Snacks and The City

Somehow, I knew that whatever was behind this door belonged to me. I pressed my nose into the corner below the knob and waited for it to open. 

The moment I felt the door twitch against my nose, I shoved it open and burst inside. “I’m here!” I awooed.

“Quiet!” Mom shushed. “I’m not sure if they’ve actually cleared you with the building management yet.”

I looked around a room as big as a City apartment and as quiet as Fisherman’s Wharf. “Where is everybody?” I asked. 

“They’re still home.” Mom dropped her bag in the middle of the floor the way she does when no one’s looking. “It’s just my turn to water the plants.” 

“You water plants for a living?” 

“Of course not. I think of watering the plants more like an act of faith. If I don’t let the past wither up and die, maybe we’ll be able to come back to normal someday.” 

She led me up a flight of stairs into a bathroom. Not the kind of bathroom where you can say hello to your neighbor in the next stall by ducking under the fence, but the kind of bathroom with one potty, one sink, a shower, and the kind of soap that doesn’t come from a spout. 

“Not in there!” I spread all four of my legs wide and stuck my butt to the ground. “Dogs get baths in bathrooms like that!” 

“No baths, I promise. I just can’t have you wandering around without me.”

I sat on Mom’s soaked running clothes and watched a blurred version of her through the shower window as the bathroom filled with steam. There was definitely something strange about my new office. Why did they have a bath room rather than a potty? Why was there a dining table, a fireplace, and an oven? And where was everybody?

When Mom opened the bathroom door, I escaped faster than the steam. Mom followed me back downstairs and banged through cupboards until she found all the supplies for poop juice. While the machine sputtered and choked, Mom opened the fridge. Her face scrunched and her tongue fell out.

“Ugh! Nobody thought to check the milk?” she practically barfed.

“Who’s in charge of milk-checking around here?” I asked. “Just say the word and I’ll get him fired.” 

“It’s no one’s job. This is a startup. Everyone pitches in where they can.”

“Is star-dup another word for an apartment?” I asked. “Because that’s what this place looks like.” 

“It is an apartment. That’s where startups are supposed to be born.” She took her mug of poop juice to one of the empty desks. “It’s a shame we’ll never get to work here and have that ‘three guys in a garage’ experience.”

“What do you mean we’ll never get to work here?” The disappointment was too much to bear. “I don’t get to be an office manager again?” 

“Not anytime soon, Spud.” Mom looked sad for me but not herself. “The company’s outgrown this office while we were all at home. There wouldn’t be enough room, even if they were letting offices open again.”

“What about when they start the City over from scratch? Will there be a place for us then?” 

“It’s starting to feel like offices are a thing of the past.” She didn’t even bother to hide her relief. “Every time the date to lift the restrictions gets close, they push it back again. The safety recommendations are such a pain that no one really wants to bother anyway.” 

I flopped on the ground with a huff. “But you said the sit-stay order was almost over.” 

“They’re saying it’s okay to leave our houses, but we’re not allowed to actually do anything yet. We can’t see friends, we can’t go to restaurants, and we definitely can’t gather in big groups like offices.” I’d never seen Mom so gleeful at work. “Even if we could, they would make us build plexiglass forts around each desk so we would still be alone, except in less comfortable pants.” 

“But why, though? We’ve been so good,” I pleaded.

“I know, Spud.” She opened the laptop. “Summer’s almost here. They can’t possibly keep people penned up much longer.” She turned her attention to the screen and didn’t speak again for the rest of the day.

As the days and nights passed, I worried how so much time in the Witch’s captivity was affecting Mom. I don’t know what you call it when someone stays home all day, watches Netflix instead of cleaning up, goes to bed at an irresponsible time, and goes to work in the same sweatpants she slept in. Usually Mom teaches me words for what’s wrong with people, but she can’t teach something she doesn’t notice herself. Without Mom’s lessons, I couldn’t tell if she was letting herself get stinky and staying in bed past sunrise because she was a good girl who followed rules, or if she just didn’t care about pushing against the boogeyvirus anymore. 

I was going a little stir crazy myself. All the love I had to give was wasted on Mom in the state she was in. I missed meeting new Friends and spreading joy with little more than a smile and a wiggle.

It had been so long since this was America that wilder-ness was taking over the abandoned places that civilization left behind. It wasn’t just the poison oak covering the trails. The news reported on coyotes crossing the Golden Gate Bridge like wily tourists and people in Ellay seeing the sky for the first time in generations. When Mom and I did see other people on our runs, they turned their eyes away and pretended we weren’t there, even outside the City where strangers didn’t used to wear invisibility cloaks.

