4

When the news and everyone in the neighborhood started losing their minds I locked up and waited. I watched from my second floor bathroom window as they packed cars full to bursting with stuff they would never need and then tie more stuff they would never need to the roofs. It took days before the last of them lumbered down the one road that ran along the beach and out to route nine. It was nearing the end of summer, and some days there was a lot of traffic along that road; cars overheating and arguments between men in shirts they had sweated through, flower patterns darker from the moisture, sticking to their backs and their bellies. There was thievery and fighting, teenagers delegated by their parents to find anything useful roved from empty beach cottage to empty mc-mansion trashing what they didn’t take and being praised for the retrieval of a can of beans or a battery powered radio. Nonetheless, when they walked by my place, knowing I was in there, it was as if they reverted back to early summer, before the panic and chaos. They never even knocked.

I heard them talk about Montreal, or Boston, or places I’d never heard of. They talked with that bright sheen in their eyes, eyebrows raised, gesticulating towards the road, sweating, normally calm hair a wild, spiky mess; they looked insane, sounded lost and, in my opinion, all acted suicidal.

Soon it was as if there had never been a happy little beach community here at all. After a few days my food started to run low and I knew this place had been too populous to be a place to stay. I knew I had to move, and I had only one idea of where I needed to go.