The Line

He still had roughly a mile or so in line before he would finally see a meal again with his own eyes. Hot or cold, he didn’t care. Peter’s reasoning and senses were already ghosts. But now, standing in what had to be his final moments of vigilance and fortitude, there in his place in line, everything had grown dull. It had already been for a couple of days, but now, here in this moment, he had finally been adopted in by panic and despair.

“What even is it? Steel? Tin? Sterling silver? ...When was was the last time I even saw silver?” Peter asked himself. Whether audibly or internally, he didn’t know.

He swayed there in an old pair of khakis that he ripped down by the shins, anchored in a pair of old hiking boots, with their durable, yet brittle tread. He wrapped a few cloths around his neck like a shawl, with some pulled up as a hood. He stood there in line surrounded by hundreds of others, lonely, drifting.

With what looked like remnants of an already drying constellation of sweat canals down his arms and lower back, sand seemed to have created a symbiotic relationship with the cracked skin that remained exposed. Caked with grit, the gem-like iridescent glint sand always seems to have reminded him of all the times he had gotten migraines from the sun shining off the water in Water World’s wave pool back in Houston. In those memories, he must have been no more than a year or so older than his daughter was now.

His mouth felt swollen, while also seeming to have completely abandoned him, feeling as though it had disappeared altogether from his face. But it was there, although he no longer felt he had the energy to operate it.

“Would it even know what to do if it had the chance to eat?” he thought, fully aware that his dehydration had robbed his mind of how the body works. “Would a meal even help?” And on he stood, thirsting.

Despite these pains, Peter knew that he and his family were lucky to have been drawn by the government’s quarter’s lottery. It truly was their literal ticket out from this hell.

He remembered how it felt receiving the news late one night by some men from the state department. How they came late so as to remain unseen. And this only burdened his mind with more suffocating imagery of other times. Times both of blissful naivety and innocence, as well as times of horrifically true despair. He proceeded to replay how he and his wife Anne felt staring in disbelief as they closed and locked the door following the men’s departure. Even there in line, he could feel the strain in his shoulders that he carried that night two month earlier, as he and Anne sat burdened by the reality that despite winning, their reality was that there is only more of the same. More to malice. More fear. More warring until they were safe.

He spent most of his waking hours devoted to staving off such thoughts, but with the resilience of a cockroach, they always found a way to creep into his mind through the cracks he never patched up. Memories about how if any of the neighbors discovered their identity, they would surely have been cannabilized. Not necessarily in some crude animalistic sense, though that was never truly off the table, but of something much deeper, much sadder.

He knows what a ravenous and devouring presence pride can be. He’s tasted and seen the ethereal moments of love, of laughter, of safety. He’s experienced, both as predator and prey, moments of stone-cold stoicism. The kind that sits in wait, watching others through thin brush, eyeing their movements like these bobcats that now roam more confidently in the open here in what used to be Salado.

Nudged from behind, Peter’s gaze dashed up and his vision adjusted on three more feet of sand between him and the guy who had been in front of him for hours. His fears far from being assuaged, he muttered a dry, almost muted, “People will take over your life if you let ‘em. That’s all I’m getting at.” This time he was sure it was aloud.

The man behind him, showing a day or so more life than Peter, began to ask what he said, when in a filterless compulsion he blurted, “Hey, man. You ok? You’re looking really rough.”

Peter, barely able to glance behind him, eyes appearing to be stuck rolled up as though he was sleep walking, nodded, and faintly creaked, “Yep. Just tired.”

The other man pointed at a rock beside their line about fifteen feet ahead. “Why don’t you just take a rest on that rock... I’ll hold your place.”

“No thanks,” Peter replied, without even attempting to spend the energy to turn and face the man’s hospitality. He knew that men will lie. Compound that with the world as it is, and deceit, theft, and murder were only an inevitable consequence.

Many had read the signs and knew to leave the states as soon as word first spread concerning the air’s toxicity. However, it wasn’t until the U.S. no longer had crops or livestock that the majority fled.

“Iron?” he thought, collecting himself again. “It just doesn’t feel like tin,” he continued, standing on legs that reminded him of the feeling you get after swimming with flippers all day. He had almost even forgotten the feeling his raw, bloody skin was experiencing as his shawl seemed to be in a never ending tug-of-war, pushing and pulling the sand against the skin with the slightest shift. He almost forgot because at this point, his mind had lost its core defenses. He was barely functioning on one piston, but that piston was giving its all to the enamoring relationship his hand had with the metal heart shaped locket that he feverishly gripped.

