Chapter 1

Heather wants a cigarette. Moreso, she wants to go home. But home, well. Home doesn’t exist anymore. So instead, Heather focuses on the more obtainable desire: Nicotine. Sweet, numbing nicotine.

She hasn’t smoked in years. Not since high school and Hunter Thomas, the boy with two first names who wore eyeliner and lipstick and tasted like ashes on her tongue. He’d broken up with her over a pack of menthols behind the bleachers during a pep rally. Cigarettes became synonymous with heartbreak, and her mother was so relieved. 

She isn’t sure why she’s thinking about that now; about him. Hunter hadn’t been her first, or even her worst, breakup. In terms of breakups, none had ground on this… But it was an ending; maybe the first ending that touched her deeply enough to change something fundamental to her world. Cigarettes taste like heartbreak; like Hunter; like endings. 

There is a man ten feet to her left. He’s in her peripheral vision, leaning against the “No smoking” sign as he places a cigarette between his lips, and lights it. It’s like he’s daring someone to object. No one does, though she catches several other would-be passengers and crew casting him interested, predatory looks. If she hesitates the pack might be empty by the time she gets there. Heather doesn’t hesitate.

“Can I—” is all she manages to say before he’s thumping one into her outstretched palm and handing her a lighter. Disaster movies are wrong, she remembers from other endings. Most people are generous when worlds end. At first, anyway. 

Others are coming forward, bolstered by her bravado. Cigarette-man seems happy to dispense cancer among them. What does cancer matter now, anyway? The world is ending.

Heather returns to her position near the rolling travel case containing everything she has left to her name. She inhales the smaller heartbreak, the one dampened by time and life experience. It fills her, shoring up the parts of her that are already beginning to crack under pressure. It reminds her that she’s been here before; she knows this storm. She can wait it out. She’ll live to see the new world on the other side.

There won’t be one, though. Not this time.

Hung above the large bay windows exposing the crowded tarmac are five large T.V.s. Each displays a different news station; some local, others not. They’re all muted, with subtitles of varying quality scrolling across their bottoms. It’s necessary, and it isn’t. The footage speaks volumes.

She was a freshman in college when the World Trade Towers fell. There’d been another room, like this one, filled with silent strangers whose eyes strayed from the screen only to stare, uncomprehending, at walls. 

Some wept. Some shook. A few scoffed and joked in hoarse whispers. They understood well enough to know no one would appreciate their sense of macabre humor. They didn’t understand well enough to believe any of it was truly happening. Reality would sink in later. Hundreds of miles across the country from New York, they had time for later. A world had ended, sure, but it wasn’t theirs—not really. It wasn’t hers.

Heather isn’t scoffing this time. She is, once more, hundreds of miles from the crisis point… and she isn’t, actually. Not where it matters. Her heart is burning in the wreckage, and no matter the miles she may well burn alongside it.

“Heather Galey?” 

The touch on her shoulder is more startling than the voice. 

Heather nearly drops her cigarette, then glances guiltily between it and the flight attendant standing beside her. She’d noticed the woman when they first boarded the plane in Vegas—striking brown eyes, bottle-blonde hair cut to her ears, and a friendly smile that bordered on noticeably practiced. The smile is gone, replaced by worried wrinkles and the air of a funeral director. 

The flight attendant gestures to Heather’s travel case. There’s a pink plastic identification tag clipped to the handlebar. It clearly lists her name, and the airport she ought to be standing in right now. An airport that no longer exists.

“Can you come with me, please?”

“Uh—sure…” Heather looks around for an ashtray. That’s what she hates most about non-smoking areas. No ashtrays. 

“You can keep it,” says the attendant in a quiet, understanding way which reminds Heather of hospitals; of her grandmother; of another world, gone.

She takes another drag of heartache, grabs the handle of her travel case, and follows the attendant out of the waiting area. 

Others are being removed in singles and small, containable groups. Some argue, but Heather doesn’t. She has no idea where she’s being lead, though she has a guess as to why. It doesn’t matter, either. Left to her own devices, she’d have stayed rooted to that spot until the cigarette ran out, then went searching for more. Maybe there’d have been another poor sap willing to share, or maybe a shop would open.

The idea of shopping—like everything is normal, like the world still makes sense—is where Heather falters, jarring to a halt just a few feet before the flight attendant reaches their destination. Heather knows this is their destination because someone has taped a handwritten sign to the blue enamel door. It reads “HOUSTON” in letters that skew toward the end, denoting the writer’s misjudgement of paper-to-letter ratios. 

And that’s exactly right, isn’t it? The effect, the way the letters fold on themselves, going crooked and wrong and threatening to fall off the page. That’s exactly how Houston should be written, for now and always, because that is how it feels. 

Houston doesn’t exist anymore. 

Houston. Dallas. Galveston. Corpus, and Freeport. The whole God-damned Golden Triangle. 

Everything is bigger in Texas. It’s a stupid slogan; one she’s hated and worn with pride all her life because it’s true. Everything is bigger in Texas—particularly explosions. 

Heather is going to throw up. She and the flight attendant realize this in unison. Maybe it’s instinct on the flight attendant’s part; preternatural puke-dar born of working public relations in confined, stomach-turning situations for years on end. Or maybe it’s just pure luck. Either way, the flight attendant grabs Heather’s travel case and pulls it out of the way in time to avoid the stream of heartache-flavoured bile hitting the floor. 

There wasn’t much of anything in Heather’s stomach. Less, now. Still, she braces her hands against her knees and heaves, coughs, gags until the moment has passed. 

Her cigarette lies on the tile, safely doused with sickness. 

It’s too much. Heather presses a trembling hand over her crusty lips, trying vainly to stifle the noise ripping her apart from the inside. It is the sound of a dying world; the death throes of a life that will never be again, for all that she—its inadequate container—remains living. For however long she remains living.

Distantly, Heather is aware of being cajoled into the room marked with a dead world’s name. There are others here; some she recognizes from her flight, but all strangers. Only and always strangers.

Strangers are all that’s left in this world that’s just beginning.

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