The two of them driving down that lonely stretch of highway in their beat-up red car had no way of knowing that they were the last two people on earth. All around them, the fog was rolling in, wrapping its milky-white fingers around the towering redwoods that surrounded the highway as far as the eye could see, beginning its daily task of trying to pull the trees up from their roots. That day, as the fog and the redwoods fell into their comfortable push and pull, they whispered to each other. The fog and the redwoods knew that the two of them driving down that lonely stretch of highway in their beat-up red car were the last two people on earth, because they had heard it from the sun and the moon, who hung together in the sky marveling at how quiet the earth had suddenly become. The squirrels overheard the trees and the fog, and quickly told the birds, who told the worms. Once the worms knew, the news spread to the dirt and all the creatures that crawled along it, to beetles, to ants, to spiders. The forest was alive with whispers, the wind roared through and brought the news out to the sea, the waves carried the message off to every corner of the world until finally, and in an instant, the two of them, driving down that lonely stretch of highway in their beat-up red car, were the only two creatures in existence that didn’t know they were the last two people on earth. And as they drove down that lonely stretch of highway in their beat-up red car, the last two people on earth sang.

They sang because the radio had faded to static as they drove deeper into the cover of the trees and she needed to keep him from falling asleep at the wheel. They sang songs they had known their whole lives without ever learning, and the lyrics spilled out in that beautiful cacophony of voices that were singing just for the joy of it. Sometimes she would hit a wrong note, and he would laugh, and so would she, and their laughter would be even more beautiful than the song because they were in love, and there is no sound more beautiful than lovers laughing. 

The two lovers didn’t have even the slightest suspicion that the entire world had changed until the forest thinned and the highway wound out towards the coast. Out his window, they looked down at a stretch of beach with warm golden sand and gentle rolling waves and saw nobody. This was the first thing that struck them as odd, because she had gone to this beach every year with her family and it had always been packed with people from dawn until dusk, even on gray and soggy days. That day the sun was glinting off the water and scorching the sand, but the beach was completely empty. They didn’t stop, although she would have liked to dig her toes into the sand on the deserted beach, let the waves wash over her ankles and tug at her in a feeble attempt to bring her further into their arms, feel time slip through her fingers with each breath of the sea. She was thinking about that beach until they drove into the small town of Crescent, until they had to pull around a car left sitting at a stop sign by its absent driver, until they parked their beat-up red car in front of a diner, until they walked through the unlocked doors and took in the empty scene of life interrupted.

Forks and knives were strewn about, some with food still speared on the tips, abandoned mid-bite. A pot of coffee was shattered on the floor, the dark liquid pooling around it and branching off in twisting rivers. A small dog was tethered to a chair with a hot pink leash, and was squealing and yapping in a futile attempt to tell the two lovers what it had seen. As he called out a wary greeting, not knowing that there was no one left to answer, she wandered into the kitchen and made a job of turning off the stoves, upon which countless pots were screaming and spilling and curdling their contents in protest at having been forgotten. She looked around, searching for anything that might help her make sense of this strange new world, but found nothing. 

Together the lovers wandered every street of Crescent, searching for movement in windows and listening for the sounds of human life. They walked past each empty house with the lights left on and the television broadcasting static to an empty couch, each car left in the middle of the road with its engine still running, each purse or phone dropped haphazardly on the street.

A breeze picked up, whistling through the trees and playing with her hair, shouting as loud as a breeze can shout in an attempt to explain, for the breeze liked people and felt very sorry for the two lovers who didn’t know that they were the last two people on earth. The lovers didn’t yet know how to listen to the wind and so they continued on, back down streets they had already walked, hoping that at any moment someone else would appear. Nobody did.

They waited through the day and night, wishing they would wake up from this dream, pinching themselves and each other hard, then holding each other close because the pinching hadn’t worked so what else was there to do but hold each other? The next day she announced that she wanted to drive to another town, where surely they would find more people . Deep in his bones and in the furthest pit of his stomach, he was certain that no matter how far they drove they would only find ghost towns. There was something in the way the foxes roamed freely through the streets under the bright morning sun and the deer wandered unafraid into gardens, something in the shift of the wind and the way it called to the sea, something he was just on the very edge of understanding, and it left him certain that there were no other people left. But she was hopeful, and stubborn, and could not let go of what the world had been. And so she left, and he stayed, with the promise that she would be back by morning. It would be three months before he heard from her again, in a message delivered by a crow.

So alone, with only the world for company, he began to listen.

