We Were the People at the End of the World  

Jennifer Morgan

Harriet finds the letter the day before she flies back to Toronto.  

David is out for breakfast with friends, one last plate of lukewarm eggs and soggy hash browns before the holidays are over. It’s January, already the new year.  

Harriet has spent the morning packing. She’s looking forward to leaving for what is now  home: a smaller place in a bigger city with a different set of friends.  

David doesn’t feel that way. David wants to stay in Winnipeg. They’re both from  Winnipeg, he explains. Their families are in Winnipeg; they have friends in Winnipeg.  “I moved to Toronto to get away from all that,” Harriet says.  

David is 41. Harriet is 38. When she met him, she was 18. As a teenager, Harriet wanted to live somewhere else. She still does.

They rent the Airbnb over Christmas again. The house they’re in this year, it’s nice. It has a backyard with a patio, now blanketed in snow, and, in the corner, covered with a small tarp, there is a real barbecue. Most mornings, Harriet finds David looking out the window at it.  

Back when they’d first moved to Toronto, Harriet bought a hibachi for their balcony. The hibachi is small but takes up a quarter of their outdoor space. They haven’t used the grill since  that first summer.  

Two years ago, Harriet heard a sound coming from the neglected hibachi. She lifted the lid and found a wasp nest. She stared at the delicate grey structure. Harriet knew if she sliced it  open, this papier mache brain, it would be full of neat, hexagonal cells. She imagined how long it  took the queen wasp to carry all the chewed wood pulp here, mixing the fibers with her own spit to create the material for the nest. She thought about the queen communicating with the workers, their existence propelled by a single, collective goal: to make more copies of themselves.

She couldn’t kill the wasps. Yellow jackets, she guessed; those are what she’d sometimes found dead in the small pools of rainwater that collected overnight in the divots of her patio chairs. So she told David to leave them alone.  

They didn’t inform the property manager, and there was no risk of small fingers getting stung or allergies accidentally uncovered because David and Harriet don’t have kids. David doesn’t want them. Harriet is undecided, but she’s with David, so maybe she doesn’t want kids, either. Instead, they have yellow jackets, summer children that come home every year and stay only a few months at a time.

Now, in Winnipeg in winter, Harriet goes downstairs into the kitchen of the rental house to make coffee. There’s an envelope on the windowsill, the one that looks out onto the backyard  with the barbecue. The envelope has her name written on it in all capitals. She is being yelled at. HARRIET.

The envelope is grey. She picks it up but doesn’t open it yet. 

* * *

David never comes home. He refuses to talk to Harriet. She texts David’s parents when she wants the password to sign into Netflix. She texts Ben when she’s lonely, which is most of the time.  

* * *

Two months later, on the second Friday in March, Harriet is driving home from work with her computer and the contents of her desk packed into a box in the backseat of her car. According to the piece of paper tucked into her bag, production is on hiatus for two weeks. Maybe more.  

The virus started in Wuhan, China, in January, then spread to Italy and Spain. It reached the United Kingdom next. Now, Canada is going into lockdown.  

In her car on the way home, Harriet realizes it’s still daylight out.  

It took an apocalypse to get me to leave the studio on time, she texts Ben. Siri reads Ben’s response out loud: Better late than never.  

Harriet and Ben have been friends for 17 years. They met in a record shop in Winnipeg, back when they were both in their 20s. Now Ben is on a farm outside Saskatoon, growing  vegetables. Harriet is in Toronto, growing bored.

She looks at the sky. It’s pink, and Harriet thinks about all of the other people who are also leaving work before dinner for the first time today. She considers how fucked up the world is: climate change and overpopulation and homelessness and food insecurity. She thinks about all  the people staying home to keep everyone else safe, how somehow everyone agreed that all this is worth saving. She cries, goes to wipe her eyes, and then remembers she can’t touch her face.  

Harriet sends a second text. Thanks for being around. It really means a lot to me. Siri says: You mean a lot to me.  

* * *

There is a little bakery on Ellice in Winnipeg’s west end, about an eight-minute walk from the Airbnb where Harriet stayed with David. She ran into Ben there on a Tuesday, close to the end of December.  

Harriet noticed the grey in Ben’s beard and around his temples. Their friendship over the last decade had been made up of words on a screen: emails and Facebook messages and random  texts; once, a three-day exchange of nothing but Seinfeld gifs. She smiled, but not too much, in case the beginnings of her crow's feet showed.

“I didn’t think you were getting into town until next week,” Harriet said.  

She hugged him, twice. Ben is tall, over six feet, and Harriet had to stand up on her toes to put her arms around his chest. From inside the cocoon of his winter parka, her face on his  shoulder, Harriet felt safe. 

“I managed to get away early.”  

They stood there in the shop for a moment, just looking at each other.  

“What are you doing right now?” Ben asked.

* * *

Ben parked the car in Gimli, just outside the city, and they stared out the window at the frozen lake. They ate the cinnamon rolls Harriet had bought for David's breakfast. Harriet was looking up suicide jokes on her phone. At work, there was a tally on the whiteboard next to her desk that marked off the number of times she said something or someone made her want to kill herself. The show started prep in November; by December, when she and David had left for Winnipeg, the tally was up to 17.

“Do you think you’re happy?” Harriet asked.  

Ben brushed a few crumbs from his beard.  

“I am right now,” he said.

