Soup Can Citizens By: Niah Wilson

https://spark.adobe.com/page/FNQ93kqrE1XF1/

RED BARON—CLASSIC CRUST—HAWAIIAN STYLE PIZZA Even when there’s a global pandemic people won’t touch that rubbish. But the space marked CHICKEN PAWS is empty. The man sighs, mopping the rivulets of sweat from his forehead. Almost believed in human rationality for a second there. We’re good. Proceed. He puts the pizza box under his arm anyways. No time like the present to try new things. He turns, places his feet over the muddy phantoms of previous boots (but ghosts wouldn’t leave such muck, would they?). Traces their trail, a cobbler, layering new sand and gravel (as if sand and gravel were new!) over preexisting stones. His mud overpowers some of the faint impressions. How long since those feet trod here? Pause, by the soup aisle. Someone’s built a castle in the middle of the aisle. Turrets of chicken noodle, a keep of minestrone. The moat (tomato soup, was it?) is rotting. He opens another can, refloods his little lagoon. It’s clumpy, concentrated as it is. It’s winter, for this castle, there is slush in the moat. A mouse pokes its head from behind the collapsed drawbridge (it’s eaten through the sleeves of Saltine crackers). “Squeak,” the man urges. The mouse barely blinks. Laps up a few drops of red soup. Retreats. The man sighs. He’ll befriend his subjects tomorrow. Surveys the shelves. Stacks of alphabet soup. Untouched. Dusty. Clucks his tongue. The mouse pokes its head out again. Silly mouse. He remembers seeing a chicken peck a mouse to death. A living dinosaur (dinosaur nuggets! How long since he’s had those? Years, decades, eons). He slips two cans into his coat pockets. He almost makes it to the checkout counter before one of them tears through the fraying lining on the right side, bursts on the tile, washes away muddy prints in a flash flood of broth and beef. He gasps, eyes fill with tears. “Oh no, no, no, no!” A wail, no, a howl. Pasta letters drift on vegetable juice currents, lost. A despondent shipwrecked sailor, the man rocks back on his heels, curls his arms around his knees. Whispers, over and over and over and over and over and (you get the point), “No, no, no, no.” Falls forward, knees hitting the tile with a loud crack, throws his hands, clasped, into the sky. He opens his mouth, pauses, thinks, shakes his head. Picks up the now empty can. Stands. He goes to the scanners. Passes the cans—one whole, one broken, its label obscured by sauce, it doesn’t matter—over the glass tabletop. “One...dollar...forty...eight...cents.” He makes sure to put the appropriate pauses and drags as he imitates the machine. Drops the cans back into his pockets. Waves the pizza box over the scanner, starts to say the price. Clenches his jaw (resist!) and stares at the ceiling where the carcasses of fluorescent lights line the sky. The full can falls out of his right pocket, following its twin. It doesn’t break. He pretends not to notice it’s dropped. Grabs his box, whistles a jaunty tune, tips a holey bowler hat toward the HELP desk. “Good day, madame.” (In another universe the woman behind the counter grins. She’s missing a few teeth, gums glisten. A bit of spit sprays when she speaks. Wash your hands and say a prayer because Jesus and germs are everywhere.) (In another universe the man laughs, more than he should.) (In another universe—SHHH. They’re listening.) (Besides, in this universe there is no woman.)

