When Anita found him, her immediate reaction was to put him in the foyer next to the stairwell so he could be decorative. Not everyone would have one, and the way his arms stuck out just so would make him a suitable hat rack. She realized, almost too late, that this might have been in bad taste. But what, she thought, was a woman supposed to do when her husband went and turned into a glass statue overnight?
She had heard of this happening, of course, but had never seriously considered it happening to her. It was something other people went through; one day they were perfectly normal and then the next, someone found them frozen. Clear. She certainly hadn’t expected it to happen to him; now she was a widow. That made her feel old at thirty-seven and she was sure she didn’t like it.
After a week she quietly filed a mortician’s report and sat down to a cup of hot tea. She hadn’t broken it to his family yet, though his sister had been calling. She told her he was away on business. The Quentins could wait another day to hear that their little boy wasn’t okay. This thought set Anita to the task of finding a place for him.
At first she kept him in front of the fireplace, where he kept her company with her tea, but soon she began to find that sitting with the countenance of her dead husband reminded her of her widowhood. She moved him to the garden and used him to scare the crows away from her tomatoes. He did little to dissuade the crows, however, and soon became their favorite perch. Finally, she hauled him to the attic. She kept the rest of her glass figurines there, and didn’t see why he should be treated any differently.
It all seemed somehow normal at the time. Everywhere you looked someone was at it. As the glass bodies began to multiply, she called her husband’s mother and told her, tearfully, that he had passed away. His mother burst into hysterics and told her that so had one of the grandchildren.
Anita was uncomfortable. Then she hung up.
When the man who cut her lawn succumbed as well, she began to worry. Now it was affecting her everyday life, which was something her husband and niece had not generally been part of. Her husband worked constantly and usually slept when he was home. Her niece, whose name she couldn’t even remember, lived in Florida.
She put entirely too much sugar in her tea and shivered as she drank it. She did miss her husband. Sometimes. And now she would have to trim her own lawn.
She thought something might have been off when she found her neighbor, frozen solid while pulling weeds in his yard. The next day, while shopping for groceries the bag boy, with a crackle, transformed, still clutching her biscotti. She tenderly wrenched it from his grip, glanced around halfheartedly, and didn’t pay.
She found the news reports began to get very tiresome. First they called it a strange, isolated event. Then it was an epidemic, then a pandemic, and then it was Susan Shepherd reporting to you live from New York City and…crackle.
Ting.
Suddenly, she wasn’t reporting. Suddenly, she wasn’t even alive.
There was panic after that, and lootings and riots, or so Anita saw on the news. She kept to herself those days. Her sister hadn’t called in weeks. She half expected her to be found, sitting at her kitchen table, never to move again. A week later, the police confirmed her suspicions: her sister was found not at the phone but in bed. Three relatives now dead, Anita was horrified to find that she had run out of tea bags.
It had been months since Anita found her husband, and her lawn was long. The four houses around hers couldn’t claim a single opaque resident. She’d taken to staying in the study for days on end, sitting by the fire with her tea while her husband sat in the attic, staring at a wall. He wasn’t needed in the yard anymore, not since the neighbor had frozen there. Anita came to miss him in the study, but he tended to alienate visitors, which she found she was having less and less of these days.
At first, she’d gotten dozens of calls for funerals of her husband’s mother, friends, old boyfriends, but soon even the funerals died off. There were too many to hold.
The television only worked sporadically, and when it did it showed news. It told her to lock her doors and windows. It told her there were people who thought this would pass. People who were trying to take things from those who had turned, so they would be wealthy when they and the rest of humanity came out the other end. It used the word anarchy a lot.
The futility of this did not escape Anita, but when the looters came, as the news assured her they would, she thought the best way to be rid of them would be to set out a plate of lemonade for them and to point them in the direction of the attic. There, she kept an odd assortment of expensive-looking things that had once been her grandmother’s. That, she thought, would keep them happy while she kept to the study with her husband, for she hadn’t had use for the china in years, anyway. Her hospitality was not such that she was not annoyed when they woke her up in the middle of the night. She took to surprising her assailants not by threatening or chasing them but wiping sleep out of her eyes.
“Hello,” she’d say. “Attic’s that way.” She waited a few moments for effect, usually, and then continued: “I’m going to have some tea.” She walked away, slowly, and they invariably stood there dumbstruck before setting off for the attic.
One night, Anita sleepily sipped Earl Gray when a thief trudged down the stairs with a sack over his shoulder started to pass her. He stopped mid-step and eyed her carefully.
“All those people up there…”
“The glass ones?”
Pause. Sip.
“Yeah, the glass ones,”
“What about them?”
Sip.
“Why did you-“
“Think of it as a sort of a tomb.”
He decided he’d stay.
His name was Roland, and Anita mistrusted him at first but soon found it was a great relief just having him around. She was running low on food and it really was lovely to have someone to break into a grocery store with. The lonely streets seemed much less so with a companion. He tended the garden, collected rain water for bathing, and even sat with her by the fireplace, sharing a seemingly endless stockpile of tea with her,
After about a month of living with her, Roland began to worry. “We’re going to run out of food, you know,” he said. “Even just between the two of us, there’s only so long that store will hold out.”
Anita shrugged and stared into her tea. Even she had to admit the stockpile of canned goods they made in the grocery had begun to dwindle. Her eyes settled on the fire and it was a moment before she answered. “So what do you suppose we should do?”
Roland shrugged. “I don’t know. Leave?”
Anita didn’t answer.
After two weeks, they had eaten nearly all of the food they had brought back from their last trip to the store and agreed, Anita a little grudgingly, that they would keep walking after this next trip to the grocery and see where it led them. There was nothing for them here, Roland reasoned, and besides, maybe they’d find other people.
Their lives became a long journey from food source to impermanent dwelling, sleeping when they could and traveling as they pleased. They took what they needed, carried what they could, and moved on. Roland led them, taking to this life with ease. As they walked, he shouted things back to her like “Lovely, isn’t it?” and she never answered. He found her silence unnerving.
Eventually, after weeks of traveling, they came upon a set of high cliffs, with a sheer drop to the sea. Anita had liberated a bottle of wine from the last supermarket they slept in, and the two of them sat with it and watched the sun rise.
“I’ve been thinking, Anita,” Roland said gently, “that the world ended.”
“No,” was her answer. It was the first time she had spoken in months.
“Yes, it did,” he said, “and it forgot to take us with it.” With that thought, he stood up and began the long hike back down the cliffs. Anita looked back after him for a long time.
She shattered as she hit bottom.
