After The Apocalypse

by Roseman, Josh

  Jake leans back in his chair, adjusting his shirt -- he’s a big guy, carries it all in his stomach and chest, and he’s self-conscious. I still think he’s good-looking, but he’s also married with a five-year-old. Some nights, I think about him maybe wanting to cheat on his wife, but I know he won’t. “Andi,” he says, “you can’t keep doing this. You can’t keep pushing everybody away.”

  “Why not? It’s worked for a nice long time.” The old me would’ve made some sort of quip about not pushing Jake away, but that’s a line I won’t cross. Jake’s a friend, probably the only really good one I have. But I will tease him. I will pull out the Firefly. “Just because it’s goin’ on a year,” I say in a stylized western accent, “since I’ve had anything between--”

  “I can’t know that,” he says, but not in his Captain Mal voice. He says it like it’s rote, which he knows makes me grumpy. “I know you won’t let me in. I know there’s stuff we can’t talk about. I respect that. But someday, you’re going to meet someone, and you’re going to have to tell him.”

  “Or I could just not go out and meet anyone. That’s an option.”

  Jake watches me sip my coffee, which has already gone cold. I drink it anyway. He finally decides to sigh at me and turn back to his computer. “We’ve been friends since you got here,” he says. “But other than me, who else are you friends with?”

  I stare at him. He stares back. “I hate you.”

  “I hate you too.” He smiles. “Go on. Back to work with you.”

  I push up out of the chair and stand in the doorway. “Jake?”

  “Yeah?”

  I sigh. He looks up at me. “You wanna hang out this weekend?

  Falling asleep on the couch this morning meant I couldn’t pack a lunch, so when 12:30 rolls around I walk down the street to the Wendy’s. I hate going into places like this -- not only is it going to screw up my diet, but when I order a salad and a baked potato, the cashier gives me a look that says “really? That’s what you’re going with?”

  I miss real food. But at least the walk back to the office makes me feel better for not buying a Frosty. How pathetic would that have been?

  Most people try to leave work early on Friday afternoons, but not me. Why would I want to leave early, when I’m just going to see someone I never want to see again? Especially when I have to see him every Friday afternoon?

  Jake drops me off at the college before he heads home -- he stays until six every Friday specifically to do that, so that I don’t have to wait in the dark for the bus or spend the money on an Uber. I told him Professor Wedlund is an old friend of the family, which he isn’t, but Jake is smart enough not to ask. “Try to do something fun this weekend,” he says as I open the door. “Please?”

  “I’ll try,” I say, but he probably knows I’m lying. “See you Monday.”

  “See you.”

  He drives off, leaving me standing under the yellow-white glow of the streetlamp. I sigh, then mount the steps to the anthropology building. Its hallways are wide and almost totally empty; my shoes clop like hooves as I make my way through the halls to Professor Wedlund’s office. Of course he’s there; I wonder sometimes if he ever goes home. Or if he even has a home to go to.

  “Good evening, Andrea,” he says when I knock. “Come in.”

  I shrug off my jacket and toss it and my bag on his couch. “Let’s get this over with, huh?”

  “Would you like some coffee?” He has a K-cup machine in the corner, and I can smell the mug that steams gently on his desk, resting on one of those USB heater things.

  “I shouldn't. My doctor says I drink too much of it."

  “Oh. Well, it’s nice to see you’re taking an interest in improving yourself, at least.”

  “Whatever.”

  He sighs. “Andrea, I’m not going to apologize for caring about you. I’ve always cared about you; you know that.”

  I roll my eyes. “You cared about my powers. You cared about me stopping the end of the world. Now you care about making sure I don’t do anything that isn’t normal.”

  “That doesn’t mean I don’t also want to see to your well-being. After your parents died--”

  “Don’t play that card with me, Professor. It doesn’t work anymore.”

  He pauses for a moment. “Very well.” From the top drawer of his desk, he removes the Device -- it has a name, but I don’t care what it’s supposed to be called. “Would you like to sit down?”

