Category: apocalypse

1

Decorated in sunshine. It gets stifling after a while, doesn’t it? At first it’s easy to laugh and breathe in the light. You run and dance amongst blossoming petals. Your friends shout, and your lover shimmers. Remember? And then you start to sunburn. Someone goes to get some water. The heat is suffocating, as they say, but it’s also kind of comfortable, and you think of sleep. You close your eyes. You open your eyes. And everybody’s gone.

* * *

When he realized he couldn’t feel it any other way, he hopped on a train. Her leaving was a caustic summer’s day putting his life on pause. Her absence a thirsty swallow. Her face was the worst part because it was still beautiful, even when she told him it was over, and now he realized. He really couldn’t feel it any other way: this was grief.

And he had to get away.

The train rocked on rails built for hundreds of other people hundreds of years ago. Everybody escaping and coming home. He didn’t know which direction was his.

He opened the book he’d brought with for comfort. Thumbing the pages, he smelled her and closed it again. The grass outside the window bowed under what he hoped was a new wind, rescuing.

* * *

At the train station, it started to rain, a fresh and eager shower, keeping his hopes up. The bright wind continued to play on the leaves and flowers and flags of this quaint, mountain village. Arriving at his rented apartment, he dropped his bags on the ancient hardwood and stepped outside onto the balcony. Behind him, the one-room summer home echoed with memories – not his own, having never been here before, but with those of lovers and adventurers before him.

He began to feel okay again.

* * *

The cafe charged almost nothing for a melange, so he bought three in quick succession, looking gratefully around the town square. The summer wasn’t over yet, and maybe it didn’t need to conclude in that wasted heap of regret and exhaustion as he had thought it might. This place was wet with wonder and simplicity, shining now though the clouds remained. He held his camera deftly in his lap, at the ready. Only minutes ago, as he’d sipped his second cup, he’d missed the chance to capture an elderly man coaxing his horse to drink. In the city, horses wore blindfolds. Here, everything was different. It was something about the familiarity these people expressed. Toward each other. Toward their fields, trees, and animals.

Suddenly, he lifted his camera and adjusted it as a child carrying a pot of flowers half his size stumbled across the cobblestone, his mother laughing and clapping from the doorway of the boutique. Click.

Half an hour later, a man sitting near the fountain lifted a hand with bread crumbs; a sparrow fluttered onto the bench beside him. Click.

A teenager crossing the square turned her face to bask beneath a silver sky.

Shutter speed. How fast do you have to be to gather all of that light into a single moment?

Click.

2

Alana couldn’t cry.

She kept breathing heavily, manufacturing sobs in the morning light, but it didn’t matter. She couldn’t make it real. Dust particles noodled around as she stared up at the ceiling of her bedroom. A straight line of sun blasted through the window across her, burying itself into the plush, lilac carpet. What do you do when nothing’s wrong and you’re still sad? What’s the next step?

Alana didn’t know. She watched that golden light sweep in slow motion through the room until the window couldn’t hold it anymore, and it ran away. She thought of her parents, vacationing in San Torini, and she thought of her career, rising like the sun that just left the room. Rising, yes, and even taking her with it. But what comes after noon?

Well, it was only 10:03. She rolled to the right and tucked her knees. Arching her back, she stretched her body, always reaching, and stood. Downstairs, Leo was finishing his breakfast. He knew she wouldn’t leave the bedroom until at least 10:00 o’clock. He always made breakfast around 8:30 anyway. It was always cold when she came downstairs. He always smiled as if to say, “Can’t you see how much I hate you?”

She never complained.

* * *

Her colleagues applauded as she shuffled back to her seat. Another victory. Apparently. She held her breath until the room was empty.

After work, she bicycled from the university, down the stoic hillside toward Cafe Renata. Beneath her, the pebble-strewn road took on a life of its own, provoking her, accusing her. It wouldn’t be so difficult to take a hard right, over the edge, into the heaving water below. Slip, said the pavement. Let me do my part. Maybe a crack up ahead could give her the excuse she needed. Maybe a sharp turn where the slope fell most welcomingly. But what can a path do, crooked as it may be? Nothing, if the pilgrim balks.

And just like that, she was inside, speaking with Hermann, purchasing a coffee, sitting in her corner, and, finally, seeing the man with the camera for the first time.

3

Rain outside the window. Falling. Steadily. They stayed inside. Those were the early days of lovemaking and unknown histories and quick forgiveness.

Snow on the cobblestones. Whispers. Echoing. They navigated the city with the confidence and arrogance of sophomores through the centuries. Alana talked about Leo seldom, but mostly here, during the winter, disguised as she was in the drifting snowflakes. He didn’t notice her nostalgia at first.

