By Cameron Mitchum

She sits on the back deck most evenings now. The mosquitoes are gone. So are the gnats. But the crickets are still here. She hasn’t heard frogs in a while, but she does hear the evening birds, their songs soft and low.

Smoke rises from a few blocks over, probably on Berryvale, although it could be Ridge Road. She can’t tell and doesn’t have the will to walk over and see. She’s seen lots of backyard burn pits in the last few months. She’s lit hers three times.

If she had been asked, months and months ago when she sat in a classroom with other sixteen-year-olds, to write a story about the end of all she knew, her story would have been populated with monsters and beasts. She thinks about that now, sitting on the back porch, sipping lukewarm Dr. Brown’s Cream Soda. It would have been a story of people raiding and killing one another, a world dissolved into chaos. But, and she’s glad for this, it didn’t happen like that. The end of the world came quietly and with the smell of bodies burning in backyards.

Enid sighs and starts to get up but sees a movement at the back of the yard, in the corner. It’s a rustle, hard to see as the evening’s light takes over. She’d be glad if it were a cat. Her cat died weeks ago. Or maybe it was months. She’s lost track of time. She thinks all the dogs are gone. Maybe all the mammals and probably even the rodents. But not the birds. That’s strange, she thinks.

The bushes back there rattle again and then are silent. She hasn’t imagined it. But when nothing moves for some time, she goes inside and lights candles. She isn’t worried about using too many. Every abandoned house has candles. She’s visited them, the houses in her neighborhood where her friends used to live, where her parents’ friends lived. She doesn’t feel bad about gathering up their things. There are a lot of things left. They’ll never be used up. She takes a candle into the bathroom and washes her face and hands with water she’s brought in from the rain barrel near the roof’s downspout. She boils the water she drinks, but for washing, she doesn’t bother anymore. She rarely finds insects floating in it.

Before she goes to bed, she stands in front of the fireplace mantle. She keeps a candle burning there, beside a picture of her mother and father, her two brothers, her sister and herself. They are sitting on the edge of the pineapple fountain downtown. She remembers the day it was taken, three years ago. Her mother asked a stranger to take the picture and Enid was so embarrassed.

She lowers her head to the mantle and says the same prayer she’s been saying for months, “Please God, keep them in your hand.” But she doesn’t think anyone is listening.

In bed, beneath sheets that are scratchy from hand washing and hanging out to dry, Enid tries to read. But even her favorite book, Little Women, cannot hold her attention. The windows are open. There’s no need to lock them, no fear that someone will break in. The air is cool on her skin even though it’s July in South Carolina. Once people were gone, it became cooler. She’s learned to be grateful for these things.

In the morning Enid rises and readies the grill outside. A little kindling and a few pieces of wood which catches quickly. She heats water for oatmeal and coffee. She’s developed a taste for coffee. After breakfast, she starts her rounds.

Her father’s old Raleigh bicycle waits under the carport for her. She’s added a large basket to the front and side baskets at the rear. She puts on her helmet and rides out. Today, she’ll go over to Crestview. She rides through three neighborhoods before she enters the obscure gated dirt driveway. She and Matt, her oldest brother, used to ride down here and look at the big houses on the water. Today, she’s hoping no one thought to come down here. Today, she’s hoping to find canned goods and pasta, and maybe antibiotics to add to her stockpile.

The first house on the road has burned. She stops her bike in front of it. She won’t look through the ashes. She did that a few times, at first, and found bones that hadn’t burned entirely.

She moves along. At the next house Enid goes straight into the kitchen. She pulls cans of vegetables and soup from the pantry’s shelves. There’s tuna and chili, and three boxes of spaghetti. A few cans of pasta sauce. She loads up her grocery bags, as if she’s shopping at Publix.

She doesn’t want to go upstairs. There’s no smell, but she never knows what she’ll find. It doesn’t have to be bodies. It could be a child’s bedroom. That’s the worst. With toys on the floor and unicorn curtains hanging. But she needs to go up there. That’s where the medicine usually is. And she’s right. She finds half bottles of ampicillin and cephalosporin and some oxycodone. She takes it all. And the Ambien, too. One never knows.

In the backyard, the water in the pool is green. Beyond, there’s a dock, over the marsh, to the river. It’s low tide. Enid closes her eyes and sniffs to catch the marsh mud’s salty dankness. She hears a small banging and a little white sailboat bobbing against the dock. If she needs to leave by water, it’s good to know this boat is here. Her father taught her to sail. But where would she go if she left?

She turns to the next house, and to the others on the street. Thankfully, there are no bodies, but a large burn pit sits in the front yard of the largest house, and Enid can tell it’s been used a lot. Maybe all the neighbors came together and wept as flames took their families. She goes through cabinets in the homes and packs what she can carry. She knows she’ll return.

