Rosa

March 24, 2082

My baby boy was born today. He doesn’t have a name yet, but I already love him more than I ever thought I could love another human. I watch the way his cheeks lift as his eyes travel the room and the way he wiggles his fingers in amazement of his own power – the power of being alive.

I know the plague, as it travels farther west each day and wipes out our cities, will reach our home eventually, but I am glad that I lived to see my boy’s eyes. 

The world is sick, and I know my baby will die, but we will die together. 

Rosa

March 24, 2083

I don’t want Owen to die. Our love is too strong to let some disease wipe us out. Here we are now, two hundred feet under the ocean’s surface, and my husband is dead. 

Richard was a marine biologist before the disease took over. He was my hero. He smuggled us onto one of the company’s research submarines. We have been on this submarine for a couple of weeks, but Richard was already infected when we boarded, and now, he begins to rot, and I begin to hold back the tsunami of tears that threaten to fall onto Owen’s face as he lies, still nestled in my arms. We will return to land tomorrow, safe or not. 

Rosa 

March 24, 2087

“Momma, How can we know, really, that we are alone?” 

The question tore my attention away from the sky. I was teaching Owen about the stars, lying on the football field of some random high school, a place probably once full of life, love, pain, and truth, now heavy with loneliness and cold echoes of the people who once roamed its halls. I often liked to imagine how many kids once ran through this school, stressed over tests and sports and never once thinking that one day they will die. 

“We have each other.”

As any little boy would, he groaned, a light, distressing sound, but a sign of life nonetheless. Life. I remember the feeling of holding him in my cradled arms when he was just a baby, a little boy with curious eyes that roamed the room, getting caught on the eyes of his father, his cousins, his aunts, and finally landing on my own, the last human eyes he will ever see. I hope that somewhere, deep down into his memory, he can remember those glances around the room. I want him, so desperately, to remember his dad’s face, or anyone else’s face. He does not remember. 

When everyone is gone, you tend to miss the intimacy of eye contact.

“But mom, how do you know there’s no one but us?” 

Owen and I have been alone in the world for almost four years now. I used to cry each night as soon as Owen would fall asleep, overwhelmed by confusion and fear. By some miracle or curse, the two of us were spared from the plague’s rampage, leaving us to die in a world that is peaceful enough to spur insanity. 

“Just watch the stars, O.”

Owen

March 24, 2090

Mom never lets me wander around by myself, not even in the school. She says that she doesn’t want to lose me, but I think she’s just being silly. She’s told me about people – the way they hurt each other, the way they lie to each other. She also told me about love and friends. I think I have friends, they buzz around my head when I lay in the grass, they wave to me when they fly into the distance. Who can hurt us now? Apparently, even in an empty world, we should be afraid. I don’t understand Mom. 

Rosa

March 24, 2098

My baby boy is all grown up. He knows how to find us food, how to keep us safe, just as I have spent the past 16 years doing. We need nobody else, we never feel lonely. 

Owen

March 24, 2100

Mom is gone now. The world has always been quiet, and I have never felt afraid of  the silence. But now, it cuts much deeper, it’s depth lower than a submarine, or the ocean’s floor.

Mom died without ever answering my question, and as I lay here, on this football field for the thousandth time, surveying the usual portrait of stars in the sky, I ponder the question for myself, by myself. 

How can I really know that I am alone? Will I know when the radio fails to turn on? Will I know when my surroundings are cloaked with a silence so deafening that there cannot possibly be any humanity left? Will I know when the only sounds that remain are my own whispers in the dark? When the birds chirp a little louder? When the grass can finally grow as long as it desires?
I close my eyes, embracing the solitude.