How I Spent the Apocalypse

by Selina Rosen

  And by me I meant me and Lucy and Billy and Jimmy. The going was rough because the snow that was left was wet and super slick. I wished a couple of times that Lucy wasn’t on the four wheeler with me because I would have taken a lot more risks if she hadn’t been. Which of course was probably her reason for always wanting to go everywhere with me.

  We were riding along the top of the ridge looking down towards the creek. Since Lucy was the only one not trying to drive through the torturous shit, it’s not too surprising that she was the one who spotted the ice dam. In a narrow spot in the creek a big tree had gone down. It had lodged side ways and the water hadn’t budged it. Now about forty bazillion pounds of ice had built up behind it. And millions of gallons of water.

  We stopped the ATVs, got off and huddled together.

  “We found it; now what we going to do about it, mama?” Jimmy asked.

  It was insane, what I was thinking I mean, but really the only way I could think of to do it. I looked at the huge ice dam and scratched my head trying to think of some better way and didn’t come up with one. I went to the toolbox on my four-wheeler and opened it.

  “Kay… What are you doing?” Lucy asked carefully.

  “I gottah blow it up.”

  “They could just evacuate…”

  “Not really. I told them that because it’s better than nothing, but that five miles might as well be twenty in the dark with kids. This shit is slicker than it was before it started melting. They couldn’t make it before dark and the temperature is going to drop again.”

  What I said got punctuated by the sound of another huge piece of ice crashing into the dam of ice already there, making an ear-pounding noise and piling the dam even bigger. We were running out of time.

  I took three sticks of dynamite and a lighter and headed for the ice dam. Lucy stepped in front of me, blocking my path.

  “What the hell are you doing, Kay?” she demanded.

  “I’m just going to light them and toss them on the middle, towards the bottom of the back side of the dam. You guys take the four wheelers and go higher.”

  “So we’ll be safe while you do this stupid-assed thing. I don’t think so.” Lucy shook her head no, and the boys who had moved in behind her were doing the same thing.

  “I’ll do it. I have a better throwing arm,” Billy said.

  “No. I’ll do it, dumb ass. You’re going to be a father,” Jimmy said.

  “Neither one of you dumbasses know anything about TNT. I do.” Cause… Well remember my job with the road crew? Well I knew all about how to blow stuff up.

  “No, Kay. No. It’s too dangerous; it’s crazy,” Lucy said. “At least think of a safer way to do it.”

  But there really wasn’t a safer way. The right way to do it would have been to go to the bottom of the ice dam on the back side, pack a charge in just the right spot, and then set it off with a detonator. But that would take hours to rig up and, well it would actually in a lot of ways be more dangerous.

  “Look we’re wasting time and we’re running out of daylight.” As if to prove my point another huge chunk of ice slammed into the dam. “Now take the four wheelers and head for higher ground.”

  “Mom I don’t think…”

  “Then don’t!” I told Billy.

  “I’m going with you,” Lucy said.

  “No you’re not,” I said. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “Well here’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.” She tried to do an imitation of me that was just too cute. “I’m just going to get really close to all that crashing, crunching, ice shit and slush and then throw dynamite at it till it goes away.”

  I laughed, which just really pissed her off.

  “Dammit, Kay, if you do this and you don’t get your stupid ass killed I’m going to cut you off.”

  But she must have decided there was no sense in really fighting with me because she got on the four-wheeler and headed up the hill. The boys must have decided that if she had given up there was no reason for them to even try because they got on their four wheelers and followed her.

  I walked over to a ledge that sort of jutted out over the creek. I wrapped the three sticks together with tape then wrapped the wicks together. I found the spot at the foot of the dam I wanted to hit, figured out which direction I was going to run after I threw the thing, then I lit it, gave it a toss, saw it land damn near right where I wanted it to, and then I took off running uphill. Of course like I said the ground was slicker than shit. I hadn’t run four maybe five feet when my steel-cleated boots slipped on the shit and I fell sliding downhill about three feet. I covered my head with my arms, lay prone and braced for impact. There was a huge Kaboom! and then small pieces of ice, water and tree rained down on me. Fortunately, nothing was big enough to hurt me, so I just lay there and waited for everything to quit moving and shaking. I heard the water release as the ice dam disintegrated into the shards of ice that covered me. The earth didn’t quit shaking so I just lay there face down in the snow waiting till I thought it was safe to move. That was when someone flipped me over and started smacking me in the face hard, and I was glad for my ice mask.

  “Kay, Kay, can you hear me? Are you alright?”

  I grabbed her hands. “I was till you started hitting me.”

