After the First (working title)

Lauren Thurman

“Did you lose someone on the first?”

He asked me as soon as there was a lull in our conversation. When he cleared his

throat and pushed his beer glass in little circles, when I looked down to adjust the napkin in

my lap. It was as unavoidable as awkwardness. I smoothed the napkin over my thighs and

sucked air into punched lungs, savoring the sting of it.

“Yeah,” I said. “You?”

I was dating again. It had been eleven months since I lost Danny. Ten since the smell

of him faded from his favorite flannel. I wore it night and day for weeks, like a second skin,

until holes eroded in the shoulders and my mother quietly folded it into a far corner of the

closet. Eight months since the CDC took down its checkpoints from travel hubs and city

centers, issuing a limp announcement that “the threat had passed,” though the threat had

never been defined. Seven months since I went a full day without crying.

Most of the government reports settled on calling it a SUDDEN MORBID PHENOMENON ,

whatever it was that happened on the first. The country woke up on New Year’s Day and

twelve million people were dead. Just like that. Most of them were between the ages of

twenty and forty, but otherwise there was nothing to connect the dots. One popular

conspiracy theory revolved around a brand of Prosecco whose sales “correlated strongly”

with places where lots of people died—which is to say, any major U.S. city. A professor from

some Midwest liberal arts college got on TV and tried to tell us it was a symptom of “mass

generational fatigue.”

1
 I woke up a little after 10:00 on the first. I rolled over to nestle into Danny and he was

cold, cold, cold. There were no marks on his body. No pills on the nightstand. The cold of his

skin shot into my blood and my hands trembled. When I called 9-1-1 they told me, “We have

an unusually high volume of calls. Someone will be with you shortly.” I sat in the bed next to

Danny’s corpse for two hours before someone came. I held his hand; I thought that might

help.

The president declared a state of emergency late that night. The media threw around

suggestions of biological terrorism, bad opioid batches, and mass suicide in turn, but nothing

added up. It couldn’t be disease—a normal number of deaths occurred the next day, and the

day after. People were just, somehow, dead.

The next day, an emergency CDC taskforce set up a tent in every city. Workers in

hazmat suits lined up body bags on the street; there was nowhere else for them to go. Each

bag was tagged with the name of the body inside and a contact number for the person who

had found it. Some had a blue flag to indicate a religious exemption. Bodies without the blue

flags were sent somewhere for testing, cremated, and returned to next of kin in a cardboard

box. If they found something while they were examining the dead, some chemical or genome

the bodies all had in common, they never told us.

That January, it seemed like more people than ever wanted to go somewhere to pray,

but weekly religious services were suspended so priests and rabbis could perform funeral

rites around the clock. We didn’t get Danny’s funeral scheduled until January nineteenth. It

was just me and his immediate family at the service; everyone else who might have attended

was at some other funeral, mourning some more significant loss. All the funerals were small

in January. Everywhere you looked, shops were sold out of candles.

2
In the early months, it was hard to leave the apartment. I couldn’t face other people’s grief,

and other people’s grief was inescapable. It was in the flower wreaths and support group

flyers and spontaneous sobbing of each street corner, coffee shop, and public bathroom. My

parents flew out every other week to check on me. They coaxed me gently outside, took out

the trash that was overflowing with takeout containers, bought me vitamin supplements.

But when spring came around and the scream of loss settled into a low, constant

drone, I found that other people’s grief was necessary to break up the white noise. The

woman with puffy eyes who rang me up at CVS sounded like her own unique note of loss,

and the man with his head pressed to the bus window sounded like his. I began to linger when

I passed strangers on the way to work, listening for it.

On a hot July night, I was having drinks with my lucky friend Shannon. We all called

her our “lucky friend Shannon” now because she hadn’t lost anyone close to her on the first.

Not a soul. She had lost a patient, though—just minutes after an early-morning delivery on

the first, when Shannon had taken the newborn away to be cleaned and weighed. She came

back to the delivery room and the mother had, in Shannon’s words, “slipped away.” Shannon

was delivering fewer babies these days.

At some point while we were talking, I realized that I recognized half the people in

the bar. Not by name or face, but by the bags under their eyes. They were nervous, moving

gingerly, like test animals newly escaped from a lab. Their clothes didn’t fit right (mine were

too tight; I was a “type A mourner,” according to my grief counselor) and they all watched

each other watching each other.

I mentioned it to Shannon—how many people I clocked as New Year’s mourners. She

looked around but couldn’t see what I was seeing.

I went home that night wanting something I couldn’t identify. The want gnawed at the

inside of my cheek for almost two months before I decided that it was probably sex. And

3
even if it wasn’t quite that, it couldn’t hurt to start there. So in September, nine months after I

lost Danny, I opened a bottle of wine and installed ancient dating apps I once thought I’d

never use again. I tried to look for something that wasn’t just Danny, back from the dead,

waiting for me.

My first real date was on September twenty-third. Harrison met me at noisy coffee shop on K

Street. The whole time, he apologized about the noise level. “Really, I didn’t think it would

be so loud in here. We can go somewhere else. Do you want to go somewhere else?”

