Breathing Room

In a world of canned air, Tess and Rowan brave dangers clinging to each other to survive.

Breathing Room

They kept the cans under the bed, lined up like chrome bricks against the concrete. When Tess slid the last one out, the metal scraped the floor with a sound that made her jaw tighten. She held it up to the light and tapped the gauge with a fingernail. The needle trembled and settled just above the yellow.

“Half,” Rowan said through his mask, the words flattened by the rubber. The filter valve made a small, constant hiss with each of his breaths. Hiss in; hiss out. It had become, over the months, the thing she could count on—the metronome by which they moved, slept, argued, and made up.

Tess turned the can, feeling a chill on her palm. Even the steel carried the ghost of winter. She twisted the regulator, and the hissing slowed, saving a little oxygen. Hiss in; hiss out.

“Eat?” Rowan asked.

“Later.”

Outside, the wind worked the rusted gutters into a low song. Dust came in through every crack and seam around the window foam, a fine gray grit that collected in corners and under the bed. It sifted down on everything they owned—blankets, tins, tools—and coated them in the same color. It could have been ash. Tess didn’t think of it as anything, just what air was now.

Rowan leaned his back against the wall and slid down until he sat on the floor with his knees up. He cradled his mask valve in the crook of his finger, an old habit from the mines, as if human touch could coax more out of a tank. They had never worked a mine; the mines had closed even before the sky burned. But after the burning, people learned the old gestures from those who survived underground.

Tess racked the empty can with the others that had already given what they had. They kept those, too. People made things from empty cans. Sometimes, traders would come by with a cart and buy them for buttons. The empty cans were the closest thing to a savings account.

“How many?” Rowan asked.

She counted. She’d counted so often that numbers felt like prayers prayed too many times.

“Two full. One half.” She placed the half-can on the crate beside the mattress. “We should stretch it.”

“We have stretched it,” Rowan said. “We’re elastic.”

He tried to grin. Where the mask pressed his lips, they cracked. She loved the look of his grin from before—the soft spread of it, the way it took his cheeks. The mask cut it into something narrow and utilitarian.

She took off her gloves and rubbed cream into the places her mask always rubbed her skin raw. The heels of her cheeks and the bridge of her nose. People died from leaks because their skin broke, and a crack you couldn’t see turned into a break you could. She checked the straps at the back of her head. They were holding. The straps were a patched patch.

“We go in the morning,” Rowan said. He was looking at the plywood door. He’d scraped off the last of the paint and oiled the hinges with rendered sump grease so it didn’t squeal when opened. If you make noise on the stairs, someone might open a door. Some doors should stay closed.

“Go where?” Tess already knew. She wanted to hear him say it to be sure he meant it for real.

“Market. Stadium,” Rowan said. He said “stadium,” like he was spitting something that tasted bad. “They got a shipment. Heard it on the radio. A pallet full.”

The radio was small. The battered radio appeared to have barely survived. They kept it wrapped in cloth in the cupboard behind the warped bowls. People came on at night, traded rumors and directions in voices that sounded like water running through gravel. The stations had names—Lifeline, Safe Harbor, Guidepost—and none of them lasted long.

“We go in the morning,” Rowan said again. “Early.” He turned the radio dial with a thumb; the static rose and filled the room. He shut it off before the battery died.

“Early means dark,” Tess said. The half-can sat on the crate. “We can’t see in the dark. We trip, we rip. We’ll bleed air.”

“We risk dark or we risk later. Later means other people.” He squeezed the mask valve with two fingers, an unconscious flex. “I can carry a full tank and two empties. You carry the half. If there’s a queue, we—”

“There will be a queue.”

“If there’s a queue,” he said, stubborn as a child, “we can trade the empties for buttons.”

“People don’t get nostalgic. Not anymore.”

He pushed his palm against the floor to stand. The air-grit marked its raw underside, and they couldn’t clean it. He reached up and pressed the patch he had glued along the top seam last spring. It held.

“Morning,” he said again, like he was telling himself a story he wanted to believe. He went to the box they kept under the shelf and took out a paper-wrapped square. He unwrapped it and broke a biscuit with his fist. It crumbled more than broke. They let the crumbs fall into their palms and ate without removing the masks. You could eat with the mask if you were careful, bending the lower flap and slotting the food underneath. It wasn’t pleasant. The biscuits tasted of grit.

