The Last Day

Melan laid on the floor of his apartment bedroom, taking in the brownish cream-colored walls. He had been living there for five years and had just noticed that the paint was chipping near the ceiling. It gave him the feeling, watching the paint flakes wisp down in spirals against the breeze from the open window, that his skin was coming off in peels, and he began to scratch his messy face. His beard began to itch and dig into his face, each hair like a small metal wire, and he began to imagine what it would feel like to remove the flesh from his head like a mask and wash off all the dirt under his skin in the shower. But the shower didn’t work anymore, and he was beginning to feel nauseous from this thought and from hunger. He stood up to grab a cigarette.

His hands were coarse with grime, the skin on his knuckles cracked, his nails chewed until blood had been drawn and small scabs created. When he flicked his lighter it hurt, because most of his fingers had become red with infection from the picking. His shirt was a light blue before, but it had since turned a rotted brownish color from his sweat. His pants had holes at the knees and odorous stains around the crotch and back, and his socks were two thin strands of fabric wedged in between free-roaming toes. He still didn’t wear shoes in the house, even though the carpet was filthy already.

The cigarette made his mind clear, but his body felt dizzy, and he began to lose vision in his dehydration. He stumbled out of the bedroom and into the living room, which connected to a kitchen and then a door leading to a set of stairs to the outside. The apartment was a second-floor loft with its own entrance apart from the main house. It was still morning, and the sun came in from small windows, one in the bathroom next to his bedroom, one in the living room set back from the steeped walls, and one in the makeshift dining room next to the kitchen. There would’ve been light from the window in the door leading to the stairs, but he had boarded that up completely when the rioting began last year.

His apartment was strewn with pieces of broken furniture. He had broken apart some of the furniture to board up the door and all the windows at the height of the rioting. When the commotion had died down and nobody else was left, he had taken the makeshift blockades off his windows but had not had the physical strength to unblock the door. He had nailed it tightly shut with pieces of his couch, TV stand, and bedframe directly into the studs of the wall. One night in winter, he had finished the last of his mushrooms and burned much of the furniture pieces for warmth on the first-floor’s roof which he could access from the kitchen window. In the darkness on the ground below, he could hear voices, so he snuffed the fire with a blanket and quickly returned to the inside of the apartment. Since then, he had only made a handful of supply runs, always during the day.

Feeling faint, he stumbled into the kitchen for a morsel to put on his swollen stomach. The fridge had stopped working, along with all power everywhere, he assumed, so he relied on dry goods found in the abandoned shops down the street. Much of the food stores had been picked clean, so in months past he would break into houses or apartments. This did yield a fair supply, which he would take home in a borrowed shopping cart. But two months prior he found a half-alive dog in an apartment, and it had bitten his leg badly. The dog had survived on the meat of his dead family, who had shot themselves perhaps a quarter year ago. The wound swelled with infection, and with a lighter-heated knife he had to cut off pieces of swollen skin every week, so he decided to stay away from residences. He didn’t dare stray too far from home, so he was forced to starve himself to ration what little food was left. There was no food left in his kitchen that day, and he laid down on the wet kitchen floor in surrender. The water from the ceiling dripped onto his face while he thought about life before.

When he graduated college five or six years ago, his family threw him a generous dinner party at his favorite restaurant. It was buffet style with an unlimited bar. He remembered the taste of the lobster ravioli, the crab cake with tartar sauce, the penne vodka with tomato chunks, the buttery bread rolls, the sweet red wine that he could never afford as an undergrad. He remembered hugging his father, holding his mother’s hand, laughing with his younger sister, toasting his friends. After graduation he moved to the outskirts of the city, rented his apartment, started his career. He made friends in the office and more friends on the weekends. In that same apartment he made a life, started new and left old relationships, made love and made war, hosted his family when they visited and even bought sweet red wine for them. His boss liked him, his friends liked him, and he would have said that he was moderately happy, getting closer to fulfillment. He wore a suit and shaved his face, he met clients for dinner engagements, he drove a car and sometimes took the metro. He practiced guitar at night, smoked pot, bought candles and houseplants and even called into the occasional radio station.

He lay there, water pooling around his still body, and looked through the kitchen window at the tree that had blossomed with life that spring. It was summer then, and the heat in his apartment was oppressive. He managed to pull himself up by the edge of the kitchen countertop, losing most of his vision in the process. His infected bite began to pulsate fire into his leg that shot up his body, but even dazed he knew sustenance was priority. Some of the ceiling water had pooled onto the countertop, which he sucked up with cracked lips, the first water he had in a day. He hadn’t eaten in three. There was a short rope on the countertop as well, which he tied to the drain pipe on the first-floor roof and used to rappel himself down the side of the house. It was wet, but it was his only option, so he scooped it up and clambered out of the kitchen window on all fours. He crawled along the roof to the edge, where he secured the rope loosely on the drain pipe. He didn’t have the energy to test his weight, or fasten the rope securely, or check the drain pipe. When he began to rappel, he put all his weight on the rope, which came undone instantly. He fell the full height of the first floor onto his back, feeling a rib snap as he hit the pavement below.

If anyone had been around to see him fall or hear his body thud against the earth, they may have stepped in to help. Instead, Melan laid alone on the ground, his chest throbbing in agony with every breath he took. He didn’t scream or cry out; he stared at the sky and watched the clouds break apart on a sunny day. Fruit flies and little bugs began to gather around his infected leg, crawling into his pants through the knee holes. After half an hour, he pulled himself up, breathing laboriously and in complete pain. The shopping cart he used during his last run was still where he left it on the side of the house, and he leaned against it for support and started pushing down the overgrown sidewalk. He only had a few hundred yards to go before he hit the shops.

It took another half an hour of slow-paced shuffling, leaning on the shopping cart, and stopping to lay down on the grass, but he finally made it to the first shop, a drug store. He walked right in – it didn’t have a door then – and began to peruse the aisles. SNACKS/CHIPS – empty. HEALTHY SNACKS – one bag of almonds that had been kicked underneath the display shelves. He nearly passed out bending over to pick it up. WATER/SELTZER WATER – empty. He remembered the water fountain in the back, but then realized that they wouldn’t have running water, either. DINNER – there was a sixpack of noodles he had left last time, still in the same spot. He couldn’t boil water to cook, but he could eat them raw. Satisfied with the score, he shuffled over to the checkout where they kept the cigarettes and tobacco products. There was still a pack of unfiltereds and some matches, which he took happily, a small solace. He lit one right away and began to cough uncontrollably.

Coughing, wheezing, shuffling, and losing vision, he left the drug store and found himself on a park bench. Opposite his bench, there were two others, which for the time he ignored as he ripped open the first packet of dry noodles and began to eat. He tried to eat the flavor packet when he finished the noodles but couldn’t stomach the taste and began to feel nauseous. As he was bending over the side of the bench, he noticed something shine on one of the benches opposite him. He pulled himself towards the new bench, curious, to find a small, heart-shaped locket with a fake ruby on its cover dangling by its chain from the top post of the bench. He opened it up, nothing on the inside. It reminded him of a necklace that he had gotten his mother for her 50th birthday, and how she had loved the gesture from her son. His face remained stoic.

“That’s mine!” he heard her cry out behind him and turned to face a steel bat coming into his forehead at speed. It cracked his skull open easily - his bones were weak from malnutrition. He never saw the woman, but he wasn’t thinking about her either as he lay on the warm earth looking at his blood and brains on the grass in front of him. His vision went out for good, and with a groan of ecstasy, he felt euphoria cleanse his tarnished body as he left his empty life.