Her hands reached across the car seat, its ripped leather telling stories with crumbs and lost money. Only the shadows from the broken windshield were more splintered. 

Her hands fumbled for something inside. Anything of value may help her barter for the next meal, the next potion of remedy. Anything to kill the hunger, the pain of another day on this stretch of Missouri highway. 

She had left Saint Louis behind, its warlords controlling all of the area from what used to be Washington University down to the Arch and the river below. Her father had told her of a hotel anime conference there where he met David Carradine. Years later she wondered who David Carradine was, and what was Anime?. But it had been important to her father. He said the old man had given half a effort at the panel, not really answering questions. But later that evening at the hotel bar, he sat alone. Smoking alone. The man her father said had been a legend of Kung Fu.
She didn’t know what he was talking about, but she liked the sound of her fathers voice. 

He said as he approached Carradine he noticed the actor watching him from a side eye, and he was pretty intimidating. But once they got past the small talk the actor slid the chair out beside him.
“Buy me a whiskey,” he said. Her fathers eyes still lit up years later when he told her this story. It was one of the happiest visions she had of her father.
She tasted whiskey once. And hated it completely. She spent the nights staring at the starry skies. Thinking about what David Carradine must have looked like. Wondering why people would gather to discuss this Anime thing. And how anyone could stomach whiskey. 

Her father did mention Carradines most famous role. A monk called Caine. Who walked the earth. She couldn’t help but smile at the similarities to her current journey. Exiled and alone, looking for faith and food in the wilderness of old America. 

Exiled and Alone. Hungry. With memories of her Father. And stories of the times she never knew.

Excited to announce my poem When You Are Dead has been included in the collection The Alien Buddha Loves You Too published today by Alien Buddha Press.
You can snag a copy off Amazon here

Your micro aggressions are felt at every slight,
The hate in your eyes is unforgiving, and unforgivable.
If you climbed to the highest ceiling, brush on your paintstick,
You’d only leave a mystery of human misery.
I’d love it if you found joy, and happiness, but you don’t deserve any of it.
But neither do I guess, a lonely excuse for oxygen.
Stagnant and old, best days behind me, behind us.
A terrible state for the end of the world,
The lines on the map mean nothing now.
They are just chalk that has been washed away,
Like any history we had.

The fire sunset over Los Angeles was crisp. Thirty years ago it would have been smudged with smog, but that smog like most pollution not caused by fallout had receded. Now the city had a cleaness not known to man.
From the hills the city may have passed as just that, its arachnid layers of highway and concrete still intact, just missing its ants. 

In Cairo the pyramids lay dormant, no tourists snapping pictures while being amused by the natives and scared of the religion. It would surprise no one if the aliens returned to take what belonged to them. Perhaps under all the sand a spaceship would rise and float away from the wasteland.
 

In Moscow the snow fell. And fell. And fell some more. Bottles of unopened vodka lined the markets, clear death, single file, undisturbed but growing weary with decades of dust. A single radio station played at town square, a song on repeat, a song of brotherhood and remembrance.

In Shanghai people worked, as they always had. The government did not let them know otherwise. It was after all, the way it had always been for the world’s oldest civilization. New rulers perhaps, but the common good carried on. Even when the common good only benefited the few not so benevolent ones. 

The earth continued to spin. That was the victory. A small grace of wonder in the universe that had long ago gave up on this place, rotten with humans, and disease, greed and bad taste.

The river rushed with an unyielding force. It crested above Jack’s head sending him swirling through the waves. How could he have been so stupid he thought, cursing himself. He had set the trap very gently on the side of the river knowing animals would be coming for water. He had already collected two other traps, a small rabbit and a squirrel. They would have fed him two meals at least. He came to inspect this river trap and saw it had found a prey. He approached it rapidly, not being aware of his surroundings. He heard the branch snap behind him and the shadow that blocked the sun turned his heart quickly. He turned to see the large bear already in attack mode, standing on its hind legs and snarling at Jack as it plunged towards him. 

