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Black Flies

acuity

—— ambrosio ——


My limbs still ached from a day of battling against the current, but every moment had been worth it. Increasingly, Matthew’s thoughts had been turning dark at every turn, and I had hoped that dropping the rosary would release a weight of sorts, like an old hot air balloon dropping ballast.

Hot air balloons: I dearly missed them. Living after almost everyone else has passed was tolerable most days, and I eased into the lifestyle a little more each day, but small things would bring pangs, like loved ones who died long ago but who still drifted through my thoughts from time to time, leaving ghosts in their wakes.

I missed the barges that used to drift by east end; I missed the Strand on a busy day, when the haze was nonexistent and vacationers and tourists walked side-by-side, enjoying the sun on their faces and the unbounded feeling that would settle in the chest on a lovely summer day like a silk cloth. It had been years since my last milkshake; my last carefree stroll; since the last time I bought a little trinket—a postcard for a friend I’d met in those two years in college or a shiny plastic crab with the island’s name on it to sit on the windowsill next to a mound of dead black flies—and the last time I felt the soft paper money in my fingers, back when it stood for something in my mind. I felt the weight of all that had been lost.

Can all souls be saved?

What an odd question, I’d thought. He’d ask these things, sometimes, but it had been awhile since the last burst. The bridges broken, this was almost certainly the last body to be found, and then perhaps the questions would taper off forever. Survivor’s guilt, I’d said once. But he’d shaken his head, like he always did when I smoked.

We watched the next blushing sunrise together, the smoke floating up from the cigarette between my fingers to form a crescent around the sun. With my other hand, I tapped the clear yellow lighter against the deck.

“It’s a shame that more people can’t see this,” I said.

Matthew leaned into me, saying nothing, but I felt his breath catch.

“What is it, love?” The air around us was pastel-hued, the fog as thick as it was for the last burning.

“Nothing. But wouldn't more people make it less intimate? I was...also thinking about the desalinators. We need another one, a backup in case the one we have quits working. Or for spare parts…” The were fluff. He knew it. I knew it. There was something else that lingered, but he either didn’t have the words or the heart to tell me. “I’ll go back to the university today or tomorrow, to see if I can find another.”

“Yes,” I said. “We have time.”

“Of course.”

The sun rose and the air grudgingly shifted back to its usual soft grey blue. A few hours later, after we both ate and talked about a book I’d scavenged and read from the old bookstore—a rather cinematically-written apocalypse story about a world on fire and its doomed inhabitants—Matthew finally departed for the university, briefly cleaning the bike with the 90% isopropyl alcohol that I’d found in the abandoned pharmacy so that the plague from the corpse would not spread to him. I had to remind him to do this, and in response he smiled and nodded sheepishly, as if he’d already forgotten about the illness that had killed everyone we’d known. It was possible to walk to the university, but Matthew always said that he felt an almost visceral freedom when he was on that bike; it worked as a resting place for his mind.

I felt a similar feeling around noon, when the sun was invisible through the kitchen window, Matthew had been gone for a few hours, and I had started and stopped a painting with the few acrylics that we had left. It wasn’t a feeling of freedom; something ate at the back of my mind, and, try as I might, it slipped through my fingers when I tried to identify it. I held the brush between my fingers as I would a cigarette, tapping it against the table. I could make pigments from the plants in the garden for the future, I mused, but my creativity would have to return first.

Over a dully-flickering candle—the only one in the room, as the light from outside was enough for now—I watched a pelican drop into the ocean to sit, duck-like, under a clump of hovering gulls. It must have been a school of fish.

Fish and birds, I thought. The plague—the pandemic, rather—had been one of the deadliest illnesses known to man, but it hadn’t been able to transfer to or from any other species. When Matthew had told me this, I’d asked why this was.

“I-I don’t know,” he’d admitted. Maybe he found it odd to talk science with me; I was never sure whether he believed my story about having half of a physics degree. It was false; I had a little more than half of a degree, but what was I to do with it when I was nowhere near dexterous to apply those physical principles that I’d half-learned? It’s not like I actually graduated; I was also loathe to consider myself an academician, and was glad when I left the cutthroat atmosphere to drift.

