i always liked blueberries the best

“You’re an animal person,” she says. “I like that.”

He is the old body of a young man, sitting against a sandbag barricade. The sack seams have long since been picked by birds, and ants have burrowed through the piles of sand that had pissed out. His helmet slipped off years ago, rolled sideways for mama vermin to whelp their wormy little pups inside of.

She is crouched in front of him, her arms wrapped around her scabbed knees. Suddenly aware of herself, she adjusts her skirt to fall more becomingly over her legs. Only one of her sores is open, weeping a flirty line of pink down the back of her calf.

“Sorry,” she says.

Slack-jawed, the old young man politely does not reply.

They are at a place that used to be an intersection. In the middle is a rusted six-car pileup, bullet holes peppered through open doors. The corpses of a couple are splayed out on the hood of the first car, hands once clasped now shattered into a pile of bones and broken glass.

Stoplight chassis swing overhead. Bees have molded their nests over the dull amber, the red, the green. She can’t remember what order they were meant to be in. She never learned to drive.

“I suppose it was the war that brought you out here.” She winces, then smacks the meat of her palm against her forehead. “Sorry. Stupid. Your uniform. Duh. Of course it was the war.”

There was a time, before any fires or deluges, that her friends would call her delicate. A fragile bird-bone thing that couldn’t make phone calls or travel alone on trains.

They’re all dead, those friends. Some of them she had watched burn to crumbles. Others she had heard about from telephones and the mouths of crows. One she had seen torn six different ways and fixed to the front of a pickup truck, like a figurehead on the mast of a ship. Another one, she had eaten the tender thigh-flesh of. She had not liked to do it, but it felt necessary at the time.

She wonders why she’s the one—out of all of them, out of everyone—who’s still alive. Caution, maybe. Luck, probably. But what she knows for certain is that letting go does not come easily to her. 

Before the war, she never slept well. Childhood sleepovers were miserable. If she fainted, she could never black out entirely. Her hearing would muffle, her vision would blacken, and her body would fall limp, but her mind was still present. Waiting. Fading and waiting. She remembers waking up once, in the middle of surgery. A wet haze of nurses rushed to put her back under. Meditation gurus and college hypnotists were stumped by her in equal measure.

No, letting go does not come easy. Dying certainly wouldn’t either. So her hair fell out, and her teeth did too, and her guts ruptured and slurried and leaked out from all ends and her eyes bled and her fingers and toes withered to nubs, but she would not die.

“What killed you, if you don’t mind me asking?” she asks him. Maybe it’s too soon for a question like that, but these postwar times have made her a bit bolder in her approach. It’s important to be honest with each other in a relationship, she thinks. These are the kinds of conversations a couple should be having.

His right hand is locked up against his chest. She gently tugs at the fabric underneath his stiff fingers, but his knuckles crumble, shedding death-dust onto his lap. 

“Sorry,” she whispers, and she imagines—if he could talk—how he might tell her to stop apologizing so much, and how touched she would be if he did. 

On his shirt she sees a ragged hole where he’d been clutching, the edges ringed rusty with old, old blood. Right through the sternum.

“Oh, poor thing,” she coos, smoothing the fabric back down. “That must have been so painful. I hope you died quick.”

His dog tags say Peter Müller. She apologizes again as she unbuttons the collar of his shirt (stop apologizing!), but keeping him nameless just doesn’t feel appropriate. It would probably be polite to tell him her own name, too, but she’s forgotten how to say it out loud. There’s been no one to introduce herself to, after all. Maybe she can trace it in the sand if he asks nicely.

“Poor Peter,” she says. The way he’s slumped over allows her to slot herself perfectly against him. As if, in death, he had known to make room for her.

He waited for me, she realizes, and a hot thrill crackles in her chest. She’s only felt that thrill a few times before, standing on the precipice of bomb craters. Oh, she could be awfully stupid over this boy. If he keeps this up, he could make her a Lemon Pledge housewife.

Is it a lonely feeling, to die? Maybe it used to be, she thinks, but not anymore. She is still alive and very, very lonely. Death is a type of belonging outside of her reach. That’s how she sees it, at least. And she hasn’t met another living person in a long time, so maybe her definition of death is the only one that even exists now.

If she is the only person left to even think about words and say them out loud, she could change the meaning of anything. Dead could mean alive and alive could mean dead. And mean could mean something else entirely. And something else could mean nothing or everything. And maybe the word lonely doesn’t exist at all.

She closes her eyes and rests her head on Peter’s shoulder.