  She started crying then and she didn’t get up from where she was sitting on my hips. “I thought you were dead. God, Kay! You were there and then you were gone and there was the explosion and…” Her words got drowned out by her tears and she threw herself down on me and was hugging my neck so tight I thought she might do damage, so I knew there was no way she was actually going to cut me off. Finally Billy and Jimmy were helping both of us up and I was just watching the water rush by feeling pretty proud of myself.

  “Damn, Mama, you scared the shit out of me,” Billy said.

  “You know, Mama, I thought I could run. But Lucy… Well she was down here before I could get off my ride.” Jimmy and Billy both just looked at Lucy with amazement and any animosity they’d been harboring against her because she wasn’t their mama just vanished in that instant.

  “I popped my mask and got on the radio. “Roy, you there?”

  “Yeah, heard the boom. You guys alright? Water’s already going down and quick. Thanks, Kay.”

  “We’re fine and you’re welcome.”

  Lucy was still crying. She’d popped her mask and her goggles so I reached up and dried her tears with my gloved hand.

  “It’s alright, baby. Now calm down; you’re going to freeze.”

  Just because it was warm enough to melt the snow didn’t mean it was really warm. Forty-five feels balmy for a little while when you’ve been dealing with sub-zero weather, but it isn’t warm by any long stretch of the imagination. I kissed her gently on the mouth.

  “I’m sorry I scared you.”

  “You’re such a crazy piece of shit, Kay,” She cried. “I love you, and you’re not going to be happy till you get yourself killed doing some stupid butch-ass shit.”

  Billy laughed and I turned on him. “What’s so damned funny?”

  “Nothing.” He shrugged, but when I looked at his brother he was smiling, too.

  “What?” I demanded.

  “Mother told her the same thing,” Jimmy said to Lucy, not to me.

  “That was like twenty years ago and she ain’t dead yet,” Billy said. He patted Lucy on the back.

  On the ride home Lucy suddenly started pointing to my right, making gestures, so I pulled over. I popped my mask as the boys pulled in beside me.

  “What?”

  “I think that’s my car… Well the rental car.”

  I stopped the motor and got off the four-wheeler.

  “I didn’t mean we had to stop. I was just saying… I mean we’re miles from the house.”

  “We can scavenge the radio right now and come back for other useful stuff later,” I said.

  I figured the radio thing would make sense to h
er. I walked over to the car, which was sitting on its side in the dead middle of a field. I climbed up on top of it. I didn’t want to tell her why I was bothering to check the car out because I didn’t want her to be disappointed if I didn’t find what I was looking for—or did and they were ruined.

  With the help of a pry bar me and the boys managed to get the door open. Then I climbed inside. The car had been tossed around and nothing was where is should have been. I found an American Tourister bag still in good shape but was about to think I wasn’t going to find what I was looking for when there it was, stuck up under the front seat. I pulled the purse free after three tugs and inside found what I was looking for—still in perfect condition.

  I grabbed the purse and the bag and climbed out of the car. I held up the purse and yelled down to Lucy in a triumphant “who brings home the bacon” kind of voice. “Oh, honey! I just found your glasses.”

  Lucy was ecstatic, but we were all cold and it was getting dark so we loaded the purse and her bag into the tool box on the back of my four-wheeler—you know all safe and sound with the rest of the explosives I’d brought and didn’t have to use—and we headed home.

  Lucy had stripped her outer gear by the stove quick then grabbed her bag and purse and hurried to our room without a word. I knew why. She’d come here with even the clothes on her back basically all but ripped off of her. She’d come here and her past, every bit of it, had been stripped from her. As small as this might seem to us, those two bags must have seemed huge to her right then.

  I let her have a few minutes to herself before I knocked on the door.

  “Who is it?” Lucy said.

  “Kay.”

  Lucy laughed a little. “Honey, you don’t have to knock on the door.”

  I walked in and Lucy was lying in the big middle of our bed on her belly wearing her glasses—which I thought made her even hotter—and looking at stuff she had spread out all over the bed.

  “I can actually see,” she said with a smile.

  “That may not work so well for me,” I mumbled.

  “You’re the best looking thing I’ve ever seen,” she said. “I’m never going to get it, the way you think, how quick you think. I just saw the car. I never in a million years would have thought to look for my glasses. I never would have thought that all of this stuff might have been in there and… Kay, none of it’s even wet, not even dirty! It’s just like it was when I packed it.”

  “Too bad they’ll never be making that add. You know ‘My car was thrown into the middle of a cow pasture by an F-5 tornado, but my luggage was fine,’” I said with a smile.

