On Monday, the mail didn’t come. Like everyone else, Martha Eshleman had been informed that this would be the final day of delivery, but she couldn’t help lifting the brass lid, peering inside the box, then letting the lid clang shut. Across the street, old Mr. Davies stood in his doorway, looking up the hill toward the spot where the postal service car had parked every day before. When his eyes met Martha’s, he laughed an embarrassed little laugh, hitched up his pants, and went inside. Poor Mr. Davies. She knew that it was more than absent-mindedness. He had been paying his respects, observing a moment of silence, unlike the McCafferty boys pedaling their go-carts along the sidewalk or the man who’d bought the old Werntz place, happily decapitating dandelions with his weed whacker. The younger ones still had their losses coming to them. How could they know?
She should have been prepared for it, but like the loss of a loved one after a long illness, one is never really prepared. Looking at all the empty mailboxes up and down her street, she felt a heaviness in her chest and tears prickling her eyes. Never more would her days be cleaved so predictably in two, her sun and her moon, before the mail and after the mail. She hadn’t minded the advertisements too much. Sometimes the coupons were for items she could actually use, or for a restaurant she really did mean to try. And bills were a part of life, indeed, a proof of life. Sometimes there were free samples, a single serving of breakfast cereal or laundry detergent. Once, she won a three-day stay at Colonial Williamsburg, although she didn’t go, because Harry couldn’t stand the idea of sitting through a sales pitch. She supposed it was silly to get sentimental over the loss of birthday cards at her age. However, she knew she would miss the Christmas cards, even the ones with the long letters inside that made her feel dull and inconsequential.
But as the world was made in seven days, so it would be unmade. Martha blinked. Now where had that gray thought come from? She remembered only one bleak thought from that book of the Bible, about how the earth was formless and empty, with darkness over the surface of the deep. Oh, maybe that was hell. In any case, right after that, there was the part about light, and how it separated the day from darkness. Yes, that was it. Let there be light.
Later, watching from her window, a habit she would not break during the remaining days, she saw a neighbor hammering upwards at his wooden mailbox until, finally, it crashed to his porch and broke, leaving a square patch of paint much brighter than she ever could have imagined.
The news ceased, too. Martha drummed her fingers on the foyer table. Was it that same Monday? Could all of those earthly connections have ceased at once, just like that? She called up the staircase, “Harry, did you pay the paper boy?” But Harry didn’t answer. So often, he was so wrapped up in what he was doing that the whole world could have vanished from beneath him and he’d just go on checking the charges on his Medicare statement or watching the history channel.
So out of habit, Martha watched for the Monday morning paper. Not that the news ever changed much. Always some team won, and another team lost. Suicide bombers were always blowing up in some faraway place. Politicians were always getting caught with their pants down or their hands in the cookie jar. The Royal Farm store was held up, again, and Macy’s was having a white sale, again. One TV series was featuring its premiere episode, and another had gone to reruns. There was comfort in this sameness, in not being surprised. Martha looked forward to these small affirmations, neatly folded, bagged, and sailing toward her porch.
But there was no newspaper on Monday morning. She was not the only one who noticed. Mr. Davies walked from his front door to the street, looked into his hedge and up the hill toward the main road, hitched up his pants, and spit into the grass. The Marshes, two doors down the hill, called out, “You didn’t see a Sun, did you?” Some of the other older neighbors paced the sidewalks with their hands on their hips and shook their heads. Words like “service nowadays” and “hell in a handbasket” were carried on the wind.
But there was no news on the air, either, radio or TV. There was only static where WBAL radio used to be, and that petered out after a second or two. When she clicked the remote to CNN, she saw only those three big letters and a newscaster with his mouth gaping open, caught in an odd holding pattern. No pixelation. Just a still. Same with Fox News. Harry wouldn’t like that one little bit.
