Last One at the Party

by Bethany Clift

I was looking into his eyes; eyes like rabbits have in those anti-vivisection films. The ones where someone has the rabbit by the throat and you know that the rabbit knows what’s coming because its eyes become huge and frantic and dart back and forth wildly even though its head is clamped still.

the man wasn’t sick, or at least wasn’t yet. We stared at each other as we passed. It was only as I drew level with them that I saw the woman and children were already dead.

I say that I didn’t see anyone, but that is a lie. I did see people. I saw hundreds of people. People standing behind curtains, around corners, in shop windows. Hundreds of times I saw them, hundreds of times my heart would jump into my mouth, I would screech the Range Rover to a halt, throw myself out of the car and stumble towards my fellow man to find … no one. Shadows.

For the first but definitely not last time I turned to exclaim to James about the beauty of the room, how lucky we were to stay there. There was no James. I needed a drink.

‘Finally, here he is,’ she must have thought. ‘Here is her great romance. Here is her Hollywood happiness.’ But of course she had forgotten the sadness that the heroines of her beloved movies always go through. The picture-perfect ending is never quite what it seems.

I am either going to the next cottage today or I am going to eat Lucky. I went to the next cottage. Lucky stared at me the whole time as I got dressed to go outside. I tried to explain to him that this was actually better than the alternative plan of me eating him. He didn’t understand.

By day three I was feeling far less sorry for her and increasingly sorry for me. The last person left alive with me was so MEAN.

There will be no end to the self-isolation I am in. There will be no vaccine developed. No lifting of quarantine laws, no celebrations at being able to see loved ones again, at being able to embrace freely once more. This will never end.