Letters to James

 Dear James The world ended for me the day that you were gone, I think it ended for everyone else about ten days later. I can't be sure of the exact date. All I know is that when I surfaced and decided I would face the world again, everything had changed.  I got up, washed, taking the longest shower you can imagine (and I am really furious with myself now for wasting all of that water!). Then, I was ready to go outside.  I was halfway down the driveway when I spotted the first one. For a moment, it looked like you. Not as you were before, but how you appeared at the end, rake thin, with your cheeks and eyes sunken in; but it was up and moving, not lying in bed hooked up to morphine.  I'm lucky, it had its back to me and there was only one. It was dragging its left foot and making slow progress past the garden gate. Like an idiot, I just stood and watched it shamble past.  It was rotting already, they are all rotting. Dirty rotting corpses up and moving around. I...

  James, the ticktock man is back. He is inside the walls, he is counting the time away. He watches. I can hear him skittering. I can hear him, he is listening. Ticktock James, it’s rainbow time. It was the listening that got you in the end, I wrote the words but they could not help you. He certainly does not want to help me, but I must remember before he ticks away the sunshine, he makes the night clouds. We are the end of days and he will eat our skin and turn us into nothing hummingbirds.   I know, I know why he climbed inside and skittered. I can smell him coming, there’s no more nothing now. James, its now, its now. James.

  Dearest James The end of the world happened for us in a doctor’s office; or perhaps a little before that when you complained of a dull ache in your shoulder, of being so tired all the time. It ended when something showed up in the blood tests that Doctor Byrne organised, prompting him to send you off for an x-ray. It ended when the results of that x-ray prompted an MRI. It ended with a lump in your lung and another in your spine, with the fourth stage of having no hope for the future. I’m not sure how it ended for everyone else. Did these things appear overnight, or did they slowly creep in during the two weeks that I had opted out? The minute I saw them, I knew what they were, although they should have been impossible. How did it happen for everyone else? Did women wake up beside their husbands, only to see those dead eyes waiting? Did people try to help them at first? How exactly did the world end for everyone else?

  Dearest James The night is the worst now; I cannot turn on the lights. I must keep everything dark, or they will know that I am here. I sit at our kitchen table, peer through the gaps in the blinds, trying to see if one has made it into the garden yet, so far, the gate has held. I stay away from the windows, if they realise that I am here, they will stop at nothing to get inside.   I keep Loki locked in the bathroom, I couldn’t keep her away from the windows and I am afraid that they will see her and try to come inside. She hates being locked in, she keeps on making that high-pitched mewling noise that used to drive you up the wall on Saturday morning, when she would ruin our plans to stay in bed by demanding breakfast. I would give anything now for those lazy days, reading papers in bed and drinking coffee, with nothing to worry us. I miss you James, but I am glad that you are not here for this.