There had been a machine, immense and useless. There had been a man, despairing and unapproachable.

The machine, deprecated and lonesome among the tilling fields, had been worn down and stripped away. It stood among the empty abandoned cropland, as barren as the plot it rested on. Its wheels had long been broken off and stolen, and the plow sat, its share blade rusted and weathered. The fields themselves were located at the top of a hill overlooking a wide, sprawling river valley. A single road lead down the hill back to civilization—to be specific, it lead back to a fork in the road of a small intersection carved into the remains of a grassy knoll. In one direction was a long, winding path back to the houses and stores and tree-house slums in the refugee towns made up of people who managed to get out from the city before it flooded. In the opposite direction laid the industrial complexes and construction sites where men now found a sudden incentive to contribute to the work that needed to be done, the ground-out pits where bankers and lawyers worked with artists and valets. The disaster relief effort had been drawn thin, as their city hadn't been the only hit by flooding—they had gotten off relatively easy compared to some of the people in the north.

The man worked two shifts a day. One at the small, cramped storefront that had been where his old employer had set up outside the city. He took old orders from his old boss like old times, checking the inventory, cleaning the floors, stocking the wooden shelves and making sure that they hadn't become crooked when the building would sometimes shake when the rains and winds grew powerful and violent. They would often grow so terribly strong that, at times, the man would fear that the storms were back, and that the flooding would shortly follow. He was a stoic person otherwise, or at least he'd like to think so, but the crash of lightning and seemingly eternal thundering often made him want to pack up his belongings and head east to the inland.

“This weather's wearing down on me, I don't know how much more I can take of this,” he would often tell his co-workers. He hadn't dare complain in the earshot of his boss, who had grown only more dour. The co-workers would always offer a slight nod or sympathetic grimace in reply, albeit conceding that life in the city had not been much better even before the flooding.

After the man's shift at the store was finished, he would go home, change clothes, and change into his other pair of boots. His wife usually wasn't home yet, so he would often cook a small meal with what he had been rationed at the beginning of each month. Once the sun had begun to lower in the skies and the waning crescent moon became visible, he would set off to his second job, which was more volunteer work—but helping rebuild the levee would give him and his wife higher priority on the rations list. Therefore the man went as often as possible, walking the path to river's coastline, crossing the hill on which the abandoned machine sat. He had never been able to visit the hill anymore; it reminded him of many memories that he'd prefer to forget.

“I feel kind of relieved, actually.” He had been sitting outside of the construction site with another of the workers, and this is what the migrant had told the man. He was much younger than the man, with olive skin and thick hair. Compared to the man's wrinkled face and thinning, graying scalp, this young worker looked as if he had just come into the town from somewhere untouched, free of the worry that seemingly plagued the inhabitants of what was left in the city. Most had already departed for the shelter of families further away from the floods—those that remained became even darker in the face, less enthusiastic in their step. But as the man had learned, the younger migrant had emigrated to the city—in a cruel twist of irony—to avoid the endless monsoons that had ravaged his homeland.  “I was always a little anxious whenever it rained around here. You know, thinking that it'd be the last time it wasn't raining.”

“Well,” The man leaned back on the bench and watched the unmanned bulldozers sit idle across from them. It had been made by the same company that had manufactured the tractor sitting at the top of the hill he couldn't refrain from thinking of. “That's a bit defeatist in thinking that something bad is inevitably going to happen.”

“Well, it did.” The young migrant motioned to the machinery that the had been watching, hints of disgust in his voice. “I saw it when I was younger, before I came here. A lot of hubris and no caution. These 'dozers, and excavators, or whatever... People kept digging and digging and didn't think much of what would happen to the earth. Just taking and taking, and now, look... Mother nature really gave it to us this time, and now for once, we don't want it.”

The man recoiled as if the man had struck him. “It's not my fault or anybody else's fault that this thing is happening. It's not some kind of... revenge on us for whatever we might have done wrong.”

“I know that,” the young one's shoulders slouched and his voice lowered to a mumble that the older man had to strain to hear. “I'm not superstitious. But I'm frustrated about—I don't know, everything, mate.”

It began to rain again. Neither made any effort to shield themselves from the pouring water.

They were both quiet for a long time. Without speaking the younger man rose to his feet and began to walk the paths toward town. Turning back towards the older man a final time, he gave a curt nod and a brief wave. The older man—now the only man, again—nodded back. He was alone now, and that was enough. He'd sat there even longer, neck freezing from the rain, unmoving.