  I fold my arms. “No.”

  I know I’m being a bitch, but it’s been a long week. The Professor wisely chooses not to comment on that and instead gets up from behind his desk. He walks slowly over to me, a tall, almost skeletally-thin man who used to scare me, once upon a time. Now I just hate him.

  No, that’s not true. I don’t think I hate him. I just hate what he does to me.

  I stand stock-still as the Professor turns on the Device. It looks like an ear thermometer, except that it's made of metal and the business end is much sharper. I feel the tip of it letting off heat as he lifts the hair off the back of my neck -- his hand is cold, which makes the burn of the Device that much worse when he touches it to the old mark on the back of my neck. Damn thing never leaves a wound, and I don’t have a scar. It’s just a stylized symbol in blue-black ink, maybe the size of a quarter, that I noticed on my neck the morning after my powers first manifested. Unlike a regular tattoo -- which I tried to get after my first real battle against evil, but which was completely gone the next day -- this mark never fades.

  I wonder if I can get a tattoo now. I wonder what I’d want it to be.

  The burn stops as the Professor removes the Device from my neck. The pain fades quickly, and by the time he’s sitting behind his desk again, it’s completely gone. I readjust my hair to cover the mark.

  “It’ll just be a few minutes,” he says as he plugs the Device into an adaptor on his desk. “Would you like some water? Tea? I can make you some tea.”

  Now that the worst part is over, some of my anger’s faded. I can be nicer to him, and it certainly wouldn’t hurt. “I’m fine.” A pause. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” The Professor smiles, then looks down at his screen. “No powers,” he says.

  “No surprise there.”

  “No,” he says, “I suppose not.”

  I still wonder what might happen if I did get my powers back; would the Device kill me? Fill me with enough energy that I’d explode into bite-sized chunks of Andrea-parts? Burn the powers out of my body and leave me... well, leave me as an overweight almost-thirty wage-slave with two cats and no real romantic prospects?

  The Professor intrudes onto my suddenly-dark mood. “Is there anything you want to talk about? Before you go?”

  I get my stuff off his couch. “What could I possibly have to talk about with you?”

  “Your job?” he suggests. “Your friends? Are you seeing anyone?”

  I give him my most withering expression, and hope it doesn’t just look like I’m constipated. “I’ll see you next Friday.”

  “Next Friday, then. Have a good weekend.”

  I grunt acknowledgment and get out of there. It’s not like this takes very long, but it’s already almost seven and I just want to go home.

  Taking the bus on Friday night is a special kind of hell, but it’s something I have to deal with. I finally drop my stuff on the table a little after eight, then go into the kitchen and stare into the refrigerator at the package of mostly-defrosted chicken breasts I was going to cook tonight.

  The hell with that. I order Chinese instead and, while I wait, change into a t-shirt and yoga pants. When I was a kid, we called them “sweat pants”; I wonder why we don’t anymore. I check my e-mail, skim the news, and browse the TV listings. Something good is bound to be on.

  The food arrives just in time for the Buffy marathon to start. Buffy and Willow -- the cats, not the characters -- jump onto the coffee table and stare at me while I figure out where to put everything. �
�You guys don’t get any. Don’t even ask.” Willow glares at my wonton soup, then gives it a disgusted mew and leaps to the couch. Buffy stares for a minute more, but I just ignore her, and eventually she stalks off to do whatever cats do when I’m not watching them. “Well, Will, it’s just you and me.”

  “Mew,” she says as I scritch her hindquarters.

  I recognize the episode the moment it comes on. It’s the season five finale, the one where Buffy -- the character, not the cat -- jumps into the portal to save her sister and the entire world from Glory the Hell Goddess. One of the best in the series, and one of my favorites. For a good reason, too.

  I watch Sarah Michelle Gellar turn a vampire to dust. The kid on the screen asks her how she did it, and I mouth her reply -- “It’s what I do.” -- along with the character.

  “But... you’re just a girl,” the kid says.

