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smackenzieMarya paused in her domestic thinking to mentally smack herself upside the head for turning into June Cleaver. At least she wasn't vacuuming and mopping and dusting in a crinoline and high heels and pearls.
She was instead vacuuming in jeans and a t-shirt with a sunglasses-wearing shark on it, and pink-and-white striped socks. It worked for her. She didn't even own a crinoline, anyway.
She found a plastic bucket and the mop, spent ten minutes failing to find the Pine Sol, and was about to give up when she discovered it in the bathroom under the sink. She couldn't remember putting it there, but she had it now, it didn't matter where it was. She poured some into the bucket, filled the bucket in the bathtub, dragged it into the kitchen, and mopped the floor. She was very careful not to mop herself into a corner, because if she was going to pre-emptively get annoyed at Oscar for tracking wet pawprints all over the floor, she should pay attention to make sure she didn't do the same thing. Oscar at least couldn't help it.
When she was done in the kitchen she took the bucket and mop into the bathroom to do the floor in there too. She couldn't shake out the bathmat in the back yard, because of the rain, so instead she shook it out into the tub and then rolled it up and took it into the front hall. The house had a front porch so she might be able to shake the bathmat out the front door to air it out a little.
She dumped the bucket into the bathtub when she was done, rinsed the mop, wrung it out, and left it leaning against the tiled wall. And then she washed her hands, because they smelled like Pine Sol and dirty water. Yuck.
Oscar had snoozed through Marya's mopping and continued to do so through her efforts to dust the den, the living room, the dining room, and her bedroom. She hated dusting her bedroom. Actually she wasn't fond of dusting any room. She had a Swiffer duster, a handheld thing, and it did a pretty decent job on flat surfaces and the spines of books on the bookshelves, but she was never sure it was really dusting around the knicknacks and random crap decorating the house. But she didn't want to get a feather duster or worse yet, move everything, dust it, dust its resting spot, and put it back. That was really too much work for her.
So she Swiffed and listened to the TV with half an ear and to the rain with the other half, and wished she'd had enough money to hire a cleaning lady or someone to do this for her. Her grandma had a thing about letting strangers clean her house, and so had always done it herself. Marya's grandma was a clean freak and firmly believed that an untidy house meant an untidy mind, and someone who didn't care to keep their house clean wasn't going to care about keeping anything else clean either. She'd never visited Marya in her dorm or anywhere she lived after college and before moving into the house, because Marya was younger and lazier and had better things to do besides put her laundry away.
But maybe she was channeling her grandma now, and had been doing so for a couple of years, because when she had some energy to burn or was otherwise feeling restless and twitchy, but didn't want to or couldn't go out, she defaulted to "clean the house". She'd told her grandma that once and her grandma had been
Marya finished dusting by attempting to brush Oscar with the Swiffer duster, which woke him out of his snooze and made him twitch and roll over. He snorted, sounding annoyed, and gave Marya a look that seemed to say "What the hell was that for?"
"I'm done dusting," she told him. "And mopping. You need to go out? I wanna take a walk around the neighborhood. Yes, I know it's raining, I'm willing to suffer." Oscar just blinked at her as if he was still trying to wake up. She'd have to get his leash and show it to him and possibly tease him towards the front door with a piece of cheese in order for him to understand that it was time for a walk around the block.
She pulled on her raincoat and boots - the raincoat was an old-fashioned yellow slicker like firemen used to wear, and her boots were green and had frog faces on the toes - and fetched Oscar's leash. She was only going around the neighborhood, she didn't think she'd need the harness. He jumped up when she clipped the leash to his collar and headed for the door. She'd have to give him some cheese for being obedient when they got back.
It didn't seem to be raining as hard as it had been earlier, but it was still coming down. There were little rivers in the dip where the road met the sidewalk, and the storm drain by the corner gurgled with runoff. Marya's raincoat and boots always made her feel about eight years old, and Oscar had always liked the rain - at least as long as there wasn't any thunder - and even though the neighborhood still felt empty and abandoned, it was raining, and people didn't go out in the rain anyway.
She was tempted to knock on people's doors to see if anyone was home, and then as she got to the corner she caught sight of a car pulling out of a driveway. Holy shit, she thought, people.
"People, Oscar, look," she said. Oscar had apparently not seen it and seemed surprised when Marya took off towards the apparently-inhabited house. The car went on down the street away from her and she resisted the urge to run after it. With the way things were going, that would probably just scare the driver and they'd speed up.
But walking up to a stranger's front door and knocking, that wasn't threatening at all. Oh no, of course not.
Oscar trotted right up the front walk with Marya and stood patiently while she rang the bell and knocked. Under any other circumstances she would have thought this kind of behavior was stalkery and weird, but what else were you going to do when you thought you were the only person left alive for blocks and blocks and blocks?