She clicked through the local news stations. A similar picture appeared on each channel, a well-coiffed head with a gaping mouth. Perhaps it was only her imagination, but all those newscasters’ faces seemed to hover like Mardi Gras masks, with some larger darker self behind them. Martha shivered. She knew a fertile imagination was a good thing, but it could come back to bite you, too.
Now the end of mail delivery, that had been expected. Everyone had been forewarned. Conservation of energy and all that. The price of stamps. The convenience of online payments. Who wrote letters and sent cards anymore, anyway? But TV? Martha bent down to her cable box and jiggled and twisted connections as best as she could. Harry would know what to do, and he wouldn’t make her feel silly about it, either. He would push a button on one of the remotes, then another, and suddenly there would be sound and a perfect picture, and he would smile and say, “Your turn to choose,” and she would always pick something Harry would like, the Orioles game or anything with Clint Eastwood.
She kicked the TV stand and only succeeded in sending a cascade of old TV Guides to the carpet. She yelled “Harry” so loud that her throat hurt after, then plunked down on the sofa. A wave of loss, of old regrets, of all the things she should have said and not said, of the little slights she shouldn’t have let bother her and the gestures of affection she couldn’t be bothered to make, they all washed over her. She slumped into the cushions. Harry couldn’t help her now. There was a crackling sound from the set, a zigzag of lightning on the screen, then a whoosh of the anchorman into a hole in the center, like a genie back into his bottle. No three wishes. Not even one.
The clouds came on Tuesday, a fog that coupled the land and sky. The sun and moon were still there, poked deep into fog, but there was no telling where they were on the horizon. A pinpoint of star appeared as her eyes adjusted, and what she thought might be Mars, but she thought her house may as well have been standing on a pedestal in the eternal void of space for all she could tell. Martha blinked furiously, trying to make out edges, the sidewalk from the grass, the grass from the driveway, the driveway from the street. The street from houses and trees, full of leaves and nests. The vermilion of a Robin’s red breast on her lawn, or the koi swimming in the Millers’ fishpond next door. But the world had been scrubbed of its colors. All fog, like the time she had flown out west to the Grand Canyon with Harry, up in clouds, and all the world below the plane had simply vanished. At least then, there had been a world above, the familiar blue, the heavens. She held his hand, then, and thought, if something happened to the plane and they died, it would be all right. The children were grown. She remembered thinking, here we are, already in heaven. But they had landed, and he had let go her hand.
At first, when the fog persisted into the afternoon, long past a time when morning mist should have burned off in the daylight, she thought maybe her eyes were back to their old tricks. Maybe allergies, hopefully not cataracts, and, please God, not glaucoma, which had run in the family. But her eyes didn’t hurt. Other things hurt, her joints, naturally enough, and there was the occasional bout of angina, but not her eyes. No, there was nothing wrong with her eyes.
On Wednesday, the fruits and vegetables of the garden rotted. Night creatures had left bite marks in the berries, plucked the flowers from the squash vines. Could it have been that very next Wednesday, or coincidentally, a Wednesday? A Wednesday that stood for some ordained time. Some sort of metaphoric Wednesday. And why Wednesday, anyway? All she knew was that at some point, the heirloom tomatoes and jalapeno peppers had lost their flavor. The celery was limp. The sugar snap peas didn’t snap. There were mealybugs in her oatmeal. She hadn’t seen those in years.
The seedless fruits, one of the few luxuries from the grocery store she allowed Harry and herself, were gone. As much as she had enjoyed seedless oranges and grapes, and the watermelons with only small white seeds that could be swallowed, she had always wondered how they could go on that way. No seeds for seedlings. No seedlings to grow and bear fruit. No genesis of trees. They couldn’t go on that way. And they didn’t. Harry understood this, the science of it all. He was the rational one, the one with all the answers. Martha only knew that life had lost its taste. And there was evening, and morning, and —how that third day planted itself so firmly in her mind.
Later, Thursday, the sun and moon and all the stars had burrowed so far into the fog that Martha wondered whether they still existed at all. And of all things, the power went out. The familiar hum of the refrigerator, the whine of the dehumidifier, the occasional pumping of the sump pump, all the ticks and whirs and drones of the house, they simply stopped.
