Skyquakers Read Online Free

world.
    ‘ Men are like parking spots , ’ she said, ‘ all
the good ones are taken and the rest are handicapped! Ha! ’
    ‘Oh my god, Lily, that ’ s so funny!
That ’ s, like, the funniest thing I ’ ve
heard, ever! ’
    Friday nights she played indie jams and acoustic covers of
classics. Tuesday afternoons was Animal Imitations Hour, when Lily would make
an ambiguous animal noise and give her audience a few songs to guess.
    ‘ It was a goose stuck in a barbwire fence! Anyone
guess that? ’
    ‘Lily, you ’ re so funny! ’
    Lonely Lily slept very little, only a few hours a night in
her protective cube, he imagined, and during times when she was away from the
microphone, she played a long playlist of songs with no indication that she
would ever return.
    ‘ If I ’ m not here tomorrow, ’ she said to him every night, ‘ then here ’ s
the last song forever. ’
    After the initial shock of finding another survivor – that was a bad word to use, ‘ survivor ’ ,
but it was becoming more and more natural to say – Ned
wondered why Lonely Lily never addressed the elephant in the room: the storm,
the beams, and the radical change which had crushed all of their livelihoods.
Maybe she was living in the same fantasy as him and believed it was all a
misunderstanding, a quiet game everyone was playing, and soon it would all be
over and people would return to their normal lives, unaware that anything had
ever gone wrong. She was in denial, like him, but subtle hints gave away her
true loneliness: Lily would sometimes, between songs, begin a short soliloquy
about her former life. She would tell him what she got for Christmas last year,
or about her favourite dog which she missed, or about how ridiculous the
concept of reality TV was and how many hours of their lives they had spent
indulged in the meaningless lives of others. These were all the fragmented
clues of someone who knew she was doomed, and Ned felt as though she was
gradually writing her own eulogy. Eventually she would run out of stories to
tell, and once everything was told, there would be no point existing anymore.
One day he would turn on the radio and hear only static on 104.1 and she would
be gone. He dreaded that day. Desperately, like suffering a long-distance
relationship with a girl with whom, after merely a week, he felt he had spent a
lifetime with, Ned anxiously needed to hear her voice every morning, and every
night before he slept, just to know she still loved him.
    ‘ I have to go now, ’ she said. ‘ As
always, you ’ re listening to Lonely Lily,
live from Charles Darwin U, the last DJ on Earth . ’
    ‘Don ’ t ever leave me, Lily. ’

QUAKERS

 
 
 
    By the end of the third week, he had searched the town high
and low, inside and out, and had found no other life forms sheltering in
fridges or hiding in any possible cracks where the beams may have missed them.
He had grown insanely bored on his own, long abandoning books and Gameboy games
for the thrill of smashing a BMW with a golf club, for no particular reason
other than the therapeutic remedy of it. He had explored every house, ransacked
every pantry and garage, and had stocked his own home high with canned foods,
chocolate bars, tinned fruits and general living supplies. He had not seen an
animal larger than a frog in a very long time, nor had he seen the footprint in
the sand of any creature other than himself. He wore other people’s clothes,
finding no need to wash his own if he had thousands of other wardrobes to
choose from, and he imagined himself living other people’s lives as he wore
them. Who had these intelligent beings been, the ones smiling in the family
portrait on the wall? He didn’t believe they were real anymore; just mannequins
whose faces gave the illusion that real people lived in this dollhouse, like
some sort of nation-wide IKEA showroom. Wyndham was a fairly large rural town
considering its distance from any major city, and yet to Ned it was