“But you said you remembered the gas,” Mrs. Nesbitt said. She was speaking from the passenger seat of a once new PT Cruiser. Methodically, in the obsessive-compulsive way she had about her, Mrs. Nesbitt was opening and closing the glove compartment. She placed her fingers, nails bitten to the quick, the pale half-boon at the bases barely visible through the tears and dried blood, on the glove compartment lock and turned, listening with satisfaction as it popped open and the contents inside tumbled out. Once open, Mrs. Nesbitt reorganized the items – a small gunmetal gray flashlight, the kind that you have to shake for an inordinate amount of time to receive a dull blaze, two lighters, a book of matches with the friction strip well worn, some rags, maps obviously well-used in the dirt and rips that poxed their once colorful surface, a package of Tums—peppermint, and a gun, one that a lady of age and bitten fingernails such as Mrs. Nesbitt might easily be able to handle. “You told me just before we left New Mexico. And now the gas gauge says E. And now we’re sitting here in the middle of a desert.”

Mr. Nesbitt was working hard to ignore his wife. He sat in the driver’s seat, the key chain dangling from the ignition. One would expect a man of Mr. Nesbitt’s stature, a man of some great rotundity whose shirt did not quite cover that last flap of skin that hung loose over his belt, with a balding scalp with errant wisps of hair waving in the breeze created by a combination of a partially open window and Mrs. Nesbitt’s rearranging of the glove compartment, to have more keys. In fact, with Mr. Nesbitt’s uncanny resemblance to every elementary school janitor ever hired, one would expect him to have circles of keys all around his presence. But, there was just the one key now with a key chain so covered in grime that it couldn’t bother to be deciphered. Resting on the driver’s wheel, from which Mr. Nesbitt was reading in his effort to ignore Mrs. Nesbitt, was a travel guide titled, “Now that the World has Ended: A Practical Guide to Survival on a Post-Apocalyptic Planet.” He had bought it on impulse, when he had run into a bookstore one morning for a cup of coffee. It was very fortuitous for him, one of few such moments in his life.

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