Outside of the store the man surveys the parking lot. Packed. He walks to the nearest row of cars. A tall light post proudly announces that this is ROW Q. The first car in the row is a gold Toyota Corolla. 2003. He whistles. That, now, that was a good year. Actually— No. It wasn’t. Like an Olympic hurdler he gets into position, begins a running head start, stops, right by the bumper of the car. He looks at it. He thinks. (He really does.) With the dignity of a royal stepping into their carriage, he lifts one leg onto the hood of the car, pushes himself onto it. Climbs to the roof of the car, surveys the lot. The cars are covered in dirt. The Nissan next to him has an especially promising canvas. He bounds over to its hood, wincing at the sound of plastic giving way under his scuffed boots. Keeping the pizza box under one arm, he bends over the windshield. He draws a flower. A rose. Yellow. (That’s important. Nevermind it’s just smudged dirt.) He jumps to the next car, a ... (it doesn’t really matter, does it?) He writes words here. (What words?) Jump. A truck bed this time. They backed into this spot. Show offs. He starts to stand on the side of the bed, ready to climb to the hood and write on the windshield when he catches sight of something on the rear (front?) windshield. A stick person family. Together. Two parents. Three kids (one girl, two boys). Even (and this, this is the last straw. There are limits to what a man can take) a stick dog. The dog—is its mouth open? Perhaps it’s howling. The man joins the howl, sustaining the broken note as long as he can. His voice strains. The note breaks. The man listens. All quiet on the earthen front. Stares at the stick family. Steps closer. Scratches at their smiling faces. Claws at their white outlines. Whimpers as his yellowed nails slip off the glass. Shakes his head. No, no, no, no. Howls again. When he looks again their smiling faces mock him still. They’re on the inside of the glass. He can see that now. Not right. Not fair. He surveys his progress on the cars. He’s perhaps a quarter of the way through the row. Enough. Jumps from the truck bed—sticks the landing (would’ve had a perfect score—is it ten or thirty?—if not for the grouchy judge on the end). Shrugs it off. Can’t win them all. Pizza box under arm, can in pocket, the man lumbers off. Homebound. Well, not his home. He can’t remember when he had a home. But no one will mind. There’s no one to mind. He stops at the first house he finds. The rickety gate’s white paint has peeled off, snakeskin, paper thin. Weeds and grass rise to his knees, higher. Off the path they’ve tangled the spokes of bicycle wheels. He tries not to look too closely. He sees rusting training wheels poking over the grass a few feet away, shaking at the sky like a vengeful fist (a supplicant hand, empty, always, always empty). The front door is unlocked when he tries the handle. Perhaps the family stepped out—just for a second, be right back—when it happened. The husk of a house plant (a palm tree?) shivers from its pot on the draft he stirs as he treads through the living room. Dust. Everywhere. The last bits of daylight illuminate it, spinning it into cold sparks. What is dust? Human skin cells, if he remembers correctly. He takes a deep breath, locking his lips, puffing his cheeks (his kindergarten teacher called it “catching a bubble”). There was a movie a few years ago. Half the universe’s life reduced (augmented?) to dust. But if there’s only one man left on the planet, well, then what percentage of humanity is dust now? What if he breathes them in? Are they partying in his lungs? Without him? Good riddance. Are they mourning in his lungs? An endless parade of funerals? Make room. He tsks when he sees the kitchen table. It’s still set. Four red placemats, a scrolling motif woven into the fabric. Crystal goblets. Forks on the left. Knives and spoons to the right. If not for the dust it would be pristine. He’d shout an apology to the silence, didn’t know you’d be returning so soon! didn’t know that anyone lived here still! didn’t know! It simply won’t do. He mimes taking a top hat off, adjusting the bright flower flopping over its brim, winks at the little girl in the front row, elicits a giggle, mock bows to a rapt audience. Replaces the hat. Raconteur voice: “Ladies and gentleman! For my next trick, I will make them all disappear!” He tears at the placemat closest to him. Tosses it to the ground. Their raft now gone, waves of gravity drag the lone survivors down, too, the earth reclaims the innocent (the guilty—they were guilty weren’t they? But of what?). He sinks the other three settings. He steps around, to the head of the table. Crunch of glass underfoot. A tear slips from his eye. Bows. Standing ovation. An encore? How could he ever top this? No point trying. He places the pizza box on the table. It’s thawed at this point (but then, it always was, it’s rotting). Picks it up, walks to the oven. He pulls the old pan out, charcoaled remnants ignored, throws it towards the sink, ignores the ensuing clatter. Then, box and all, slips the pizza into the oven and shuts the door. Back to the table. Pulls out the soupcan. The soup has dried to a thin patina on the metal. He sets the can a foot in front of him. Leans forward, props his chin on his forearms, tapping an anxious dance with his feet, waiting. Waiting. And waiting. But wait— Was that—? No. Waiting. No! There it is again. A peep. “Come on, I know you’re in there,” he whispers. “Please?” Perhaps there is a rustle. Perhaps it’s the skip in his breath as he thinks he hears them. Perhaps it’s the ghosts of this house’s past residents, residual life’s weak attempt at flirtation, drifting through the room, poorly forsaking notice. He picks up the can. Empty. He sets it down, resumes his vigil.

