Crowds

by Chris Scott

Your son is the first to send you the video. “Creepy” he writes, short and sweet as always. It’s a link to one of those video sharing apps you don’t have, but the link opens for you anyway. There’s a woman in what looks like a grocery store, recording her face, and when you finally adjust the volume she’s in mid-sentence: “--wait, let me check real quick. Right, it’s 11:37 a.m. on a Saturday, so there should be plenty of people here. A ton, usually. This is seriously so spooky to me.”

Then she toggles the video so it’s moving down the aisles as she provides voiceover, “I swear there were people here when I came in. A lot of them. I got my cart like always, started shopping, and now like… the entire place is just empty. There’s nobody.” More aisles, no people. This goes on and on. What about the employees? You think to yourself. She reads your mind: “No cashiers either. No employees. I’m literally the only person in the entire store. Did they, like, evacuate it without me? Do I just… leave without paying for my stuff?”

Another minute or two of pushing her cart down empty aisles, and then suddenly, startling you so much you almost drop your phone, she turns and there’s another shopper at the end of the aisle -- a man, picking out frozen pizzas -- and now you’re slightly worried about this woman, but when she approaches him, he’s confused. Another shopper turns down the aisle, and then another. Then an employee, and then another. She keeps recording and the grocery store is quickly fully populated again. “Ok, but I’m not going crazy,” the woman pleads. “You saw that right?” Yes, you think. I saw it. You were alone.

The video goes viral for some reason. A couple days later, you find your husband watching it, which is how you know when something’s exploded online: When it’s finally filtered down to out-of-touch middle-aged technological neophytes like you. There are other videos from other people -- copycats, some call them -- in similar circumstances. In locations that should be humming with crowds, but are suddenly completely, weirdly empty. A shopping mall, a town square, the DMV, a concert venue. Some of these are faked or exaggerated, you’re pretty sure. The news is pretty sure, too. This is a classic example of a social media feeding frenzy, an organic trend emerging out of nowhere, and then fueling and perpetuating itself, everybody getting in on the action.

But the videos keep coming. And then the third- and second-hand accounts. A friend of a friend took her daughter ice skating and when they came around the corner, the rink was devoid of people. It was just them. Your husband’s coworker was in Prospect Park the other day and swears he had the whole place to himself on a beautiful afternoon, when it should be teeming with Brooklynites.

So, okay, there are other explanations. The economy isn’t great right now. Inflation is keeping people homebound more than usual, and so, sure, you would expect crowds to thin a bit. You would expect an increasing likelihood that you may occasionally find yourself alone in a typically packed space.

And let’s talk about likelihoods, while we’re at it. Let’s talk about probabilities (the talking heads on television are all at once obsessed with probabilities). What are the odds that you might find yourself completely alone in a supermarket, even in a heavily populated area, even during a high-traffic time of day. Not terribly high, per se, but definitely not out of the question. Because it is possible. Most things are. Everywhere is empty sometimes. Probably this kind of thing was always happening, and now people are just paying attention to it.

And as far as these other videos are concerned, these videos that keep popping up everywhere, filmed from all four corners of the globe now, in a dizzying array of languages, ranging from higher probability (alone in a movie theater, high grossing film, opening weekend: 1 in 50, let’s say) to extremely low probability (returning from the restroom in a football stadium to discover every other person on and off the field has apparently decided to take a bathroom break, or visit a concession stand, or whatever, at that exact moment: 1 in several trillion, fine. But still: It could happen. And anyway, that video looks digitally manipulated).

Let’s say you don’t buy the explanation of statistical variances, and you don’t believe it’s being faked for online attention, or at least not all of it. What are we talking about then? The gradual disappearance of crowds? A vanishing population? Even though by every proven metric there are more people alive right now on our planet than at any other time in human history?

Or maybe what we’re really talking about is a kind of cosmic slowdown, right? An unwinding of reality -- the breakdown of our shared experience into individual consciousnesses, each reality spinning off into its own little universe, everything just slightly off its axis. Not an apocalypse of flames and destruction, but a more casual degradation, a fading away, little bit at a time, until eventually it’s just you. It’s just this.

At least, this is what’s on your mind driving home from work on a too-dark-too-early Tuesday evening, your headlights finding your garage door, your feet finding their familiar route into your sizable home, and after a glass of wine and a checking of emails, you think: I had a family, right? A husband and a teenager? I’m not just imagining that, am I? Didn’t we once fill this house with noise and love and fighting and fixing? I could’ve sworn it wasn’t just me in this big, empty place, you think, looking around, calling out, hearing nothing. Seeing nobody. You take out your phone and start recording.

BIO: Chris Scott's work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, Okay Donkey, Flash Frog, ergot., MoonPark Review, New Flash Fiction Review, scaffold, Gone Lawn, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. His fiction has been selected for Best Small Fictions 2025, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He is a regular contributor for ClickHole, and an elementary school teacher in Washington, DC. You can read his writing at https://www.chrisscottwrites.com. Bluesky: @iamchrisscott.bsky.social. Instagram: @iamchrisscott