(Myls)
Zeslinry was daydreaming for a little while, sipping on her boiling hot beverage reminding her of tea, while gazing outside. The mist, the clouds.
We don't have tea anymore, but we have a house used to dry all sorts of herbs before they have a chance to rot. You have to be swift.
And she sometimes makes for herself these kinds of randomly bitter tasting infusions.
But usually she doesn't look so absorbed in gazing outside.
M - What is on your mind Zes?
Z - Oh, well, the silence. I should be used to it now, but sometimes occasionally, it still weirds me out to realise we're in a city, and that not a single noise is reaching us from outside.
M - I can be more noisy if you want.
I poke her, making a face at her. Zeslinry giggles gently at the joke and finishes her so called tea.
She stretches her arms as she stands up, leaning a little. I looked at her, still a little taller than me, and then at her trousers legs, hiding the scar and prosthetic.
Knowing that is there, still bugs me personally more than the silence of the land.
I bite on dry bread and eat it. It's a little sour. I think it's turning bad.
Zeslinry finishes dressing up with her handgun and her jacket on top. She's ready to go out.
M - Anything special today?
Z - Hopefully not! See you later Myls.
She grins and leaves. She's going to work the field of the square she gradually turned to plantations. Weird idea, but it's rather working.
I finish dressing up myself, check my own pistol and leave as well. We don't have electricity currently so it's only the natural cold light entering this flat, and its cold shades I leave behind.
~
Outside, I breathe in carefully. I check the winds in a few long inhaling. Something smells faintly of upturned earth on one side. It's faint and probably just a small foraging animal.
I'll start my patrol on that side. I leave the outer side of the locked city block we've made our fortress of, and begin inspecting the surrounding streets on this way.
The roads are lonely and dirty. I walk silently that intuitive way, looking around for anything unusual.
There isn't much to expect and nothing bugs me. We don't get big surprises every other day. There's just more dirt and rubbish. More cracks along some walls and pavements also.
Not as much wild grass taking over as Zeslinry expected in every other garden of the city. It's puzzling, but things don't grow fast anyway.
I'm a little sick of soups and dry stuff, but this isn't the fattest of farms we live in. We haven't found better. The land is fertile, but there's not much yield. Even I can tell.
Zeslinry tries all sorts of seeds to grow and select what's best, in divided sections of the square field.
I shouldn't complain, I'm not starving.
In winter we can hunt snakes mostly, weirdly apparently, but now that season ends.
So it's just quiet, until fruits grow back in every garden of this forsaken island.
I sigh.
I want to see what's out there, but...
I shake these thoughts and focus on my duty.
I follow the road to a partially collapsed neighbourhood. It happened before we arrived. An earthquake split a part of this countryside and town apart, and a whole city block collapsed into the fissure created.
A few seasons of rains and accumulated dirt later, it turned into a mud lake with protruding ruins. Not much to make of it.
Although on this budding spring, we can see some grass and little shrubs growing over it. Little bits.
I kneeled to look closer at the little stems and germinations over this wild piece of landscape.
I catch a waft of upturned earth again.
I stand and cautiously head toward the outskirt woods where it came from.
The forests are light, and the rustlings of branches aside, they are as bare and quiet as everywhere else.
You just have your occasional gigantic animal or monster to fear. But they never come to bother us. We watch them passing by in the distance sometimes.
I look for prints and eventually found some traces of digs. Some animal dug in places for roots or mushrooms I think.
I venture a little deeper into the woods until I find it.
A boar. Not a monster. It's digging.
I get a little closer, quietly readying my handgun.
Then I notice there's another. And another, smaller, almost cute. And two others.
From my quiet distance I look at them for a little while. A family of boars digging around for their food there.
I hear them rustling there and snorting, as if speaking to each other.
I wonder what I should do.
I listen to them and watch them for a little longer. I never saw them before.
In the end I put the safety of my firearm back on and leave quietly.
I'll resume my patrol.
~
As expected, there was nothing else unusual happening on this day. I walked and jogged the few kilometres of periphery around our home. Everything was fine.
I picked up my map of the city as I sat on a decaying car, nibbling on a dry fruit.
I looked to places and buildings we never checked or not too thoroughly.
I chose a place, drank a little water and headed out there.
Another tightly packed neighbourhood of houses cut down in multiple flats and plots.
I check the front door. It opens.
The hallway behind has poorly aged. The walls are damp and some globular mushrooms growing along the stained sides.
The first flat door is crumbling down and already missing its molten lower part. The coating on it mostly remains like an insect moult, but the wood fibres or particles it held together have liquefied in time.
I pushed this remnant of a door open, breaking it unwillingly with this light push on the lock and knob.
I stepped above the pile of rotten wood and paint flakes, to enter what once was someone else's home.
A place abandoned many years ago. I try to imagine how someone lived there, but it's always difficult. Because I have to imagine everything else making this likely. The town. The roads. The society of a country. A constant supply of food from more efficient farms using technologies we can't rebuild on our own.
I push the crumbling next door toward the kitchen open as well. The stains everywhere make it look like something exploded there. Something gore. It's just growing rust stains that propagated like moss over every surface, eating the steel inside the walls.
I check the cabinets for preserves. I find a few unspoiled cans, and bag them immediately. It's not much.
I pass by some kitchenware I have no clue what was the purpose of.
There's an old painting on a wall, partially exposed to direct sunlight from the nearby window.
The top triangle of it exposed regularly to the sunlit sky has turned a flaking pale and mat grey.
The lower part of the painting has turned an oozing and dripping brown and dark mess otherwise.
It looks like it boiled and leaked in a fire. Only it was only time doing so much?
And maybe also whatever caused the world to change.
I can barely fathom what that painting was depicting now. The shapes are faded one way or another.
It feels like only us survived...
It's not that bad.
~