Explication “I feel rather drained. The prolonged creative effort.” —Hamm, Endgame, pg. 70 I don’t actually have a vendetta against Hawaiian pizza. During spring break my dad and I were driving to the grocery store, listening to the radio. The host said that the least popular item at grocery stores was frozen Hawaiian pizza. Sure enough, that was the one section of the frozen food aisle in Walmart that looked normal. Nothing else did (never thought the absence of chicken paws would be abnormal, but alas, here we are). The cleaning aisle was barren, the canned food aisle nearly the same. All the cans could have been condensed into a space the size of a china hutch. I first read Endgame in late February. I never thought that in just a few weeks we’d be living in a world far-too reminiscent of that one. A bit of hyperbole on my part, perhaps. We certainly enjoy a greater degree of freedom than the characters in the play. We still can leave our houses, go for walks, go to essential businesses. Things have changed, but our lives have not been completely confined to just a few rooms (although it sometimes feels that way). In the wake of COVID, Endgame is especially relevant to the world today for its dealings with themes of isolation and confinement. The characters in Endgame are isolated, but the keyword there is characters. There’s more than one of them. While scrolling through Instagram a week ago, I found this writing prompt: “Your character wakes up to find they are the last person on earth. Describe their first twenty-four hours.” I thought about this prompt in conjunction with Endgame. Hamm and Clov bicker endlessly, yet the characters have a dependence on each other that extends beyond physical needs. These characters need each other for companionship, something whose premium is made clear when Clov equates friendship with beauty (Beckett 89). What would it mean to truly be isolated, to have no contact with anyone? Technology keeps us connected with our classmates, professors, and not-so-distant family and friends through COVID. But what if you truly were the last person and could only converse with the shades of your imagination and memory for company? To explore this issue, and why the not-so-isolated nature of Endgame is significant, I wanted to toss a character into just this situation. What happened to the rest of the earth’s inhabitants? Who is this one man that remains? While it’s fair to raise questions about these plot holes, I’m more interested in exploring this: is it better to be alone and able to wander the world or to be stuck in a room with three other people? For all the nagging of Endgame’s characters, I think the main character in my story would gladly trade places. Human compassion and companionship are what matter most in a plagued and unknown world. Besides this initial premise, I also drew inspiration from a few other key aspects of the play for my story. Shakespeare references pepper Endgame, and I wanted my character’s howling episode to be like Lear’s mourning as the character is forced to acknowledge (not for the last time) just how alone he truly is. On the flip side of this, though, many people across the nation are engaging in an evening howl at 8 pm. Some people are participating to honor essential workers, others in mourning, and others as a form of connection that they can’t have otherwise. Moreover, my character’s eccentricities should not be mistaken for madness. For this, I have to thank a line from King John, when Constance says that she is “not mad but sensible of grief” (3.4.52). The grief of being the last person on earth...it’s unfathomable. Concerning the writing style, I tried to emulate a sort of Beckett-ish style in my writing. My copy of Endgame contains a four-page play, Act Without Words, at the end. I love this play. It’s written as just stage directions, yet the way it’s formatted reads like prose. I wanted to have the action in my story read this way, to pay homage to the theatrical aspect of the play as a reminder to myself that this was a play and meant to be performed. Some of this action is also tedious to read. It wasn’t until I watched the 2000 film production of Endgame that I realized how tedious Beckett’s stage directions can be. From miming scanning food at a checkout counter that no longer operates to repeating an action numerous times, my character engages in tedious action. We rely on routine, and the importance of routine, even for seemingly trivial, pointless actions in our daily lives has been made excruciatingly clear to me over the past month. And, while on the subject of the checkout scene, the “other universe” mentioned is a reference to a piece I wrote in LIT 431 reflecting on the last month living in this new world (shameless plug here: https://therotatingstones.wordpress.com/the-sound-of-silence-by-niah-wilson/). If my story seems especially desolate—its namesake doesn’t exist—it’s to showcase the glimmers of hope in Endgame. Perhaps this is my reluctance to accept how dark it is, but I think there are glimmers of hope throughout the play. Sure, “there are so many terrible things” in the world (pre- and inter-COVID), but there is more to the world than these terrible things (Beckett 52). One of these things is compassion, which Hamm cites as the reason Clov stays with him. This compassion, he admits, isn’t easy to find; Clov thinks it’s tiring (Beckett 84). Yet, this compassion remains and “there [they] are...that’s enough” (Beckett 92). "Life goes on."—Hamm, Endgame, pg. 75

Works Cited Beckett, Samuel. Endgame. Grove Press, 1957. Shakespeare, William. King John. Ed. Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine. Folger Shakespeare Library, www.folgerdigitaltexts.org. Accessed 19 Apr., 2020.