A ramshackle, dust-coated world filled with tradition and suspicion, a la that of the inestimable Cathy Perdue. In the woods, dark and choked with clutter as though long abandoned, a brown clapboard house, low to the ground, but many-gabled.

I’m lost, wandering, with no idea where I am or how I got here. I find the door hanging loose from the hinges, clear myself a place on the floor in the living room and take up residence among the mice and spiders.

I’m careful. I know that people in this age (whatever age it may be) don’t take to strangers. I only go out at night. In the woods, in the dark, in some abandoned ruin, I figure I ought to be safe.

But I get caught. A fat bald guy with a shotgun and a giant flashlight warns me off his land, suggests I get out of town altogether. I’m ready and willing to take his advice. It was a nice place, a relief from wind and waking up with frost on my clothes. But these things are temporary, as are all comforts. I walk on–or I start to.

My dad steps out of the wooded shadows and stops me before I get 20 yards. He points out an even more ramshackle, even more ruinous outbuilding to the dark ruined house–just a shack, really. A single room. Inside, however, is a stairway leading down into a vast, high-ceilinged basement. A gas lamp casts unsteady light across drifts of abandoned crap. My dad shuts the door, leads the way down, and gets back to work.

I find myself helping him to clear space, to clean and organize and forge some kind of living space from the chaos. He has found an old upright vacuum cleaner and is tinkering with it, trying to make it work.

“So what happened here?” I ask him. “Is this supposed to be some kind of post-apocalypse?”

He gives me a look that says “No kidding,” and sends me off scavenging for power cord.

The Class of 2005 graduate page is up now on the Odyssey website. I am on it, complete with silly quotes, goofy headshot and glowing testimonial. Go see.

Half the people disappeared from the world. Inexplicably. There was no apocalypse. No alien invasion or war to end all wars. People were just gone. Streets empty. Maybe it was more than half. Those of us who were left had no way of counting. At first, we couldn’t have if we tried. We were all too busy grieving.

It happened on a balmy, overcast summer night in Boston. I was standing on a crowded subway platform under orange halogen lights–the red line, Charles St., the river north, rows of little shops leading south towards the Common–when the eerie keen of collective loss arose all at once from those around me, and I turned to find Erin gone.

I retraced my steps, walking over every inch of ground we’d travelled that night, stopping at every corner, every store window. The whole way I had to fight against everyone else. They were all as distraught as I was, all occupied in the same task. But the people we were looking for weren’t there. Finally, again collectively, we all accepted they were gone. People sat on curbs staring into the silent streets, speechless. I got up sooner than the rest, resolved to systematically seek out every person I cared about, in order of shortest distance. Somewhere I found a bike. I rode across the bridge to Medford, but Amy wasn’t at her house. Who knew where she might be. So I took my bike and got back on the T, which was still crowded, though quieter now. I went to Brighton.

I found Diana sitting on the floor outside her room. She’d just come from home. My parents were gone. She didn’t know where Amy was, or Udi. So we got up and went into her room and just kind of sat there on the bed, listening to mp3s from her computer. We talked about how weird it was that everything still worked even though there was nobody to run it or use it. We could ride the subway and surf the internet, but the quiet and the mass grief had impressed upon us a sense that the world had ended and was empty, that we who were left didn’t count.

We decided we’d live together from now on. Exhausted from our search, emotionally drained, we agreed to go to sleep. She got up to take a shower. I lay down on the bed.