Tess chewed the crumbs and thought of water, of how it used to feel to drink and not worry. She thought of rain. You didn’t keep thoughts like that around long. They honed nothing. She took them out like toys. Then, put them back on her mental top shelf.

They slept, the way people slept when there wasn’t enough oxygen to afford dreams. Tess kept her palm on the half-can and felt it chill as the room cooled. She woke before light, to a gray that looked like brick dust. The hiss of their masks whispered the small, important fact of continued life. Rowan was already sitting up and fitting the strap of one of the full cans across his chest like a bandolier. He adjusted, tested, adjusted again.

The building’s stairwell was a spine of poured concrete worn smooth by feet. On the second-floor landing, they passed a door; someone had blocked it with a mattress and barbed wire. Behind it, something moved—a shuffle, a scrape. Tess and Rowan kept their faces forward and their breaths slow. They didn’t hurry, and they didn’t stop.

The street had lost its trucks, its signs, its colors. It kept its wind. The wind pulled at their eyelids and chased grit into the corners of their eyes. Even through the masks, they could taste metal. Like old coins that had been touched by thousands of hands.

Rowan knelt to tighten the strap under Tess’s chin. His thumb stroked once across her jaw, where the rubber kissed her skin. She smiled—just a little—and then flattened it into nothing. Warmth in his thumb. Warmth was a resource.

They took the back streets to avoid the main road. The main road had a queue. The queue had order until it didn’t, and when it didn’t, people died. Passing over wet spots—they weren’t wet; nothing stayed wet now—was a habit left from when water still made puddles. Habits kept you alive. They cut through the old laundromat. Someone smashed the glass and attempted to create a makeshift wall using washers stacked like drums. It blocked nothing and said little.

“Do you remember the smell?” Rowan asked, thinking of clean laundry.

Tess didn’t answer.

They saw three people on the block before the stadium. None of them looked up. Observing others can prompt you to get to know them, and knowing them can lead to informed choices. A man sat with his back to a brick wall, his mask hanging loose with a gasket torn so wide it wasn’t a mask anymore. He looked asleep. His hands rested along his sides. Tess reached out for him. She pulled it back.

They took their places in the queue and pretended they had always belonged there. The line curled around the stadium like a long snake. Someone had spray-painted BREATHE CLEAN across a slab of wall in big letters. The paint dripped like tears. Men guarded the stadium doors in layered coats with plastic shields covering their masks. You could see their eyes. In their eyes was tiredness. Doing a job too big and too foolish to be an actual job.

After an hour, the line moved three steps. After another hour, it moved five. Tess flexed her gloved fingers to keep the blood from getting lazy. She checked her gauge. The half-can had bled more than it should have. Her regulator was old and rough, and every jolt stole something from it.

“Thieves,” Rowan said, glancing at the guards.

“It’s not them,” Tess said. “It’s the cold.”

Rowan nodded. Then he leaned closer, his face to her ear so the shield of her head blocked the wind. “If we can,” he said, “we get two more cans. One for the caddy. One for the pack.”

“We can’t carry more.”

“We can try.”

“If there’s a riot,” Tess said, “drop everything. Grab me. Run.”

“Don’t talk about riots,” he said, like the word itself might invoke one.

“Fine. If the queue becomes… unqueued.”

Rowan almost laughed, a sound like a small foot scuffing across grit. “If the queue becomes unqueued, we go.”

A child walked the line with a carton of something under his arm and a hand-painted sign that read: MASK PATCHES. GOOD. His mask fogged. Tess pressed her gloved fingers into the back of her knee and told herself to stand.

“How much?” Rowan asked.

The boy lifted the carton lid with pride. Inside were strips of rubber, gaskets cut from bicycle inner tubes, little triangular tabs. There were also lies—the sort of lies you call hope. He lifted a patch between two filthy fingers. “Good. Sticks good. Three coins.”

“We don’t have coins,” Rowan said.

The kid looked past him at Tess like maybe her coat would yield a coin if he stared hard enough. “You got anything? Buttons? The men up front are trading buttons. Shiny ones.”

Rowan lifted the hem of his coat to show three small holes where buttons used to be. “We’re poor in every way,” he said.

“Take one,” Tess said, surprising herself. She reached out and pinched a patch from the carton and stuck it in the pocket at her chest. “For luck.”

