FORK AND KNIFE

He let out a sort of grunt as he hurdled the cinderblock through the large storefront window. It shattered into a trillion pieces and an alarm went off, ripping the silence to shreds. He knew it would be annoying and it may never stop, but he didn’t care. He had a time limit, he wasn’t even sure if this was going to work at all. He just knew he had to try.

The automatic doors already weren’t working, which is why he had to break the window in the first place. Once he was inside and toward the back of the Best Buy where the display computers were located, the alarm was a bit quieter, though just enough racket remained to annoy him. He was lucky enough to find a computer that was hooked up to the Internet, but it had no printer. Another sort of grunt; but after all this was an electronics store so he knew there would be one in some box nearby that he could open and install. Badda-bing badda-boom, he’d finish what he started and be out in less than an hour.

He was, for the most part in the end, correct about that. Only the normal troubleshooting errors. But he got the printer hooked up and luckily the Internet ports weren’t yet downed. He was able to easily bring up Mapquest, type in the information he needed, and print up a very rough map of how to get where he needed to go.

When it first happened he didn’t react the way one might think. There was no running around screaming and yanking his hair out, no panicking at all. Just a sort of ‘hmph’ as the realization hit him. Then the closest to panic he had come when another realization had hit him. So he turned around and headed for the electronics store.

He had been walking to work, which was in the opposite direction. So he passed his house on the way to Best Buy. He would have to walk the four miles because the cars were all gone too, but it didn’t bother him much, especially when compared to the journey that lay ahead.

He was headed for Minnesota. It was 400 miles away, give or take, but it was where he needed to be. It was where he hoped she would be.

People had always criticized it. They always said that a long distance relationship wouldn’t work, especially with someone met over the Internet. But they had made it work. For three years they had made it work, and he had even recently got a job to save up enough money to visit her.

Except now there was no money. Now there was also no job. There was just him and the 400 miles of desolate highway. No birds flying by, no cars passing, no sun in the sky. Just another overcast day. But he would still visit her, assuming she wasn’t gone, too. But when everything in the world just suddenly disappears, all one is really left with is one’s hope. And with all of the time in the world now at one’s hands, why not try for it?

So he now had a crude map. It was a grand overview with a big red line that roughly traced his course and a list of directions. So he followed it.

It would take him about 5 or 6 days to get there, depending on how much he slept. But he wasn’t much in the mood for sleeping. Sleeping meant that time was going by, and he figured that if she was also still in this world, still wandering the same plane of existence as he was (though, being at least 400 miles away at all times it was often difficult to know that she ever did exist on this same field) that she would come looking for him, too. It seemed ridiculous to think that she would still be there, even moreso to think that she would think that he was; but again hope was the only thing that hadn’t left the world.

So he traveled. He followed the directions on his map, thinking that by now the Internet ports were probably crashed with no people to run them, and so he would never log on again. He would never sign on to an instant messenger again, never talk to her through the brittle text of a computer monitor, monitoring him rather than the otherway around like with normal people who could look forward to every day holding hands with their loved ones, every day kissing them and seeing them smile, and every night not going to bed alone. And he went to bed alone, even on the sides of highways, always pointing rocks in an arrow so he wouldn’t become disoriented while he slept.

And so he woke in the wee hours of the fourth or fifth morning (as he could not mark the days with rocks, for in the time it took the sun to traverse the sky behind the clouds the rocks would be dozens of miles away) he grew off of the highways and onto more personal roads, roads that were given names as though they could replace people if they ever happened to leave the earth. But roads could not love, roads would never walk 400 miles on a simple hope that there would be someone there waiting for them.

He came to a fork in the road. The map didn’t say anything about it. Both paths led up hills and he couldn’t see much beyond either. The road to the left looked more like it continued in a straight line, however, and since it was not mentioned in the map he figured they both probably led to the same place anyway. Besides, supposing he took the wrong one, he could always come back and try the other. So he went left.

And he would never know. It came out into streets and directions that were impossible according to his map, so he turned and went back. He returned to the fork and went right, and followed his map from there. But by then, half a day had passed by. So he never knew that while he had gone left, only twelve minutes later had a girl that he would’ve recognized from the dozens of shared pictures, a girl who’s smile he could’ve felt from a mile away had gone by, also carrying a crude map, and also coming to a fork in the road, and also going left. So even as he reached her house on the map he never knew, even as he knocked on the door, then opened it when no answer came, and even as he walked through the empty house seeing no sign of anything but an empty world, he never knew that the fork in the road would cause a knife in his heart, a knife that would stick right next to a girl that would always be there, real or not. Even as he went to sleep in her bed, as he cried himself an aching lullaby and slipped into a world of dreams where he may yet see her but she would be gone when the sun gave rise, he never knew.

All he knew was that people who had been there before the world left, people who had seen their lovers every day, had gotten to hold their hands every day, gotten to kiss their loved ones every day and who never went to bed alone every night, people who had taken their love for granted, probably wouldn’t have even tried.