One weekend morning, the car stopped in the usual place at the bottom of the Haunted Highway. When I climbed into the copilot’s seat for Mom to fasten the leash, there was a crowd outside the front window. A couple of dogs and a couple of people were standing in a very un-ghost-like way, blocking the spot next to the gate where the Haunted Highway began.

“Hey!” I shouted through the window. “Don’t you know you’re not allowed out of your stuck house?”

Mom shushed me and waved a friendly hello. 

“That family could be dangerous,” I warned. “They must have passed a hunerd GO AWAY signs on their way here.” By this time, the GO AWAY signs had multiplied so many times that they lined the whole drive from the City to My Hometown, even in the places where there was nowhere to park or walk. “If they can’t follow instructions, there’s no telling what they might do next.”

“They probably live here too,” Mom said. “Be nice, they could be our neighbors.” 

She opened the last barrier separating our air from theirs. “Hi. Good morning. It’s good to see you,” she said, hitting the button on the key that told the car we’d be back soon. 

“She lives so far away that she had to drive here!” the car beeped, tattling on Mom’s misdeed in case they hadn’t noticed yet.

“The lady is leaning on the sign that tells her to go home.” I looked at Mom in disbelief. “Are you really gonna let her get away with that?” 

Mom silently closed her nose and mouth behind a smile as the dogs and their people stepped out of our way. “I hate those signs,” she said when it was safe to open the vents and breathe. “For my part, I’m happy to see people again. There’s plenty of room out here for everyone. We’ll just keep our distance, the same as we always do.”

I looked carefully at the person on the other end of the leash. She smelled like Mom and had the same pah-dumping hitch to her stride as always. Only the smile and smooth forehead gave her away as an imposter. “You mean that it’s okay to make Friends again?” I asked in disbelief.

“I sure hope so,” the impostor said through Mom’s mouth. “It’s hard to tell a minor inconvenience from the end of the world when all you have to compare it to are the thoughts in your head. Especially when the only people who talk to you are the ones on TV telling you that everything’s bad, other people will kill you, and you’re filthy disease-ridden scum.”

“I don’t recall anyone trying to kill us.”

“Okay, maybe not literally. But how can we find common ground when even looking at someone’s face feels like a fight if only one of you is wearing a mask? I’m looking forward to meeting new people again, and learning from the ones who think differently from me.”

Everything went back to normal as we ran through the peeling eucalyptuses with their bark like toilet paper after a cat tantrum. At the balcony overlooking My Hometown, I discovered a bike lying in the poison oak beside the trail.

“Oh no! Do you think it’s hurt?” I ran as wide as the brush allowed in case the bike had the boogeyvirus. 

“Maybe someone needed to use the bathroom,” Mom said, purposely keeping her eyes out of the bushes. 

Around the next bend, a man stood beside the trail waving the biggest knife you’ve ever seen.

“Zoinks!” I jumped. 

I peeked around Mom’s legs and watched him grab a handful of branches. He hacked savagely at them, grunting and slashing until they came away in his hand. He held the severed branches up in triumph for a brief moment before throwing them on the ground with the dismembered boughs of his other victims.

I relaxed. He was just making himself a salad.

He noticed us behind him. “It was getting too overgrown,” he explained as he swung his knife-arm in another wide arc. He held up a pawful of severed leaves to show what he meant.

“Thank you,” Mom said meaningfully. 

“Should we report him for murdering the mountain?” I thought-whispered. 

“Certainly not! Without people like him, you and I wouldn’t have anywhere to run,” Mom said, like getting away with murder was a decent and admirable thing to do. “We’ve all been so afraid of each other that we’ve forgotten how most people just want to help.” 

“Talking to screens makes people forget that?”

“You can’t sit in companionable silence through a screen. The easiest way to get people talking on the internet is to disagree with them. Or agree with them about how awful the people you disagree with are. So everyone has just been sitting at home looking for things to disagree about. Pretty soon it starts to feel like everyone’s out to get you and you’re paying the bill for everyone else’s needs. In regular life, mutual needs usually lead to opportunity. That guy wanted his trail clear, so we get a clear trail as well. Isn’t that nice?”

Now I was really concerned. “Are you okay, Mom? It sounds like you’re saying that other people make life better, not worse.” 

“Remind me I said that in a few months when we’re stuck in a traffic jam and I have murder in my heart.”

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