The kid watched her do it. “Luck costs two coins,” he said, but there was no heat in it. He walked on. Tess watched his back recede into the general grime of the queue. She touched the pocket. “I’ll sew it in,” she said. “If we get thread.”

“We have fishing line,” Rowan said.

“We had fishing line. We have fishhooks and the memory of line.”

“Right.”

It was noon when the queue got information. Holding a megaphone, she climbed onto a pallet near the entrances, and then she announced numbers. You could manipulate people with numbers, having no need to show them. She said how many cans and how many per person. Those possessing coins paid one price; those with trade goods paid another.

Rowan said, “Two per person.” His eyes had a peculiar look in lines like these. Tess had seen it when they were bone-hungry and a trader rolled up with sacks of grain. It wasn’t greed. It was a readiness to seize whatever wasn’t nailed down by rules.

He moved his shoulder to knock his pack higher. The strap squealed. The queue tightened, then surged, then settled again like a large animal deciding whether to run.

Inside, they checked every mask for leaks. If the leak was small, they waved you through and pretended they hadn’t seen it. If the leak was big, they made you go to the patch table and buy a patch. Tess and Rowan got waved through. Inside the stadium, it smelled of too many people.

Someone had covered the field with boards and tarps. The pallets of cans sat like a small city in the middle, stenciled BREATHE CLEAN in neat block letters on each. The letters were straight. That meant a machine had done it. Every so often, a forklift whined, and another pallet turned into the lane, and people murmured like the cans were livestock they loved.

Rowan handed over both empties and the last ring from his grandmother’s chain. The woman behind the table held it to the light. Then mouthed a shape that was not a religious one. She passed them a stamped card.

“Two cans,” she said, as if she were giving something instead of trading something.

“Two,” Tess repeated, tasting the rubber inside her mask.

They moved toward the pallets. Rowan’s shoulders squared. Tess watched his hands. She knew every vein.

That was when the first noise hit.

It wasn’t a gun. Guns got used and then stopped getting used when there was nothing left to fire. It was a barrel lifting and dropping, a hollow metal sound that made everyone’s spines ring. The men with shields turned. One of them lifted his hands as if to calm a storm with his palms. He might as well have.

Somewhere along the edge of the field, a pallet tipped. Cans fell and bounced, making sounds like laughter. People turned toward the sound. The queue didn’t become a riot; it became unqueued. It became a mass.

Rowan put his palm on Tess’s shoulder blade and kept it there, the pressure not a shove but a statement. They moved toward the nearest line of pallets in small, deliberate steps.

“Don’t run,” Rowan said.

A man with his mask askew shoved past, eyes wild. People herd when they panic.

A girl had fallen at the corner of a stack, and her can was rolling. She stretched for it with two fingers, but the rubber hose of her mask pulled her head back. Her breath came in fast rabbit-hisses. The can bumped against a shoe and bounced away. Rowan knelt and palmed the can on the next roll. He stood in one smooth motion and handed it back to the girl without looking at her face. If you looked, you might feel. The girl clutched the can to her belly and vanished into the legs.

“You ok?” someone screamed close by, and then, “Don’t push—”

And then something else. A different peal of sound from deeper in the pallets. It had a fresh, thin, and clean smell. It smelled like the time Tess had cracked a can and pressed her face into the hiss without a mask. Someone had opened a head valve. Not the regulators, not the careful hissing—one of the big boys. You opened those, and oxygen blew in an angry white torrent and then didn’t exist.

“Idiots,” Rowan said.

They got to the pallet. A woman with a shaved head and thick arms stood on top, a wrench in her hand. She whacked the knuckles of grabbers trying to climb up. When she spoke, her words buzzed behind the mask. “One each,” she said. “One each, or the valve opens.”

Things congealed around her order. The mob loves anyone with rules, as long as the rules seem like they could lead to something being put in a hand. Tess stepped forward and held up the stamped card. The woman took it and scrawled with a dirty pencil and shoved two cans down one by one. Rowan reached, took them, and loaded them onto his shoulders. The weight caused his knees to bend and then straighten.

“Next,” the woman said.

“Thank you,” Rowan said, as if “thank you” was a currency that was spent.

They were moving out when the lights went out. The city’s heart was generators, and its heart had stopped beating. The dark that followed wasn’t complete, but it was enough to turn all eyes into floating points. People moved, unsure of where to go. In the half-dark, a slim figure jostled close, and Tess felt a tug at her pocket. Her hand snapped down and caught a wrist.