I told him, “It’s the morning rush. It should calm down soon.”

Harrison asked me if I had lost anyone on the first and I ended up crying and crying. I

wasn’t prepared for the Danny-shaped hole inside of me to be part of casual conversation. He

got me some paper towels from the bathroom and patted my shoulder. I never even learned if

he had a New Year’s story, I just made my excuses and sobbed on the bus ride home.

Then it was Clara, whose black hair, when she stood up, reached her tailbone. When

she sat down next to me at the bar she swept it out behind her so that it glistened like oil on

water.

“What do you do?” she asked.

“I love your hair,” I said. I blushed furiously and she laughed.

When she asked me the question, I was ready for it. Loss bloomed under my sternum

like exploding antimatter but I breathed through it. I shared a piece of it with her without

crying.

“For me, it was just an ex I could never get over,” Clara told me when I turned the

question back to her. “I know it was nothing like what you lost, but it really shook me up, you

know? It was like, one day I was daydreaming that she’d still come back to me. I was

clinging to all this false hope. And then after the first, I was looking at an eternity of ‘what

4
if.’ What if she were still alive, what if she had come back to me, what if we were together

now, if, if, if.” She shook her head and downed the rest of her whiskey sour. “It was like I

was letting my imagination build even more of this fake life for us, and I could do that

because she was dead. She couldn’t blow me off anymore.”

“Damn,” I said.

“Yeah. It got me fucked up.”

There was Lisa, who had lost her older sister. She was the first person I slept with

after Danny. When I told her this, she pushed me away. “Are you sure you want this?” I

wasn’t sure, but I knew that I needed it.

There was Dylan, a journalist, who bragged about the award he had won for his

reporting on an entire house of young professionals that had died in Columbia Heights. Their

bodies weren’t discovered until the next day, after the SUDDEN MORBID PHENOMENON had

become a news event, after people had started calling each other in a panic. I pictured their

phones ringing and buzzing, the house otherwise silent and still. “That’s pretty much how it

went,” Dylan said. “We have photos, in the story, of their phones lined up with all the missed

calls showing on the screens.”

For three dates in a row there was Mark, who smelled like warm bread and, we

discovered on date two, had had the same grief counselor as me. We aped her saying “Time

takes as much as it heals” and laughed and cried.

“Did you lose anyone on the first?” Day by day, I found that I needed to ask the question

more than I needed to answer it. I needed to know the shape and color of each person’s loss,

their stories like tiles I was slowly adding to a sad, shitty mosaic. It wrung me out each time,

but it was pain I wanted to feel. It was a scab I kept picking at just to watch myself bleed.

5
 In early November, I was waiting for the light to change at a crosswalk and a man

next to me shuddered. Without thinking, I asked, “Did you lose someone on the first?”

He told me her name was Renée. She had been training to be a beautician. She’d had

long, perfect fingernails that she would trace delicately across his back late at night when he

had trouble sleeping. She had moved up from New Orleans for him, and he tried to fill their

apartment with the things she loved, so she would feel at home: fruity candles, French

moisturizers. On the morning of the first, he told me, he performed CPR but stopped when

her braids fell out of her silk cap. He tucked it back in. When the EMTs arrived he pleaded

with them: Be careful with her hair.

I followed him for twelve blocks to gulp the sting of his story down. When we passed

a Starbucks I gestured to the door. “Can I buy you a coffee?”

He didn’t know what to do with all her stuff, he told me. It was all in his apartment

still—moisturizers, jewelry, bags full of little nail-polish bottles that clinked whenever he

reached past them for a new razor head. He couldn’t throw it out. He didn’t know anyone

who would want it. He couldn’t keep looking at it.

“I don’t want her stuff to just be another dead kid’s trash. You know there’s piles of

junk in my neighborhood—we don’t have thrift stores or nothing nearby. So people put all

the clothes and coffee tables and shit on the street, and who’s supposed to come pick it up?”

I nodded. I had seen some of that in my own neighborhood, and back home when I

visited. But less and less every month. It didn’t matter if it came from a ghost; free stuff was

free stuff.

He said, “Sometimes I think it’d be easier if she had died on a different day. So I

could have that to myself, my own space to figure out life without her.”

I couldn’t imagine feeling that way. If Danny had died his own death on a normal day,

I’d have to walk around with a hole through my body while the rest of the world continued as

6
normal. I’d have to worry about moving my car for street cleaning and filing my tax returns

on time. There would have been no government stimulus to help the bereaved pay for

therapy, no monthly community memorials, no hollow looks of understanding between

strangers.

The man who lost Renée checked his watch. “Oh shit, I have to run.” He thanked me

for the coffee and blew out the door. I never learned his name.

There were twenty-nine days until New Year’s Eve. I was sitting across the table from a man

named Jack. My lucky friend Shannon had set us up—gently, timidly, still treating me and

the rest of the people in her life as though we were glass.

“It’s fine,” I had told her after she had apologized for the third time for even

suggesting it. Her cheeks were red from embarrassment and from probably her third glass of

wine. “You know I’m out there again.”

