I still remember the first time I mailed you a letter. It was late in November, a quiet and wintry night entrenched with white-out conditions from an unexpectedly ash-ridden blizzard. The snow seemed to encapsulate my emaciated legs, and I still think of how hard it was to move through that heavy mass of human residue mixed with snowy liquids all the way to the postal office. There weren’t any traces of cars slipping down the treacherous road before me, and I knew there never would be again. Not since the cataclysm that rages what little of the world we live in today happened. Not since we saw the first casualty of our hometown return from the war.
I still think about the distortions that appeared on your face when you got your first letter all the way back in late September. You looked up at me with nothing short of unadulterated panic filling up your crystalized eyes. There was an unearthly tension in the room as though the words spilling out from the parchment trembling in your hands was a binding force terrorizing every square centimeter of the space we inhabited. It was a call to arms you repeated insistently, alongside a supposedly urgent plead for voluntary recruits. After all, our government had been supposedly fighting a successful struggle against that unnamed terror consuming the other half of the globe for years now. By this point, there weren’t many able-bodied people left to be conscripted. But I would never go to certain death, so I let you do it for me.
Even some like you, who had the worst eyesight anyone in the world could achieve, was called to be shipped out like cattle into the jaws of peril. I remember you writing how the sands were baited with hidden dangers and swallowed up the rest of your platoon up as you did nothing but watch in petrified curiosity from the safety of your observation station. You never overcame your mutilation fascination. Nothing could describe how thoroughly I’d nourish and flourish you back to humanity. But I’m neither there nor here, I’m somewhere that is nowhere helpful for you.
Still I remember dropping off the envelope at the dingy office, its abandoned facade reflecting how nobody in this sorry little town had contacted the exterior world for what seemed like years by now. But there was nobody else left around to contact us, not since the contagion began at least. And certainly not since the collapsers, oh those collapsers I don’t like mentioning them, found their explosive mark across every city of the vicinity. Everywhere except here, apparently. Normally, I’d have more to say about it, about the fact that everyone I’ve known in my life was incinerated into some molten mass of twisted bodies and burning flesh, but that is neither here nor there. I am neither here nor there. I do not know where I am, nor who I am anymore. Dissociating some call it, I prefer to refer to it as coping.
I even watched my own mother choke beneath me. She just kept repeating that phrase, don’t breathe. Don’t breathe. I won’t be able to breathe with you. For if you do, then the termites come in. She was hallucinating I assume, I knew that was the effects of the gas they used, it wasn’t real. But she didn’t have a gas mask to put on in time. I did, it shouldn’t have affected me.
But it got to me somehow. I felt those little insects she screamed of crawling up my flesh. Into my skin. My skin they’re in. It HURTS. It hurts mom why can’t I get them out help it hurts mommy I-… Don’t like thinking about that night much anymore. I only like thinking of you.
Last time you wrote to me, it was exhilarating. You were unintelligible. Nothing but the rawest stream of consciousness flowing freely onto the most disgusting piece of paper I’ve ever seen. Surely that stolen stationary from the strategic station went to waste. How desperate are you to risk a mission through an irrational decision to write as though you’re seeking my validation. Now thirty thousand died in a botched invasion that would’ve been averted if only you had given permission with the little paper you had to order an official retreat before it began.
Truth be told, I never knew why you of all people wrote to me exclusively. It makes sense when you consider we literally had no one else left otherwise. A country doesn’t lose 55% of its population over a years long dirty little war without cracking a few eggs you’d personally know. But I hated you, I hated your choice to allow yourself to go. You’d go and take your place as the last person in your family to die in this conflict. You would go and leave your poor little mother without a child left in the world. You’d go when you knew she had already lost her last six. So when you packed up for the last time ever, and hugged me goodbye, I glared at you.
Then I was set to leave. I was so close. I was so CLOSE. I had it all tucked away into three little shoddy briefcases left over from my father’s suicide, the last pieces of memorbilia that he kept after he sold everything he had to keep our family from deadly homelessness. The winter that year was nuclear, and the temperature never went above zero. Even the wood cost next to nothing for there were no buyers left for it, but even then we couldn’t afford it. The war insurance company decimated our payout potentials daily. It seemed as though the entire nation cashed in on life insurance, leaving nothing for the survivors as the assets liquidated.
So before our potential payments could dip below a level that even the Great Depression would consider pitiable, he walked out beyond the stars one night. Past our pasture, and past the mutated game lining the roadsides, straight to the banks of the river, where he broke the ice and fell through to the bottom of icy waters. He let the currents carry himself off to the far edge of the world, and out of our lives forever. And I always hated him for that.
But I digress, and I reassure you that I always hated you, which is what I wrote to you in the first letter I wrote since the start of the apocalyptic landscape we reside in now.
There are no people left from our old life, and certainly nobody left to collect that stupid confession I thrusted into a blue metal grave of a post box that not even the flies would touch. As if flies could even reproduce in this subzero wasteland we leave suffer in now.
So I trudge back into my shack, and I look at your eulogy resting on the kitchen table. You didn’t even last two months in the stupid little battlefield that for so long you dreaded arriving at. It didn’t even hurt did it now. When the bullet pierced your armored skull, shattering your left brain and dislocating the first spinal column from the rest of your vertebrae.
They burned your body in the desert that night, if you didn’t already know that. They burned it in the sands that once were a thriving jungle in the deepest regions of the remotest continent on Earth. And your ashes are mixed in somewhere among the tainted soil of hundreds of other recruits also pyred into nothing. I hate you, because I wish I’d go that comfortably.
Yet, I don’t think about you much anymore. I don’t think about anything anymore. I only wait for a final release from this life to occur. Even so, I am too afraid to do it myself. I wait for the end daily. The way the world is though, it already is the end. I wait for you to hold my hand and we can share our last dance together, just as we did when you first got drafted. That was late in September. It is currently late in November. You died in late October. At this rate, maybe you’ll read my mail after its delivered by some ethereal force, and you’ll pull me into a final and eternal embrace with you by the time it’s late in December.
Thomas ‘Trey’ Droste
Thomas 'Trey' Droste is a Sophomore from good old Grand Rapids, Michigan studying Environmental Business Policies. When he's not busy ranting tangents on societal grievances, he can be found hanging around swimming holes, history archives, and living precariously on rusted carnival attractions! He thanks God daily for his incessant cynicism.