The wrist was bone wrapped in skin. It stopped and tugged and twisted. She didn’t twist back; she held and let it fight. “Don’t,” she said. The lights struggled and came back in a lower, weaker version of themselves. A kid blinked up at her through a cracked mask. It was the patch boy.

“Don’t,” she said again, not unkindly. He jerked once more and then stopped and let his hand be held. They stood there for a moment. “Take the patch back,” Tess said. She used her other hand and put it in his carton and closed the lid. He nodded once. He didn’t thank her. She let go.

Rowan had seen none of it. He had his palms braced on the straps of the cans and his head down in the posture of oxen. They moved with the small flow of people through the tunnel leading out under the stadium.

The tunnel was a tight throat. Inside, the air felt chewed. The people in it made small sounds. A woman coughed, a wet cough that said her mask had failed. A man groaned the single groan of someone whose foot had found a drop where a floor should be.

Tess’s shoulder brushed rough concrete and then cold steel. They were almost through when there was another sound, closer, sharper, an electric bike. Tess turned her head and saw a hand—just a hand. It reached out and sliced the strap of one of Rowan’s cans with a hook. The can slid. Rowan made a sound unfamiliar to her. The can didn’t fall. Another hand grabbed it and another, and it moved up, forward, away, crowd-surfed like a body at a show that had never happened.

Tess grabbed her own strap to prevent being pulled along with it. The strap cut into her palm. Rowan looked at her, eyes wide.

“Go,” she mouthed. He shook his head.

They moved forward. The crowd narrowed around a column, and the one in front of Tess stumbled. She moved sideways into a sort of alcove in the concrete that had been a storage closet. Rowan followed, as if she’d put a piece on a chessboard. They pressed themselves in and made themselves small and breathed. Outside, the sea of people rushed by.

The world simplified. Two bodies in a concrete box. Two cans between them. One strap cut. One strap whole. Hiss in; hiss out. Rowan’s eyes were fearful.

“You’re cut,” Tess said. She wasn’t talking about the strap. A line of blood had found its way under the seal at Rowan’s cheekbone and run down his neck in a thin red color that looked nasty.

“It’s fine,” he said. “It’s the strap.” He put his thumb to the place, and it came back scarlet.

“The seal,” she said.

They both moved with the speed they had practiced but never wanted to use. Tess pulled a patch from her chest pocket. It was small and useless in an emergency, but it could slow a leak for a minute. She pressed it there, on the skin above the cheekbone, where it wouldn’t hold to skin but might hold to rubber. It didn’t stick; the blood made everything slick. She pressed harder with the heel of her hand.

“Hold it,” she said.

He held it. He always did what she asked. She lifted his strap and slid the can from his shoulder to hers. The weight changed her balance. She could feel the harness cutting into her collarbone through the coat. The old pain that would be there this evening and the next day. If there was an evening and a next day.

“We still have two,” Rowan said. His voice sounded as if it were being filtered through wool.

“Yes.”

“Two is… a number we can live on.”

“For a bit,” Tess said. She didn’t tell him that the bump with the column had cracked a seam in her own regulator. She could feel the air on her jaw. It wasn’t big.

They waited until the crowd thinned and then stepped back into it, like stepping off a bank into shallow water. Outside, the light was doing its metal trick again, stampeding back and forth from bright to bark. The wind was up. The wind always found a way to the places people were.

They didn’t take the low streets back. Through torn banners and stanchions, they crossed the truck parking area. They didn’t talk. Conversation was a luxury for rooms.

A man stood alone at the far edge of the lot. He had his mask on the top of his head like a hat. His mouth moved. He put his hand on his chest in a gesture that had once meant apology. He was dying. Tess looked at him and then looked away. Looking was cruel.

Rowan didn’t look away. He reached up and peeled his patch—her patch—off his cheek and extended it, almost an offering. Tess grabbed his wrist.

“No,” she said.

Rowan’s eyes fixed on the man, as if he were looking at himself ten minutes in the future, assuming nothing changed. But he had a kink in him that could not watch someone choke when he had anything to throw them.

