The Kayaker (Dystopia)

 The man steered his kayak from the wide Hudson to Canal street, ironically now a canal, paddling now under the huge rusted sign at the old Holland Tunnel entrance. The watery road was quiet in the early morning, but the man’s shaggy dog on the nose of the plastic craft was still alert, poking her head up and sniffing the air. 

The man carried hand crafted goods from the mountain farm to sell at the Essex floating market, the boat stalls stretching North over what was Roosevelt park at Chrystie street. He brought honey in Mason jars. He brought baskets woven from plastic trash. He brought knives of different sizes, always a necessity in this fallen world. 

The man looked at the darkened buildings and remembered the last time that he saw light. Before the war of the skies, the satellites exploding 1000 miles above the earth, the communications crashing. Before the mega-hurricane finally put a stop to the power grid. 

The dog started barking, and the man realized that something was wrong. Even early in the morning, he should start to hear the sounds of the Manhattan settlement waking up. The vendor’s boats starting to jostle in place, the people greeting each other before what passed for a normal, daily life developed. 

And then he saw it. A body, back arched, head tucked down. Dead. And it was not alone. Ahead, the bodies collected, crowded on a bottleneck as if they were cars approaching the tunnel entrance at rush hour. 

The man spun the kayak, moving away from from whatever caused this. He remembered the pandemic as a child, remembered thinking that this is as bad as it will get, not expecting the floods of refugees as parts of the world became too hot to endure. He needed to go, return to the relative safety of the mountains, hope that this would all pass, would all stay here.