He did not have time to dodge or evade so he threw his arm up and outwards knocking the bear back slightly. The force sent him stumbling back, and into the freezing Missouri River. Now he fought the waves, catching air occasionally, tossing and turning, trying to find something to grab onto. He spun for minutes, growing tired. He hit a shallow bed and it scraped his legs but he was able to get a grip on a large rock. Cursing he pulled himself up, his meals lost to the river but he was alive. Jack headed for shore and took in his location. He was far from home. Time to head back upstream and hope the bear wasn’t there. Or that he wouldnt freeze to death in his wet clothes on the way home. Jack knew he needed to be smarter to continue to survive like this. Something had to change.

She took his hand gently. It was unexpected but welcomed. He looked at her, a beautiful thing peering at him behind bottle coke glasses.
“Do you want to talk about this?” he asked, looking at their hands entwined for the first time. She smiled and looked away towards the setting sun. It was a good enough answer for him. A while later her head rested on his shoulder and they sat there watching the world fall asleep. To grow old together without the dullness of language.

“Mondays are the worst.” He remembered saying such things. Now he didn’t even know what day it was. He knew it was fall because the leaves were turning golden brown, but there was no sense of days, no weekends, no holidays. It would have been football season now. Crowds would have been walking down this Georgia main street on the way to the old high school football stadium.  You would have been able to smell the hot dogs and bbq grilling, hearing the PA announcer in the distance like a ghost announcing players names.
But now the street sat silent. The football stadium was deserted, although the bleachers provided respite from the sun if you found your way underneath them. In those days Fridays were tolerable. You had a game to look forward to and a cold beer. He imagined how it felt on his hands, the chill of alumnium, the sound of the can cracking open. The cold pour into his throat, and the instant relaxation that followed. He had found a six pack last year. It was expired but he drank it anyway. It was one of the worst things he had ever tasted. And it threw most of it up later that evening. But if presented with another beer today in the fall autumn sun, he would undoubtably do it again.

Tall empty buildings, alone in their memory of humans.
A single bit of sunlight shines through their empty husks,
Concrete and leftover waste, a lone spark in an electrical conduit somehow still powered. Flickers on and off into eternity.
Numbers on doors mean nothing.
A few ants traverse ripped carpet still scavenging for food.
A plant on the rooftop grows wild eating the sunlight whole.
A bird chirps in the distance singing a song.
There used to be a melody here.
In a place of constant noise.
In constant pain.
In constant laughter.
In constant bustle.
In constant joy.
In constant life.

The thunder was constant. It never stopped. Sometimes Ezekial could imagine the silence he used to hear. Thirty two years as a librarian, it was a quiet life. Now the Tulsa corridor just stormed, a constant raging sound of fire and tornadoes. He had rescued what he could from his small library, knowledge for a future society. But he often asked if he was delusional, his doubt growing with every lightning strike. Are there children out there? And if so was anyone even spending time to teach them to read?

He hoped so for the alternative was that he wasted his time here, preserving things that only gave history to a time before. And maybe, none of it mattered. None of what came before, and nothing existing in the ongoing storm. Another crack of thunder, another dark cloud on the horizon, pure malevonce, the atmosphere cleaning, erasing the words for the next generation. A windmill of time, and sand, and flood. The story had been told before, and would happen again, but could anyone ever know the conclusion?

“People used to watch those,” he smirked as he pointed at the old flat screen tv on the wall.
“Like they stared at the wall?” Heather asked curiously.

“Well yeah, but mostly they had it on in the background while they looked at their phones.
“What’s a phone?” the young girl asked.
He laughed at that, rubbed his hands through his thick brown hair.
“Well originally they were things you could call family or friends on. But eventually they became like a drug, something everyone became attached to.”

“Sounds bad. What would they watch?”
“Oh everything. Some people even made shows where they just lived in a house together.”
“That sounds nice. Better than always being on the move.”
He thought about that. Yeah, it was nice to have a home. But they no longer had such luxuries. Had to keep moving to avoid the road gangs, and to search for food.
“Did people like the world before?” she asked. He spoke quietly then,
“Sometimes. Yeah maybe. But most of the time they just wanted more.”