[center][u]The Daily Grind
[/u]By Green[/center]
Let me tell you how my average day starts. I get up, stretch, take in the (admittedly pretty great) view from the window, wash up, eat something quick, and then head down 4th towards a certain little coffee shop. Traffic's pretty good on 4th, but I prefer to walk, with gas these days being the way it is. Anyway, this shop isn't a big chain or anything, you've probably never heard of it. And I don't mean that in a hipster way, I just mean that it's called Percolations, and I'm pretty sure there's only one of them. I let myself in, take in the newspaper, never anything exciting anymore, and sit down in my favourite seat, by the side window, where there's never any glare from the sun. Sometimes I don't know why I still come here, they never get my order right, but I guess it's for the company, not the coffee. I catch the eye of Mona, the waitress, and smile, and before I let her know what I want, I say hi and ask her how it's going, how her day looks, whether they've been busy. You know, smalltalk. Mona always just smiles and says nothing, but that's not really that surprising. I mean, she's been dead for ten years. Everyone has. 

I was just a kid when it happened, only sixteen years old. Never did figure out why I was spared. I guess it's just my luck, eh? But then, the details of back then are neither pleasant nor important, so I'm fast-forwarding to the interesting part, a whole decade of living on my own later. It wasn't all that hard finding food, honestly, a lot of the city's power grid stayed up, so I was able to locate fridges and freezers for [i]years[/i], even get some rudimentary cooking going sometimes (rudimentary based on my skills, sadly, not the available materials). I worried about animals moving into the city, but for the most part it's just small things like foxes and rabbits, so I didn't have to worry about being menaced by urban bears. I make my home in the penthouse of a building whose elevator still works, because I'd always told myself I would live in a nice penthouse apartment when I grew up. I'd kinda been hoping for more fanfare, honestly. Or any at all.

See, that's the hard part about life after the end. Finding a way to survive comfortably isn't nearly as much of a problem as you'd think (at least not in the early years, I guess), but Humans are social animals, they need other people around to talk to, interact with, in order to keep their minds running efficiently. Once I got over the initial fears of starving, freezing, or being mauled to death, I found myself... bored. I had no "job", nothing to [i]do [/i]every day except search the city for more supplies. I didn't really pay attention to the thought, but I guess I stopped hoping to find other survivors after about the two-year mark. So after a few months by myself, I started talking to things around me, since it felt less insane than talking to myself. Mona the waitress, for example, is a cardboard cut-out with a photo of a woman wearing a waitress uniform on it, I think this place was running some kind of contest or something and she had the entry stubs stuck on. I figure whoever the woman in the photo is, she's probably dead, but I try very hard not to think about that. Her boss, Bob the stern but understanding manager, is a framed photo of the dude who ran this place, stuck on the wall in the back, which I pretend is a TV phone to his locked office. Sometimes I have to improvise; Tim the barista is a mannequin I carried over from Sears. I guess Bob believes in casual dress, since Tim is eternally modelling a nice summer outfit. 

I'd set up 'still life' scenes like this here and there throughout the parts of the city I frequent when I'm not out searching for supplies. A fancy restaurant, a department store, a big train station that took me the better part of a year to set up just right, all with their own colourful casts of characters. But of them all, Percolations is my favourite. I don't rightly know why, I just grew to feel like Mona and Tim were the closest thing I had to friends, and Bob was almost like a mentor I could explain my problems to. I wish he could have given me some sage advice like the mentors in the movies I've found, but sometimes having someone to listen helps a little all by itself. As I grew older, I found myself focusing on Mona. Maybe it's because she was a photo (which I was careful to keep out of the sun, so it wouldn't fade so fast), maybe it's because she was the cutest female 'character' I'd invented, but I think I developed a real crush on her, one I never mentioned because it was embarrassing to think about, let alone mention out loud. But sometimes I had dreams of her being a real person, and I would walk in and ask her if she'd like to join me after her shift, go uptown to a [i]real [/i]coffee shop, for a fresh cup of joe. They were nice. But I'd always wake up, and not only would there not be a real girl smiling beside me... there'd be no one at all in the city.

That's kind of the problem. No matter how colourful I made the characters I invented, no matter how much I tried to play into my own fantasies, at the end of the day, I was still the last man alive, and I was talking to myself. But hey, I guess that's just my luck. Sometimes I would allow myself to pick up that hope that there were more survivors out there, but with communications networks all messed up, the only way I'd ever know I wasn't the sole survivor of the human race would be to lay eyes on another person, and the city was fresh out. And after ten long years, I found myself with no one to turn to, no prospects of any future except more of this existence, repeated every day for the rest of my life. Is it any wonder I started to lose hope altogether? I had a few guns, no post-apocalypse scavenger worth their salt wouldn't, mostly to be used to chase off or defend myself against the occasional larger animal. But as the days passed, I found my thoughts turning to putting one of those guns to a use that had nothing to do with protecting myself. Just gotta try and go out like Mice and Men, think happy thoughts before I pull the trigger. Every day, I would get up, stare at the handgun from across the room, and find a reason to stay alive. Eventually, though, all of them started sounding so hollow, more like justifications. This progressed to its logical conclusion about two weeks after the ten-year mark. 