She nodded emphatically, always such an expressive drunk. “I didn’t know if I should

say anything about it. Not that—oh god—not that there was anything to, like, say about it.

But I didn’t know if it’s something we were talking about. Oh my god, I’m sorry, I’ve had

too much wine.”

She decided she’d take care of everything for me, coordinating the time and place. “A

good old-fashioned blind date,” she declared.

We met at a trendy Belgian place in Georgetown, with low lighting and dark wood

tables. The bar was crowded and warm with evening chatter, but the rear dining room was

half-empty—it would fill up around us in the next half-hour.

Jack, with his trendy cropped pants and knife-straight nose, was in finance

technology; I was in communications—we ran out of things to talk about soon after the

waiter brought out our drinks. When he asked the question, a spotlight swung over the chasm

7
beneath my ribs and I ached so sweetly. I took a deep breath, trying to fill it up, trying to

deepen it. One of the two.

“Yeah. You?”

Jack nodded. “One of my sisters. Elise. She was a twin.”

I asked him to tell me about her, but he shook his head. “I don’t really like to talk

about it, not with people who didn’t know her. It’s not something I feel like I need to share

with the whole world.”

I looked down at my lap. My cheeks felt hot. “The whole world is going through it,” I

said.

“Yeah,” he said, “but I think that makes it more important to move on—or maybe not

move on, but at least move forward. I don’t think the entire country is supposed to be in

mourning forever, do you?”

“I guess I still don’t know what else to talk about,” I said.

He hmmmed and took a sip of his beer, a heavy Belgian wit in a fat tulip glass.

Carefully, he raised his napkin and dabbed at his lips with one corner of it. When he was

done, he looked at me. His gaze was hard to meet. “Why are you here, Mara?”

I puffed out half of a laugh. “Shannon set us up.”

“No,” he said. “Why did you come? What were you hoping to get from me tonight?”

I didn’t answer.

“I think you wanted to share sadness with someone,” he offered. “I’ve met a lot of

people like you. It’s not that you wanted to meet me or start something new, you just wanted

to commiserate. It’s okay,” he added, “I’m not hurt by it. But I’m just not interested in doing

that.”

“Then why ask me about it?” I snapped. “Why even start the conversation?”

8
 He shrugged. “I’m sorry. It’s a habit I’m trying to break. I was genuinely interested in

learning more about you, though.”

But I wasn’t going to tell him about Danny now, not like this. And I wasn’t going to

tell him how I panicked when it didn’t hurt to think about Danny as much as it used to, and

how hearing the story of someone else’s loss helped me find the hurt again, but never for long

enough. How these days I woke up thirsty for the sadness of strangers. Jack seemed to have

figured that out already.

A little childishly, I asked, “Why are you here, then?”

“Honestly?”

I nodded.

He spread his hands out above the table, palms up. A surrender. “New Year’s Eve is

less than a month away,” he said. “I’m trying to lock in a date.”

A year ago, that would have been a good line. The girl sitting across the table from

him would have laughed and said that was awfully proactive of him. And I would have been

far away from this restaurant, at home on the couch next to Danny, catching up on some

stupid show. But today, no one could mistake it for a line.

“You don’t want to die alone,” I said.

“Just in case,” he said.

I tried to imagine us in twenty-nine days, me and Jack at some party where everyone

drank steadily and watched the clock tick the year away. I could not imagine that there would

be noisemakers or party hats, or that we would kiss at midnight. We would toast the ones we

lost a year ago. We would hold our fingers over each other’s pulse points. We would sit in a

room with our friends, fighting off sleep, quietly waiting for the sun to rise. If we heard

sirens, we would remind ourselves to breathe.

9
 Powerful piece Lauren! Overall, I feel the story works as a meditation on the concept

of grief, and how it can completely overtake one’s consciousness, framing all things, all other

people with its tonal shades of grey. I guess that the way this emotion has captured the

narrator’s mind so fully works to explain why other characters seem to be responding in

similar, if not exactly the same obsessive way as she herself grieves.

The main recurring doubt in my mind regarding people’s responses to the SMP is the

absence of anger/protest/futile rage at what has happened. I guess this could largely be

explained by the narrator’s grief-coloured lens, but I still think it would have been interesting

to have her interact with somebody who had responded very differently to the way she does.

Perhaps one of her many dates could have represented an alternate response to grief? As it

stands, Jack’s calm, mild-mannered, approach to ‘moving on’ does work as a counterpoint to

the narrator’s studied obsession with grief.

However, I think a structure incorporating a character with a third kind of reaction

(perhaps anger, perhaps full-blown, unhinged psychopathy), could have acted as a nice kind

of counterpoint to the two main representations of grief-response modelled in the characters

of “Girlfriend to Danny” and Jack. I also wonder whether it would be worthwhile naming the

central narrator? Or perhaps her namelessness works to underline her role as a grief-

sponge/mirror, alternately soaking up and reflecting the grief of those fellow bereaved she

encounters.

I particularly like the image of the potential NYE party painted in the closing lines.

They strike the right tone of ominous expectation, commingled with the wistful, slightly

pathetic atmosphere that can always haunt parties celebrating the arrival of a new year.

10