Tell Me There's Nobody Else in the World

At the precipice of the end of humanity, a married couple repairs their relationship

Mara Davis Price is a North Carolinian writer. They earned their MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte in 2021 and now work as an editor. Mara enjoys watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, crafting, visiting antique shops, and spending time with their husband Christian and their two cats, Frankie and Fern.

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You’ve stopped thinking you’ll survive. If faith is another word for momentum, it’s fitting that you’re standing still. Somewhere on this cavern of a ship, she’s going about her daily tasks, pretending you’re not here. She’ll stop pretending later. 

The ship has stopped moving — it’s lacking faith as well — and you’re drifting through space, aimless and exhausted. The emergency lights have been on for three days; you think they last for five. You’ll have food for another week, if you keep eating like you do. And from there, starvation, endless, slow. 

For now, you sit on the flight deck and look out at the stars. They used to whizz by the windows as you traveled at breakneck speeds. Now, they laze like drunken flies. You think you’ve watched the same one for hours, large and light green. It may be a distant planet for all you know. 

Rhonda has settled for denial. She’s always been so good at compartmentalizing. She’s concerned that you’re not getting enough protein, of all things. She makes you eat irradiated beef. She’s slowly working her way through all the tubes of chocolate sauce, apparently not concerned about her own health. 

You always think that the time will never pass. You used to be this way in school; everything felt interminable, even the happy moments. This exam will never happen; I’ll be studying forever. If I don’t go to sleep at all, morning will never come. You were always wrong, of course. Minutes are such finite things and you devoured them like the cups of ramen you ate steaming over the sink.

Now, you know the end is merely days away and it feels like it’ll never actually arrive. It feels like the lights won’t shut off, even though you know they will. The time will pass anyways; even up here, where time means not much of anything. Days don’t cycle by. It’s just the stars and the blackness between them, and still time plods on. 

Rhonda was concerned about black holes at first, that you’d find one and be sucked in and obliterated. But the lack of them has scared her more than anything. She’s hoping you’ll come across one now; being swallowed seems a much better fate than wasting away in dead space. You think she’s entertaining fantasies of being zapped into an alternate reality, where you can toddle on to some other version of home. 

But home is the thing you had to leave behind. There was nothing for you there – no one left alive after the virus — and this was your only option. You joined a fleet of five star ships and watched them drop off one by one, destroyed by space junk or simply wrung dry of all their resources. Your last communication with another ship was two weeks ago. It’s a wonder you’ve held on. 

Rhonda comes into the room; you hear her bare feet padding against the floor long before you see her. That’s one thing about Rhonda – she loves being barefoot. You can’t count how many times she’s said she misses grass. 

She hands you a cup of black coffee. The sugar was the first thing to run out. 

“I keep thinking we should leave a logbook,” she says. 

“That would be—”

“I know. Pointless.” She sips her coffee and stares where you’re staring. “Don’t you ever get tired of looking?” 

You shake your head. “I might be the last thing alive to see these stars.”

“Do you think that matters?” she retorts. 

“You have your pointless things. Let me have mine.”

She doesn’t respond to this. In the span of her silence you ponder the entirety of your relationship. You’ve certainly grown into a humbug, to say the least; she calls you a grump, and you tell her that you’re a realist. Then she says pessimist under her breath, and you say something about how at least I’m not blind. 

You start to feel a little bad; you didn’t mean to be so harsh. See, you know you love her, but you think that might mean nothing. The poets all thought of love as something eternal, as if the earth after you’re gone will give off waves of it like heat. But there aren’t any poets left.  

When the population of the earth is dropping dead in mass amounts and you can choose to save one person, you naturally choose your wife. Even if you haven’t truly been in love with her for the better part of a decade; even if the last time you had sex you hadn’t bothered to turn the lights on, you choose her, because fuck it, you chose her in the first place. Before it all. 

Before it all, you chose her for the way her hair curled after a shower, before she decided to blow dry it flat: formless and unruly, like each strand followed a different pattern. You chose her for the way she always listened to you when you wanted to talk about bands from the twentieth century, about singers that had joined the twenty-seven club long before you were even born. You chose her because she reminisced with you about Saturday cartoons, the ones where superheroes wore multicolored spandex suits and everything wasn’t so goddamn gritty. You chose her because you seemed to fit, could have conversations about everything and nothing into the wee hours of the night. 

When you met Rhonda, you couldn’t believe how small she was, as if she could fold in two and fit into your pocket. She had a problem gaining weight, she’d later admit to you after you’d wondered how she could eat so much spaghetti carbonara and not gain a pound. Some days, she’d seem almost skeletal, the corners of her mouth stretching back around her skull. 

But she still felt soft curled up against you in bed. She slept hot and you’d both get sweaty while cuddling but you came to love it, the stickiness of your bodies enclosed together underneath the blankets, creating your own heat. 

