You find ways to pass the time. Just the other day, I drained a stagnant lake—they’re all stagnant anyway—just to have a look around its bed. It was the usual stuff: a few cars, bones, garbage.
A few years back I just walked around the planet at a leisurely pace, from Hokkaido to the Falklands, it not being too much trouble for me to walk straight across the waters themselves, even if it’s a little bumpy—I really don’t mind. It’s a break from flying anyhow.
It did used to disturb me however, going past all the bodies, flesh gradually being torn away by what remained of the elements. For a period I attempted to bury them all in decent mass graves, scooping them up in big armfuls street by street. I started on the north-eastern coast of the United States, but gave up towards the middle of Pennsylvania. The thought of eventually having to move on to Bengal and the Chinese coastal cities…months and months of grisly work…years maybe…it was just not feasible. What can you do? Better just to let the dead rest as they are. At the very least I made New York and Boston a little bit cleaner for myself—even if the cities themselves remain cracked and cratered. I was never much of a handyman.
Don’t get me wrong, I still do fly about—no one to see me anymore, no one to cry out with joy, no enemy in fear. I scan the ground everywhere I go, looking for something, anything. There is still the odd insect, a few cockroaches, a small ant hill here and there; no bees though. If you stroll the ocean floor, you can come across a crab or two, not that they look all that healthy. You just have to be grateful I suppose for whatever’s left.
Yes, I exercise. I don’t really need to, but like the wandering, it kills time. A brisk run through Antarctica—not much ice left now to get in your way—lifting boulders, a quick float around the moon.
The new atmosphere is not that kind to paper, but I have managed to read a lot, even though I was never much of a bookworm. (I’ve read Joyce’s Ulysses three times now and I still don’t get it! Maybe I’m just trying too hard…)
I invent games too. Just a few weeks back I managed to throw a double decker bus from Tower Hamlets in East London all the way to Calais, just skirting the edge of the stratosphere, no orbit. Yes, I ended up smashing a few bodies, but as I’ve said, what can you do? Just try your best not to make too much of a mess. Once I wanted to see how short a time it would take for me to run the length of Florida, a nice flat territory, Fernandina Beach to the end of the Everglades (pretty fossilised now), and back. I kept trying to improve, over and over, until at last I went so fast it caused a whole storm of tornadoes! I had a good laugh about that.
Yeah, you’ve gotta have things to do. I don’t need to eat or sleep, but if I find any canned food untouched I’ll have a pick at it, and if I do get too bored, I’ll lie my head down wherever I am and try to have a dream. It doesn’t always work, but sometimes I’ll get there, and I’ll have a dream, more often a nightmare, sometimes just weird nonsense from the past and the present mixed together, impossible relationships, the grotesque, the unimaginable somehow imagined. I guess that’s what it was to be human.
Do I feel any guilt? Well, sometimes I do, and sometimes I don’t. I helped them as much as I could. I did everything from stop falling elevators, to blocking up leaking oil tankers (those are great to toss by the way), and fighting off external aggressors. Of course, those elevators have stopped going up and down, those tankers have stopped sailing, and those aggressors don’t come by anymore. There’s nothing left to invade.
I could only help them so much. I loved them really, truly I did. One woman in particular. If only I could remember her name.
Okay, I admit it. My memory’s starting to go. But yours would also if you’d been alone for ninety-seven years.
Yeah, I could’ve done more to stop it, stop it all; that’s my guilt when I do have it. But when I’m not feeling guilty, I look at it like this: I was their protector, not their god.
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Harris Coverley has short fiction published or forthcoming in Curiosities, Planet Scumm, Horror Magazine, and The J.J. Outré Review. He is also a Rhysling-nominated poet and member of the Weird Poets Society, with poetry most recently accepted for Star*Line, Awen, New Reader Magazine, Clover & White, and The Oddville Press, amongst many others. He lives in Manchester, England.