The man under the awning coughed a sound Tess felt in her own ribs. She let go of Rowan’s wrist. He walked to the man and placed the patch in his palm. The man’s eyes cleared the smallest amount and then swam back to mud. He lifted his hand in the gesture people now used for ‘thank you’: palm facing out, fingers together. Rowan returned it and came back to Tess.

“You’re bleeding more,” she said. His cheek had gone from a line to a crescent.

“It’s fine,” he said again, and then, “We need to get inside.”

They did. They moved through the laundromat with the washer wall. Climbing the spinal staircase. The motion of climbing made the breath rate climb, too. Tess could see Rowan fighting to keep the hisses regular. She tapped her gauge with no need to. The needle was telling her everything it had to say.

Inside their room, the empties under the bed looked like a pile of small, sleek animals asleep. Tess set the cans down, closed the door, and slid the bolt. Then she stripped her gloves and pressed the heel of her hand to Rowan’s face. The cut was worse than it had been outside. Outside air didn’t just harm the lungs; it also weakened the quality of the blood. Everything misbehaved in this air.

“Sit,” she said. “Lean back.”

“I’m fine,” he said for the third time, but he sat. She cleaned the cut with what she had, which was a rag with alcohol someone had stolen from a clinic. Silently, she worked. She had always been someone who did her talking with her hands. He watched her in a way that was almost tender, except tenderness had no place to sit here, so it leaned against the wall.

“Hold this,” she said, pressing the rag to his cheek. “Hard.”

His glove went up. He stared at the ceiling. Tess took the can with the cracked regulator into her lap. The crack was a thin, dark mouth that made a tiny, treasonous noise. Using the smallest screwdriver, turned a screw a quarter turn, and listened. She turned again and listened. She dabbed glue, pressed the patch, and then held it counting to sixty.

The radio was a square of cloth and metal in the cupboard. She switched it on. The static rose and then settled into a disrupted voice.

“—stadium compromised—” the voice said, and then a long rush, like something had been dropped on the transmitter and rolled.

Tess shut it off. The news didn’t help. Knowing removed nothing from the body of the day. It added weight.

Rowan dropped his hand. The rag had stuck to the cut. He lifted it; the skin came with it. He hissed involuntarily and then laughed at the sound of his own hiss. Under the mask, his mouth was white. Tess adjusted the mask for him with fingers that wouldn’t stop shaking.

“We’ll be ok,” he said. It was not a lie. It was a wish he had wrapped in a firm voice.

“For a bit,” she said again, the same words they had spoken in the closet. “We have two.”

“We’ll sleep,” he said. “Tomorrow I’ll go to the depot by the tracks. They do refills. I’ll take two empty ones. I’ll come back and we’ll have four again.” He offered the plan like bread.

“Ok,” she said. “Tomorrow.”

Night came. It brought cold. Cold made the oxygen in the cans denser. Cold made the seals brittle. The wind sang from the gutters and the joints of the city like a choir that had forgotten all of its words.

Tess dreamt a small dream because they rationed all dreams. In it, she was underwater and could hold her breath forever. She woke with Rowan’s hand on her shoulder. She sat up fast. His mask had gone mate with frost from his breath. He had his pack on. He had its dawn.

“Tracks,” he said. “Before they wake.”

“I’ll come,” she said.

“I can move faster alone.”

“You can die faster alone,” she said.

He stood two feet away, pack-bent, a blood line leaking onto his mask strap. The thought came to her that she should say something meaningful. She found nothing. She stood and put her head against his chest and listened to the hiss and the thump behind it and let it take both of them.

“I’ll be back,” he said into her hair.

“Ok,” she said, because the body of the day demanded an answer. He went. The door snicked. The bolt slid into place with a small, important sound, like punctuation.

She ate a piece of the biscuit. It turned to dust in her mouth. She turned the radio on and off three times because it was a thing to do. She stood at the window and pulled the foam aside an inch and looked at a street that had given up naming itself. She sat. She counted the cans. She watched the light grow in the cracks around the door. She told herself a story about him walking, about him approaching the depot with his stamped card and his reasonable voice. She walked the room in a line the length of a human. She checked her mask. She checked the crack in her regulator. It held.

After an hour, she checked again. After two, the room tightened its fist around her. She opened the door, walked down the stairs, and stood on the landing with her hand on the rail.

The lights went out twice. Lifting one can, the one with the good strap, she put it on. She lifted the second and then put it back. She took a third thing, small, stupid—a button from the pocket of Rowan’s coat — and put it in her glove.