She doesn’t sleep with you now, not on the ship. The cots are too small, for one thing, and the distance between you has continued to grow the farther you’ve gotten from Earth. She sleeps in her own small room, and you know she stays up late because you’ll see the light on underneath the door when you walk down to the bathroom. She’s reading her books; she’s praying to a god she claims not to believe in. But she was always the praying kind. 

You think she must be cold, that lean body made leaner by lack of sufficient food. Sometimes you wish you could just go to her, close the distance like a kiss, and create that heat again. 

A guilt has been weighing on you since yesterday, when you insinuated for the hundredth time that keeping a logbook would amount to nothing. You go to her room and knock on the door. You push in, without waiting for an answer. 

She’s sitting cross-legged on the bed and moves quickly to conceal something underneath her pillow. You raise an eyebrow. 

“I wanted to say I’m sorry,” you start, “for being an ass about the logbook. You can keep one if you want. You should.”

Her face is uncertain for a moment, then falls just the tiniest amount. She reaches behind the pillow and pulls out a notebook. “I already have,” she admits. 

You pause and can’t decide what to feel. You suppose you can’t be upset that she’d hide something like that from you. You have been an ass. 

“What have you been writing?” you ask. 

“Nothing much.” She shrugs, flips through the pages. “It’s mostly blank. Just snippets, here and there. What I eat, what you eat. What we do in a day.”

“So, really, nothing much,” you concur. You move to sit on the end of her bed, feeling as though you should sniff her hand like a frightened creature. Small movements, a tentative approach. 

You both sit in silence for a few minutes. You wonder why you’re wasting your time like this, if time is a thing that can still be wasted. It’s not as if you can write the next great American novel in the time you have left, or learn a skill that would be of any value. So what could be a waste? 

Was it a waste to come to her like this, to soften your heart around its stony edges for a few last days of peace? Was it a waste to seek comfort now? 

“Do you think we’ll become violent?” she asks in a small voice. 

This startles you, the word violent falling from her mouth like an anvil. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, when we start to starve.”

You think about it. You can’t say the thought hasn’t crossed your mind; people become desperate when they’re starving to death. They’ll eat their dogs, their traveling companions; but could you eat your wife? Could your wife eat you? You think you’ll starve first but really, you don’t feel sure. 

“I don’t think it’ll come to that,” you say, and you hope she can’t pick up on the precariousness in your voice. 

“I don’t think I could—” She sighs and lays back against the wall, her hands limp in her lap. You realize how small she is, how much bigger you are. How futile a struggle would be between the two of you. 

“I won’t hurt you,” you say, and you mean it. 

That night — what would be night if it wasn’t already darkness, interrupted by stars — you sit looking out at the stars again. This time you’re sure you must be going in circles, or not moving at all. There’s an emergency light blinking on and off in the corner of your eye, and you feel like pumping music should be playing, like back in the day at a dance club. 

Your eyes are starting to hurt. They shouldn’t be strained so much; it’s not like you’re staring at anything bright, trying to read small text. But they hurt nonetheless. 

You get up from your chair; you stretch, arms raised at your sides, in a yoga pose that Rhonda taught you. It does loosen your back. 

You go to find her. You find you’re thinking of her all the time now, and not always in that empty, pitiless way you’re so used to by now. 

She’s sitting at the kitchen table, her skin gray in the unnatural light. Her black hair is curly; she hasn’t bothered with the hair dryer since you boarded the ship. You find yourself appreciating it, like it’s the first time you’ve seen her curls in years, like they’ve been brought back from the dead. 

“What did you write in your logbook today?” you ask. 

“Ate chocolate sauce for breakfast and lunch. Corned beef for dinner. Read a book. Talked to you.” She doesn’t meet your eyes. 

“You wrote that down? That we talked?”

She shrugs. “It was unusual enough to warrant writing.”

This hurts you, just a little. You don’t think that’s what she intended; there’s no bite to her words. But it stings anyway, like she’s called you out on something. 

“Do you think we can talk more?” you ask. 

“What? Like, right now?”

“Right now, and… and tomorrow. The days after.”

“Until?” she asks, lifting her chin. She doesn’t finish her question. 

You nod. “Until.”

If your calculations are right, the emergency lights will shut off tomorrow. You haven’t touched yet, kept a careful distance between you like two animals circling each other. Gradually growing closer. 

You still aren’t sure why you’ve bothered seeking closeness now. But she’s been open to it, to your surprise. You thought for sure she was sick of you and your ho-hum ways. You thought she’d been holding on to her optimistic beliefs too tightly. But you’ve found that both of you have been touching down on a center of grounded realism tainted by a distant sadness. Distant because you still don’t feel the end will come. 