"I live down the street," she called through the door - or tried to call through the door, anyway - "I didn't think there was anyone left around here. My name's Marya, I'm harmless, I promise."
The door opened a crack, then opened wider, and a woman with shoulder-length, messy blonde hair stuck her head out. She looked about forty, give or take five years. She also looked scared, and relieved.
"Oh thank god," Marya said. "I saw the car and I was just hoping someone was still home. I live around the corner and a couple blocks down." She pointed back the way she'd come. "I'm Marya, this is Oscar." Oscar barked and tensed to jump. Marya pulled him back just in time. She didn't want to freak this woman out so soon after finding her. Maybe she should've put him in the harness anyway - he was easier to control and yanking on the leash didn't hurt him.
"Annette," the woman said. "Annette Murphy. My husband Phil just left to go to the store. I should have gone with him, but he wanted me to stay here in case someone called us. I don't know what's going on. Do you know what's going on? Channel Four says it's a plague or the bird flu, but if it was the bird flu there would be bodies, right? You're not contagious, are you?"
"Uh... no, I'm not contagious. It's not the bird flu. It was too fast for that. And there aren't any dead people. Like you said, no bodies. Do you get the cable access channel? There was a guy on before who was talking about what might have happened."
"My husband's brother in Vermont is ok. My boss was on vacation - I'm a paralegal - I can't get a hold of anyone from the office. We were too afraid to drive around yesterday, but everything is much calmer today, so Phil went out. We need to stock up. Do you have everything you need? Water? Canned goods?"
"Yeah, I went yesterday. Annette... is your phone working? Do you have, like, cell phone reception?"
"Oh, I don't have a cell phone. Phil doesn't either. Our phone was working fine this morning, I called my cousin Andrew in Baltimore and talked to my sister. She lives in Virginia, but when everything started happening she drove to Andrew's. She thought she'd be safer with him. Andrew's a cop." Annette said this as if cops could offer some kind of special protection when everything else had failed, and it was a given that you'd be safer with them than in your own house. "Julie's ex-husband worked for the State Department. I do not care what happened to him, let me tell you."
"I just ask 'cause my phone went down. My cell works, though. But I can't get online."
"We can't either. Phil thought it might be something with the DSL. We have cable, but last I checked, only three stations were coming in."
"Try cable access. Community TV, whatever it is. Channel eleven." She wondered if she should float the ley line theory to Annette. But she didn't really understand it herself, so how could she tell someone else about it? And anyway Annette had apparently given serious thought to the disappearances being linked to the bird flu.
But maybe she'd also seen a wandering cat that didn't really look like a cat.
"Have you seen, like, strays?" Marya asked. Oscar sat his butt down on the doormat, having evidently realized that he wasn't going to be let inside and wasn't going to get to jump on this new strange person.
"What do you mean?"
"There was a, I dunno, an animal in my back yard this morning. It looked kind of like a cat but not really, and it just sat there and looked at the house. I don't think it had a collar or anything, but it was really too hairy to tell. It gave me the creeps."
"I haven't seen anything or anyone. I haven't even heard any birds. It's as if most of the world just vanished."
"Most of the world did."
"Pets and all. Everything." Annette shivered. "It's cold out, with this rain. I can't let you in, Phil's allergic to dogs. I'm happy someone else is out there, though. It's frightening. I'm glad I have Phil."
"If you get lonely or something, I'm at number 62, down that way. It's a white house with a black roof and green shutters. Oh, shit, I should check on the lady next door." Marya suddenly realized she hadn't heard Cujo or Cujo II all day, although she hadn't been listening for them and they were generally quieter on rainy days, or at least she couldn't hear them as well over the sound of the rain.
"I'm going to go inside. It was nice to meet you, Marya." And Annette pulled her head back inside and shut her door.
"Huh," Marya said to Oscar. He was still watching the door. "That was kind of weird and kind of reassuring. So that's four people we know of around here. Let's go see how the little old lady and the Cujos are doing."
But the little old lady and the Cujos had either left or couldn't hear the doorbell or Marya's knock. The driveway was empty, but that didn't necessarily mean anything because the little old lady had a garage and her car could still be in it. But maybe her daughter had come to get her. Marya decided to believe that either the little old lady's daughter and grandkids had driven up from wherever they lived and had taken her and the dogs back with them, or she'd gone to the store like Phil from up the street had, or she was driving around looking for her friends.
Marya didn't want to think that someone had essentially vanished out from under her nose. Although if it had to happen, at least the little old lady had gone with her dogs. Or her dogs had gone with her. Whatever. They were together, wherever they were. Marya hoped the grandkids liked loud, pushy, hairy mutts.
