Without new experiences, life is boring. Just unbearable. All you look forward to is chores. The next dishwashing, the next weeding, the next potato-peeling.

As I read the neighbor boy’s daily letter, my thoughts echo back to me in a different voice. A wave of recognition washes over me and it feels like being touched. Then again, almost everything feels like touch to me now. Even holding the paper’s crumpled edges reminds me of being brushed with perfectly rough hands.

New things give you something to hold on to. I mean we need something to focus on other than how sad things are.

Laying in bed, I imagine the neighbor boy’s head resting gently on a pillow, sheets floating over his body, my fingers twined in his hair as we sink into the cool mattress. All unremarkable teen girl dreams, but I know better than to wallow in this kind of longing.

It would be nice to talk. Even if we were just sitting on the porch.

We write about our desires carefully. Letters being stolen wasn’t uncommon. After all, condemnation is the ultimate pleasure of the bored.

These days, people frown on the carnalities of young love. When it doesn’t spread the virus, it creates more mouths to feed. Love and lust—and the babies born of it—are greedy and selfish and covetous. There’s no room for that now.

Everyone in town has been keeping to themselves for a while. The disease is probably gone by now.

There’s something intoxicating about his brazen lean into the unknown, but he’s far from smart. A few people already tested this theory, hosting modest dinner parties in their backyards. For many of them, it wasn’t just their last gathering, but also their last breaths.

But that was months ago. By now, who would be infected?

He’s a champion of wishful thinking, but I drink eagerly from his pool of positivity. My hands are cupped, gulping it down like a desert traveler, letting the water run down my chin to wash away my weariness.

—-

It hadn’t taken long for the Drift to set in. In retrospect, it’s easy to see that our lazy attempts at camaraderie were the first signs of it.

“We may be far apart, but we’ll always be jaguars at heart!” read the brick-lined marquee on the high school’s roadside lawn. “We’re all in this together” proclaimed the yard sign staked outside of the shuttered ice cream shop.

It was a futile attempt. By then, we were already starting to forget what “together” meant.

The postal workers were the first afflicted—just a year after the disease changed everything. Our postman, who we once showered with sugar cookies every Christmas, climbed out of his truck midway down Main Street one hot afternoon. He started walking, throwing his sweat-soaked hat to the ground, followed by his stained shirt.

The twin brothers who ran the nearby gas station, known for making the whole town’s business their business, followed him down the road calling his name. He ignored them and kept looking forward.

When he reached the edge of town, he struggled out of his navy shorts, tossing them into the road. His shoes squeaked with puddles of sweat. He made his way into a soybean field, toward the swampy woods beyond. No one had seen him since.

After a week with no replacement postman and a mountains’ worth of missing parcels, we tried to contact the postal service. It took days to get someone on the phone.

“We’re a little short right now. We’ll send someone from Elmer to do the route every few days until we can find someone,” the woman said weakly, exhausted from repeating the same lie over and over again. No replacement ever came.

For a while, the owner of the local diner volunteered to deliver the town’s mail. He cheerfully declared the job a temporary monotony, his civic duty until things went back to normal. The truth was that he was listless without doe-eyed busboys to yell at. He went to-and-fro all day long, visiting cluster boxes on the edge of the county—pick up, deliver, return; pick up, deliver, return.

The last time I saw him he stood on the other side of our fence, my father talking at him endlessly across the lawn from the safety of our porch. He looked like he wanted the conversation to be over. A few weeks later, he drifted too.

Everyone assumed that the postmen were just overworked. It made sense, we thought, to see the Drift as a kind of occupational hazard. Maybe they were better alone in the woods, heads finally cleared of never-ending parcels and cramped mail trucks.

“Lazy government workers. The minute we need them, they can’t take the pressure,” my father used to rave after his hundredth evening beer.

But a few months later, one of the gas station twins—right in the middle of cordoning off a broken pump—suddenly undressed. His brother ran outside and pleaded for reconsideration, even trying to tackle him to the concrete. But the drifting twin silently shook his mirror image off and walked until he vanished into the woods at the town’s edge.