It started out in the kitchen; you sat down across from her and asked what she was reading. She said she’d been reading religious texts lately, right now the Bhagavad Gita. You smiled at this because you knew she was still trying to parse her way through the things that didn’t make sense. Trying to find meaning in it all. That’s who she was, and you liked it. 

From there, a conversation sprang up about what might come after. Heaven, hell, reincarnation, nothingness. You leaned towards nothingness these days; you felt that if there was a heaven, or a hell, you were out of bounds of both up here. She favored reincarnation, that you might come back as something that wouldn’t be killed off so easily by a virus. Kudzu swallowing a building, lichen covering a grave. 

You found that you learned something about her in that unwinding conversation. Whether it was something new or something you’d forgotten and were simply rediscovering, you couldn’t tell. But the more you listened to her talk, the more your heart gave in. You started thinking of her in the afterlife like how the saints are depicted in ancient paintings, enveloped in golden aureola. 

Now, she’s teaching you new yoga poses in the flight deck, sticking one leg up in the air behind her and leaning forward. You find it difficult to keep your balance; you stumble a few times. She actually laughs at that, a sound you haven’t heard in eons. 

A warmth is blooming in your chest whenever you’re around her. You choose to talk to her more often than you gaze out at the stars. 

Who would have thought that if you put a little effort in, things could start again? There are no flowers to present her with, no dance you can whisk her off to, no movie to see. You thought all the mystery had gone, dried up in the long years you’ve been together. You hadn’t thought this sterile spaceship could be the environment for anything to grow. And yet here it was, blossoming. 

You make her laugh again and you love the way the corners of her eyes are creasing: a sign of age you didn’t think you’d live to see. You love it; soon, you realize you’re close enough to spot a few grays in her hair. You haven’t been this close in so long. 

The emergency lights switch off while you’re sleeping. They don’t make a sound, but you wake up anyway, the room bereft of light. You grab a flashlight after fumbling around in your bedside table and get to your feet. You don’t bother finding your slippers, even though the floor is metal, cold. How has she managed to stay barefoot this whole time? 

You slip out into the hallway. Everything is dark, pitch dark. Soundless. You walk to her room. 

She’s awake in bed. You can’t see her but you can tell by the way her breath hitches when you come in. You move to sit on the edge of her bed again. 

A moment passes. Then you feel her hand on yours, pulling you closer. 

You turn the flashlight off and in that tiny bed, you generate your own warmth. Body against body, touching like the stars can never do. 

You love her, and you know that it means nothing. But there’s joy to be found anyway. The days go by quicker, to your dismay; yoga and chocolate sauce, two cots placed side by side and pushed together so you can have more room to roll around. Laughing into her hair. Humming songs that you remember all the words to, but don’t bother speaking aloud. 

She still picks off her fingernails and drops them on the floor. You don’t care anymore. All your clothes reek of your unwashed body and she doesn’t say a thing. Neither of you have bathed since the emergency lights turned on. You grow used to it, your musk mixing with hers. You breathe it in. 

The food supply is growing more sparse with each passing day. You sleep longer than you mean to, because it’s better than being hungry. Hours pass between each meal, if you can call them meals. You make sure she eats first. 

One day she suggests something to you that stops you in your tracks. You think she’s crazy; you tell her so. You want as much time with her as you can get. But things are already getting bad, she protests; she’s tired. Aren’t you tired, too? 

That night you set it all out on the table: the irradiated beef, the last of the chocolate sauce, granola bars, rolls, applesauce. The last supper. 

You eat with relish; you feed her too, finding her mouth without the aid of light. She eats all the chocolate sauce and you eat as much protein as she tells you to. You go to bed with only a slight ache in your belly and her curled up in your arms. 

Starvation may as well be the easiest thing in the world to you. Waves of irritation pass between you with the hunger, but you try to laugh it off. You ease up on the yoga, trying to conserve your energy. You sit together in the dark as she tells you about the Bhagavad Gita and The Tao of Pooh. 

You didn’t think you’d ever have sex again, but you fumble through it one night in the makeshift double bed. Her moans come out like gasps, as if she wasn’t expecting it to feel like that. To be fair, you weren’t either; it’s like discovering a planet, the way it all feels new. 

You find yourself grateful for this time, even for the way it’s stretched on. You know it’s tapering down now. It feels almost appropriate, that as soon as you’ve mended your relationship your life will come to an end. At least you’ve found some way to start over, a final beginning when the cycle of time no longer means anything. You’ve rolled over like an old stone and found new life. You’ll go out vibrant, Rhonda pressed against you, hot as the sun. 

One morning — or night — or afternoon — you’re sitting in the flight deck drinking lukewarm coffee. It’s all you’ve got left, and it won’t sustain you. You hear her bare feet crossing the floor and you don’t turn on the flashlight to see her. She puts a hand on your shoulder and sips her own coffee. You stare out at them, you, the last two things alive to bear witness: the stars like a pox, and you can’t look away. 

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