We find the bottle of scotch stashed in the back of a cabinet, when the house is on its last leg and we know

we’ll have to leave soon.

Stanley whistles as he turns it around in his hands, inspecting the label. “This thing is literally twenty years old.

That means it’ll be good.”

“Does it?” I ask, taking the bottle from his hands. I roll it across my palms and flinch; the glass is colder than I

expect.

“I dunno,” Stanley says. “That’s what my grandpa used to say. I’ve never had scotch.”

“Wasn’t he an alcoholic?”

Stanley takes the bottle from me. “Probably. That’s why we should listen to him.”

“Let’s open it, then,” I say. “It’s already twenty years old. How much older can it get?”

“Who knows?” Stanley hesitates, then puts it on the counter. “I don’t wanna risk opening it and losing out of

some damn good scotch twenty years later.”

“Do you really think we’ll make it that long?” I ask, my voice small. He doesn’t answer.

 

Truthfully, there’s no way for either of us to tell. When the sky started changing colors, orange to red to purple

to black, we knew there wouldn’t be much time left. The fires and drought did nothing to fight off death’s creeping presence. Every day, we see fewer people wandering around.

Some days, the sky lightens a bit, from a suffocating black to a husky gray. It would look like just a cloudy day

if it weren’t for the sun shining relentlessly, in the middle of the sky like a hopeless beacon.

The sun dries out our house, and when the roof almost collapses on us, Stanley wordlessly tosses me my bag.

I throw some things together—the few clothes I have, some trinkets I salvaged from my first home—and see Stanley slip the bottle into his.

 

When we find a new home, a barn that’s a few days away from decay, we swipe some food from an

abandoned grocery store and clamber up to the hayloft for a picnic. I’ve got a slightly moldy baguette; Stanley’s got the bottle of scotch.

“I wonder what it tastes like,” I say, as I rip the baguette in two pieces. I offer them both to Stanley, and he

takes the smaller one. “It looks like it should be sweet. Like butterscotch.”

Stanley side-eyes me. “You did not just suggest that scotch tastes like candy.”

“Hey, they both have the word ‘scotch’ in them,” I say as I scrape some mold off the baguette.

Stanley smiles, but doesn’t reply. He twists the bottle around in his hands before setting it down. After a few

seconds, he says, “Remember when we could see the stars?”

I hardly could. It had been months. “If you press your hands against your eyelids, you can see little white

specks. That’s almost the same thing.”

“Gee, thanks. Can always count on you to fix things,” Stanley says, chuckling.

​

The bottle comes with us when the barn burns down one night, and when Stanley falls and snaps his femur

clean in half, and when we find a bunker tucked into the side of a hill, a cozy little thing that provides us shelter from the sun for a few months. It’s infested with mice, but it works.

​

We put the bottle on top of the fridge that’s gone dusty and long since stopped working. It stares down at

me every time I carefully step over all the mice scurrying around and grab some food. We venture out during the night to swipe cans from abandoned grocery stores. We settle into a routine, Stanley and the mice and I, one that’s very comfortable. One that makes me think we could have a future, for however long this godforsaken world lets us.

​

The bottle is still on top of the fridge when months later I toe at the pile of dead mice on the floor, when

open the door and see even more sprawled around our cans—cans that have recently been chewed open, cans that we got on our last grocery run.

I call Stanley over. “Poor things,” I say. “Wonder what got them.”

Stanley sucks in a sharp breath, but doesn’t say anything for a long time. His face is blank. His gaze stays on

the mice as he reaches up. His hand trembles slightly.

I turn to look at him, and he twists open the bottle.