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maybe.
    â€œNothing,” they said when they came back down the stairs. Not giggling now, but faces full and red, nervous hands reaching to hold smoldering cigarettes. Camille hasn’t come out of her room since.
    And from below, agony. We never go into the basement because that’s where The Shouting lives—a man’s voice, but bodiless. Cam and Trevor, also drunk, went down there a few nights ago, baseball bats in hand, thinking there was perhaps an intruder down there.
    â€œNothing.” That’s what they said when they came back up, faces as plain as white t-shirts.
    Later that night there was no yelling, finally. Nothing, finally. And we could have forgotten about it, probably, would have wanted to, but the boys’ boots had stirred the subterranean air. It took a few days before the disruption of dust and atmosphere settled down before another shout shot up, the coarse underwing of a black bird.
    This is how we live: in ancient old rooms with others like us, just as we always did. We came to this place after running into Trevor outside City Hall, lining up for rations. He remembered me and Aimee from the Mission and we remembered him from Kohl, the old goth club at Queen and Bathurst, where he used to perch on a newspaper box wearing the same torn lace top and tight black jeans every night, posing in the hopes that someone would take pity on his tentative prettiness and bring him inside for a drink.
    Trevor’s black dye job has grown out now, his lace top replaced with a black t-shirt, faded brown cords on his legs. We almost didn’t recognize him, except that the look in his eyes is the same: part puppy, part lost boy.
    But whatever collectivity we had before The End has fallen away: some here have had more primitive urges surface, creating change, clashes. Protecting what they’ve got, except it doesn’t feel the same as when I moved in with Valium. The other girls here, Brandy and Carrie and Camille, are made of amber eyes and sharp shoulders. Me and Aimee only take our knives with us when we leave the house, but the other girls tuck blades into their boots all the time. At night they sleep between the guys, covered only by the shells of leather jackets and wiry arms. They catch me staring at their faces, trying to summon a name or a place I might have seen them at before. When our eyes meet, though, they tell me to say nothing, stay quiet, look away, so that’s what I do.
    You’d think no one has anything to hide anymore, but there are still pills, secret stashes, hidden connections not everyone wants to share.
    This is how we live: either constantly on edge or constantly on the edge of oblivion. Some of us are like Cam, who’s been on his own since his first foster home, or like Aimee, who has only ever mentioned her dead father once, her mother left unacknowledged. Myself, I spent years perfecting the art of thinking of my parents solely as a source of income and annoyance, blanking out my brother. How I live now is I don’t tell anyone that my work is unraveling, that as we’ve stopped wondering the hows and whys of what’s happening around us, today, I can’t stop myself from wondering what’s happening to them.
    This is how we live: believing this end is a slow grind. We pick at the wet skin of lips, a miscarriage of nutrients. Eyelashes prod my tear ducts; I pluck them away and they turn to earwigs, mascara nightmares between my nails.
    I will not move today. The lifeless grey meat Aimee cooked yesterday had its claws out, kept me on my knees all night. It was something Cam, our self-proclaimed hunter, had brought in, either killed on the street or found dead already. A cat, probably. There are hundreds of them out there.
    Middle of the night I went outside to sweat it out, spit it up. We only have warm rainwater to drink, collected in pails on the back steps. Sand sifts at the bottom of each bucket, silt against teeth.
    My mouth is raw