Martha thumped the palm of her hand to the side of her head a couple of times to make sure she hadn’t gotten water in her ears from the shower, but that wasn’t it. She called “Harry” out of habit, and he didn’t answer. When had he answered? Had he answered on some other Thursday and not just ignored her on this Thursday? He had talked to her on Wednesday, hadn’t he? Or maybe that was Tuesday, before she had cried out so loudly? She tried to remember if he had explained to her the science of it all, like he often liked to do, ad infinitum, unfortunately. She was sorry now she hadn’t listened. She called “Harry” once more, just for the reassurance of her own voice, and hummed some old hymn, just to hear the humming of something.
Since there was no electricity to the boiler, by the afternoon Martha had to put on her heavy wool sweater. Odd to wear a sweater. She thought that just that morning it had been mid-summer, with strawberries rambling over the hill at the back of the yard and yellow flowers opening on the tomato vines. But the old do get cold. She looked out the front window toward where Mr. Davies’ house was, presumably, and pulled her sweater tightly across her chest. Her bifocals were still in the pocket, since she rarely had to use them anymore, and she put them on to peer through the top for a moment, and then through the bottom. No night or day, no years, no change of season. It was all the same. Damned fog. Where was the sun to govern the day, and the moon to govern the night, when you needed them?
No mockingbirds or doves awakened Martha on Friday. No burbling from the fishpond next door. Poor koi. There was still no electricity. Without the water pump and filtration system that the Millers spent so much time futzing around with, those lovely koi wouldn’t survive long, and scarlet Hanako, who would eat peas and bits of watermelon from her hand, who was older than her Harry, would not survive. Some would survive longer than others. Martha wondered if the koi would turn on each other or simply shut down quietly as the pumps.
Martha turned away from Harry’s side of the bed toward the blue numbers that signaled her to rise and shine. But the face of her alarm clock was black now, inscrutable. She thought, “Time’s up,” and squeezed her eyes shut, pressed her palms together and prayed, but God wasn’t talking. The birds wouldn’t sing. Already, she missed the golds and reds of the tanagers and cardinals, and especially the vermilions, of her neighbors’ koi.
An old habit, sleeping in on a Saturday, although now that both she and Harry had retired, she supposed every day was a Saturday. How many had there been now, during the unmaking of the world? The land animals vanishing into the fog, one by one, following the birds of the air and fish of the sea—just like that nice anchorman with the open mouth. She wondered what he had been trying to say, or if his mouth was open in hunger, asking for one last little bit of manna. Martha had stopped feeling hungry, but she missed the cattle that had fed her, missed knowing they were out there somewhere in an old-fashioned red barn. And she missed the chickens she had fried very crisply, the way Harry liked, even if it wasn’t the best thing for his heart. Some things you know intellectually, he would say, but that didn’t always change what you wanted, what you did.
Martha tried to make the image of God in her mind. God in man’s own image. Mr. Davies, old as sin, yanking up his trousers. The Marshes, bones of each other’s bones, looking for the Sun. Her Harry, explaining at great length, with great patience, the inexplicable, how heaven could seem so close, so blue, but with no place to land. But none of the images stayed. They slipped, as if weary of reaching a finger across time toward an outstretched hand.
On Sunday, Martha Eshleman rolled toward Harry’s side of the bed and found the hole in his side, the side where she had burrowed on cold nights for most of her long life, the hole God had opened like a genie bottle, and returned home to that place she had left so very long ago, tucked among his ribs.
Barbara Westwood Diehl is founding editor of the Baltimore Review and a Master of Arts in Writing student at Johns Hopkins University. She works for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her short stories and poetry have been published or accepted for publication in a variety of publications, including MacGuffin, Confrontation, Rosebud, Thema, JMWW, Potomac Review, American Poetry Journal, Measure, Little Patuxent Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Able Muse, and Gargoyle.