I finally let go of the last of my empty reasons not to do it about midway through bathing one morning, but it seemed wrong to go out without finishing the job and getting dressed, and since I was hungry anyway, I broke out my favourite foods that I'd been saving for a rainy day, thought I'd go out in style. But as I stood in front of my scenic window in my favourite outfit (with all the department stores open to me, I was able to have more of a wardrobe than Mad Max suggested), holding the gun to my temple, I suddenly had a moment of deepest despair. Not because I was afraid to die, not at that point. Because I didn't want to die alone in an apartment that may have been home, but that I felt nothing for. The alone part I couldn't really do anything about, mostly, but the emotional part? I lowered the revolver and made a decision then, that if I was going to kill myself, I was going to do it at Percolations, the place that made me happiest, surrounded by the closest thing to friends I'd had for the last ten years. So I wrote out one last entry in the journal I'd insisted on keeping all this time, a farewell to the theoretical person who might find it and read it in the future, and headed out. It was about the time I usually left anyway. 

As I walked down 4th, weaving my way between the cars left to rust in the road, I planned it out. I would sit in my usual booth, gun on my right side, so the bullet wouldn't take out the window after leaving my skull. The window was completely intact, if rather dirty, and it just felt [i]wrong [/i]to vandalize Percolations on my way out if I'd left it alone for a whole decade. The journal would be sitting on the seat opposite mine, so the table would be in position to block any, uh, [i]mess[/i] that could render the book unappealing to future historians. But most importantly, before I went and had my seat for the last time, I would tell Mona how I felt about her and ask her for that cup of coffee. It's not like she'd be all that upset if I didn't keep my date, so I didn't see the harm in finally taking that step right at the end.

The thing is, as I walked in the front door, I suddenly found my throat hitching up as I approached Mona, even [i]now [/i]I found it hard to confess to her. Just my luck, right? So I go take one last tour of the building to try and shake off the jitters, heading into the back offices and closets, and peeking into the washrooms (which aged [i]much [/i]better than you might think, with no one using them anymore) as I tried to calm myself. And then, just as I thought I was ready, I heard a noise from the front. Sounded like some of the dishes the shop had kept on hand clattering around. Now I [i]know [/i]that couldn't have been Tim laying out an order for a customer or Mona mishandling a tray, so I drew the same gun I'd intended to blow my brains out with, suddenly afraid. Funny how your survival instincts can kick in, even when you only loaded one bullet into your gun. Thus armed, I crept down the hall towards the door back to the main room, moving with the same careful silence I'd used when there was a hungry coywolf in the area but I wasn't quite sure where. Although my usual strategy would be to just wait out the noise, avoid whatever was out there entirely, today I was clearly feeling a bit less defensive, so I slowly turned the knob, counted to ten, and then barged through the door. 

My eyes took in the same coffee shop they'd seen countless times before, good old Tim standing by the espresso machine, Bob's picture on the wall, and Mona standing near-ish to my favourite table. They also took in, for the first time, a young woman, about my age, who was knelt down, clearly searching the drawers next to Tim for useful supplies. Her head snapped around to face me, alarmed by my method of entrance, and she froze when she saw the gun. There was a hunting rifle on a fabric strap on her back, but she made no move to draw it. I froze too, like I wasn't quite sure what I was looking at. I asked her if she was real, and she slowly nodded, telling me her name in a calm, flat voice that sounded like she wasn't sure if the same were true of me. I replied with my own, and I kid you not, I had to think about it for a second to remember my name, I was so stunned. I lowered the gun, and belatedly realized that she was surprisingly pretty, figured survival would have had more of a toll on her. After the most profound silence of my life, I said 'Hey' and got a 'Hey' of my own in return. I paused for a moment, wondering if it was weird that it felt like I was cheating on Mona, then thought about it and decided that yes, yes it [i]was [/i]weird, Mona was a cardboard cut-out. It's probably worth noting, though I didn't even think about it at the time, that I put the revolver back in the holster in my jacket and buttoned it closed. Maybe my luck was taking a turn for the better. So, as she stood up straight, I grinned at her and I said the very first thing that came to mind.
        "So... can I buy you a cup of coffee?"