He first started listening as he sat on the beach, the waves crashing and crashing and crashing on the rocky shore, the sea-smoothed rocks grasping desperately at the water as it receded, hoping to hang on to the feeling of the cool water on their backs for just a moment longer. As he sat just past the line the water refused to cross, relishing in the icy pleasure of the waves lapping at his toes, he began to hear the joyous, rattling cries of the agate. Their gentle voices created a symphony as they greeted the ocean. It would be a long time before he could pick out the higher tones of the blue lace agate from the bass notes of the snakeskin, or tell the difference between the rumbling laughter of the moss agate from the dendrite’s giggle. But that day, sitting in the sun with just his toes dipped into the water, he listened and he began to hear.

By the end of the second month without her, he could hold casual conversation with the pebbles on the beach, with the waves that lapped at his toes, with the wildflowers that bloomed out of season, with the ivy that had begun to grow over the cracks in the walls of buildings left in disrepair. He was still unsure of the subtler language of the redwoods and the hissing whisper of the fog, but he would sit in the forest and try to pick out the strains of their voices. He listened to the chattering of squirrels, who yelled at the dirt because they were sure it had been moving their buried treasures to make them look like fools, and the steady vibrations of the dirt as it maintained that it had left everything in its place. He loved talking to the breeze more than anything else, because the breeze remembered how she had seemed so pleased when it played with her hair, and it missed having hair to play with. Together they could sit perched above the highway and watch for the beat-up red car and wonder where she had gone and when she would be back.

He was sure that she wasn’t dead in the way that lovers can always sense each other’s heartbeats, no matter how far apart they are or how long it has been since they have held each other. He felt her heartbeat in his chest, an echo of his own. Ba(ba)Dum(dum). That little, syncopated beat reassured him, but it didn’t take the edge off his wondering or his worrying. 

The third month of his new life was coming to a close when the crow came looking for him. This was not one of the crows he knew, because its voice was thick with some regional accent so strong that he wondered if canadian crows sounded anything like canadian people had back when there were any people besides the two lovers. Everything around him went silent to hear what the crow had to say, for even those who did not care much whether or not she was coming home knew that crows were excellent storytellers.

The crow said that she had been driving north, hoping for signs of life in the small roadside towns and finding none. She had blared her horn and shouted as loud as she could, but no one responded. She searched meticulously, checking every house twice and then a third time. She refused to give up, not wanting to return to Crescent with no answers. She was still so sure that if she just drove one town further, just made it to the next state, to the next biome, to the next climate, she would find a town or a city that was alive with the chatter of people going about their days, and the people of that town would explain everything, and then she could return to him with something to show for her leaving. Their beat-up red car had broken down and she had walked on foot, and when she hit a river she fashioned herself a raft. By the time she had been whisked off down the river by a current that had looked, from dry land, to be so gentle and easy, she realized that turning back would have been smarter and was now entirely impossible. 

When finally the river grew shallow and allowed her to scramble up onto a muddy bank, she had been carried around so many twists and bends that she had no way of knowing which direction to go, and so she sat down to think and stayed sitting there on that muddy bank through countless days and nights, listening to the birds, listening to the birds, listening to the birds, and finally one day she understood what they were saying. And so she had gathered her strength and her courage, which she had been letting dry since she clambered out of the river, and left her spot on the muddy bank to go talk to them. She had told them her story, and it was the best story the crow had ever heard, so it offered to carry a message to her love.

“She is safe. She loves you. She is finding her way home.”

The crow was tired from its long flight, so he offered it water and seeds and free pick of anything shiny that was lying around town, and in the morning he asked the crow if it would bring a message back to her. 

“I miss you. I love you. I will be here waiting.”

Over the next months, still missing her terribly but reassured that she was safe, he found joy in conversing with the waves about the days when children would splash about in the shallow, grabbing at shells, shrieking joyously as the water tickled their calves and sent them running up the beach to their parents. The ocean answered the burning question that had sat at the bottom of his lungs since the day he came to Crescent, washing gently over him as it explained that the lovers really were the last two people left. There was no one out there for her to find aside from him, sitting and waiting in Crescent. It didn’t surprise him to hear this. He had sensed it on the first day as they walked into the diner, but it still stung to know that she really had gone off for nothing. He asked every migrating bird if they had seen her, and when they hadn’t, he asked if they would watch for her. The breeze told him that the sun and the moon knew where she was, but they would never tell on their own, and even the towering redwoods and the powerful Diablo winds were too afraid to ask. He spent hours each day with his hand pressed hard into the left side of his chest, living for that echo of a heartbeat that told him she was okay. Ba(ba)Dum(dum) Ba(ba)Dum(dum). 

