Photo by Sven Mieke on Unsplash
Traci and Mikey stand outside their boutique gym, Slim. The signage is oversized and pink, loopy like Traci’s handwriting. It is the most colorful thing about this large box of a building in a nondescript strip mall with more parking spaces and palm trees than people. Two anonymous blond friends hold a ribbon across heavy doors and Traci and Mikey laugh as they clumsily maneuver a pair of scissors.
“1, 2, 3!” they chant, and slice into the ribbon with a satisfying snip. There’s cheers, Traci and Mikey kiss, long and drawn out, all tongue and injected lips. Their matching baseball caps emblazoned with the Slim logo knock against each other. Mikey grabs Traci’s ass, tight in yoga pants, ready to work out. The ribbon holders stand by awkwardly, smiling nervously to each other and waiting for them to stop, flaccid halves of ribbon dangling.
When they’re done their display, they push open the heavy doors, holding them for friends and the cameramen who follow silently. Traci doesn’t look at them, she’s a pro.
Sparkling gym equipment stands at attention. Lines of treadmills and ellipticals, weights and yoga mats. There’s a long row of mirrors against the back wall making the gym look twice as big as it is, with twice as many machines. A man dressed in black holding a camera on his shoulder stands off in a corner, trying to blend in. A red light blinks.
“We! Are! Open! For! Business!” Traci yells into the empty hall, her voice enveloped by the padded floor and encroaching walls. She spreads her arms and does a twirl, extensions flying. A series of expected claps erupt from the friends standing behind her. Traci dances over to the reception desk and runs her fingers over Slim branded merchandise, autographed pictures, water bottles, baseball caps, sports bras, coasters, posters, wine glasses, her newly published memoir. Technically it’s not out yet, but it will be by the time the episode airs. Mikey stands behind the desk at the computer.
“May I help you Miss? Are you interested in a Slim membership?” he asks, a goofy smile on his face.
“Oh I’m interested in a membership alright,” she responds with an exaggerated wink.
* * *
Mikey runs frantically from the reception desk to the back office, packing up bits and pieces of their lives before the ocean takes it. Traci can hear it inching its way towards them, block by block, like an octopus moving on land, its tentacles unfurling down empty streets. Every time they go outside there are more places they can’t access: the restaurant where Mikey proposed, the nail salon where she gets her weekly French tips, the bar where Traci meets the girls for drinks that are inevitably thrown in each others’ faces for the benefit of the cameras.
Traci wanders the gym looking for things to rescue. She takes a few yoga mats, some clothes, her memoir, tenth anniversary edition with a bonus chapter. She finds some tubs of protein powder and five boxes of power bars. The fruit has collapsed in on itself, a pile of brown rot nestled in a 500 dollar glass bowl Traci got years ago as a gym-warming present from someone she no longer speaks to. Flies pick at it and buzz off to a dark corner of the building where they store spare towels and organic lavender detergent.
The air conditioner has stopped working and the air is thick with humidity and phantom sweat. It rests on her sunburnt skin, pressing against her like a dress two sizes too small. Her blond hair is pulled up in a high ponytail, frizzy and stiff. It smells like smoke. Everything smells like smoke even though they managed to escape the fires that ravaged their gated community and the surrounding homes last week. The smell is in her nose and on her clothes and she can’t get it off. Sometimes she forgets what’s happening and tells herself that she’ll have to buy all new stuff. But then she remembers and that there is no stuff anymore and nowhere to buy it either.
Traci wants to save the weights but Mikey tells her to leave them.
“But we can at least work out a bit,” she begs. She needs something to ground her, to make her feel normal. They have already lost so much, she doesn’t want to lose her body too. She is 55 years old and her kids are gone but at least she has rock hard abs and smooth toned arms.
Mikey shoves the contents of file cabinets into bags and tells her she’s being ridiculous, not prioritizing the situation properly. He is rushing, looking over his shoulder like at any moment the water will pour in through the front door. He wipes sweat from his brow as it drips from the rim of his baseball cap onto his nose. His graying hair is soaked, like the ocean swallowed him up too, along with the others. The heat is unbearable and according to the spotty news reports it’s only going to get worse.
Traci’s phone buzzes and she pulls it from her back pocket, slippery in her sweaty hands. She hopes it’s Lauren telling her she made it out safe, or Olivia saying she found Stan, but it’s just a warning that her battery is about to die. She holds it up in the air hoping to catch some wisp of reception but there’s nothing. She hasn’t had service for days.
When they’re done, they pull the heavy gym doors closed behind them and lock up out of habit. Traci looks up at the sign and pulls out her phone to take one last picture, but it’s already dead.