  Buffy looks over her shoulder at the camera. We both do the line. “That’s what I keep saying.”

  Chopsticks in hand, I snatch up a piece of Kung Pao chicken and salute the screen with it as the credits start to play. “Just a girl, sister,” I say. “You and me both.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  FIRST DATE

  +++++

  The TV’s still on in the morning. I really hate when that happens. But it had been a good marathon, and I didn’t want to get up, and I have all sorts of excuses that aren’t going to fly when I finally wash my face and start feeling normal again.

  Moving slowly, I clean up what’s left of dinner from my coffee table. I guess I’d hoped to have leftovers for lunch today, or maybe for dinner, but after sitting out all night nothing looks very appetizing. Into the trash it goes. I give the cats fresh food and water, and then go into the bathroom.

  As I sit on the toilet, Buffy parades in, jumps up onto the counter, and gives me the evil eye. “I know,” I grumble, “it’s Saturday. Leave me alone.” She meows, but just keeps watching me. “Y’know, that’s not very nice. This is my private time.”

  No response.

  I ball up a couple of squares of toilet paper and toss them in Buffy’s direction, but they fall well short. I wonder if she’s laughing at me on the inside.

  Cleaning litterboxes is the most horrible chore I’ve ever had, and I’ve done some pretty horrible things in my time. It never ceases to amaze me how foul two small cats can make two decent-sized litterboxes in only one week -- and that’s even with me scooping out the worst of it every couple of days. I guess I could buy the automated kind, but I always worry that they’ll stop working, or that they’ll go off while one of the cats is in there and scare even more shit out of her.

  I also hate automatically-flushing toilets, for the record.

  The other problem with cleaning the boxes is that, after I wipe them with spray cleaner and get the worst clumps out from under the liners, I have to rinse them off so the smell doesn’t put the cats off their business. That means I have to completely clean the second bathroom as well. Not that I have a ton of guests, but hope springs eternal. At least no one uses this toilet much, so it only takes a minute to scrub it out and wipe down the sink.

  The moment I’m done, Buffy saunters past me and toward the covered litterbox. I watch her step inside. “Sometimes, I really hate you.”

  She doesn’t reply.

  I consider whether or not I really want to clean the rest of the apartment -- too often, the answer is no, even though the state of my range top has gone from “pretty dirty” to “how can I possibly cook on this thing without starting a fire”. But I feel like doing something. Something constructive.

  Oh, hell. That can only mean one thing. At least I don’t have to change my clothes first.

  I hate exercising. Hate it. I hate the smell of the gym, I hate the sound of people pumping iron -- what a dumb phrase -- and, most of all, I hate how it makes me feel.

  Well, I got myself into this situation, and I paid for a year in advance at this place, so I guess I’d better make the most of it. I climb onto a treadmill and hunt-and-peck at the console until it turns on and starts trying to convey me backward. In response, I begin taking steps forward, my pace slow, and try not to look at how slowly the time goes. Even listening to music doesn’t help. It’s just plod, plod, plod, walking nowhere, and not too fast, even when I up the speed to two-and-a-half miles per hour.

  At least I’m sweating a little. It takes a while to get to that point, but by the time the machine is telling me I should be going at least twice as fast, and at a much steeper incline, I have a respectable sheen on my forehead and my lower back feels damp.

  Ha! Take that, every doctor who ever told me I’m overweight!

  Half an hour on the treadmill is all I can manage, though. Too many people are actually running on the things, or climbing the stairs like there’s no tomorrow, or swinging their arms on those elliptical machines. They're all exercising for real, and here I am in the middle of it all, plod-plod-plodding away.

  I hit the stop button -- of course the machine doesn’t stop; it just transitions to cool-down mode -- and let it carry me off until I can step down onto the floor. I grab my towel and my water, turn down my music a little, and start walking toward the... what’s it called, anyway? The room with the weight machines and stuff in it. When I bought my membership, I got a free session with a personal trainer, and I think I kind-of-sort-of remember some of the exercises I’m supposed to be doing.