The next message was sent some endless stretch of time later, carried by a fish who was young and brave and wanted a reason to explore the ocean now that there were no fishermen to catch it or propellers to get trapped in. After sending the crow off with her message she had stolen a bike, if you can steal something from someone who no longer exists, and made her way through empty towns until she had found a coast. After a moment’s elation, a brief burst of hope, she had realized that the sun was rising, not setting, over the horizon. She was on the wrong coast. Her legs were tired from biking, and icy weather had chased her all the way to the coast and finally caught up with her, so she decided to rest and think and decide what to do the next morning. She found a cozy house with a soft couch, a pile of firewood, and a brick chimney, and she let the flames warm her and sing her into a deep sleep. When she finally awoke, her hair had grown long and the sun outside was declaring summertime to the birds and the bees, who buzzed and chirped cheerfully outside the window of the little house. She had slept through most of winter and all of spring, a total of one hundred and sixty three days. and swore she would waste no more time. As she walked outside, her legs unsteady from months of disuse, she discovered that the bike, which had carried her for so many miles, had rusted and refused to spin its wheels. She would walk, then, heading down the coast because the only thing she knew without a doubt was that she had started her journey by moving north. She stayed close to the ocean, letting her bare feet dip into the shallow of the water as she walked, and that was where she met the little fish who listened to her story and offered to bring a message home to him.

“She is safe. She loves you. She is finding her way home.”

The fish did not promise it would find her again, having found that it loved adventure and would go wherever the ocean took it, but he gave the fish a message just in case.

“I miss you. I love you. I will be here waiting.”

The messages came in an unsteady flow as the days and weeks and months dragged by, and each time he heard from her it seemed that she had only gotten further away. An alligator brought news that she had walked from the little coastal town where she had slept for one hundred and sixty three days all the way down to what used to be florida without stopping even once to sleep or eat, her thoughts fixed on making up the time she had lost while she was sleeping. A snake brought news that she was traveling inland, following what had once been a major highway. A squirrel heard from another squirrel who heard from a palm tree that she had been carried off by a hawk, who flew with her in its talons out over the sea until neither of them could be seen on the horizon. He didn’t hear from her for months after that, until a heavy, warm wind blew from overseas to bring the message that she had been dropped somewhere where what signs she could still see under the thick growth of moss and ivy were in french, and that she was searching for a compass and a boat. There was a message from a worm, a snowstorm, a seal, a mosquito, each one carrying the words:

“She is safe. She loves you. She is finding her way home.”

And each time he would respond

“I miss you. I love you. I will be here waiting.”

The messages grew further apart, grew shorter, until instead of stories the creatures only brought those words. 

And then they brought nothing. Ten winters cycled past without a single message. All he had to rely on was that Ba(ba)Dum(dum)Ba(ba)Dum(dum)Ba(ba)Dum(dum) that hammered in his chest. The breeze did all it could to cheer him up, but he had grown into a stoic sort of sadness, the roots of his grief digging deep into the earth and holding him steady. He felt most at home among the redwoods and the fog, where there was nothing expected of him but to simply be. 

It was the spring of his twelfth year in Crescent when finally, after seasons of silence, a mockingbird came with an echo of her voice spilling out of its beak.

“I am safe. I love you. I am almost home.”

And finally she walked back down the highway, on bare feet grown sturdy and firm with callouses, a lifetime lived since she had driven away from Crescent, down that lonely stretch of highway in their beat-up red car. He had lived too, grown as sturdy and as wise as the redwoods, and his voice was stiff and crushed in his throat from years of speaking languages that did not require it. And yet when they saw each other the lines slipped from their worn and tired brows, and in their smiling and in their eyes they knew that they had barely lived a day apart. They spoke without words, the language of the fog and the redwoods and the wind and the birds and the fish and the sea rolling smoothly between them, and they embraced and were whole, and they lay down together on the dirt and held each other, and he put his hand against the left side of her chest and felt that double heartbeat, and she did the same, and they lay like that, wrapped in each others arms and speaking without words. As moments and days and years passed, the inching ivy wrapped its tendrils around them, binding them together, and the last two people were welcomed into the earth.

About the Author:

Caitlin Cowan (they/them) is a writer and storyteller living in Portland, Oregon. They have had work published in Orange Blossom Review and Porter House Review, as well as contributing to the anthology Reformatting the Pain Scale. You can find them on twitter @caitlin_e_c

*Feature image by Andy Peter from Pixabay