An Abandoned Exeter: Exeter Without People
By FIONA LIU ‘28 and ANNIE ZHU ‘28
A ray of sunlight makes its way through one of the wide, gridded windows. It was rather easy for all sorts of mediums to travel through the tattered glass — thin and chipped like mica, and in some places, several entire panes were broken. As the air inside lay stale and dusty (the only thing that hadn’t changed since the virus that wiped out the entire population), the only sign of life was chalk still scribbled on the blackboards. Little clumps of ivy clung to each of the once-enameled chairs, intertwining through their barren frames. Without the people, a Harkness conversation began on its own, the creaking of chairs and light chirping of birds replacing the feverish notetaking and forcefully asserted comments of sleep-deprived students.
A chipmunk scampers into Elm Dining Hall. All the food had long since disappeared; the only subsistence remaining were the slabs of grilled chicken — tough and charred as the cement above it, yet still raw and reeking on the inside. Gagging, the chipmunk darts out of the wooden doors and instead scurries to Grill, where the rest of its companions lie, half-drowned in cans of Arizona and mozzarella sticks. A newspaper lies lopsidedly on the marble counter, the investigative on its page still displaying information from when the epidemic first hit.
The library has become a church of peace, the feverish scribbling and loud chatter of students who said they were going to “lock in” three hours ago a remnant of the past. However, not much has changed on the shelves. Thousands and thousands of heavy tomes continue to collect dust, their bindings and pages still yellowed and unraveling. Who knows how much knowledge has been lost to the elements? Probably not us — we never read them anyway.
Inside the science building, textbooks rest silently on tables. In biology classrooms, a few organs float halfheartedly in various buckets, waiting for a dissection that will never come. Graded tests lie in a neat stack by the door. At least now, no one will cry about getting the pulmonary artery wrong. The pendulum in the physics classroom continues to swing, imitating a spider and its huge web a few inches away. Without the feverish writing and praying of students, a sense of peace settles in the classroom (unlike the wavelength-frequency formula, which will never settle in the pupils’ brains).