The Dog Stars

When will I get home? As a poetic question without answer narrated in a post-apocalyptic world nine years after the end of the world as we know it. Inspired by Peter Heller’s book The Dog Stars, we take a journey through what disappears and what remains when everything that’s now relevant suddenly ceases to exist.

I want to be two people at the same time. So one can run away.

The Dog Stars

When will I get home?

Nine years ago, the world as we knew it ceased to exist. The world of waking up, watching the news, going to work, coming home, and waiting for the life after—believing that there, on the other side of time, something more real would exist to strip us of the sensation of the temporary.

Now there are no schedules; we eat when we’re hungry and count the days so they don’t escape us. There’s no people either. Just aerial postcards of burned cities, nature opening its jaws, and the occasional survivor willing to kill me—a zombie land.

I had a job, a wife, almost a son, a dog. Now I have a neighbor. Only one. We’re neighbors out of necessity, because it’s easier to survive in pairs. I don’t like killing, although my survival depends on it; he likes killing. No qualifiers. I like planting and harvesting. I like poetry. I like navigating the dark waters of memories. I like inventing constellations, like The Dog Stars constellation and a constellation for Melissa.

I fly in The Beast with my pilot license number 135-271, as if that mattered, as if some control tower could ask me. I travel once a month to a distant truck full of Coca-Cola cans to stock our caffeine dose. Sometimes I go fishing, though there are no more trout or elk or tigers or elephants.

My favorite poem is by Li Shangyin, from the 9th century in China. It’s called: When Will I Get Home?

When will I get home? I don't know. In the mountains, on the rainy night, the autumn lake has overflowed. Someday we'll be together again. We'll sit by the west window, with candlelight. And I'll tell you how I remembered you this night on the stormy mountain.

Someday we’ll be together again, and though I don’t like killing, I already did, for a poetry book that had a dedication from Melissa on its first page.