The Last Good Conversation in a Ruined World

Richard had long ago determined that the apocalypse, for all its biblical grandeur, was ultimately a bore. The undead were predictable, the survival was tedious, and the constant vigilance—well, that part was rather like living in New York City in the 1980s, only with fewer neon lights and more putrefaction.

He kept his cobbler's shop sanctuary meticulously ordered. Not because order mattered anymore—what was there to keep at bay?—but because it gave him something to do besides contemplate the universe's rather tasteless joke of allowing humans to evolve consciousness only to have most of them reduced to mindless shambling. The irony wasn't lost on him that so many had lived that way before the plague anyway.

Today had been different, though. He had ventured to Alderman's Grocery with his usual expectations: scavenge what remained, avoid becoming lunch, return to solitude. The routine of it all was almost comforting, like how one might have once found comfort in checking email or scrolling through social media feeds.

"The peaches are still good if you don't mind the syrup being a bit... industrial."

Her voice had startled him so completely that he'd nearly dropped his carefully curated collection of protein bars. She stood by the canned goods, a woman approximately his age, which is to say old enough to remember restaurants and young enough to have many years of remembering ahead of her.

"I find most things are still good if you don't mind something about them being a bit off," he'd replied, surprising himself with how quickly his social reflexes had returned, like muscle memory.

She'd laughed at that. Actually laughed, not the nervous tittering of someone making noise to cover fear, but a genuine laugh that made her eyes crinkle at the corners. Richard couldn't remember the last time he'd made someone laugh. Before, certainly.

"I'm Eleanor," she'd said, "from the settlement east of town. You know, the one with the ridiculous name."

"Ah yes, 'New Eden,'" he nodded. "Nothing says 'fresh start' quite like stealing nomenclature from the original paradise."

Another laugh. "It was between that and 'Zombietown,' but the committee felt it lacked gravitas."

"Committees," Richard sighed. "That's why I could never join. The world ends, and yet somehow Robert's Rules of Order survives."

"They're not all bad," Eleanor said, her smile fading a bit. "There's something to be said for a few extra pairs of eyes while you sleep."

Richard had wanted to say something cutting about how one doesn't require committees for safety, just competence, but he'd found himself nodding instead. "I suppose there is," he admitted.

They'd talked while filling their respective bags with items the other wouldn't have chosen. Eleanor took vitamins and medical supplies; Richard focused on coffee and books from the small rack near the checkout. The conversation flowed with a startling ease, as if the apocalypse had stripped away all the trivial introductory gambits, leaving only what mattered.

"You should visit," she'd said as they'd parted ways at the storefront. "We have actual bread. Not that pre-apocalypse stuff that lasted forever because it was more chemical than wheat. Real bread."

"I'll consider it," he'd said, knowing he wouldn't.

Now, sitting in his cobbler's shop with its reinforced door and carefully arranged escape routes, Richard turned the interaction over in his mind. What struck him most wasn't Eleanor herself, though she had been striking—gray-streaked hair pulled back in a practical knot, laugh lines deep enough to suggest a life of either great joy or tremendous suffering, possibly both. No, what haunted him was the ease with which they'd spoken, the way conversation had unfurled between them like a forgotten art suddenly remembered.

Richard had always prided himself on his self-reliance. Before, he'd been the sort of man who found most social interactions exhausting, preferring the company of books and his own thoughts. The apocalypse had merely given him permission to live as he'd always wanted: alone, accountable to no one, master of his limited domain.

"And yet," he said aloud to the empty shop, "here I am, talking to myself about talking to someone else."

The irony made him smile. Oscar Wilde would have appreciated it—the man who thought he preferred solitude discovering, in a world mostly emptied of people, that perhaps he didn't.

Eleanor had mentioned bread. Real bread. Richard tried to remember the last time he'd smelled fresh bread. Before the fall, certainly. Maybe at that pretentious bakery in the city where they'd charged eight dollars for a sourdough boule and acted as if they were doing you a favor by taking your money.

In his meticulously ordered home, Richard suddenly felt the absence of disorder—the mess of other people, the chaos of connection, the entropy of shared experience. His fingers found the edge of a cobbler's tool, worn smooth by years of use before he'd claimed this place. Someone else had touched this once, had used it to craft something for another person to wear.

Life had once been a series of connections, of things passed from hand to hand. Now it was a carefully maintained isolation.

"Ridiculous," he muttered, setting the tool down with more force than necessary.

But as night fell and Richard prepared for another evening alone with his books and his thoughts, he found himself wondering what sorts of committees they had at New Eden, and whether any of them might benefit from a contrarian voice. Not that he was considering it, of course. It was merely an intellectual exercise, the kind of pointless  speculation that helps pass the time when there's too much of it.

He opened his current book—a dog-eared copy of Proust that he'd been working through with deliberate slowness, rationing the pages like the luxury they were—but found himself reading the same paragraph three times without absorbing a word.

Instead, his mind kept returning to Eleanor's laugh and the way her eyes had lit up when they'd discovered a mutual appreciation for obscure pre-war films. He thought about real bread and committees and the sound of another human voice that wasn't screaming in terror or moaning with undead hunger.

"Perhaps," Richard said to the empty room, carefully marking his place in the book, "I'll just stop by. To see about the bread."

He knew, even as he said it, that it wasn't about the bread at all. It was about Eleanor's laugh and the way conversation with her had felt like slipping into a warm bath after years of cold showers. It was about the realization that perhaps his carefully constructed solitude was less a philosophy and more a fear—not of the undead, but of the living and all the messy, complicated, wonderful ways they could disrupt a perfectly ordered life.

The apocalypse, Richard decided as he began to mentally catalog what he might need for a visit to New Eden, hadn't changed human nature after all. It had merely distilled it, removing all the distractions that had once made it so easy to hide from oneself.

"Wilde would definitely approve," he murmured, allowing himself a small smile as he began to pack.

Mike Elam is a comedy magician and mentalist who resides in Northeast Tennessee. He enjoys traveling with his wife and daughter, and writing poetry and short stories.