If We Survive This

by Racquel Marie

Only recently infected, they’re still human enough to know how to hunt like one.

I hope they’re all hollow. I hope they aren’t screaming in there.

It only took a few days for society to collapse, but even while people were chomping down on one another, bills had to be paid. Of all the things I have to grieve, capitalism will never be one of them.

I cannot watch you die. I cannot lose anything else. I wish you were unknown to me again, I want to add. But I don’t.

Sometimes, I think I like being upset. Anger and victimhood make me feel good in an awful way.

In the dark, her eyes find my bruises just as easily, her gaze heavy enough that she may as well press down with her hands and make new ones.

I smile at the gift, at being human. At loving something that can’t die, gifted by someone who could.

He doesn’t need to prove anything to me. I don’t need hope hand-delivered in a miracle package. He just needs to live.

I am not looking into the eyes of a killer. And I’m not sure the world is willing to accept anything but.

There is a chance, if I push up, if I try hard, if I get them off me and crush this rock through their skull, that I can walk away. And then I can spend another day alive. And then do this over and over and over. I have been here before, and I will be here again.

The single bloody handprint on the back window reminds me that miracles these days are just the remains of other people’s nightmares.

That this is all there is, the only guarantee. Everyone will mourn until they are mourned, and nothing about that can ever change. I have been here before, and I will be here again.

The world does not pause its violence for grief, the world does not care.

His breath shudders, eyes still on his lifelines. “I wasn’t built for this world.” I do not say what I have feared for some time: I wasn’t built for anything else.

I had a friend. In this world, I had a friend. I should have recognized the impossibility.