No goodbyes, no information. We don’t want anyone to know where we are. We don’t want anyone to follow us.
Tara’s made it easy to avoid her. She woke up with her hand out, asking to go and do a pick up with us. Me and Aimee agreed we’d never go to a dealer’s place alone. We should do the same for Tara but we don’t, instead told her we had to meet someone today, “a friend we promised to help.” So she left a little while ago. We don’t ask if she went with anyone.
No one’s seen what we’ve put into the bags on our backs. No one knows we’ve taken all we can. And so no one asks when we pick our way to our bikes. No one asks if, or even when, we’ll be back.
It’s raining when we get outside. We cup our hands and drink from a bucket of rainwater in the yard before we push off. The hydration goes right to my head, clarifies.
We ride.
We’re breathless by Queen and Portland. Aimee’s at her calf, wiping at a cut that opened from the graze of a rusting car.
“Should I be worried?” she asks. “Like, is tetanus an actual thing?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. Didn’t we all have to get shots for that?”
“Yeah,” Aimee says. “Maybe.”
“You shouldn’t be out here.”
The voice comes from behind me, belongs to a head of red hair shot with grey, a chin that’s pocked with early signs of aging.
There used to be a club here, its entrance adorned in spires, wrought iron spirals. The door’s off its hinges now, metal links bent at impossible angles. In its place a curtain, four inches of it drifting off the doorframe, enough to show the dancefloor. I see one, two, three pale bodies on their backs. One of them moans, rolls over.
“Come inside.”
The request comes from inside the club, but it’s too dark to see who it’s coming from.
“Nice boots, wanna fuck?”
Through the slit of the curtain I can see a bloated body crawling limbless like a slug, one eye shut and the other sitting low on a distended cheek, mouth an exaggerated sag.
“Go,” someone says.
We get back on our bikes and we ride, take short breaks every few miles. Even when we were at our most nourished, this ride would have been hard for our smokers’ lungs, boozers’ endurance. Between breaths come the excited gasps over clean sheets, quiet rooms and privacy.
We turn left onto my old block and stop at the neighbour’s yard. The front window’s been smashed out, frame clean of any panes, but there are still patches of pale green in the grass. Aimee scoops out a fistful by the roots and hands me a chunk. “Eat it,” she says, “so we don’t get scurvy.”
The corpse of a cat is only a few feet away from where the blades of grass grew. Its belly is a dried slit, but the blood’s yet to trade all of its red for brown. “Looks fresh,” Aimee says, chewing through her words.
Russet circles of toothless stains have spread across the bedspread in my parents’ bedroom. Were they there a few days ago? Am I so contaminated that I left behind an imprint?
Aimee’s oblivious, lying back, right hand in the dead center of a stain. The comforter looks like it carries a contagion factor, like it’s leaking from the inside out. There are stains on the floor and ceiling, too, but they’re smaller, easier to avoid, which is what I do as I will the house to settle around me.
Something scrapes against a wall a floor below—a fingernail or a picture frame. Something with just enough of an edge to catch on our nerves.
Both of us at the same time: “Did you hear that?”
Darkness falls. Like the house has placed a phantom hand over our eyes. A finger catches in the dip of my throat, presses. I try to push it away but nothing’s there.
The foundation gives, tilts the house to the left.
“Ang?” Aimee says.
It’s still daylight but everything’s gone black, as if the darkness is coming from the house itself.
Something like a man’s breath is at my cheek. It comes at the moment when I know I truly have nothing anymore, not even the hope of spending one night in this house. Ever since the flames became the same colour as the sky, this city has been stealing my sleep, cutting at the youth that used to be my face. Black and curls of orange could have filled us in seconds but instead, we ran. If I’d known we were running just to be left with nothing, maybe I wouldn’t have moved so quickly.
Something oozes out of the carpet beneath my knees. Something else drips onto Aimee’s hair. The house is rotting at hyper-speed.
The ceiling fan comes down on Aimee. “Shit!” she says.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“I don’t know.”
Pressure on my chest. The phantom’s angry finger, its silent accusations, poking a throbbing trail down the front of me. What do you do when there are no more rules? What do you when nothing is what it used to be?
You give in, you give up, you get out, or you get up.
I used to know the staircase by heart, walked it a hundred times drunk in the pitch dark. I’ve let too much time pass to keep it all in my head. I miss the very first step and tumble down. Aimee is only seconds behind.
We crawl to the front door because the house won’t let any light in even from the windows downstairs. Outside, the blindfold lifts, vision is restored. We fly off the front steps just as the tip of the roof caves in, the rest of the house collapsing beneath it.
When there are no more rules, it’s hard to tell whether you should cry or just move on. For now, we just move.