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She was instead vacuuming in jeans and a t-shirt with a sunglasses-wearing shark on it, and pink-and-white striped socks. It worked for her. She didn't even own a crinoline, anyway.
She found a plastic bucket and the mop, spent ten minutes failing to find the Pine Sol, and was about to give up when she discovered it in the bathroom under the sink. She couldn't remember putting it there, but she had it now, it didn't matter where it was. She poured some into the bucket, filled the bucket in the bathtub, dragged it into the kitchen, and mopped the floor. She was very careful not to mop herself into a corner, because if she was going to pre-emptively get annoyed at Oscar for tracking wet pawprints all over the floor, she should pay attention to make sure she didn't do the same thing. Oscar at least couldn't help it.
When she was done in the kitchen she took the bucket and mop into the bathroom to do the floor in there too. She couldn't shake out the bathmat in the back yard, because of the rain, so instead she shook it out into the tub and then rolled it up and took it into the front hall. The house had a front porch so she might be able to shake the bathmat out the front door to air it out a little.
She dumped the bucket into the bathtub when she was done, rinsed the mop, wrung it out, and left it leaning against the tiled wall. And then she washed her hands, because they smelled like Pine Sol and dirty water. Yuck.
Oscar had snoozed through Marya's mopping and continued to do so through her efforts to dust the den, the living room, the dining room, and her bedroom. She hated dusting her bedroom. Actually she wasn't fond of dusting any room. She had a Swiffer duster, a handheld thing, and it did a pretty decent job on flat surfaces and the spines of books on the bookshelves, but she was never sure it was really dusting around the knicknacks and random crap decorating the house. But she didn't want to get a feather duster or worse yet, move everything, dust it, dust its resting spot, and put it back. That was really too much work for her.
So she Swiffed and listened to the TV with half an ear and to the rain with the other half, and wished she'd had enough money to hire a cleaning lady or someone to do this for her. Her grandma had a thing about letting strangers clean her house, and so had always done it herself. Marya's grandma was a clean freak and firmly believed that an untidy house meant an untidy mind, and someone who didn't care to keep their house clean wasn't going to care about keeping anything else clean either. She'd never visited Marya in her dorm or anywhere she lived after college and before moving into the house, because Marya was younger and lazier and had better things to do besides put her laundry away.
But maybe she was channeling her grandma now, and had been doing so for a couple of years, because when she had some energy to burn or was otherwise feeling restless and twitchy, but didn't want to or couldn't go out, she defaulted to "clean the house". She'd told her grandma that once and her grandma had been
Marya finished dusting by attempting to brush Oscar with the Swiffer duster, which woke him out of his snooze and made him twitch and roll over. He snorted, sounding annoyed, and gave Marya a look that seemed to say "What the hell was that for?"
"I'm done dusting," she told him. "And mopping. You need to go out? I wanna take a walk around the neighborhood. Yes, I know it's raining, I'm willing to suffer." Oscar just blinked at her as if he was still trying to wake up. She'd have to get his leash and show it to him and possibly tease him towards the front door with a piece of cheese in order for him to understand that it was time for a walk around the block.
She pulled on her raincoat and boots - the raincoat was an old-fashioned yellow slicker like firemen used to wear, and her boots were green and had frog faces on the toes - and fetched Oscar's leash. She was only going around the neighborhood, she didn't think she'd need the harness. He jumped up when she clipped the leash to his collar and headed for the door. She'd have to give him some cheese for being obedient when they got back.
It didn't seem to be raining as hard as it had been earlier, but it was still coming down. There were little rivers in the dip where the road met the sidewalk, and the storm drain by the corner gurgled with runoff. Marya's raincoat and boots always made her feel about eight years old, and Oscar had always liked the rain - at least as long as there wasn't any thunder - and even though the neighborhood still felt empty and abandoned, it was raining, and people didn't go out in the rain anyway.
She was tempted to knock on people's doors to see if anyone was home, and then as she got to the corner she caught sight of a car pulling out of a driveway. Holy shit, she thought, people.
"People, Oscar, look," she said. Oscar had apparently not seen it and seemed surprised when Marya took off towards the apparently-inhabited house. The car went on down the street away from her and she resisted the urge to run after it. With the way things were going, that would probably just scare the driver and they'd speed up.
But walking up to a stranger's front door and knocking, that wasn't threatening at all. Oh no, of course not.
Oscar trotted right up the front walk with Marya and stood patiently while she rang the bell and knocked. Under any other circumstances she would have thought this kind of behavior was stalkery and weird, but what else were you going to do when you thought you were the only person left alive for blocks and blocks and blocks?
