The Return-1
500 Words
The Return
It was funny, that I should think of childhood for the second time that day (the first being when we’d descended the great tree next to the starship while still in our spacesuits, like kids playing astronaut). Still, there it was—just an image, really, a vignette—in this case a scene from a movie I’d seen at the East Fork Drive-in as a little boy (Escape from the Planet of the Apes, as I recalled, with Roddy McDowall and Kim Hunter), the one where the returned astronauts take off their helmets—as Maldano and I had just done—revealing themselves to be not men at all but advanced primates. As a metaphor, it was apropos; we hadn’t shaved since well before the moon.
I looked at the pure, perfect sky and its few scattered clouds, like white cotton candy. “Okay. So it wasn’t a nuclear exchange or a bolide impact, I think we can safely rule those out.” I squinted at the sparse blue dome. “No contrails, no homogenitus, no ash. EMP burst, maybe. But not a large igneous province—Yellowstone, say. Not a caldera. That leaves pandemic—something which had to have raced through the population like wildfire. It’s funny. All this time dreaming about home, only to end landing via the Doomsday Protocol.”
“Yes, well. Like I said,” said Maldano. He looked out over the Gulf of Mexico, which sparkled in the sun. “Could have been a malfunction. All that protocol actually means is that Mission Control hasn’t been detected. The fact is—we don’t know. It could be that Houston’s grid has been down, long enough for emergency power to have dwindled. It’s just that—what, what is that? There, low on the horizon.”
I followed his gaze to where a handful of queer lights could be seen twinkling amongst the clouds. “I’ll be damned if I know. They—they don’t look like aircraft. More like navigation buoys, but in the air. I honestly can’t tell if they’re manmade or not. Look, over there, still more of them.” I pointed due south. “It’s like someone strung Christmas lights in the sky.”
I looked at Maldano and found him already looking at me, sweat beading along his brow. Both of us, I think, were unnerved by the silence, or at least the lack of human activity, and by the crashing drone of the sea. I peered along the waterfront beyond him; it was just us and the bearberry bushes.
“Nobody on the road, nobody on the beach,” I said at last, quietly.
The tide rolled in and then out again.
“I feel it in the air; the summer’s out of reach,” added Maldano.
“Empty lake, empty streets—the sun goes down alone.”
“I’m driving by your house—”
And together: “Though I know, you’re not hoome.”
And we moved out, trudging through the sand toward the boardwalk, singing Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer”—trying, as we walked, to ignore the nearby high rises (hotels, mostly), which looked on in perfect silence, stoic, inert, monolithic, like tombstones.
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- Writer
