Untitled and from the same world as this story
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The wars had broken out and things were starting to look bleak. Back then, of course, we underestimated the extent of the eventual damage.
Henry was among the first drafted. I don’t think he agreed with it, but he wouldn’t have dodged. He swore he wasn’t scared and I believed him. I think he was ashamed of his thirst for combat.
I’d been living in an apartment in the city with a boyfriend who paid my rent even though we always fought. Before our block was evacuated, he decided fate wasn’t on the side of our relationship. My uncle Cameron’s mansion was the only place I could go.
The property’s charms failed to delight me as they had when I was a child. I felt lost without the internet, which had gone down around the time of the evacuations. I spent my days drawing pictures and exploring the woods and fields around the imposing structure. At first, I was planning to stay for a few weeks, maybe the whole summer at the longest. Soon I lost contact with everyone from the outside world. It happened to all of us — the infrastructure attacks. My aunt and uncle started to take people in.
First was a friend of the family. After setting her suitcase in the foyer, she greeted Cameron and aunt Donna in a three-way embrace and gave me a hard handshake. “I’m Barb,” she said. “Your hands are really cold! I hope the heat works around here!” She laughed at that for some reason.
It didn’t take long for Barb to grow on me. She made life a little brighter.
By fall, we all acknowledged that the length of our residence was indefinite. Not that we talked about it, but our faces were softer for it. There was still no way to know what was gone for good and what might come back.
Next to arrive were Glo and Cindy. Glo was a friend of Barb’s and one of the most massive women I’d ever seen in my life. Cindy was Glo’s cousin, not as obese but still quite fat. Both bleached their hair and made no small matter of the absence of salons in our new reality. They showed up with cases of wine and drank even more than Barb.
For a while we were six: uncle Cameron and aunt Donna; me; Glo; Cindy, and Barb. Then Simon arrived, ringing the doorbell three times. That same morning, Donna had told me I should feel free to welcome guests — we didn’t call them refugees — so I didn’t have to ask. I answered the door and found myself eye-to-eye with an iguana perched on Simon’s shoulder. Donna was quick to point a finger at it: “that has to go.” A few weeks later, I discovered that Simon only pretended to set it free.
Bo, Dolores, and Lulu showed up the week after Simon. Bo came wearing a business suit. He said it made him feel like he was still a part of the world. Dolores was Bo’s daughter and Lulu was Dolores’s best friend. They were my age but didn’t want to hang out with me. I wasn’t bothered by this: I already had my new friends, and the boundaries that defined relationships would soon collapse so that it no longer made sense to think of friendship.
Barb would always be my favorite but Glo and Cindy liked me just as much. We all lost our identities in time.
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