sam milligan – if the wind would change

        Everyone thought the shelter-in-place would be lifted after a day or so, but something happened with the wind and then the long lines of Jeeps or Humvees or whatever you’d call them blocked the highways out of the city. I grew up while we were dicking around in Iraq, not a real war like Greatpop fought in, where people back home followed it or cared enough to know the names of the vehicles. Not even the kind of war that’s noble and right enough where you could learn them from Call of Duty, because even Activision knew that we didn’t really want to know what was going on over there, so they invented shit where we got to fight the dirty Russians in suburbs that could be anywhere, or fight big nameless, countryless, causeless terrorist groups. That’s easier to market than a game where you’re driving around doing fake police work in a country that isn’t yours and never would be, or where your mission is to double tap the NFL safety who’d just started thinking he didn’t know what he was signing up for. They filled plastic barrels with sand and stacked them in rows to block the highway entrances, and people stopped wondering about when the barricades would be taken away. It was more of an “if” thing. 
        My only buddy in the neighborhood was this guy named Paul. He had a big red beard and little rat dog and he walked around with headphones on but he’d always take them off so we could have long conversations from opposite sides of the street. He was from somewhere in the Midwest I think and played college basketball for some Jesuit University but he wasn’t religious anymore. Sometimes there was a kid with him, a little pink jacket with hands and feet that pedaled endlessly on a white tricycle. He told me he lived alone, so I didn’t know what the deal really was. When the shelter-in-place came down, one of the first things I thought about was how he probably wouldn’t be outside and I wouldn’t get to hear about the rat in his wall. He was convinced that his building had a big rat, or a bunch of rats, that ran through the walls. He could hear them. He’d hired out an exterminator and the guy had discovered that the walls weren’t sealed off from the crawlspace and ductwork under Paul’s floorboards, so those motherfuckers really had the run of the place. He was sealing every crack and gap he could find with caulk and then he was planning on filling the space under his floor with traps. Cut off the routes they could take out and then wait in the bottlenecks. The last time I’d seen him, he was walking up the road after our game to Ace Hardware to buy the traps. 
        “We’re going to find out one way or another,” Paul told me. 
        There were rumors of trenches in the countryside, controlled burns. Turning the Pine Barrens and southern PA into charcoal to stop the advance. If only the goddamn wind would change. With the highways cut off, we were blocked from going north and the fires were coming from the south and we were well and truly fucked. 
        The first hint the sky was changing came at sunset. The bridge over the parkway filled with people. Families, men in ski masks and white tee shirts and heavy gloves. Most people were still out barefaced, but some wore medical masks and some wore wet washcloths tied to their faces. I thought carefully, watching the sky redden, about only breathing through my nose. The humidity and hair prevented more debris from making it into your lungs, I read. I wasn’t going to wear a mask; that seemed alarmist, or panicky, like it might be embarrassing to prepare so fully for a future that wasn’t sure to come. The clouds bled. Grenadine through peach juice. At twilight, columns of bats and swallows forded rivers of mosquitoes in the dying light. Their wings flapping, stretching, gliding through a blackening expanse. I listened to people walk and jog by. 
        “I don’t think my aunt is being forthcoming with my dad. Like fucking spit it out, Betty Jo.” 
        “Back left. Not in the icemaker, no. Next to it. In the back. And there may be stuff on top but…no, I don’t know. You’re looking at it.” 
        “We told her not to move, didn’t we? Yeah. Three months is thirty seconds.”
        “Should I be worried? You’d know better than me.” 
        A week after the shelter-in-place, I started getting headaches every time I stepped outside. They pulled the government out. Cell coverage in the city got real spotty. I was working in this bar called Pop’s down the road from the zoo. I walked over to pick up my check from the last pay period, which I’d only worked half of – a real funny thing to be concerned about, now that I mention it – and there was a sign on the front door that just said GONE. I thought about putting a rock through their window. Instead, I walked to Harris Teeter and bought bottled water and Neosporin and bandaids and Fritos and a bunch of protein bars. The misters in the produce section were watering bare plastic and the only milk was Whole. You could tell some of the jugs had frozen and burst in the back, but there they were in the chute anyway. 
        I saw a video online where the cops and trash trucks were destroying tents that homeless people lived in. They said that all those homeless people were living too close to a middle school, and as the cops were watching the sanitation workers break poles and fold fabric and throw away a bunch of lives, the star-spangled banner began playing on loudspeakers outside the school and all the cops put their hands over their hearts. I was pretty sure that I knew a teacher at that middle school; we’d had drinks once or twice, nothing serious, and she’d told me that administrators said she had to skip all the parts of the curriculum that required kids to use scissors, because the summer fundraising work had pulled in less than expected. Someone shared the video, saying: America is the greatest place on earth, every day.
        I watched the smoke encroach without going outside now, but a day or two of laying low turned into a week turned into ten days and then a crisis wasn’t a crisis, it was just how things were. Pickup runs started back up at the park. We’d be throwing up between games, breathing hard into wet hand towels we brought from home. If yours got dry, the water fountain in the park, though only the part they’d put in for dogs, still worked.
        There were attempts at togetherness. A woman I recognized from Pop’s – she’d been a server, maybe? Or bartended for a minute? – came by a pickup run one morning and handed out surgical masks and activated charcoal and little gummy electrolyte blocks that you were supposed to dissolve in lukewarm water. Every day, fewer and fewer guys would show up to play until it was just me and Paul and two other dudes who didn’t share their names, only letters. J and Q. Some days I could hardly run and I knew it was fucking stupid to be out there in the first place. 
        But where else was there to be? When J and Q stopped showing up, Paul and I would just sit in the shade. Not even talking, just sitting together. I don’t know if it was the smoke or the stress but I felt this weight behind my eyes and a twist in my stomach. If I’d had to talk about what was happening, or what might happen next, I think…I don’t know. I was always on the verge of sobbing, or puking, or just laying down on the sidewalk and going to sleep. Like I might fast forward to a resolution. When Paul didn’t show one day, I sat there on the side of the court until the sky had emptied itself of color, the bold strokes of grapefruit and blood fading to grey, then black. 
        The next day, I watched something that might have been Paul’s dog cross the street, a small head and big ears on tiny legs, a purple leash trailing behind like a cut noose. I rushed down out into the street, but it was gone. 
        I’ve got nothing to say about the rest. At some point, I noticed there was no horizon, just a greyness where the world used to be. We’d all burn soon. But my God was the sunset nice and pretty, a perfect cherry dropping off the edge of the world, before the sun stopped bothering to rise again at all. 


SAM MILLIGAN lives in Washington, DC, where you'll probably find him playing pickup basketball, returning favors with batches of cookies, or gawking at cats in apartment windows. He's reducing his caffeine intake and getting worse at parallel parking. He is @sawmilligan on Twitter.

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