Ralph and Helen spent an afternoon making love in her bare, shabby lodgings with the peeling wallpaper. The window shades were pulled down, the lights were dimmed, and the radio was switched off. Nobody else was in the boarding house at that time of day.
There was no time in the room, just themselves. They buried themselves in the bedclothes and their own nakedness and heard no sounds from the rest of the house or outside. Then they slept a while in the still winter twilight, bodies overlapping, breathing in unison. Nothing disturbed their rest.
They’d met working in adjoining offices at two of the many agencies recently formed by the government. The first time they’d snuck away to Helen’s room, Ralph had kept checking his wristwatch. Helen had taken it off and laid it on the end table.
Ralph awoke, with a start. He reached for the place where his wristwatch would have been, if he’d still had it, but it had stopped working a few days ago and he hadn’t been able to get it repaired yet. He roused Helen from sleep. “I’ve got to go,” he said. “She’ll be expecting me for supper.”
Helen stirred, sat up, gathered her robe as a thin shield against the room’s chill. Ralph made his way to the blinded window to look out at the street below. Instead of people making their way homeward in the evening gloom, coats cinched tight to keep out the cold, he saw devastation: bodies strewn on the ground, cars halted in the road, blackened trees and nothing moving.
He backed away from the window, shaking his head.
“What is it?” Helen asked, now standing by the bed. Ralph gestured helplessly toward the window, and she walked over and looked out.
“The Enemy….” Helen began, stumbled, tried again. “But how — what kind of weapon causes that?”
Ralph shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. He turned on the radio. They expected bulletins on the nature of the attack, the number of killed and wounded, and whether it was safe to go outside. But there was only static.
They ventured out of the room, handkerchiefs held to their faces, to see whether anyone else was in the house. They knocked on doors and peered down dark hallways. They were like the only two people alive in a tomb.
When they came back to Helen’s room, Ralph finally broke the silence. “I wonder whether anyone else made it back from work,” he said. “Do you think she and the boy–”
He stopped and shook his head. “What should we do?” he asked.
Without a word, she took him by the hand and led him back to bed. They curled up together, her behind him, bodies pressed together, as though they could melt into one flesh.
^^^
Bridget Goldschmidt received her MFA in creative writing, with a concentration in fiction, from Brooklyn College in 1991. Her short fiction has been published by Flash Fiction Magazine, Every Day Fiction and The RavensPerch. She works as a trade magazine editor and lives in New York by the ocean.
Image by Kalyee Srithnam.