“Immunity is—theoretically—possible, though,” Matthew had added this in a small voice, as if he hadn’t been sure that I should know; as if it were some confidential information that he shared with me. “I could find—”

I’d reached for his hand. “Don’t bother. You’ll spend the rest of your life searching, and it will be time wasted. Time that could have been enjoyed.” He hadn’t looked at me.

“And if, by some...natural cause, you and I were found to be immune, as some people are inevitably?”

“I don’t know how likely that is. But I wouldn’t question it.”

This seemed to satisfy him, and the subject of the plague was rarely—if ever—resurrected after that conversation, sans little sprinkled bits about his work at the university, back when it was a functioning institution. When we had conversations over the microwave dinners that he actually seemed to enjoy, when the sickness was still scattered. Although it found its way to the island early on (hence the burning of the highways that led in and out; the people here thought that they could stop new instances by halting travel into the island) we still thought it as something controllable and remote. I had, at least.

“Biology,” he’d replied, narrowing a million possible subjects down to a thousand. He would say no more on the matter.

It always seemed like neither of us cared too much for our respective pasts. The present was always enough, the conversations and explorations of the various things that interested us both at a given moment, things that weren’t always semi-comedic books about an apocalypse that never came, an overly-dramatized end when the real end was more of a slow fade, a light jog into a blanket of mist.

Finally I stood from the table, putting the brush down and holding the painted cardboard in both hands. I then gathered up some canned food and took a bottle out of our water bottle armada and placed them in a worn messenger bag that I had secured from the thrift store where Matthew and I would laugh over the overabundance of pastel hibiscus and palm shirts, and then I’d buy one for him, knowing that he secretly liked the patterns, always a kitsch biker at heart.
————

The interior of the university was hollow, life’s fingerprints marring the now-empty halls in the form of flyers advertising upcoming events; pencils, pens and other supplies scattered around the floor; white papers, now yellow, that found themselves knotted in corners and sullenly gasping on cold white tiles, stirred by winds that broke through likewise-broken windows.

I walked down the halls, careful not to touch anything, until I found a single room that brimmed with light.

Matthew jumped as I shouldered open the door. “Ambros—what are you doing here?”

We were in a little lab, power supplied to us by a generator that hummed in the corner of the room.

“I brought lunch. I thought we could have a picnic?” It sounded stupid, but he smiled and nodded.

“A picnic,” he repeated, setting down his cracked glasses. “On the beach?”

“Unless you want to in here.” I gestured around. The room was small and windowless. Syringes littered the table in front of Matthew, alongside an unmarked cardboard box. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

“I—I just found this place, a-actually. I hooked up the generator to get a better look, because there wasn’t any sun coming in from the hall.” He hesitated, but added, “I...found something, too.”

I set the bag on the floor and moved closer as he opened the box.

I recoiled as soon as I saw its contents. “Flies?”

“I think—well, I—they might be the ones.”

“What are you talking about? The ones?”

The words tumbled from his mouth like snow in an avalanche. “The ones—the first—Ambrosio—Ambros, do you remember how high the disease instance here, in this region, was, as opposed to the rest of the nation, the rest of the world? How we—they—were so efficient to quarantine here, as if they knew what would happen?”

I stepped back. “I don’t understand.”

“Y-you do. I think you do.”

“The pandemic, it—it originated here. Just pack the tourists’ vehicles, the homes here, everything, with flies of the first gen—er, the parent gen—and they brought it to the rest of the country. Flies, they...they breed so quickly, and, uh…”

“Why?”

“Why?”

“You are saying that the plague was…” I searched for a word, but he had it ready.

“Engineered?”

“Yes. Why would anyone do that?”

“I—” His eyes lit up, but the light quickly died. I’d never seen anything like it. He set the box of dead flies down and my breath caught; he wore no gloves. “I don’t…know.”

My eyes narrowed, but I hoped he didn’t notice. “Let’s leave this place, then. It’s no good.”

“All...all right. Let me cut the generator.”

We walked home, but my hand in his was cold. My heart froze and thawed and froze again, pieces of it flaking off and landing as ashes in the hollows of the footprints that I left in the sand.

The old steel wheels on the generator were rusted, and the rust had bled and fallen onto the tires and the tiles beneath.

It had been there for some time.
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