Days pass. The sickness draws ever closer, bringing with it an unrelenting heat. Missouri is quickly overrun and the neighbourhood comes alive with a nervous energy. Some pack their belongings and flee. I watch them leave with an impending sense of dread. Simon refuses to evacuate. I abandon all hope of convincing her and instead resolve myself to preparing for what lies ahead.
I gather up as many containers and buckets as I can find and fill each of them with water. I plug the sinks and fill them too. Though I briefly consider filling up the tub in the master bathroom, I find I can’t bring myself to go anywhere near it. Instead I slip over to Phil and Helen’s house and fill theirs.
I raid their cupboards for canned goods and other non-perishable foods, stuffing them in a sheet and lugging them back to our pantry where I perform a full inventory. We have enough food to last us, I don’t know, a month, maybe, if we rationed carefully?
I briefly consider the immense privilege of having absolutely no idea how much food a human being consumes on a weekly basis, and then try to push the fear of watching what was once plentiful grow scarce from my mind.
I sort the perishables by their sell-by dates and try to assure myself that all of this is an academic exercise. There’s no reason they’d shut off the utilities. But stranger things have happened, and if it came to it there would be no warning.
From the back porch I look towards the city. How long could modern infrastructure survive without human interaction? Were there fail-safes in place for this kind of eventuality? Could the water and electrical systems operate autonomously? If so, for how long? If the illness swept away the city’s population would we feel the aftershocks immediately, or would it take time for the impact to ripple out into the suburbs?
I water the vegetable garden profusely, though it seems to have become an exercise in futility. No matter how much attention we pay to it, the crop continues to spoil. Nevertheless, I let the hose run until the ground beneath my feet is a bog.
It’s then that I remember the compost bin at the foot of the garden. A freestanding plastic drum that could easily hold a few hundred gallons of water.
I tip it onto its side and scrape out the damp contents with my hands. I remove autumn leaves and dirt, but am surprised when my hand wraps round a lilac-coloured ribbon. I pull at it and from the mouth of the drum emerges a floral wreath that I don’t recognise. I reach inside and find another, and then another. The drum is full of them. The flowers long dead, but still held together in their bouquets.
Attached to one is a card. I wipe the dirt from it and hold it up to the light. The writing is hard to decipher, but I can make out my name. I lay each of the bouquets on the ground, like tiny bodies, and inspect them. Every single one is tied with purple ribbon. I feel my mind searching desperately in the heat. I know that there is relevance to the discovery, but no part of it sparks recognition.