They drove back to the bakery for more cinnamon rolls, but the shop was closed when they got there. They’d been gone all day.  

Time moved differently then.

* * *

Now, time stretches out in front of her. Harriet sleeps late. She stops looking at clocks, instead counts down the minutes in her body until it’s socially acceptable to go to sleep again. If the lockdown were ending in two weeks, would she spend her time another way? Harriet imagines she is a vampire. Without an ending, life is meaningless. Vampires, she decides, are the epitome of existential dread.

Harriet doesn’t want to think about David. David who still hasn’t called her, not even now that the world is ending.

She watches all six seasons of BoJack Horseman in five days. She bakes cupcakes. She throws out the cupcakes. It’s Sisyphean.  

She talks to Ben, who is getting ready for another growing season.  

Have you watched the new episodes of Ozark yet? Harriet texts.  

Her seasons are different from his.

* * *

Graduate school changed Harriet. She grew edges, sharpened them with ideas. She stopped laughing at David’s jokes. She pierced her nose.

“Why do we have so many copies of The Bell Jar?” David asked.  

She was up late one night, finishing a paper. They were in Toronto by then, wedged into separate corners of their little apartment. Outside, the sky was indigo from light pollution and  raccoons rummaged in the garbage bins, fighting over their spoils.  

David sat down on the couch where Harriet was supposed to be working. 

“What are you doing?” she asked.

She hated the time between days. It made her feel lonely to be awake through it.  “I’ll stay up with you,” David said.

They reached the other side of night. The sky turned from indigo to pink to gold. The raccoons left, and another kind of wildlife took over: people, dressed up in suits with travel mugs  of coffee in hand, trying to beat traffic on the Gardiner.

Harriet finished the paper. They went to bed.

It was late afternoon when she woke up. Harriet looked at David, his face gentle in the softness of sleep. She remembered the green sweater, torn at the collar, that he was wearing when they’d first met. She thought about the time that David brought home a cabbage, thinking it was iceberg lettuce, and how he still kept the ticket stubs from every film they’d ever seen together. Maybe it doesn’t matter that we don’t have children, she thought. Maybe it’s okay if we never get married.

Harriet had loved him so much in that moment.  

* * *

Slowly, Harriet’s days take shape again. She goes running. Her ankle swells up from an injury two years ago, but she ignores it.

Harriet isn’t a fast runner. Sometimes she stops and looks at the trees, which are starting to bloom again. She takes selfies. She does not send them to Ben.

She stops sleeping in, instead is excited to wake up and brew coffee in the mornings. Harriet experiments with adding different things to the grinds: salt, cinnamon, vanilla, orange zest. She’s surprised to find she likes the orange most.

She starts cooking. She uses spices she bought last summer at the farmer’s market and found, still sealed, at the back of her cupboard. She makes pasta from scratch. She simmers  curries. She prepares a vegan moussaka that turns out to be a mistake.

Her freezer grows so full that she knocks on the doors of her neighbours for the first time. She leaves notes taped to containers of food: From the girl with the nose ring in 12B. Harriet writes down some of the recipes, the ones that work out. She sends the recipes to Ben, who says he’ll mail her seeds so she can plant vegetables next month, when the weather warms up.

* * *

When she broke her foot, David didn’t go with her to the hospital.

“You just twisted it,” he said. “You’ll be fine in a couple of days.”

It happened over Christmas, the year before last. They were in Winnipeg then. The x-rays showed an avulsion fracture in the fifth metatarsal and a complete tear of the anterior talofibular ligament in her right foot. Harriet left emergency with a cast and on crutches.

A week after they got back to Toronto, David went to LA to pitch a new series. Harriet stumbled around their house, bumping into walls that were suddenly too narrow. She called a  friend to help her out of the bath.

When he came home nine days later, David brought a tin of lapsong souchong for Harriet.

No one picked up the series.

* * *

She wakes up, and Harriet is in the middle of the bed. Somehow, at night, she drifts over from her side. She realizes she doesn’t have a side anymore.

She searches online for information on sourdough bread. Harriet discovers a whole community of amateur bakers. Suddenly, confronted with a vampire-like sense of time, people are fermenting flour. Local shops are giving glass jars of starter to their neighbours. People are dropping off baskets of blueberry muffins to friends. A new ethics of care is emerging.

Scrolling through the recipes, Harriet understands that everything is different now. Everyone is alone, but not everyone is lonely.

She re-watches Jurassic Park. Harriet remembers, two years ago, the discovery of caihong juji, a theropod the size of a crow with a crest of rainbow feathers and an iridescent black body. She stares at a hummingbird hovering at her neighbour’s feeder. The bird’s feathers shimmer, kaleidoscopic in the sun.

Evolution is inevitable.  

Once, Harriet was a unicellular organism. One day she’ll be something else, something  she can’t even imagine, something as far from human as she is now from that eukaryotic cell.

* * *

In June, Harriet will throw the hibachi into the trash bin. No yellow jackets will come this year.  Instead, she’ll hang a hummingbird feeder.

Harriet will start dancing in her kitchen. She’ll put on weight around her hips and across her breasts, develop new muscles from running and kneading dough. She will stop saying we and  start saying I.

One evening in early July, she will sit on her balcony and look at the little garden she’s planted. Brazen green shoots will have started to poke through the dirt, her new summer children: tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, carrots. Harriet will take a picture and send it to Ben. Be patient, Ben will write. You have to give things time to grow.