—-

Today I broke the best story yet: Wilmington fell. A guy made his way over the bridge at the border. He’s looking for shelter in town. Apparently he made a lot of noise when he first got in. Said it was like Atlantic City.

Excitement runs through the neighbor boy’s pen, leaving behind a seismographic recording of feverish awe at the tragedy of it all.

I can’t help but root for him. He somehow had managed to mold this catastrophe into the shape of an opportunity. I picture his eyes brightening as he recounts the day.

Remember when the old judge’s shed was lit on fire? Turns out the mayor did it over some old feud. The judge’s dog ate his chickens or something. Can you believe that? 

He loves all news—the tragic and the trivial.

Before the disease, he’d been a college dropout. Real journalists, he believed, learned on the job. But things hadn’t worked out the way he’d hoped. He ended up working in the grocery store meat department hauling pallets and grinding flesh.

But when the local paper stopped running, the yellow brick road to his teenage boy dreams emerged. At its end was a glimmering emerald city colored in visions of famous story-sniffers and truth-tellers.

He met the fantasy in his own way—he was a kind of town crier. He first ripped headlines from bigger city papers that were still operating, reading the stories aloud and offering commentary on the edge of people’s lawns. His father, seeking refuge from the comfortable suffocation of his family, supported his son’s burgeoning career by scrounging old newspapers from the garbage a few towns over.

The way the clouds are looking in the east, I predict a 39% chance of thunderstorms this afternoon.

Now that all the papers were gone, he read the skies for weather and outlined the day’s local rumors. It was a realization of his true calling.

Before the disease, I worked at the local coffee shop, armed with a diploma but no dreams. I laid in wait for a revelation of my true future to strike. It never did. Instead, I spent my days negotiating shift schedules and telling regulars that we were out of skim milk.

I’d hated it then, but longed for even that feeble sense of purpose now.

How many thunderclaps do you think we’ll hear?

At least there was the neighbor boy.

My guess is 30. Leave your number in the mailbox before noon. The closest gets to choose the game for tonight.

—-

After the gas station twin drifted, many followed in close succession—my high school math teacher, the pharmacist, and a number of people from the old folks’ home.

The Drift seemed to have accelerated everywhere. People started talking about it on the news. Initially it was a welcomed change from the fruitless vaccine updates. 

Soon, the Drift became so prevalent that the few senses of normalcy we had left began to wane. The grocery store shelves were sparse, containing only local fare and canned goods. Phone lines and internet connections became less and less reliable. We’d go dark at least once a week for hours at a time.

There were theories that the Drift was a side effect of the disease, but no scientists could make the connection. There was only a set of creative delusions that imagined the government poisoning us with dissociates in food and water supplies.

Deep down, everyone knew who was to blame. We all felt the Drift in us, bubbling beneath the lid of our consciousness.

It wasn’t until later that we realized some people weren’t just drifting from society, but from themselves. Bodies started washing up on beaches. On television, rows of ghostly forms sprawled across coastlines.

Sitting around the television one afternoon, my parents and I saw images of bodies bobbing like bloated apples in Cape May’s ferry terminal, where we’d vacationed every summer. I spent that night pretending to sleep as I listened to my mother’s quiet sobs emanating from the little reading room down the hall, where we kept our family albums.

I’d thought about coming into the room with her, where we could lean together over the browning polaroids of first ocean swims and clumsy sandcastles, letting our tears clean the dusty laminate pages until we felt our most cherished memories had been given a proper funeral.

But I didn’t and we never talked about Cape May again.

—-

The neighbor boy and I convene at our bedroom windows an hour before sunset. I peer down at the strip of lawn and fence between our houses to see if either of our mothers are outside tending to the family veggie gardens. Much to my delight, I find that we are alone.

He arrives a few minutes later than usual. I wave to him in greeting, flashing my brightest smile.

When we first found each other and began playing our games, I gridded the window screen with string to create a board. He did the same shortly after so we could play chess, crafting pieces from hand-cut paper and duct tape. Every time one of us made a move on our board, the other would mirror it. Two boards, one game. It was my favorite.