The line moved. But he questioned it being the waves of heat dancing atop the pavement and sand the way they do when it’s too humid outside. Either way, Peter imagined holding his daughter Haven’s hand as he clung to the locket. That was the last thing they talked about before boarding their boat in Galveston, taking its group of lottery winners to the East.

“Nuland?” he questioned, remembering it being called that once.

This lottery was an opportunity to begin again. To move to one of the few reemerging societies that was finding success with crops and animals. A chance for life. For safety.

That is, until Anne’s panicked cry about a month ago. “I’m pregnant...”

He remembered celebrating the news, despite what it entailed.

“Look, it won’t affect us! It doesn’t matter, you’re not showing, and once we get there, they won’t be keeping tabs. The only hard part is getting on the boat, and I’m sure we’ll get on before you begin to show. You might even start showing on the boat, but the tickets will have been punched by then!”

He said all of this with the same charming demeanor displayed by the mascots of their once glorious political system, as they plead to everyone for votes. But like the ancient politics, there was much insecurity and naivety under the surface of his shiny words.

He remembered the joy their six-year-old daughter Haven expressed with her wide eyes and squealfull scream when they told her. It was the same reaction they had felt when they were kids being told about Disney World, or allowed to stay up late to watch a “big kid movie” with their own parents.

He gripped the locket even harder. Each squeeze draining what felt to be one of the few remaining hours from his life.

Surprised that his husk of a body had enough to produce a final tear, which immediately fell down his cheek, he remembered his daughter’s despair a week ago when the guard wouldn’t let them onto the boat. Anne had begun showing, and Haven knew what that meant.

“Daddy! No, we’re all going! We’re all going!” she cried.

“Babe, we’re going to figure this out,” Anne kindly said, freeing Peter from having to be their resident liar.

He stood there, tear trail hardening, feeling like an unnatural trespass, continuing to reminisce. He remembered kneeling down on the dock to stare into Haven’s eyes, barley able to see them because of their tears. She wouldn’t take this moment. She couldn’t. She wasn’t meant to. No kid was. But he did. He knew what she was too innocent to know. This would be their last time together.

He fell to the sandy concrete sobbing his life’s final tears. Ignorant of the apathetic grumblings from the others in line, his body lost all strength as he remembered this.

“Hey buddy, can I help you?” asked the man again.

“No! How could you?”

“Buddy, I-“

“We’re all dying and no one cares. No one gives a fucking shit about us.

About my family! About me. About you.” Mustering what might be his last words, he took a deep breath, but before being able to speak, the man interrupted.

“I’m sorry, friend.”

This gave him pause. Peter felt a bit more warmth come into his body. Traces of blood still flowed. He finally looked up from the ground, sand muddied with his snot and spit, and looked through the other man and said out loud to himself, “Do I eat and live? Or do I remember and die?”

The man just looked into him, holding a gaze that wasn’t really meant for him.

“I’m wrong. No matter what I choose, I’m not my wife’s husband, my kids’ dad. I lie here in the god-forsaken stench of my own shit and selfishness.”

The man knelt down to keep Peter from straining more and asked where his family is.

“They’ve gone to Nuland. They’re safe.”

He wasn’t quite sure why this reality felt as if it were ripping him into two opposing halves, but it was. This was his new reality. This was his new land. Peter mumbled out a near inaudible thought so visceral and vulnerable that it could’ve undone any man in line had they heard it. He simply said, “There is rarely a best case scenario in this life. Ours are only choices of lesser evils.”

Peter stood, depleting his body of its final life, and proceeded to walk toward the rock the man had pointed out. The man instinctively came alongside him to serve as Peter’s crutch.

He began to remember more. He remembered his final moments with his wife’s beautiful eyes and her life changing smile, which she wore in that moment as a mask to keep her sadness out of his future memories. He remembered the little bump in her stomach, and how he would give his spot all over again for his child he would never know. He remembered his daughter running back to him at the dock one final time, yelling “Kiss and hug,” and her final act of giving him the very locket he gave her three years earlier. And with the forgetful innocence that only children have, she saw past the moment, and simply said, “Think of me when you hold this!”

He remembered this final memory on his walk with his neighbor. And like the shawl that had now slipped down to the earth, he felt the burden of becoming fall slowly from himself. He quit worrying about the shred of energy that could’ve come with a meal, as well as the shame of not using that energy to find a way back to his family. He had done his part. He gave them safety.

And there, on that sandy rock, Peter’s sadness ended. He sat holding the locket, and with the same glint in his eye as the sand, he let himself die.