* * *
Traci picks her way down the crumbling street, weeds poking up through cracks in the pavement. Her walking stick thumps against dry ground, its sound enveloped in a cocoon of heat. She doesn’t know where she is until suddenly she does. A corner of the sign has fallen, covering the gym doors. It is coated in dust, the pink lettering bleeding together with brown.
She is tiny and wiry, all tendons and leather. She manages to squeeze between the sign and the doors and pushes but they clatter together, metal on metal, still locked after all these years. The sound echoes in the barren landscape. She shushes to herself and waits a few seconds, listening for movement. She hasn’t seen anyone in months but that doesn’t mean no one’s here.
She ruffles around in her bag for her keys. Some things she could never manage to part with: keys, an empty tube of her favorite lipstick, an old receipt from drinks with the girls. The receipt once blew out of her bag in a dust storm and she spent hours looking for it, crawling on her hands and knees, sobbing until her suntanned and calloused fingers clasped it again, snatching it from between two rocks like she had snatched it off a restaurant table years ago.
Muscle memory takes over as she finds the right key and slides it into the lock. There’s a sharp click, and Traci uses the whole weight of her body to push the door open.
It’s pitch black inside. She instinctively reaches for the light switch on the right but it just ticks like an old clock. She pulls out her solar powered flashlight and shines it into her gym, casting a long finger of light into the familiar space. There are no windows. Mikey wanted some. He said it would cheer the place up and make it more welcoming. She told him it’s not exclusive if everyone can see you all the time. She remembers he raised his eyebrow. They hadn’t been together for very long yet and he wasn’t used to all the cameras. He didn’t know what it was like to live among them without even realizing they were there.
The ellipticals and treadmills are coated in a thick layer of dust. Sheets of paper form a trail of panic from desk to office. She’s surprised to see that nothing is wet, nothing stinks of ocean. Either the water never made it up this far before it receded, or the gym was sealed tight.
She moves quietly but confidently, retracing the steps of her past life. She runs her fingers over her memoir on the rusting, metal rack, her spray tanned face smiling back at her from the cover. She opens the cash register but it’s empty of course, they took all the money when they left, not that it helped.
The room to the office is still open from when Mikey dragged the bags outside. She sits down on the leather couch where they would take afternoon naps, eases into its cool hug, and looks across at the bulletin board with first aid instructions, emergency numbers, and staff schedules. Jenna, Larissa, Hugh.
Mikey.
There is a little bar fridge. Traci had forgotten about it. The day they fled they had raided the storage cabinets but had somehow missed the fridge. It takes her a few tugs until it opens but when it does the smell of mold and rot makes her cough and cover her face with her scarf. Rotten sandwiches, a Tupperware container of a dinner long forgotten, an ancient slice of birthday cake on a Hermes plate with a gold rim.
There is also vodka. Three bottles. One is half empty, the other two haven’t even had their necks cracked open yet.
Traci throws herself in front of it, blocking it with her body, a learned reaction to protect what is hers, what she has found, and what she has foraged. She looks over her shoulder and then remembers she’s alone here. Tentatively, she reaches into what is now just a warm, smelly box, and pulls out the opened bottle. She twists off the lid and breathes in the smell. It is late night parties, lunch dates, martinis by the pool, screaming matches on patios as the sun sets where glasses get broken and cameramen have to jump in to stop them from pulling each others’ hair. It is a whole life, recorded for the entertainment of others and then destroyed by the ocean or the fires or whatever climate catastrophe came next.
She takes a sip. It burns her throat and warms her stomach that is so tiny the old her would be jealous if it weren’t for everything attached to it. She takes another sip, and before she knows what’s happening it’s pouring out the corners of her mouth and onto her tattered blouse, soaking into the creases of her worn jeans, coated in years of mud. She slides down onto the carpet of her old office, her old life, legs splayed, and laughs into the slowly emptying bottle. If they could see her now.
She is laughing so hard she barely hears the front door click open. She covers her mouth with grubby hands, her nails cracked and bitten to the nubs. She is drunk and fumbles for the flashlight. It shakes wildly and clatters to the floor before shuttering off. She can hear footsteps approaching as she sits in the dark between the couch and the fridge. Her heart beats out of her chest and she doesn’t know what to do.
It is obvious she is in here. It is obvious she is drunk.
Reaching for the vodka one last time, Traci takes a giant, determined swig and then smashes it on the floor. Shards of glass fly all around her, twinkling like diamonds. She stands up, holds the bottle out in front of her by the neck, and turns on her flashlight.
Tam Eastley is a writer and web developer based in Berlin. She likes writing about reality TV, tech, the post-apocalyptic world, and is editing her way through her first novel. She is a co-founder of ongoing, a prompt journal for music and prose. These days you can find her curled up in her snuggie in front of the Netflix fireplace show, reading a good book.