# H Mart at the End of Everything

[Alex Eos](https://substack.com/@alexeos)

Jan 28, 2026

We have always said we have forever. We always had New York, Rome, and maybe the Vatican too. We had love, lost it, and found it along the way—like one of our superstitions: touch the train door twice, never finish the fortune cookie if the fortune is too sweet, cross yourself on the early blink of the hand when the avenue is empty enough to be a rumor. Most nights, it’s a joke.

We are the city when it’s paying attention. The block, the building, the people braided together—thinking with one body and moving like a bodega line: impatient, loud, and somehow still making room on a crowded subway train.

Tonight, it was steam.

We saw it from all angles, all viewpoints above and below, and a dozen ways to retell a story. From the bus mirror that still shook even though the engine was off. From the puddle that held a slice of sky and returned it with oil rainbows. From the kitchen window where a grandmother turned her radio down to hear if the sirens were saying our block’s name. From the TV: a presidential State of the Union that couldn’t decide whether it was comfort or gasoline. Outside, the steam rose in loose silk, smelling like curry spices and the life that could have been.

The two of them were up there, watching city lights so bright they went blind—each window clicking out with satisfaction. They watched the sky light up one last time. We knew them by the way they treated shared things: folding the grease-blotted paper into a neat square instead of crumpling it, sliding the carton closer to the edge and then farther back because we taught them edges.

We’d watched that roof in better weather—fireworks blasting off like tiny red rockets. We’d watched the weatherperson on TV accuse the moon of stealing tides, and listened to the conspiracy theorist down the hall who once believed we faked the moon landing. We’d watched from the sky when the airships arrived wrong.

You could hear the wrongness in the way seagulls fell silent and car alarms forgot their melodies. Light stopped acting like itself. It didn’t become dark; it became less. Heat went. Color went. The hum under your fingertips on a radiator went. A ferry sobbed once in the blue and then held its breath.

We didn’t say their names. We could. Half of us knew them from elevator rides and laundry rooms, from the chalk game they once drew that hopscotched all the way to Jupiter. But naming is a flare. We learned that quickly: attention draws cold math.

Phones buzzed on tar. A baseball stadium now empty. A brother with a soccer ball. A mother calling from her kitchen: come home, she said—dinner’s on the stove. The same stove we once knew couldn’t catch fire from a pilot light the super “forgot” to fix one Christmas.

We are good at remembering, and excellent at leaving. We’ve practiced for hurricanes and rent hikes and romances that moved away. We know the short stairs and the crooked stairs and the tenants who complained. We know the service ladder off the fire escape that bites your thumb if you grab it wrong, and the courier alley that smells like lavender vape and basil when the delivery truck misses a crate.

We began to move ourselves into place—one of us propped the lobby door, one of us kicked a cone aside to free the curb, one of us carried a sleeping child with a paper crown still on.

On the roof, the two of them hesitated. We were split on what forever meant. Half of us said courage tastes like sesame and sea salt. Half said fear has the same flavor.

We learned something else, and we hated it: the airships’ maps were not just heat and noise but a notice. Any place we gathered our eyes became a bright shape in their language. Fireworks would be a death wish instead of a celebration. Even love—if we showed it too loud, too proudly—became a target.

So we practiced new tenderness. We looked sideways. We looked through reflections, or not at all. We listened from the next room. We eavesdropped like survival depended on manners.

We dimmed. We let the laundromat sign fail and pretended it had always flickered. We quieted the scaffolds so their teeth wouldn’t chatter and give anything away. We eased the wind across the roof—not to make the moment prettier, but to catch the siren sound and fold it like a napkin.

“Eat one,” one of the creatures said. We heard it in three apartments and one pigeon loft.

“Then we run.”

We agreed. We always agree with plans that include running, even when we know how many of us will trip.

The plastic knife broke and still worked like a little miracle. They each took half. It was ridiculous and holy. We’ve fed armies and after-parties and grief that showed up without an RSVP, and we know this: the last bite isn’t about hunger. It’s about leaving as a person instead of a statistic.

We began to open paths. A breeze pressed the stairwell door ajar just enough that it wouldn’t latch. A neighbor who disliked talking to anyone happened to be holding the elevator, even though the elevator wasn’t coming. A ribbon of caution tape unstuck itself from a sawhorse and flapped, revealing an easier duck-under for small shoulders. We were a chorus of tiny permissions.

The airship hung lower. Where it looked, soup cooled too fast. Down by Pier Six, the good stand—the one that always gave an extra cilantro leaf when you didn’t ask—lost its boil. We kept our eyes soft. We practiced a survival of glances.

We wanted to keep them—of course we did. We are greedy for our best people. We wanted to fold both of them into one pocket and walk them out under our coat. But a city isn’t a cage, not even when it’s made of love. We refused to be a lock.

So we risked ourselves.

* * *

We spun up the little generator behind the deli that coughed on a frequency the drones didn’t like. We opened a steam valve on Ninth so a false heat signature bloomed like a decoy lover. We threw our voices down three alleys at once so the echo got lost in decision trees. We were not brave; we were numerous. It felt the same.

They kissed their thumbs and pressed them to each other’s knuckles and ate the last half as if it were a vow. We didn’t clap. We breathed.

Then they ran, and so did we.

We ran ahead to check the curb for ice that wasn’t ice—it was the absence of heat shaped like ice. We ran behind to catch a door before it banged. We ran beside to say turn here without saying turn here. We followed both routes at once, because we could, because we must—because we have always been a mouth and tonight we were also hands.

By morning, we would be missing teeth. We could feel which ones already: a block where our favorite bookstore argued with dust and lost, a pier that forgot how to hold its boards together. But we could still taste the warmth on the handrail where they’d gripped it, left and right, stadium and theater—two routes braided in our memory like steam that didn’t know it was visible.

We have always said we’ll leave after one more bite.

When we say we, we mean you, too. We mean the part of you that waited for the good soy sauce and the part that ran without it. We will remember both. We will speak them softly. We will not make a flare of what we love if a whisper will guide you home.