A Small Gray Dot

Parents tried teaching their kids themselves but most weren’t prepared for it, and resources to help them with homeschooling were non-existent. The ones who could afford it hired tutors. At first, I tried to get a job tutoring but with teachers out of work all over – including college professors because the state universities also shut down – no one who could afford a tutor for their children wanted a third-year middle-school English teacher.

I tried to hire on at one of the facilities where the government sent the bulk of the children who’d lost their parents, but they weren’t interested in hiring a third-year teacher, either, so I began tutoring kids for folk who couldn’t afford to pay.

By April, I had to find ways to bring in income because even though things were sliding through the putrid intestinal tract of the universe, eating was still necessary and my finances started going in the ditch as my money began to run out. I couldn’t depend on anything from the sale of my book; sales ceased almost immediately after the Event. No sales, no royalties. Besides, by January the little company that published it became a casualty of the rapidly downturning economy and the book quickly went out of print. So, with reluctance, I gave up the gratis tutoring and returned to digging graves.

I did that until the end of June – around the first anniversary of the Event – then, when I couldn’t abide doing it any longer, I took a job that consisted of helping clear the rubble of abandoned building that were being demolished. Sometimes we found previously missed human remains. These we took to a crematorium. Fortunately, as time went on, this happened less often.

When there was no demolition rubble to be cleared, I swept streets and removed fallen branches from roadways and sidewalks after storms. I figured I could stand it until the schools finally reopened even though the work was uneven and the pay wasn’t good. It was a job.

I took up writing again which I did in my down time. My laptop still worked and even though I couldn’t afford a landline or the DSL internet connection, I didn’t need those to write.

Yes, I knew my being able to publish again carried only a miniscule probability, especially since my publishing company no longer existed. Still, I finished the sequel to my adventure novel even though I didn’t expect it to go anywhere, because I found it was something that helped me maintain a little equilibrium and kept me from going completely insane.

I finished the novel and continued to write. Usually I wrote little vignettes that involved the characters from my novels. Perhaps I would use them to begin another sequel. It was a thought. I also kept a journal in which I recorded my experiences since the Event. Writing about some things was painful, but it helped me cope.

I worked at the clean-up/street-sweeping job for months, picking up other odd jobs, such as washing dishes in a greasy spoon, to supplement the low wages. I ran up on a couple of ex-coworkers from school who’d survived the Event and were in the same predicament. We’d sometimes get together for a drink after work, to commiserate. Like me, they were working at what they could and waiting for the schools to reopen.

By then, smart people from several different countries had held a conference and released the estimate that approximately five billion worldwide – about half the world population – died. That was shocking but it explained why whole neighborhoods were empty. According to several accounts, the populations of some cities and towns were gone in their entirety. I suppose we were fortunate that enough people survived to more or less carry on.

I don’t know how accurate that was, but that was only on the day it happened. More people died in other ways that first year. Tens of thousands succumbed in one way or another before the National Guard controlled the riots and rampages, and the sickos who decided that the best way to handle the situation was to kill as many as they could. Like the ones who opened fire in Miami, killing my cousin along with a lot of others. And, the suicide rate was high. I could understand the suicides.

Once the governments of the world began to reorganize, for a while, a lot of finger pointing and blame went on until everyone gave it up for lack of evidence and because of the fact that no country was in great shape – or in any position to rule the world. Until that happened, I suppose those of us left were lucky there was one particular technology that no longer worked: ballistic missiles. Like airplanes, those were defunct. No one said it but everyone knew that if it hadn’t been for that there would have been a lot of those flying around after the Event. Or maybe not. Maybe I’d watched too many doomsday movies. Of course, the Event was a doomsday all by itself.