Scareship_Issue8

“Another Manhattan” copyright © 2012 by JBMulligan
T
ommy’s awakened to an empty room for years, gotten up
and gone out into the empty kitchen to black coffee and
buttered toast, marmalade-frosted, but this morning there is
no Times outside the door. The first sign of what has happened, but
he doesn’t understand it, eyes mucus-clotted and sleep-glazed,
mind a stunned and slow-moving bear lurching from the cave of
sleep.
The alley outside his kitchen window presents the customary
drab rectangle of red brick and windows curtained and shaded
against neighbors and light. Bobo the cat is gone from the third
floor window (what the cat’s name is, Tommy doesn’t know, but
he thinks of it as Bobo. And the cat has never complained. But it’s
not there, it’s deserted its post). “Traitorous feline, what if the
aliens attack?” A minor change in a minor morning, and what good
would a cat possibly do against aliens? “I could throw it at them, I
suppose.” (Bobo would probably win, looks mean and hungry like
Miss Getz at work, Halliday’s admin, a vampire bitch with teeth as
yellow and sharpened as a pencil. A fight between Bobo and the
Bitch Queen? Now that he’d like the concessions for: “Soda, hot
dogs, hand grenades, blood.”)
It’s when he goes outside that life gets strange. Most
mornings, the elevator is empty, and still too close (Tommy has a
thing about closed-in spaces). But today the street is deserted:
parked cars and trees and house fronts as always, but the people
are gone. And the cars should be rolling down Third Avenue, the
buses and cabs maneuvering for position. But there’s nothing.
There are no sounds of cars. Of people. And there had been no
sounds upstairs, he remembers now. None whatsoever.
A little later, he hears a common sound that today is creepy as
hell—a bird, audible, in a tree nearby, he can’t see the damned
thing and it scares him. You hardly ever hear birds, except in the
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