Free The Man Who Watched the World End by Chris Dietzel Page B

played more than fifty years ago. Most of the cards have been picked apart by the mice and rats anyway. A Ty Cobb card couldn’t be traded for a loaf of bread. A Stan Musial card is worth as much as if it were a mere blank piece of paper.
    While down there, I rediscovered Mr. Lee’s old safe sitting next to a box of cards. The Johnsons and I found it when we inspected his newly abandoned house for anything useful. I asked them if they wanted it, but they both shook their heads.
    “What are you going to protect?” Mark asked.here’s noedo
    His sister added, “No one is around to steal anything.”
    They were right , of course. No one new had come to the neighborhood in over two years and there were millions of abandoned houses to pick through. I took the safe anyway. It was something I didn’t have, and it serves a purpose different from any of the other things in my house. A sticker on its door said it was both waterproof and fireproof. I guess a part of me liked knowing that, no matter what was happening around me, whatever I selected to go inside the safe would remain protected. Life has a funny sense of humor to give me the safe but nothing worth putting in it. I don’t need to protect my birth certificate or social security card anymore. No one is around to steal my mother’s jewelry or my father’s coin collection. I ended up putting a photo album filled with my favorite childhood memories inside before locking it back up.
    After coming back upstairs with a box of baseball cards, I pushed the old rag under the doorway to keep the bugs downstairs where they belong. It would be nice if I could create a similar blockade for everything lurking outdoors, something I could put around my property to keep the predators away.
    Standing in front of the bathroom mirror to make sure no bugs were hiding on my clothes, my thoughts went back to my high school cap and gown, which were downstairs in a box between the safe and some family photos. The last time I tried it on, it still fit like a bed sheet, just like the day I graduated. I finished high school fifteen years after the first Blocks were identified and nine years after a hundred percent of new babies wouldn’t be able to speak, move, or do anything for themselves. As a freshman, it was the norm to get treated like shit by the seniors. It was quite a bummer not to have anyone to do that to by the time I was a senior. Andrew would have been a freshman that year. If I saw anyone hazing him there would have been problems; no one gives my brother a hard time except me.
    My graduation year was noteworthy for being the same year the world’s population dipped back under six billion. At that point , twenty percent of people were Blocks. This was reported on the evening news as my family ate dinner, the anchorman saying it with the solemn voice saved for declarations of war or assassinations. My mother seemed to take comfort in the number of people in the world becoming more reasonable. She didn’t say anything like that in front of my father, but you could tell she was slightly encouraged by the way she asked us if we would like seconds of the mashed potatoes. My father told us the world didn’t feel any more vacant: the roads were still packed during rush hour, the lines still long at the post office. The comment was meant to comfort us.
    Those were the circumstances in which I joined the adult worE"> each for senior week. It was tradition; they felt like they had to let me go.
    The trip was supposed to be my final seven days of carefree life. My friends and I got drunk every night and hooked up with girls just as each graduating class before ours had, but there were also nights out on the sand where we passed jugs of wine up and down the line of friends while talking about the future. The ocean looked black in the night. Waves crashed against the shore while we spoke, causing some of what was said to be missed above the rush of water.
    We said the same things that other