But we aren’t indulging in a battle of wits tonight. His count had been closer. I overestimated the intensity of the storm and bet 50 lightning strikes. His pick for the day was Go Fish.

I remove my window screen before plucking two decks of cards out of my nightstand, settling cross-legged in a chair in front of the window.

Go Fish may be a child’s game, but like everything else we do together, the distance makes it complicated. We deal our own hands and fish from our own oceans, holding a card up to the window to request it from the other.

Our reimagining of the game had its flaws, but we aren’t here in a competitive spirit. We’re here for fantasy. We dream of moments when we could be in range of each other’s voices and touch. The games allow us to fade into one another and into ourselves until the boundaries blissfully blur.

A few rounds in, I request a queen of hearts, pressing her against the window glass. He shakes his head, pointing at me to draw. I pluck a card from my ocean.

When I look back to his window, I find him distracted by something on his bedroom wall. Maybe he just sees a housefly—an especially loud one, fat with the juices of cherry tomatoes from our gardens. Or perhaps his mind escaped the boundaries of his house, wandering into memories of life before.

But I strive to be captivating, always. In this world, the worst thing I can be is boring. I smile, reaching down to slowly lift my shirt.

When he finally looks at me, he bites back a smile. Our eyes meet for a moment before he gently leans back in his chair. I imagine the sound of the wood moaning against his weight.

His right hand slips away from the cards, out of view beneath the sill. I can see his stomach quivering beneath his slightly shrunken shirt. The cards fan across his fingers, but he looks right past them and into my window, reading my body like he reads the skies.

I see the shapes his lips make, even as they part with a yearning sigh.

Go fish, he mouths.

—-

I’ll never forget waking up one morning to find the last television channel gone static.

My father didn’t say a word about it. He simply pulled out a 20-year-old radio he kept in the basement, perching it on the fireplace mantle. It became the new centerpiece of the living room.

With television extinct and newspapers folded, citizen radio hosts began broadcasting new programming from their bedroom closets and backyard sheds. One man even boasted a deer stand as his recording studio, though we never heard from him on rainy days. We learned that his wife drifted when he gave his report of the day’s missing, grief spilling out as he uttered her name.

I still remember what the neighbor boy wrote that day.

I know he’s sad but it’s sloppy journalism.

Times were hard. This was just how he dealt with things.

—-

I wander into the living room to find my father feverishly adjusting the dials on the radio.

“The President’s broadcast stopped,” he says. He tries to sound confused, but anxiety tugs at the edges of his voice.

We barely heard from Washington anymore. The broadcasts were few and far between, and when they came, it was usually to introduce the new President—another voice in the long line of virus victims and drifters.

Of course, the presidents never drifted from society. They always just ended things.

The voice that last poured into our living room was the former Secretary of the Interior, freshly thrust into the spotlight of duty. That was months ago.

“Everything okay?”

“I don’t know. I was napping when it came on,” he says.

“What did you hear?”

He doesn’t answer. He won’t stop fiddling with the dials.

“Dad, what did he say?”

“That it was time for this to end.”

He sounds distant, as though nothing could be less interesting. 

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

I wait for him to look at me, to tell me he’s afraid. Instead, he keeps looking at the dials as though they are telescopes offering windows into worlds beyond.

“I’ll peel the potatoes after I write to the neighbor,” I say. I retreat to my bedroom. 

My despair bleeds into my letter. It’s an ink wash of rage and anguish and confusion.

We’re on our own now. The whole nation will go the way of Atlantic City.

You’re feeling a lot right now but you’re not thinking clearly.

America’s Playground had transformed into America’s Graveyard. The Drift sent many people into the ocean and marshes surrounding the city—their floating bodies collecting on bridge piers in heaps, like mounds of fleshy barnacles. Other drifters retreated into the woods on the mainland to make their own way, isolated from society’s despairs.

The people who didn’t drift had it worse. Order broke down. Some hid. Others hunted.

A polaroid of bodies piling around Atlantic City’s bridges circulated a while back. Someone escaped and brought it into town with them. It was given to a girl down the road, a talented artist. Her sketch reproductions were passed around in mailboxes.

