The Birthday Stick

He greeted the rubble like an old friend. The ruins of the city scoffed in Al’s face as he came back to the city that was once a beacon of hope and freedom for the United States of America. He looked at the filth, the vile extremity of such a place being in such a country as this. The apple is rotten, he thought, pressing on through the crowded streets of the city. He looked up at the chipping statue that once stood as a symbol of our country, our world. What is it now? A welcoming hand waving us into the seeping decay of morality.
He stepped over an eerie body lying lifeless on the pavement. He walked on with a lump of disgust clutching to his throat like the gum on his shoe. He kept his eyes on the buildings ahead; the life he once knew, the home he once had. He attempted to ignore the stench of rotting flesh and wails of helpless victims as he found his way to the place he once called home. He reached the rotting place and ignored the shattering glass that fell like sinister snow. Walking on, losing his way, or was it his conscious? This filth, he muttered under his breath, what happened to this city? It seems like yesterday that it was 2013 and things were yet to have wilted completely.
The knob to the apartment door screamed with age and foul experience. If New York was first, how long will it take for the rest of the country to croak and corrode as well? Al looked inside the cobweb-decorated room. It was completely empty—unless you wanted to count the number of spiders nesting in each corner of the gloomy place. It was all empty except for a single chair and a table in the middle of the room with a tiny man in its presence.
“What are you doing?” Al asked the life-worn man. The man’s eyes didn’t move from what looked like a crack on the table before him. The plum-colored bags that sunk low beneath the man’s yellow eyes told the tale his mouth couldn’t utter. “How long have you lived here?” Still no answer. Al scrunched his mouth to one side and took a few steps closer to the senior. He crouched down, bouncing on his heels, and studied the man’s crackled face.
“Leave me alone,” a wheeze puffed from the old man, “I’ve had just about enough of you young men destroying my life.” Al turned his eyes to his fidgeting hands.
He squinted his eyes, “What have they done to you?” He didn’t expect an answer. The old man watched as Al slid a warped green and blue spotted candle out of his pocket. His fingers fiddled with the stick—tossing it back and forth like an innocent game that would have once been played. The old man fixated on the tiny party candle with a look of sheer awe. One tremoring hand held itself out in front of the man’s body, yearning for the touch of such innocence.
Al smiled gently and handed the stick to his elder. The man squealed in delight, holding the stick with a hand on each end. “What is this?” He breathed. Tears welled up inside of Al’s dark eyes, threatening to break the barrier he’s learned to keep up.
“It’s my birthday stick,” he choked, “My mother gave it to me in this very house.” The old man nodded vacantly and pulled the stick up to his hairy nose, smelling the waxy aroma that used to be nothing.
“Where is she now?” The man’s eyes were closed.
“She died…” Al’s voice trailed off, but the man seemed to pick it up.
“Ah,” he said, “Like so many of the others. My family too,” he nonchalantly smirked in a disgusted sort of way. The man nodded his crippled head and sputtered out an unexpected blubber of whines. “I love this little thing,” he squeaked at the candle, “It reminds me of how things used to be.”
“Me too.” Al’s eyes traced the path of a cockroach trailing across the floor. He looked up and saw the room how it was forty-three years before, on his eighth birthday. The toxins in the air from the circulating wastes and diseases were already taking their toll on the area. His mother tried to hide her hacks in her flailing sleeve as she tried to enjoy the party. She smiled down at him and kissed him on the forehead.
“Are you ready for your cake?” Her ailing eyes were burrowing into her skull, and her face was pale and thin. Al looked around at his friends—there were two of them. A chubby brown kid named Zack and a gangly red headed boy named Steven. He returned his mother’s smile and nodded his head ecstatically, ignorant to the events going on. She unveiled a lone cupcake with blue frosting with the blue and green spotted candle sticking up in the middle. Al remembers how his eyes lit up at the pathetic thing. It was all they had. His mother got a job down at the bakery, but they still struggled to get by after his father died. He remembered how she used to cough red clots of blood into her arm sleeve. Even then he hadn’t realized the extremity of the events transpiring.
“Yeah, 2015 was a good year.” Al snapped back to the present at the old man’s remarks. A sullen darkness fell over him like a heavy blanket.
“Maybe…” His voice trailed off. The old man didn’t even flinch at the incoherence of Al’s response, but instead clicked his pupils back onto the worn candlestick. His unseeing fingers trailed through each groove swirled into the wax. “What do you think will happen to this country?” Al whispered, half not expecting a response. The old man’s eyes stayed fixated on the candle.
“Same thing that happened to Europe, I s’pose,” he replied in a crackling hack, coughing the way Al’s mother did before death took her away. Al let his face fall into this trembling hands. Here he is at a stranger’s house when the Earth is turning to pot—hiding like the scared boy he was in the early 2010’s. He racked his brain for an answer; there had to be some way he could do something about this mess…there had to have been something he could have done about his mother…He shook off the guilt-ridden thoughts and just thought about what was going on in the world.
Europe’s people overthrew their government, destroyed their parliament, and ultimately caused the demise of their country. The plague of mass ignorance and idiocy has been drifting to the United States since the illness breakout started and the natural disasters began. If people weren’t half as much concerned about themselves through this whole thing and worked together, a lot less lives would have been taken. And it’s just getting worse.
Al thought about the ridiculousness of this and shook his head, choking back tears. Humans have given into their natural state, he thought, and it’s only a matter of time before they completely lose any sense of intelligence whatsoever. No good will come from that, and that is what will ultimately cause the death of the human race, he shook off these thoughts as well, praying inside of himself that it was just a wild stretch of his own imagination. He knew it wasn’t.
“Are you going to do anything about that cough?” Al asked. The man just blinked and sat in silence. Al scrunched his mouth to one side and looked out the murky window across the room.
“What can I do? The medical system has been corrupted…” The old man’s voice trailed off. Al wished that he could somehow comfort the man and tell him that what he said wasn’t true, but he knew that it would just be a pack of lies.
“I guess there’s nothing we can do about any of this,” Al stated, attempting to crush a cockroach with his heel. He bit his lip and let the creature go—he didn’t even have the heart to kill a vermin like that.
“You’re wrong!” The old man’s abruptness caused Al to jump in his seat. The man’s large round eyes buried themselves into Al’s face. Al swallowed his shock and shot his gaze to the ground. The cockroach had disappeared.
“Yeah,” is all he could bear to say. Deep inside he knew the man was right; he just wished he’d know how, or why. A siren sounded outside, calling in a muffled wave. Al’s eyebrows narrowed against his slanted eyes—were there still police officers in these parts?
“Maybe there is hope,” a tear drooped from one of the man’s sagging eyes.
Al wished he could believe it, “Humans have lost their sense of morality,” he said. “I don’t think there is anything like hope existing anymore.” He grasped his lower thighs by his kneecaps, avoiding the man’s expression, and pulled himself up weakly. “I should be going,” he muttered. “Hopefully there is something I can do.”
“Hopefully,” the man smirked at Al, who couldn’t help but smile back. Maybe, he thought, just maybe.
“I guess I should give you this back,” the man held out the candlestick. “I don’t have much time left in this wretched place, but it was nice to have something to look forward to, looking at this little thing.” Al never really believed in the afterlife, but it was the only thing giving him hope these days, so he just simply nodded and reached his hand out towards the candle in the wrinkly palm.
He curled the man’s fingers inward, masking the vision of the candle. “Keep it,” Al said, “You need it more than I do.” He didn’t know how true this statement was, but the reddening eyes of the old man brought a newfound hope to his weary heart. Maybe there is hope for humanity after all.