Love in the Time of Global Warming

Part 3

A light under the door frame. The door shakes on its hinges—the sound of a screwdriver in the lock—and it shudder-thumps open. I grip the scissor handles.

The man’s sweatshirt is covered in grime and I can’t see his face under the hood. His flashlight blinds me.

I just stare at him with the scissors held out in front of my body. Through the rest of the house I hear the other men stomping and yelling. It won’t be long before more of them find their way down here. There’s no other escape route except past the man’s wide shoulders. I need to run anyway. But where would I go?

“What’s this?” he whispers, crouching and holding out his hand. “What do you have down here?” His flashlight moves from my face and scans the walls of the basement.

Shelves stocked with canned food, water. My supplies are dwindling. He and the other men will take everything. Who knows what else they’ll take. Which one was he, yelling in the yard? Heard the wife and daughter were hot.

“It’s mine,” I say in my deepest voice. “You all need to leave.” It sounds ridiculous, like I’m going to start crying.

He shakes his head and puts a finger to his lips. “It’s not that simple. What’s your name?”

“Get out of my house.”

“Shhh, they’ll hear.” That’s when he holds his flashlight up to his face and I see his eyes. Dark eyes like mine. He sets something down in front of me—it’s a chocolate bar. I’ve eaten up the entire basement supply; it was my comfort the first few days, my only meal, and now they’re all gone. I want chocolate; I remember reading somewhere that it can trick your body into feeling like it’s in love. Sometimes when I looked at Moira I felt that way—a lightness, a tingling, an exhilaration mixed with calm. I still feel it sometimes when I dream of her, until I wake and remember that the world I knew has ended and everyone I have ever cared about is gone.

Not taking candy from strangers just doesn’t seem to matter anymore so I reach out and point to the floor with the ends of the scissors, indicating that he should put the bar down, which he does. I grab it and shove it into my pocket.

“I had a kid,” he says softly. “She fought constantly with her mother about the amount of sugar she was allowed to have.”

I wonder why he’s talking about this now. It seems so trivial.

The lines around the man’s eyes deepen. “Where’s your family?”

I just keep staring at him, trying not to think of their faces, smiling in a photograph under my pillow. (In the picture my mom is holding Venice and I have Argos on my lap in the same position, chest puffed out proudly because he’s upright. My dad has his arms around all of us and is squinting just as proudly into the camera as if saying, “This is my wonderful family. Mine.”—Don’t think of it now, Pen.) I bite my lip and feel the little crescent moons of my teeth almost breaking the skin.

“Most everyone’s dead.”

“Everywhere?” I say. I didn’t mean to reveal so much . . . what?—shock? vulnerability?—but it came out anyway