The neighbor boy had seen the original photo, as was his town crier duty, but he’d refused to send it to me.

Later, he admitted that the sketches hadn’t been exact copies of the original. The bodies in the photo weren’t just drifters that gave themselves willingly to death. Some had been cut open and strung up, dangling from the guardrails like sinuous pendulums.

We don’t know what’s going on with the government yet. Even if something bad has happened, Atlantic City was unique.

It wasn’t unique. For weeks, more people from Wilmington had been making their way into town after scaling the abandoned quarantine barricades on the bridge. They all told similar horrors.

D.C. hasn’t been helping us for a while now. Things might not change much at all.

I wish that I was lighter. Each new trauma hangs heavy on my body, making my muscles ache and bones creak. I see it when I look in the mirror, pulling down the corners of my mouth and the creases below my eyes until my entire face wilts.

The neighbor boy and I are bound together by our sadness, but he rises each morning with a vision of the day and dreams of tomorrow. I see it in his letters. He feels the blade of today’s circumstances as a persuasive brush against the skin. I feel the sinking threat of a mortal wound. He waxes poetic about the woes of the world without letting the weight drag him down.

There’s no poetry in my letters—just a manic processing of the world.

It’s not over. One day we’ll all be seen as heroes for living through this.

I think about my great grandfather flying an F4F Wildcat in the Pacific during the Battle off Samar. His purple heart collected dust in the back of his bedside table drawer. He pulled it out to show me once as a child after a few whiskies, talking about the war as though it happened to someone else.

We’re braver than we know.

After he died, in a rare moment of vulnerability, my great grandmother confessed that he’d never stopped waking in the night and screaming into the darkness.

We’re going to make it through this stronger than ever. It’ll be okay.

I don’t feel like a hero and I don’t want to be one. But hearing it helps me survive.

—-

In the dark of my bedroom, I cut the words out of his letter in a thin strip and tuck it under my pillow.

I want them to show me that other possibilities are real. I wish for the words to sing me to sleep, where my dreams can reveal something wonderful and true.

But I can’t sleep. My skin chafes against the air and the bedsprings groan at my smallest movement. I keep hearing his voice—not as it is when we try shouting at each other through bedroom windows, but the way I remember it when we exchanged neighborly pleasantries before the disease. His hot breath floods the conch of my ear, whispering a highlight reel of his letters’ sweetest contents.

After an evening spent writhing under a hot blanket, I write how I feel in plain sight. It was odd to see the three words I avoided for so long emblazoned in ink.

In a fit of love and lust and fury, I sneak down the creaking stairs of our home and place the letter into his mailbox. I take care to close it softly.

When I slink back into bed, my great catharsis complete, the night finally feels quiet. His voice is replaced by the great chorus of cicada songs vibrating in the air. Pale moonlight streams in between the crude chess pieces taped to my window screen, casting shadows of a Medieval battle on the floor.

Finally, when I fall asleep, I dream about horses and queens and towers.

—-

The next morning I try not to stand watch by the window. I don’t want to seem desperate.

When I make my way to my mailbox at the usual time, I play nonchalant. But I still don one of my prettiest house dresses, the one with the deep v-neck. After all, he might be watching.

Once in my bedroom, I turn on the letter with desperation. We usually try to save the envelopes but my desire to conserve is no match against my eagerness.

At first, the words smear together on the page. As his scrawl comes into focus, my breath catches, as though exhaling might make my expectations real. Maybe, if I hold them in, I can swallow them and let them dissolve in my belly.

You’re a dream, you know that? I could not be more lucky to have someone like you in my life.

Falling back on the bed, I lay his letter across my face. It brushes my lips like a gentle kiss. I’m warm, locked in an imagined embrace.

I revel in that feeling—my reunion with hope itself.

—-

A few weeks later, fevered by the summer air, I climb into the car with my parents. We haven’t left our house in three months. We haven’t left town in even longer. Our yard shimmers with the rich green of grass touched by rain as we pull out of the driveway.

As the neglected farm fields stretch around the road, overgrown with wildflowers, it briefly feels like the world is opening her possibilities to us.