The city was cleaved by a wind that had come over the flats and through the ruins. She walked in a way that matched the present supply of air—that is, without hurrying. You could hurry if you had to at the last minute. If you did it too soon, you would have no last-minute.

She took the spine of stairs down, the low streets, and then the Railtrack path. Tracks existed because of a lack of energy for stealing them. People had stolen the ties. She walked on packed dirt worn by people going where she was going. She passed three figures sitting, backs to the half-wall, heads down. They could have been friends. She did not keep friends.

The depot was a shed with a broken sign that said “Freight.” In the past, it had probably smelled of creosote and the oil felt on metal. Now it smelled like the inside of an old tank. A man stood near the tanks, with his sleeves rolled up. His forearm had a tattoo of an anchor with the rope cut, a sailor who had lost the concept of harbor. Beside him, two women squatted by a rig the size of a bed. It was a generator someone had hauled from a school and rewired to run on bicycle power. Four kids took turns on the bikes, faces red.

Tess stood at the edge and watched the line. Rowan was not in it. She moved around the shed in a wide circle, keeping her hands visible. Behind the shed, lug nuts, coils, a bed frame, nothing. In the ditch beyond the shed, a bundle. She knew bundles. She knew how people looked when they stopped breathing. She did not move toward it. Her gaze did not go beyond what she had already looked at.

She walked back to the front. The man, with the anchor tattoo, saw her and raised a palm out.

“You refill?” Tess asked.

“Fulls for empties. Power for power.” He jerked his head towards the bikes. “We don’t do charity.”

“I don’t need charity,” Tess said. “I need oxygen.” She held up the stamped card as if it covered both things.

“You and everyone.” He pointed with his chin at the line. At the front, a woman was crying slow, careful tears under her mask, each one a measured waste of water. “Where’s your other?” he asked.

She didn’t say, “He went.” She said, “Coming.”

“Then wait.”

She waited. The wait changed shape with each shift of the line. The kids on the bikes squeaked like mice. A man in line coughed and tried to disguise the sound. Someone at the back of the shed dropped a tool, and everyone jumped.

When it was her turn, the anchorman held out a hand. She gave it. He plugged it into the rig. The hiss got louder. It was the kind of clean that hurt. The woman with the tattoo of a sun on her temple read the pressure gauge. “Slow,” she said. “Slow or it pops.”

Tess nodded.

“Where you from?” the anchorman asked, because people could not help themselves from adding words to a transaction.

“Blocks,” she said.

“Your other’s late.”

“He’ll come,” she said. She had made herself into someone who only spoke in short statements because anything else used air. She glanced at the line; she glanced toward the tracks; she glanced at the ditch. The bundle lay there like a soft punctuation mark.

The can took a charge. Greed chilled her as the needle reached full. You could love a needle.

Then someone shouted. The shout rolled off metal and multiplied. Tess’s skin went electric with the old fear. She turned, and in the turn she saw it: men with shields like at the stadium, but not the same men. These were in a different uniform—a private force with polished plastic that said they belonged to someone who could still afford polish.

“By order of Breathe Clean Holdings,” one of them said through a megaphone, “this operation is closed. Private apparatus. Unauthorized distribution is theft of company property.”

The anchorman lifted his hands. The sun-temple woman stood with her feet apart, like a door that had decided to be a wall.

“Leave it,” the man with the megaphone said. “Step away.”

No one moved. The kids on the bikes kept pedaling, small legs pumping, because you don’t stop when you are in the middle of being useful. One guard moved forward, resting his hand atop a valve, displaying casual entitlement, as if he needed nothing. He turned. The hiss turned to a scream. White frost covered the end of the hose. The sound made Tess’s teeth ache.

“No!” the sun-temple woman shouted, and her voice went raw because the mask made shouting a thing a throat hated. She swung the wrench. The guard ducked. Another guard lifted a baton and brought it down on the rig with the dull sound that batons make when striking something important.

The can in Tess’s hand jerked with the sudden change of pressure. She gave up the idea of fairness and yanked the line out of the rig. The needle on her gauge bumped and then slid and then steadied a little below the mark she wanted.

“Go,” the anchorman said to her without looking, his eyes on the guards. “Go now. Take that one and go.”

“What about—”

“Go,” he said again. He stepped forward into the growing melee. Tess moved.