It was enough for the man think long and hard about his own self. He had hated the city and longed for peace and quiet, a relief from the noise and people around him on cramped sidewalks and restaurants filled to the brim with other people. The old hill with the broken down tractor on it, well, he could still remember the first time he had ventured out to the hill, the glorious isolation that came with it; finally alone for once. It was an exhilarating feeling, enough to make his heart beat faster—this was his own planet, a realm where he was the only man on earth. Finally alone. Finally quiet.

That had become his spot of meditation, of studying, of focusing, and he would have been happy for it to be only his lonely spot for the rest of his life until the day he took the long trek from the city to that hill and found that it was already being used by a girl his age.

“That was about a good decade ago, honey,” his wife told him.

“But you remember it, right?” The man—her husband—replied.

It was dusk, under near-total darkness and a starless sky, though the freezing moon still shone through their bedroom window. “Of course I do.”

Sleepless nights were common for the man and he'd often simply lay in bed, thinking. It'd been seven years since he'd been married to her, maybe nearly eleven since he first had laid eyes on her sitting there, actually in the seat of the tractor, overlooking the city. His first thought had been to be offended. That had been his spot. A sort of jealousy, a possessive bewilderment. That had been his spot. He remembered walking up to her, his face red, and she had only turned to look at him and her eyes destroyed him.

“Hello,” she had said.

“You...” he stammered—suddenly a great deal less confident—“is this your first time up here?”

“No,” and she brushed back her black hair with long, thin hands. “I go up here often, and I noticed that someone went to this hill the days I wasn't here.”

“Well, I go to this hill a lot,” The young man insisted, as if to prove himself to this new and strange intruder on what he had believed to be his domain.

“Guess it was you, then,” the young woman concluded.

That was how he had first seen her.

“I remember that,” she told him, still drowsy, still facing away from him. She yawned, and he felt a pang of regret for always waking her up to talk about things that probably could have waited until the morning. “I remember that, and how we used to talk about plenty of things up on the hill.”

“How come we don't go there anymore?”

“Was your decision. You said it wasn't good for either of us.”

The man's chest swelled as he recalled more and more of the events between himself and his wife—back then, she was just another person, an acquaintance, if anything, an inconvenience in his youthful eyes, as it meant his miniature world of solitude would have to be shared. But over time, as he learned that the young woman had felt the same way about many things the man did, they became close, confiding in each other their beliefs in the world, what the world meant to them personally, and plainly what the meaning of the world was. 

“I didn't say that,” the man said. “We just went up there less and less.”

“The floods didn't help.”

“Yeah, but even before that,” the man watched her stir, tracing himself among her soft skin, the moonlight illuminating a halo around her head. “Even before that we stopped going. We used to go up there to talk about all the things we hated and people we hated... Then we grew up and became what we hated.”

She only grunted.

The man kept pressing, undaunted by the grasp of sleep beginning to reach even him, eyelids fluttering, breathing deeper. He was tired, but he wasn't going to leave the topic alone. “I think you don't remember a whole lot, is all. It's a long time since you and I were young.”

His wife turned to him, suddenly very awake, eyes burning. The man breathed in quick and shot her a look as if to say, I was kidding, go back to sleep. She only stared—stared with those same eyes that pierced through him and destroyed him when he was young, destructive enough for him to try and look past her, through the windows, through anywhere, as long as it was far away from here. “When you and I were young,” she began.

The man tried to look away.

“You used to want everything to go away,” she continued, held his gaze, caressed his face. “You were tired of it all. I was the same. I remember the nights on the hill we spent, waiting for something to happen. And it did.”

The man said nothing.

“Everything is gone now,” she told him. “There's nothing left to hate anymore. You and I used to imagine the world without that city, thinking that it would finally free us, right?”

He finally managed to whisper something, but the words again quickly became caught in his throat. His words were wavering, lungs suddenly without air. “The city's gone and we're alone now, it's...”

She only looked at him. Waiting for him to speak. Expectant.

“It's...”

“It's not as you imagined it.”

The next morning, he woke up, wordlessly dressed and fed himself, then walked along the cracked and muddied paths until he reached the path's split and followed the old roads up the hill. He found his oldest machine in the abandoned fields and climbed back into the seat and watched the sun rise over the old city in the valley below, below the valley, below the skies, below the flooding waters. Below the lights. He sat, trying to remember how it had been, how it had gone, how it was going to be. The waters had begun to lower, and he could see what was left of his old apartment's roof.

The man looked into the sky the color of rust and felt warm tears streaking down his cheeks. He could remember nothing.