Husk

A Story by Wisconsin

The human race is extinct.

I looked into the people's eyes but I didn't see anyone looking back. Sure, they might have looked at me and waved briefly, but all I saw were the plastic eyes of wind-up toys. After a while people started to seem like shells. Something was inside them once, something made a home of them, something formed them, but it was gone now. The husk it left behind is content to stand still with a hose, watering the trimmed little lawn.

I fear I've become an outside without an inside.

As the reader, you are an inside without an outside. You can feel lines of text, but you can't change them as they are projected only by me. I wonder what you see in my "I"s.

Couple days ago I was biking through a suburb with my little brother. They're all the same. Small collectives of buildings, each with a tree surrounded by red woodchips in the square lawn, given corny nature names by flatlander developers, "Evergreen Meadows," "Steeplechase," "Flowery River," "Deer Haven," etcetera.

Those places give me the creeps. I feel like I'm looking at a ghost town; nobody is ever outside, not even in cars driving down the roads. The house is just another outside, and inside each house is two happy adult empty-outside-people, the procreating ones. Next to them are two or three little outside-people, all of them watching the televisionbox. They're like toys, the little dolls that you open up to see a smaller duplicate which contains a smaller duplicate which contains a smaller duplicate. You open them all to find there's nothing at the core but another empty outside. Just a big layer of shells.

My brother stopped his bike at a corner and waited for me. I stopped somewhere up the hill, observing one of the lawns. It was different from the others. All the other lawns had a single balsam pine growing in a pile of red woodchips, but this one was different. This one had a small white birch growing in it's woodchips. The owner had even rigged up a little spotlight there in the ground next to it, so even at night people could marvel at his tree.