Spring sunshine boring a hole into his mind. Dust bunnies under sweaty feet on the wood floor. Spores infiltrating every breath. He started choking long before he knew why.

* * *

Summer.

On a Sunday, they awoke to the curtain sun framed in the window. Alana said she felt sick, and he reached over with his palm to her forehead.

“Not warm.”

“Feels warm to me.”

He got up and shuffled into the kitchen. She’d mentioned (not just a few times) that her previous husband was constantly making breakfast too early, leaving it on the table to cool long before she was ready to eat. She remembered it as a slight. He endeavored now to trap the heat, but the longer she stayed in bed, the more he began to doubt her memory. He left the food and stood into the hall.

“Alana?”

* * *

Hours later, he left the apartment to get some fresh air and couldn’t find any.

When he got home she declared the breakfast – and their relationship – tepid: “Just like Leo!” He froze by the window, decorated in sunshine, and stared outside until she left.

When he realized he couldn’t feel it any other way, he hopped on a train.

I could tell you about their hands.

The foil didn’t stand a chance. Their fingers licked the edges of those squared, metal sheets of paper faster than flames in the night sky, nail polish cemented on and flickering like fireflies, and I watched because I couldn’t look away. They were magicians. I could tell you about that…

Or I could write about their voices. We would sit in a row. Chang sat to my left, Rosa to the right. I intercepted every morsel of conversation: low whispers and spontaneous cries ricocheting above the countertop where our hands kept busy. Rosa made music with sentences full of symmetry and punctuated by her rhetorical invitations:

“Sherry, I just look right at her, you met Sherry? now she didn’t bring no salad, no fruit, can you see? no fruit for salad – she didn’t bring it – that Sherry, what you do? I just look at her, say, ‘Sherry!’”

Stories for the heart. I would listen and drink greedily of her enthusiasm. She spoke as if she cared about her routine stories of fruit salad and a woman named Sherry. And she made me care too.

When Chang was angry she talked like a tornado siren. Her eyes rolled back in a certain hysteria known only to her (and maybe Rosa, who would close her eyes tightly and nod and nod and nod…) and I watched as Chang’s voice rocketed, sourced by the breath within her lungs that fed off her one-track heart: even when she whispered her passion swept me up in its currents. And her voice still sounded like a siren demanding attention…just from really far away. When she was quiet, she rapped her words in even rhythms. Maybe some would call those low tones ‘disappointed’, maybe some ‘resigned’ if they weren’t watching closely. I think back now and call them a lesson in gratitude. For the little things. For the kind of hope that doesn’t take a knee.

I could tell you about their voices…

Rosa would sing when there wasn’t anything left to speak. It sounded like the pulse of ancient wisdom that (at the time) I imagined coursed through every wrinkled person’s veins – I was only twenty-four, and hadn’t yet realized most “older people” are still learning too. Age doesn’t promise wisdom, but Rosa had it in her bones, and she released it in her lullabies while we worked, side by side by side, rocking in the waves of her melody.

Growing older doesn’t give you those songs for free. You earn them, or you don’t.

You see, these women didn’t walk with the arrogance and ignorance of privilege. They’d been stripped of any pretense of right quite regularly, repeatedly, by greedy eyes and insatiable appetites. They were daughters of forgotten promises, malignant secrets, careful deceit…

Chang had worked in a casino, before the chocolate factory, folding laundry at the back. Wasted opportunity. For the white collars, the ones in charge, I mean. She should have been a dealer with hands like that. And she knew it.

And she decorated those creases in the foil with gentle caresses of victory. She was an overcomer.

She told me once, “The towels at the casino. The foil here. The dishes at home. The face of my husband. My fingerprints stick to everything I touch; through these I leave my secret legacy.”

I’ve tried to notice the things I touch since then.

So, it is their hands, too, and their voices.

And every day I sat beside them, these women, Rosa and Chang, I waited. I was patient. I waited for their belief in the somethingness of life to rub off on me. For their magic to make a difference in the caverns of my skeptic soul. And now that I think about it, I realize it’s not only their hands or voices you need to know; I want to tell you about their faces.

Living.

Lots of faces don’t quite make it there, or they had it once and lost the wonder. But these women…they had living faces: expressions you could touch, trace the lines in their travel-worn wrinkles, veteran joy comfortable even in grief and suffering and banality. I felt like their faces were more real than my own, and when they weren’t looking, I adjusted my smiles and frowns, though I knew I couldn’t fit in. They would often tell stories of injustice and laugh at the absurdity of prejudice; their faces showed no brokenness, the twinkle in their eyes echoed Maya’s timeless rhymes.