It isn’t until we pass the first abandoned shopping center that the decay leeches in. We contemplate a boarded-up grocery store out of the car window with a dark reverence. Trash pools on the edges of the parking lot.

My father breaks the silence with a quip about the economy. No one laughs.

After that, I see desolation everywhere. I count the collapsing barns and old farmhouses we pass. We drive for hours.

We turn the car around when we come upon a wake of vultures that engulfs the entire road. Plumes of black feathers pad the shoulders around their bald heads, like tiny men in dark robes. They share in a violent ceremony, pulsing toward the center of their circle to bow their heads for sacrament.

Even as we begin to drive away, I turn to watch them through the rear window. They leap in unison, revealing their communion bread. Piles of pale flesh sprawl on the ground—two larger, one very small. Their ribs are spread open, like arms raised toward the sky. I turn back around and say nothing.

Only a half hour away from home, we almost hit a man crossing the road. He emerges from a field of corn, grown tall and vivid green from the wet summer. My mother and the brakes scream together. She stops only feet away from him.

I immediately recognize our old postman. He stands naked except for his shoes, his skin dimpled as old leather from the sun. When he turns to look at us, there’s no shock or fear in his expression. His blue eyes practically glow against his deep skin and for a moment, I find myself tumbling into the darkness of his pupils, searching, as though I can unearth the person he used to be if I try hard enough.

But there’s no sense of recognition in them. In fact, it’s as though he doesn’t see us at all. I wonder if he even knows where or what he is—if drifters see the world as one flat, continuous thing with no boundaries between earth and sky, living and dead.

Maybe that’s why some of them kill themselves. They can’t tell the difference anyway.

And yet there is something in his eyes that I, for a fleeting moment, am envious of. An element of surrender, a kind of tired peace.

I look away, pretending to check the car locks.

As though he knows my probing is done, he turns away from us slowly and walks to the other side of the road, disappearing back into the corn.

When the car starts moving again, my mother peers out of the bug-splattered windshield with squinted eyes, pretending to concentrate on her driving. My father sits passenger with his forehead against the window, a hand-rolled cigarette lazing southward from his lips, jaw loose from morning beers.

I wait for him to make some deranged chicken crossing joke. He says nothing.

It begins to rain hard. The sound of droplets hitting the steel and aluminum roof of the car cuts through the air, as though we’re trapped in the hollow body of a broken drum. I hear the fingers of God, tapping impatiently on the membrane of the universe, urging on our march toward the bitter end. I think about the disintegration, the vultures, and our drifting postman.

Mankind’s days are over.

When we get home, everyone returns to their usual places. My dad sinks into his living room chair by the radio. My mom sits on one side of the loveseat alone, reading the latest book she’s traded from a neighbor.

I retreat to my room, where the chipped-paint walls close in.

I peer out the window. The neighbor boy’s shade is closed.

—-

I’m crying like I can wash away the vision of our future but there’s no unseeing it.

The yawning abyss of tomorrow follows me everywhere. I see it in the blackness of the drain as I wash dishes. It’s in the storm grate as I walk to the neighbor boy’s mailbox. I even see it lurking in the shadows as I lay awake in bed, waiting to consume me when I fall asleep.

The only thing I look forward to are his letters, when the abyss diminishes for just a moment. I’ve barely slept in days and it’s difficult to follow the scratches of his handwriting. I’ve been writing to him about these things—how I’ve seen the future. But his interest in standing witness to my grief fades across the page.

You shouldn’t think about it that way.

He tires of my negativity. He changes the subject, tries tricks of distraction.

You’re so beautiful.

Sometimes, out of a desire to please, they work.

I’d like to remember what you look like up close. I only have memories.

I remember the Polaroid camera on my father’s basement workbench. It was valuable now that the disease had narrowed our world. I could easily sneak it away for a short while, but I’d have to use it carefully.

Remind me what you look like. And make it personal :)

I slip by my father. He’s passed out on his chair next to the radio, a beer bottle nestled between his legs. Out the back window, I see my mother opening our makeshift hutch to feed the quiet rabbits that will one day lay broken-necked on our dinner table.