She ran. She had not planned to run. Running could break your mask. Running broke the small economy of breath. But there are moments when you put your body into the red because staying in the black will kill you. She ran along the tracks without looking at the ditch. She ran under the old signal tower and past the small market of weavers making rope from the guts of dead plastic. She ran with the can, banging her hip and the needle on the gauge bouncing.

She reached their building and took the stairs two at a time because her body had forgotten how to be smart. She unlocked the entry, then cried, relieved to be within the tiny room. On the floor, she set the can down like a baby and looked at the door and waited for the click of the bolt from the outside.

It didn’t come. It didn’t come for a long time. It didn’t come after a long, long time; it passed into something even longer. She turned the radio on. The static made the room feel like it was full of bees. She turned it off. She went to the window and slid the foam a finger’s width, watching a street that did not change shape.

At dusk, she went to the stairs, sat on the top step, and made her hands still in her lap by putting one on top of the other and pressing. She did not count. She had run out of numbers.

At twilight, noise stemmed from the base of the staircase. Not the thump of a foot. A drag. She stood. She lifted the latch. The door pushed. It stopped at the chain.

“Tess,” Rowan said. The chain sang as she slid it back. He fell into the room. He positioned himself on the floor, his feet inside, lying there weakly. She knelt. She turned his head. She pressed her fingers to the patch on his cheek. It hung from one corner. His skin under the rubber was raw.

“Mask,” she said.

He lifted his hand toward it and did not complete the gesture. She did it for him. She matched rubber to skin, pushing, smoothing, and pressing. With her hands, she cupped his head, breathing life into it. He gulped once, then once again, attempting another, but he coughed instead. She kept her hands there because you can hold very little in this world, and something’s only for a minute.

“Depot,” he said when he could.

“I know,” she said. “I was there.”

“Guards,” he said. “Company.” He laughed a small laugh that contained no humor. “They turned the valve like they were washing their hands.”

“They didn’t take the rig,” she said.

“No. People give nothing up now.” He made a face that was a smile if you loosened your definition.

“You’re leaking,” she said.

“Everywhere,” he said, which was a kind of joke about blood and about a life, and he deserved credit for it, but got none.

She got him up onto the mattress. She took the half-filled can and hooked it to his valve, imagining she could watch the oxygen travel into him like clean water into dirty. He lay with his hair in his eyes, hair that had not been washed properly in months.

“I brought one,” she said, and held up the filled can like a trophy.

“You always were better at the bad things,” he said.

There are moments you will recognize as the ones you have been pivoting toward without knowing it. Tess recognized one then. She knew the shape of it in her bones, the way animals know weather in their bones. She kept her voice from trembling by putting it in a box far back in her head.

“We have three,” she said. “Two good. One that will be ok if it stays warm.”

“Ok,” he said.

“We’ll ration,” she said.

“Ok,” he said.

“We’ll sleep,” she said.

“Ok.”

They did. Or they did the closest thing to it left.

In the morning, Tess woke to a sound she had not heard in their room: a soft periodic beep. For a half-breath, she thought of old machines that cared if your heart went too fast. Then she realized it came from the regulator of the can—the was half can. She turned it off. The room grew quieter in a way that made all other sounds seem louder.

Rowan was awake. His eyes had a feverish glow again. He looked at her face like it was the last thing he needed to memorize.

“Tell me something boring,” he said.

She thought. “The washers in the laundromat were stacked three high. The bottom row is rusted through at the door. The middle ones are not so bad.”

“That is boring,” he said. He closed his eyes as if it had done him good. “Again.”

“The anchor man has a tattoo that used to mean something. The sun-temple woman can swing a wrench better than I can. The kids on the bikes will be the ones who build the next thing or break it.”

“Better,” he said. “Not boring.”

“Ok,” she said. She put her hand on the hard bone of his wrist and felt the pulse, skipping again.

“Tell me something pretty,” he said.

She took too long to answer. “When you laugh for real,” she said finally, “you don’t make a sound. You turn red and shake, squeezing your eyes shut. You look like you’re trying to swallow the laugh so you can keep it. Like it’s yours. Like it’s food.”

“That’s gross,” he said.

“It’s pretty,” she said.

He lifted the hand not under hers and fumbled under his jacket. He pulled out something small and held it to her. She took it. It was the button from his pocket. He had sewn it to a square of cloth with crooked, earnest stitches.