Enid is pedaling home when she hears noises in the bushes along the side of the road. A kind of shushing sound, a rustling. Stopping her bicycle, she swivels her head to catch the sounds again, but the world has gone quiet. She wonders if this is how she will lose her mind.

At home she stores the food in the garage and puts the medicine in a box in the freezer, even though there’s been no electricity for months. But if there’s a fire, the freezer wouldn’t burn. She doesn’t know how she knows that.

She hears a ding-dong chime coming from the front. It’s Billy riding past her house again, ringing his bicycle bell. He rides past every day, his face almost covered by his hoodie, but she knows it’s him. He sat behind her in freshman English. It would be easy to open her door and call out to him, invite him in for something to eat, be friendly. But something has held her back. Perhaps it’s the way he leans forward, looking neither left nor right, but focused so intently straight ahead. Or the way he incessantly rings his bicycle bell. She imagines his thumb, pulling the bell lever back over and over. Enid knows that something has gone wrong with him.

Ehe moves to the living room window and watches from between the blinds. She’s learned to trust her instincts.

There aren’t many kids around. One day she worked out the numbers. Five percent of the human population meant there were probably thirty-one kids left out of six hundred and twenty at her high school. She knows there may be more because younger people had a better survival rate. Maybe they’re hiding, like she is.

But people are still around. She found some living in the police station, the cells offering security, but from what, she wonders. Churches, at first, had people sheltering there, but now, the buildings are vacant, and the doors left wide open.

The library, though, is busy. People are always there. Enid has gone a few times, but some of the people made her uneasy. They weren’t keeping themselves clean or fed. They said crazy things. One man told her he saw snakes on his street. Every night they came closer to his house, he told her, but he scared them away with firecrackers. He held out a string of firecrackers and asked if she wanted some. A woman in a Star Trek costume told her to be careful going home because the sidewalks had started rising, up and down, like waves at the beach. Another told her that Jesus was visiting her at night, when the world had gone to sleep. Perhaps he was.

When she needs a new book, Enid goes to her school library early in the morning. She’s always the only one there.

Tonight, she sits outside under a full moon. She feels warm and touches the back of her hand to her forehead. Even though she hasn’t been close to anyone, she worries that she might be getting a fever. She goes in for a glass of water. When she comes back out onto the porch, it looks as if the bushes in the corner of the yard have moved closer. The moon’s shadows are playing with her eyes, she thinks.

She rocks gently back and forth in a rocking chair that’s been out on the porch forever. She looks forward to this all day. It’s the time of day she allows herself to remember. Tonight, she’s thinking about the time she sat out here with her mother, snapping green beans from the garden. Lately, though, she’s had to dig deep for the memories, as if a veil or mist was settling over them, making the edges fuzzy.

It’s so quiet. She tilts her head back and rests, rocking herself to sleep.

When she wakes up, the bushes have moved beside the back steps.

Enid jumps up, overturning the table beside her, and runs inside. She leans against the door, turns and locks it, and leans against it again. She’s breathing heavily and tries to catch her breath but has a hard time. One part of her wonders if this is what a panic attack feels like. When she can, she steps away from the door and moves to a window, peeping out from behind the curtains her mother made.

The bushes are in the corner of the yard again. Enid’s heart pounds so loudly she feels it in her ears. Tonight, she’ll lock the windows and doors.

She lies awake in bed a long time and it’s raining when she wakes up. The sky is full of heavy clouds all day, and the rain doesn’t stop. She feels achy and hot. Breakfast is cereal with canned milk. All day she alternates reading and sleeping. Late in the day she wakes up, sluggish, but her fever is gone. Enid tells herself the fever made her see those bushes last night. The dark afternoon is occasionally lit by lightning strikes in the distance.

While in the kitchen, putting grape jelly on crackers for dinner, Enid is startled by a bright flash which lights up the backyard. She opens the back door and walks out. Lightening has struck her mother’s clothesline. The grass beneath the metal poles is charred and smoldering.

And the bushes are standing beside the back porch steps, their leaves quivering.

She freezes. But her heart rate and breathing slow down, she feels it. She doesn’t run. She doesn’t hide inside, behind her locked door. Her lungs fill with air, and she screams, “What do you want?”

The branches on the bushes rise up. Enid’s legs leave her, and she sits heavily on the porch floor. “What do you want?” she cries, softly now.

Thunder rolls across the sky and rain comes harder. The bushes shudder. Enid is crying, her tears competing with the rain.

A small branch finds its way into her hand. Enid’s fingers grasp it. She rubs the leaves, thick and waxy. Gardenia, she thinks from somewhere. Dad’s favorite.

In the morning, the ground is still wet but the air smells clean. No fires burn in the neighborhood today. Enid comes out of the house to boil water on the grill for coffee.

“Good morning,” she says to the bushes, which have gathered around the back porch. Their roots stretch down now, down into the rich soil around her house. She reaches out and strokes their leaves. They raise their branches to say ‘hello.’