells like rancid olives, not the packages of cookies and crackers that are so much dust – nothing except the two aisles with most of the cans.
Again, many of them are rusted beyond use or so bulging with bacteria that Seth can practically hear it growing inside, but moving the torch up and down the shelves, he finds plenty that look normal, if dusty. He fills his cart with soups and pastas, with corn and peas, with even, he’s delighted to find, custard. There are so many cans, in fact, he’d have to make several trips here to even make a dent in them.
So, enough to feed him. For a while.
For however long he might be here.
The darkness and silence of the supermarket, even with the comfortably heavy torch in his hand, suddenly feels like too much. Too oppressive, too heavy.
“Quit it,” he tells himself. “You’ll go crazy if you think like this.”
But he puts his weight behind the cart and gets himself back out into the daylight.
He’s tiring again, he can feel it, and the hunger is a real thing now, almost as bad as yesterday’s thirst. He spies some green up around a corner from the market and remembers the little park there, sliding down a hill into a small valley with fountains and paths.
He pushes the cart, grunting at the effort, until he’s at the top of the park. It’s grown up like a jungle, unsurprisingly, but the basic shape is still there. There’s even a little sandbox area nearby. It’s about the only place here free of weeds.
“This’ll do,” he says, and lets his backpack fall to his feet.
He follows the directions on the camp stove, and five minutes later, there’s enough butane left in the small canister to heat up a can of spaghetti he opened with a far-less-rusty can opener he also took from the store. It’s only when the spaghetti is boiling that he realizes he didn’t take any knives or forks. He clicks off the stove and has no choice but to wait for it to cool.
He takes a bottle of water from the cart and holds it up to the sun. It looks clear, clearer than the water from his tap anyway, but even though the seal is unbroken, the water is still half-evaporated away. He cracks it open, the bottle giving a little hiss as he does so. It smells all right, so he takes a drink and looks down at the park below him.
It’s familiar, yes, despite the wildness, but what does familiar mean? he wonders. This place looks like a version of his childhood home stuck in time, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually the same place.
It
feels
real enough. Certainly to the touch, and definitely to the nose. But it’s also a world that only seems to have him in it, so how real can it be? If this is just a dusty old memory that he’s trapped in, maybe it isn’t really even a place at all, maybe it’s just what happens when your final dying seconds turn into an eternity. The place of the worst season of your life, frozen forever, decaying without ever really dying.
He takes another sip of water. Whatever
this
place might be, they’d never come all that much to the real version of the park. Sandbox and small play area aside, the steepness of the hill prevented it from being much fun. A big brick wall across the bottom of the main incline made even skateboarders avoid the challenge, so it must have been more a place for High
But he turns a corner and there’s good news. Batteries, lots of them. Many are corroded but some are okay. It only takes a few tries before his big flashlight is working.
Torch,
he thinks, shining it down a long dark aisle, seeing piles of flour scattered across the floor.
The English call this a torch.
He balances the torch on the shopping cart and picks his way through the rest of the supermarket, finding some bottled water but not much else. Eventually, he realizes there’s going to be nothing much of use anywhere – not the loaves of bread shrunk to nothing inside their wrappers, not the unplugged freezer chests filled with a black mold that smells like rancid olives, not the packages of cookies and crackers that are so much dust – nothing except the two aisles with most of the cans.
Again, many of them are rusted beyond use or so bulging with bacteria that Seth can practically hear it growing inside, but moving the torch up and down the shelves, he finds plenty that look normal, if dusty. He fills his cart with soups and pastas, with corn and peas, with even, he’s delighted to find, custard. There are so many cans, in fact, he’d have to make several trips here to even make a dent in them.
So, enough to feed him. For a while.
For however long he might be here.
The darkness and silence of the supermarket, even with the comfortably heavy torch in his hand, suddenly feels like too much. Too oppressive, too heavy.
“Quit it,” he tells himself. “You’ll go crazy if you think like this.”
But he puts his weight behind the cart and gets himself back out into the daylight.
He’s tiring again, he can feel it, and the hunger is a real thing now, almost as bad as yesterday’s thirst. He spies some green up around a corner from the market and remembers the little park there, sliding down a hill into a small valley with fountains and paths.
He pushes the cart, grunting at the effort, until he’s at the top of the park. It’s grown up like a jungle, unsurprisingly, but the basic shape is still there. There’s even a little sandbox area nearby. It’s about the only place here free of weeds.
“This’ll do,” he says, and lets his backpack fall to his feet.
He follows the directions on the camp stove, and five minutes later, there’s enough butane left in the small canister to heat up a can of spaghetti he opened with a far-less-rusty can opener he also took from the store. It’s only when the spaghetti is boiling that he realizes he didn’t take any knives or forks. He clicks off the stove and has no choice but to wait for it to cool.
He takes a bottle of water from the cart and holds it up to the sun. It looks clear, clearer than the water from his tap anyway, but even though the seal is unbroken, the water is still half-evaporated away. He cracks it open, the bottle giving a little hiss as he does so. It smells all right, so he takes a drink and looks down at the park below him.
It’s familiar, yes, despite the wildness, but what does familiar mean? he wonders. This place looks like a version of his childhood home stuck in time, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually the same place.
It
feels
real enough. Certainly to the touch, and definitely to the nose. But it’s also a world that only seems to have him in it, so how real can it be? If this is just a dusty old memory that he’s trapped in, maybe it isn’t really even a place at all, maybe it’s just what happens when your final dying seconds turn into an eternity. The place of the worst season of your life, frozen forever, decaying without ever really dying.
He takes another sip of water. Whatever
this
place might be, they’d never come all that much to the real version of the park. Sandbox and small play area aside, the steepness of the hill prevented it from being much fun. A big brick wall across the bottom of the main incline made even skateboarders avoid the challenge, so it must have been more a place for High
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