“You carry it,” he said. “For luck.”

“I don’t believe in luck,” she said.

“Me neither,” he said. “But carry it.”

“Ok,” she said. She put it in the glove. She had no place to keep things except on her body.

He breathed. The hiss marked time. Outside, someone shouted three stories down. The wind worked the gutter into its song. The lights flickered. The radio said nothing.

“We should go,” he said. He lifted his head. It took more effort than it should have.

“Where?”

“The depot,” he said. “The stadium. The anchor man. The woman with the wrench. It’s stupid. But we should go where people are. In case there is anything.”

“In case there is anything,” she repeated.

She stood, lifted the two cans. She strapped the good one to Rowan, though his hands felt clumsy at it and could not find the buckle. Strapped the other on herself. She put the button in her glove. They stood at the door and listened to the other doors. They went down the stairs, descending with their heads tilted to the side.

The street was the street. The people were fewer. That meant something had happened elsewhere, and here they had lost. They walked. They did not speak. In front of the laundromat, a man had arranged a small pyramid of empty cans and was holding a sign. The sign said PRAY. He had drawn a picture of a can with a halo around it. Someone had tried to set the sign on fire. It had not taken.

At the stadium, the queue was gone. The pallet was gone. The woman with the shaved head was sitting on her heels, her wrench resting across her knees. She was looking at nothing. People sat and looked at nothing.

Rowan touched Tess’s elbow. “Depot,” he said, and there was a shred of hope in the word that was indecent. She nodded and turned them both toward the tracks. At the depot, the rig was still there. Someone had pushed it over, and the hose had frozen itself into a hard, useless curl. The kids’ bikes lay on their sides. The anchorman was there, too, lying with his arm under him as if offering his tattoo to the ground. The sun-temple woman sat with her back to the rig. The crack damaged her mask across one cheek. Her eyes were open and dry.

Tess stood and looked, and then did the only thing that sounded like something: she lifted the can in her hand and shook it, in the old, stupid hope that shaking a thing would change it. The needle stayed where it was. Rowan leaned one palm on the rig. He looked smaller. He had never looked small before.

“Hey,” a voice said behind them, and they turned. The patch boy stood in the doorway of the shed, carton under his arm. He lifted his chin at them. “We got some smalls,” he said. He went inside, set the carton on a table, and opened it. Inside, six tiny cans. Breath toys. Party favors. The kind they used to sell to tourists who wanted to pretend the mountain air was special. Tess picked up one and felt its weight. It might give a minute.

“Where did you—” Rowan began.

“Found them,” the boy said. His shield had three new cracks. “In the office. Guess they had a sense of humor.”

“How much?” Tess asked out of habit.

“Trade,” the boy said. “Buttons, thread, stories. I’m not picky.”

Tess pulled the button from her glove and set it on the table. She took two of the tiny cans. She wanted to take all six. She didn’t. Each hand holding one ridiculous can.

They walked back slowly. The day had used the half can. The wind had gone somewhere else to work. In their room, Tess sat and placed a tiny can. Rowan lay on the mattress with his hands on his chest and his eyes fixed on the ceiling.

“Here,” she said, lifted his mask and pressed the tiny can’s nozzle. It hissed a thin strip of cold clean mountain air into his mouth. He closed his eyes and took it like medicine. She took her turn and let the same cold ribbon into herself. It was nothing. It was everything. They did it again, sharing a minute back and forth like children sharing a lick of ice cream on a summer day that would never come again.

When the cans were empty, Tess rested them next to the empties under the bed. They were silly beside the big ones, like toys placed among tools. She lay beside Rowan and took his hand.

“What now?” he whispered.

“Now, we breathe,” she said.

“For a bit,” he said.

“For a bit.” She turned her face against his shoulder and listened to the hiss the way she had listened to rain once. Outside, the wind found the gutter and made its song. It sounded, for a moment, like leaves. She let herself think of leaves. Then she stopped thinking and did the thing she could: drew air across a cracked regulator and breathed.

Note ▼

AI tools, including Grammarly and ProWritingAid, were utilized to assist with grammar and spelling checking in the text.

ChatGPT was used to help brainstorm this story.

Prompt: What if the environmental impact of humans on the planet causes complete deterioration of the natural world.
Word count: 7350