I knew I couldn’t fit in.

I hadn’t walked where they had, and frankly, I would have responded in fear and rage where they responded with overcoming.

But I could soak it up, and their faces bathed me in that light that’s brighter against the darkness.

I guess I’ve told you everything there is to tell.

Der Adler fliegt, bis Fleisch hier liegt. Der Mensch im Krieg, nur Blut genügt.

He kept following the man in the vest.

At first, it was just a handful of silly encounters, the two of them raising eyebrows in polite recognition, hung in the balance of fantasy and future. By the third or fourth week, though, they were already nodding, and by June, the man in the vest huffed, Guten Morgen, as he took his seat on the U-Bahn.

Michael didn’t trust him.

So, he began to follow:

9:10 am: The train pulls into the station and Michael finds a window seat, facing forward. He counts the seconds until the next station.

9:12 am: One hundred and sixteen seconds later. The train slows to a hissing stop. As always, the man in the vest stands, one hand in his pocket, the other holding a grocery bag. Michael wonders again what might be inside.

And so it went.

That’s what you do, right? Follow the leader.

And the following was nearly unintentional, even after Michael had decided to begin. They rode together just four more stops each day, exited en masse with everyone else, and wandered toward the tram. They stood, alone and together as the others filtered off the streets into businesses along the block. It’s hard to say what the other man was thinking, but Michael was clearly intrigued. The astute onlooker would have seen his furtive glances, cast like flower petals – the drama and rhyme pinned all on one hope: She loves me. She loves me not.

Michael and the man in the vest waited and boarded the tram. It was here each time, on this stretch of the trip, that Michael couldn’t muster the initiative.

9:22 am: Nowhere Man exits the tram at Nowhere.

Michael almost disembarked in June, after the Guten Morgen, but he kept finding excuses: He was expected in early at work to help recategorize files. He hadn’t eaten breakfast yet, and he was very hungry. The rain and sun on this or that particular day were too rainy or sunny.

Finally, however, it was indeed the weather of July that compelled Michael to rise and pursue. The temperature outside was sickening, the sun overwhelmingly unkind, the humidity unprecedented, and yet: Nowhere Man showed no signs of unzipping his vest, which was self-evidently designed for gray, brisk days. Michael swallowed a sob imagining him, in the vest, trudging through the fields of Nowhere, sweltering in the apathetic heat, alone.

Still, when the tram stopped, Michael moved slowly. It was scary, okay? The first time always is, and all subsequent followings develop as acquired taste. That first time, he didn’t want to know what lay across the burning horizon.

And he desperately did.

The sliding door almost caught his frame, but he elbowed his way out and spotted the man in the vest. Running.

Already sprinting at full-speed, Nowhere Man was at least fifty yards ahead. Michael shouted a hefty “dammit!” into the dense summer air and bolted in pursuit.

Into Nowhere.

The fields were saturated that year, but young; the harvest was months away. The dirt held promise, but as Michael stomped in weary slow motion, it provided only resistance. Nowhere Man ran like the innocent pursued. The soles of Michael’s tennis shoes hit the ground with adolescent reluctance – refusing to arise ever again – and yet arise they did, churning the soil like animals unwillingly yoked. Nowhere Man ran on. The sun trailed its wet and boiling rays back and forth the land, and everything became a mirage. The normalcy of the highway receded into the distance; the tram forged its own way forward. Michael shuffled deeper into Nowhere. Until, at last, the man in the vest stopped, before a stump in the middle of Nowhere, head down, hands unclenched. Michael shuffled faster.

Finally, when the hunter grabbed hold of the hunted, the first thing he noticed was the absence of sweat on the collar of his shirt. No matter, he thought, and buried his knee into the vest. Nowhere Man went to the ground, but Michael wasn’t satisfied. Something about the way he fell. Willingly. He brought his knee up again, connecting solidly with the back of the man’s head.

The grocery bag, forgotten, spilled its contents on the earth. An unopened bottle of wine. Bread fresh out of the fire. Receipts.

Consumed as he had been for months with the idea of catching his prey, Michael had no idea what to do now that it was finished. Nowhere Man lay on his face, silent. Michael sat down on the lonely stump.

And whispers filled his mind.

What are you saying? What are you saying??? What are you saying? What are you!! What?!

And the wind began to crawl across the earth.

I followed you.

And the insects swarmed across their bodies.

Who sent you?

And the sounds of Nowhere meant Nothing.

this world’s just gonna keep on ending ‘till she don’t eat that fruit.