"I live down the street," she called through the door - or tried to call through the door, anyway - "I didn't think there was anyone left around here. My name's Marya, I'm harmless, I promise."
The door opened a crack, then opened wider, and a woman with shoulder-length, messy blonde hair stuck her head out. She looked about forty, give or take five years. She also looked scared, and relieved.
"Oh thank god," Marya said. "I saw the car and I was just hoping someone was still home. I live around the corner and a couple blocks down." She pointed back the way she'd come. "I'm Marya, this is Oscar." Oscar barked and tensed to jump. Marya pulled him back just in time. She didn't want to freak this woman out so soon after finding her. Maybe she should've put him in the harness anyway - he was easier to control and yanking on the leash didn't hurt him.
"Annette," the woman said. "Annette Murphy. My husband Phil just left to go to the store. I should have gone with him, but he wanted me to stay here in case someone called us. I don't know what's going on. Do you know what's going on? Channel Four says it's a plague or the bird flu, but if it was the bird flu there would be bodies, right? You're not contagious, are you?"
"Uh... no, I'm not contagious. It's not the bird flu. It was too fast for that. And there aren't any dead people. Like you said, no bodies. Do you get the cable access channel? There was a guy on before who was talking about what might have happened."
"My husband's brother in Vermont is ok. My boss was on vacation - I'm a paralegal - I can't get a hold of anyone from the office. We were too afraid to drive around yesterday, but everything is much calmer today, so Phil went out. We need to stock up. Do you have everything you need? Water? Canned goods?"
"Yeah, I went yesterday. Annette... is your phone working? Do you have, like, cell phone reception?"
"Oh, I don't have a cell phone. Phil doesn't either. Our phone was working fine this morning, I called my cousin Andrew in Baltimore and talked to my sister. She lives in Virginia, but when everything started happening she drove to Andrew's. She thought she'd be safer with him. Andrew's a cop." Annette said this as if cops could offer some kind of special protection when everything else had failed, and it was a given that you'd be safer with them than in your own house. "Julie's ex-husband worked for the State Department. I do not care what happened to him, let me tell you."
"I just ask 'cause my phone went down. My cell works, though. But I can't get online."
"We can't either. Phil thought it might be something with the DSL. We have cable, but last I checked, only three stations were coming in."
"Try cable access. Community TV, whatever it is. Channel eleven." She wondered if she should float the ley line theory to Annette. But she didn't really understand it herself, so how could she tell someone else about it? And anyway Annette had apparently given serious thought to the disappearances being linked to the bird flu.
But maybe she'd also seen a wandering cat that didn't really look like a cat.
"Have you seen, like, strays?" Marya asked. Oscar sat his butt down on the doormat, having evidently realized that he wasn't going to be let inside and wasn't going to get to jump on this new strange person.
"What do you mean?"
"There was a, I dunno, an animal in my back yard this morning. It looked kind of like a cat but not really, and it just sat there and looked at the house. I don't think it had a collar or anything, but it was really too hairy to tell. It gave me the creeps."
"I haven't seen anything or anyone. I haven't even heard any birds. It's as if most of the world just vanished."
"Most of the world did."
"Pets and all. Everything." Annette shivered. "It's cold out, with this rain. I can't let you in, Phil's allergic to dogs. I'm happy someone else is out there, though. It's frightening. I'm glad I have Phil."
"If you get lonely or something, I'm at number 62, down that way. It's a white house with a black roof and green shutters. Oh, shit, I should check on the lady next door." Marya suddenly realized she hadn't heard Cujo or Cujo II all day, although she hadn't been listening for them and they were generally quieter on rainy days, or at least she couldn't hear them as well over the sound of the rain.
"I'm going to go inside. It was nice to meet you, Marya." And Annette pulled her head back inside and shut her door.
"Huh," Marya said to Oscar. He was still watching the door. "That was kind of weird and kind of reassuring. So that's four people we know of around here. Let's go see how the little old lady and the Cujos are doing."
But the little old lady and the Cujos had either left or couldn't hear the doorbell or Marya's knock. The driveway was empty, but that didn't necessarily mean anything because the little old lady had a garage and her car could still be in it. But maybe her daughter had come to get her. Marya decided to believe that either the little old lady's daughter and grandkids had driven up from wherever they lived and had taken her and the dogs back with them, or she'd gone to the store like Phil from up the street had, or she was driving around looking for her friends.
Marya didn't want to think that someone had essentially vanished out from under her nose. Although if it had to happen, at least the little old lady had gone with her dogs. Or her dogs had gone with her. Whatever. They were together, wherever they were. Marya hoped the grandkids liked loud, pushy, hairy mutts.
words: 2089
total words: 15,936
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Date: 2007-11-10 10:25 pm (UTC)