  Kind of. Sort of.

  Nope. Don't.

  If there’s anything worse than going to the gym, it’s using the locker-room. People who look like me have no choice but to walk past people who look like... oh, pick an actress, any actress; let’s say Scarlett Johansson, for the sake of argument. So you’ve got a room half-full of half-naked Scarlett Johanssons strutting around like they own the place, and the other half half-full of women who are only here because even the specialty catalogs are running out of things they can wear out in public.

  Okay. I’m not that overweight. But sometimes, when I’m in the mall, I see a cute top and I wonder if they make it in my size. The answer is always ‘no’.

  There aren’t too many Scarletts here today, thank goodness; no one questions my decision to bring my entire bag to the shower with me, or to go in still dressed and come out wearing my towel around my waist and the same sweaty t-shirt -- turned inside-out; I’m not that crazy -- as I plod some more, this time back to the bench in front of the locker I claimed when I got here. It’s as far away from the main flow of traffic as I can get, but the gym is still busy enough that I have to swallow my body issues and turn away from two women about ten feet away who are getting dressed and chatting amiably to each other.

  I haven’t had a girlfriend like that in a while -- not the kind I can go to the gym or to the movies with, anyway. I guess it’s my fault for not getting out more.

  My ears perk up when I hear them discussing a repeat of How I Met Your Mother that I guess was playing on one of the gym TVs. I know Willow was on it -- and yes, I also know that’s not her name, but to me she’ll always be Willow -- but I don’t watch sitcoms. I just can’t. The episode was about baby names, and one of them -- the taller one -- says she didn’t get the joke.

  “It’s from Buffy,” I say as I tie my shoes.

  “What?” the woman asks.

  “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” I sit up and start gathering my things to put into my gym bag. “Alyson Hannigan played a lesbian on that show, and her girlfriend was named Tara.”

  “Oh.” She makes an amused noise. “Am I missing a lot of jokes like that?”

  “I don't know.” I zip my bag. “I don’t really watch the show.”

  “Then how do you know this one?” asks the other woman -- she’s shorter than me, and also smaller in circumference, although we both are firmly in the not-Scarlett-Johansson category.

  “Internet.” I put the bag on my shoulder. “I have a lot of down-time at work.”

  She laughs. “No fooling. I’m a receptionist
; all I seem to do is play Candy Crush half the time.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  And now I have to make a decision. This conversation has gone on long enough that it’s verging on uncomfortable. Either I have to introduce myself, or I have to get out of there.

  Too many times, I’ve gone with the latter, and where has that gotten me?

  No. Time for a change.

  “My name’s Andrea,” I say.

  “Janice,” says the short woman.

  Her friend says her name is Carolyn. She looks like one of those really tall women who was an athlete in high school because she was tall and strong, not because she really wanted to be. “You new here?” she asks, one hand waving vaguely to indicate the entire gym.

  “Not really. I mean, I have a membership; I just don’t use it.”

  “I hear that,” Janice says. She ties a huge mass of curly black hair into a simple ponytail. “I’m only here ‘cause my husband got us a discount through work.” She inclines her head at Carolyn. “She actually likes to exercise.”

  Carolyn, who is blond and fair, blushes.

  “I won’t hold it against you.”

  “Hey,” Janice says, “we’re going to get coffee. You want to come?”

  “Wh... what? Really?”

  “Sure, why not?” Janice gets her purse out of her locker and closes it. “You want to follow us?”

  “I didn’t drive.”

  “Oh. Okay, I will. Come on then.”

  The Starbucks is about as crowded as an average Starbucks would be on a Saturday morning -- older folks reading the paper, hipster kids with iPads and MacBooks pretending to write the next great American novel but really just being snarky on Tumblr, and a steady stream of soccer moms and dads getting their drinks to go as their kids bounce around in the cargo compartment of their minivans. I don’t usually go out on Saturday mornings specifically to avoid this kind of crowd, but I have to admit that it’s kind of nice to sit here with Janice and Carolyn and talk about nothing.