Slowly to avoid the creaking from the old hinges, I open the basement door, revealing the black descent of the stairs. For a moment, bile rises in the back of my throat and the ground pitches beneath my feet, as though the earth itself is trying to cast me into the darkness below.

—-

The setting sunlight spills down the street where me and the neighborhood boy live, turning the asphalt the color of kindling.

My fingers shake as I slide the envelope into his mailbox. I think about the town’s busybodies and the photos they might find if he doesn’t retrieve my letter soon.

I graze against another thin parcel. It crinkles under my touch. I run my fingers over its waxy surface, feeling the edge of a Polaroid wrapped inside.

I take it out of the mailbox. It’s parchment paper folded into the shape of an envelope. The glow of the sun-washed street illuminates the envelope’s underside, revealing a ghost of the contents beneath. It’s the color of flesh.  

Before I can consider the people that can see me through their windows, I tear into it. A photo of a woman’s body is fastened to a letter. It’s a girl I went to school with. She lives within eyeshot of the neighbor boy’s house. She’s dark-haired and sprawled ridiculously against a plaid sofa, legs spread at the camera. I drop her to the pavement and dig into the mailbox.

There are more. A faceless blonde bent over the bathroom sink. A redhead pretzeled feet-over-ears on a desk. Another beauty is spatchcocked on a bed, pale breasts braided with veins, nipples like dark pebbles.

I tear into every envelope, creating a puddle of pornography on the ground.

I’m not weighing the bodies of these women against my own or the erotic creativity of their poses. Instead, I see every desire imagined by the neighbor boy, the man of straw that I propped against the corners of my mind, stuffed with fantasies of life before the disease.

He’s another illusion of the connection tomorrow might bring—not just to me, but to all the women in his mailbox. All of us drift through this quiet apocalypse, our lives a gauntlet gilded in two looming dooms: the virus on one side, the Drift on the other.

My body tenses with mortal desperation, like my cells are struggling to cling to one another and keep me whole. A primal cacophony rises in my ears, the universe and its multitudes screaming into them with divine fury.

A thin feeling rises in my stomach—like a sharp gasp or the moment you slice your finger deep with a knife. It’s as though my consciousness is peeling off my body slowly, like a scab lifting from the skin.

This must be the Drift.

I resist, pulling on the fraying tether keeping me bound to my body. But the cord is heavy and I’m tired. I don’t have the strength for delusion. Reality, naked and ugly, stands before me unflinching.

The fact I’ve silenced since the disease began comes to the fore: That the people populating my life are nothing but little fires, impermanent bursts of energy that can turn to ash without warning. I’d once hoped that this would make me hold my family close, where we would savor each other’s warmth until our inevitable extinguishing. But the truth is that I’d begun seeing them as little more than animate meat, manifest ghosts haunting the house without mind or purpose. And on the rare occasions when our eyes met, which we always avoided for fear of revealing ourselves, I could see that this was how they saw me too.

I stare into the empty mailbox. The abyss yawns wide, waiting for me to lean in and be swallowed whole. I could walk all the way to the Delaware River and cast myself in. I imagine what it might feel like to let the cold waters flood my lungs and usher me into that great darkness—a place where I could finally sleep.

But then I think about the postman—the look on his face as we stared dumbfounded out our car windows. To him, it was as though none of this existed. The pangs of the past were distant echoes and there was no such thing as a future. It was just him and his body—the movement of his legs, propelling him forward into a world of his own making. The abyss was nothing at all.

For once, my mission is clear.

In my letters to the neighbor boy, I always said the world is ending. But the world doesn’t end. It’s just us. We cry alone in our homes, we succumb to disease, we choose death instead of despair, we live hidden from a civilization in shambles.

But the world continues, unconcerned. The great rock spins on, content with its part in the ballet of space and time.

It comforts me, this remembering of the truth, the basest realization of all.

I’m ready to return. Back to the way it was when we used to pray for rain and bleed for gods.

I’m so tired of holding on to nothing.

Finally, I let go.

__________

Read our interview with Jacquelyn White HERE.