She had meant to blast “Hoppípola“ as the stars darkened, sucked backward into the void. She had actually planned for it this time, when she started her sophomore year, when she said to her roommate, who barely even nodded, “This song will be with me at the end of the world,” and she had it in her phone, within its own, lonely playlist…

Most people don’t plan for that kind of thing, but she wasn’t most people. First of all, her name was Pinecone, so that’s really something. Her actual name. Her father thought it significant, like somehow he’d played his part in protecting the planet, and he called her Pine most of the time because he thought it sweet. Her mother didn’t think anything about it. Her mother didn’t think anything about anything, but that was just a side effect of Day 1. Before that, before Day 1, she had probably thought something and probably tried to get her daughter a real name, like Monica or Rachel or something wholesome, right? That’s what Pine used to tell herself. Something she could carry with her besides the guilt. But Day 1 was decisive, and the baby was stuck with Pinecone.

But her dad, he tried most of the time, and he called her Pine, and he took her to the shop with him. She stood barefoot behind the counter, dusty toes and oily hair. Her mother’s friends came in to flirt with him, and they looked at her, imagining what she might look like at sixteen, twenty, thirty. Would she look like Evie? Wouldn’t that be nice?

Well, she was thirty-three at the end of the world, she always was, and none of them were there to witness the culmination of all their hard-fought predictions. This time, her hair was an electric red bob, made violently bright by the extraterrestrial glow cast across the city. The tattoos chased themselves in circles up and down her arms, watercolor lilies facing down ashen skulls. The skin between offered breathing room, full of vibrant life, but most people didn’t notice. Of course, the women would have been shocked and thoroughly tickled to see her grown out of the knees and elbows of her childhood. Here, at the end of the world. They didn’t know this person, though, who left town right after high school and never called. They’d heard rumors, through the years, and tasted those on their tongues like fine wine shared delicately, in surreptitious whispers.

Pine never really had much of a chance; she was taken and tasted, and she took too.

Over and over. Every time it came to this, Day 11,881 or something, here at the end of the world. And she always had a plan, and it always ended anyway. It was so crafty, as if sentient, stealing into her room in the dead of night, whisking her away in the throes of a new romance. Or this time: showing up on the day, the only day, her phone died, taking with it her Icelandic soundtrack.

Pine glanced down at her feet, rooted in place. First, the muscles stopped. In all of her planning, she’d always tried to be running. Or dancing. For once, she just wanted to be moving when everything froze. Would her momentum break the spell?

Instead, her feet looked quite peaceful, with no ill conceived intentions of going anywhere. She let her gaze float lazily upward, back to the tree under which she had been sitting when the shivers started. The same tree beneath which she had met him, three years ago, and shrugged him off.

She had eaten the spoiled fruit of her decisions for so many lifetimes…the cycle jammed in repeat. And still, was she to meet that guy, with that haircut, on that park bench, beneath that tree, every time? And did he always have to be the same no matter what she changed? Always when she was thirty. Always waiting for an answer.

Here she sat again, but without him for the first time, as still as the leaves that shone with autumnal flare in early May. She felt alone – as if the bodies scattered throughout the park were already empty. And, yes, she could see those that were howling wretchedly and the others that wept. Yet, she couldn’t seem to hear the cacophony of their desolation. Everything. Silent.

And so, she gave her mind permission to drift, remembering old boyfriends and missed opportunities first, like a tragedy in rewind, ending happily at the beginning: their trailer home on the Missouri River.

As the stars dimmed and the sun grew cold, these final lights flickered away from Pine, until she became enveloped by the reaching shadows. Just as movement didn’t and sound wasn’t, neither did nor was light, and her mind circled around those earliest years. Her rocking horse with a pink and fraying mane. First steps through cigarette butts and gravel. Dancing with her father to Florida-Georgia Line in the waning moonlight. Pictures of her mother held nervously.

Why was it always her fault? Day 1. Day 11,881. She could almost swear these people in the park were evaporating because of her; their shrouded faces triggered looping memories of humanity receding into the distance.

That kind of bummed her out a little and she opened her eyes. She was supposed to be dancing here, at the end of the world, per schedule. Run first. Resist, a little. Then, nobly turn toward the apocalypse and dance with abandon. But life is what happens…

It didn’t scare Pine anymore that she couldn’t move or feel anything. She was used to it. And when the sound went, so did the screams, so that was nice. And in the absence of light, she felt a sleepy invitation. She wished for a coffee, and then she chuckled to herself, thinking it childish at first. But, as the minutes became hours, she allowed herself to indulge in petulance. If it really did have to be the end of the world, couldn’t it at least be punctual? And then she laughed again, but because she couldn’t tell what it meant to laugh in such a void, she stopped. And waited.

And her mind ran on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on until