“I never had a boyfriend, you know.” Her arm slides across what’s left of his waist. “I just . . . I don’t know. I felt scared of everything, and the world moved too fast. I could never just close my eyes and settle in. And now it’s slowed down, but it’s just me and nobody else. Left behind again.”

She wonders if her Peter had a sweetheart he left behind when he was drafted. A girl he picked up by the waist and swung around when he kissed her, cinema style. A girl he pictured in his mind as the wound bled out. A girl who died thinking of him, too. A girl who’d be waiting for him at the peak of those post-life opalescent stairs, a mushroom-cloud bouquet in her hands.

Her hand crawls up to the pockets of his shirt, where she digs for photographs. I know she’s here. I know you love her more. I know I mean nothing to you. 

Mean. Nothing. Hadn’t she changed those words? Or planned to, at least? How long ago had that been? Time is another thing that seems to have disappeared, save for sunup and sundown, but even those seem to get reversed sometimes.

She digs in Peter’s pockets for a few years, finds a small wet bible and a gum wrapper, and she laughs. She laughs and laughs, and a tremble rattles her thin shoulders.

“It’s—well, it’s not that I didn’t trust you, Peter,” she says, wiping her eyes. “I just worry, is all. I just worry so much about everything. Which should mean nothing now. Gosh, I keep forgetting that I’m supposed to be changing what words mean what.”

Inside the gum wrapper is a hard, dry nugget with the imprint of a molar fossilized onto it. Even though she doesn’t have many teeth left to chew with, she places the dried gum on her tongue. It softens and dissolves, and Peter’s ancient saliva seeps into hers.

She hums, wrapping her arms around herself. “This is my first kiss, you know.”

Maybe it’s his, too. How awful, to die in a war before even having your first kiss.

She looks down at the little wet bible in her lap.

“I feel just like how Eve must have,” she says. “But not naked. And I don’t think I could chew an apple anymore. But that’s fine. I always liked blueberries the best.”

How badly she wanted a man to know that. Is that too much to ask? For a man to remember how much she liked blueberries?

Peter, poor Peter, he’s got no brains left to remember things like blueberries. And if she’s Eve, she can’t help but wonder if there’s an Adam kicking up dust on the other side of the world. Something alive, or at least mostly alive, like she is. She can almost see him on the horizon, a steel-cut shadow against the setting sun. He’d gallop down on a rotting horse and pick her up by the waist and swing her around and kiss her cinema style. Oh, she could really be a Lemon Pledge housewife this time.

It would break poor Peter’s heart. It would be so difficult for her to choose between them, and she hates to hurt people’s feelings. But she is the last woman on earth, after all, and that puts her in high demand. There’s only so much a woman can give of herself, and after losing her ears and nose and a few choice fingers, there’s not much left she even can.

She throws the bible onto Peter’s lap. 

“I wish you wouldn’t be so jealous,” she tells him. “You’re ugly when you’re jealous of me. I can’t help being alive any more than you can help being dead.”

She thinks of the discarded gun lying a few feet away and she wonders if he’d ever gotten mad enough to want to hurt someone. If she made him real mad, would he take that gun and kill her? Maybe she can’t die, but what if she could be killed?

She scrambles back, so suddenly that the mice under Peter’s jacket scatter.

“You wouldn’t,” she whispers. But she knew what they said about soldiers who came back from combat. How they never stop smelling gunpowder, never stop hearing bombs in every firework. It was a nasty time to be anybody, back then. She’d walked past plenty of those conscientious objectors when the war started, oh yes, she’d read their signs.

(No, she’d been too scared to join them. Too scared.)

“I knew something wasn’t right,” she whispers. She smacks her hand against her forehead again and this time, when her hand comes away, a thin deli-slice of skin peels off with it. “I knew it. How could I be so stupid? I tried to be careful, I never . . .”

She pushes herself up off the ground, dirt scraping into her raw nail beds. It’s a struggle to get back to her feet, but even still, she stands so quickly that vertigo spills out of her nose. Thin, tangy blood drizzles to her lips. 

Peter doesn’t even try to help her. He doesn’t even care.

“I suppose you do this to women a lot!” she cries, wiping her nose on her sleeve. “Making them feel special. Breaking their hearts. I suppose I’m just another one to cross off the list, aren’t I?”

She tries to spit him out of her mouth, but the gum has completely disintegrated. Pink saliva hits the toe of his standard issue boot.

“Don’t bother calling,” she says as she turns away. “I’m leaving.”

And even as she bleeds and cries and limps down the road, a little ache of pride swells in her chest. Her stupid dead friends would be awfully shocked to see her stand up for herself like this, if they could see at all.

The mice crawl back underneath Peter’s jacket. Her sobs fade to a distance, to nothing at all.