  She patted the bed next to her and I crawled up there and lay on my belly beside her, careful not to move any of the items she’d so carefully laid out. A manicure kit, a bunch of make up, brushes and combs, deodorant, a pair of dress pants, a red silk blouse, a short blue skirt, a blue and white polished cotton blouse, a pair of stiletto heels, pictures—lots of pictures—more than most people carried. Then I realized why. Lucy had been very close to her family but she was gone a lot so she took them where ever she went.

  “When the girls got here I just felt so sorry for all they went through. Then one day they were both going through their family pictures just having a good cry, and I was really mad because I had nothing. My family was just gone and I had nothing.” And then she introduced me to her family. She was a little weepy which was understandable, but she was happy, too, because now it didn’t seem so much like they were something that she just made up.

  “What about the girlfriend?” I asked.

  I shouldn’t have asked because she frowned. “I never carried her picture with me in case someone would see it and ask who she was. I didn’t want to have to lie about it. I wish I had one now.”

  She looked at me quickly, no doubt to see if I was upset. Which I wasn’t. I wasn’t jealous of some dead chick any more than I expected Lucy to be jealous of Cindy. And I guess I should have expected the next question.

  “Kay, why don’t you have any pictures of Cindy?”

  “I do have,” I said.

  “Why aren’t they out? I mean I’ve seen pictures of her because both of the boys have them hanging in their rooms but why don’t you have any pictures out?”

  “Really? You really want to know?”

  Lucy nodded.

  “You aren’t going to like it.”

  She smiled. “Try me.”

  I sighed. “It’s just going to ruin your good mood about being reunited with your own photos.”

  “No it won’t, Kay. It’s not that I don’t care what you think, but I don’t feel like we have to share a brain, like we have to believe the same shit.”

  “Alright, but remember that and remember that you’re the one who wanted to know.”

  I have to tell you that right then I thought about just telling her a lie because I was afraid it really would ruin her mood.

  “I have pictures and occasionally—not very often—I even look at them. Those pictures… They never look the way I remember my boys looking when they were little. Cindy never looks the way I remember her looking. Looking at them well it just makes me wonder if I remember anyone or anything the way it really was. See I tend to see people more as who they are than what they look like. Pictures always look close, like I know who it is but… that’s not the way I remember them. I don’t like pictures because they make me question my own judgment of people and of the time in which they were taken. My parents were the worst sort of dicks, but in pictures they always looked like happy, easygoing, even loving people. People pose for photos or maybe even worse a photographer waits for just the right moment to snap a picture. Pictures are all about what things look like and not what they really are. It’s all about making what’s ugly pretty. Or making someone look plain when they really aren’t plain at all because their spirit shines when they speak. You take a picture of a place and it’s always prettier than it was when you saw it. It doesn’t really look like the place you saw at all. I never saw a picture of me and said, wow that looks like me, and there is not one picture that I have of Cindy which I think looks like her.”

  “Wow.” She moved to kiss the back of my head and then she messed my hair all up. “That really is some pretty dark shit.”

  Apparently she was in too good a mood to let my very negative take on pictures bring her down. She got up and started to pack her things away, not in her bags but into her drawers in the dresser. She propped a picture of her mother up on top of it.

  “I can make you a frame for that.” I told her just so she’d know I didn’t have a problem with her pictures. Then I rolled onto my back and looked at the ceiling. I didn’t want to admit it to anyone but my ribs were sort of smarting no doubt from falling on my face followed directly by the percussion of the blast.

  “That would be great. I’m going to go get a shower.”

  She left and I just lay there in my thermal underwear looking up at the ceiling and poking at my ribs where they hurt. It wasn’t bad just the old wound smarting because yet again I’d done something insanely stupid. I wondered if maybe the women in my life weren’t right and I did have some sort of death wish.

  I must have fallen asleep because I didn’t wake up till I heard one of the boys wolf whistle. They were always making some sort of noise so I turned the right way in bed—just because once I realized I was sleeping on it backwards I just couldn’t do it—and started to go back to sleep.

  Then the door opened and when Lucy walked in she was all dressed up. I would have said I didn’t care about things like that, but when I saw her in that tight black skirt with stockings and heels on, in that red silk blouse which was almost-closed across her boobs, her face all made up and her hair pulled back with earrings and the whole works… My heart started pounding, and I was instantly hot. I got out of bed and stood there just looking at her.

  “So you like what you see?” she said, and winked seductively.

  “Uh huh,” I said intellig
ently as I came in my pants. I just wanted to throw her right on the bed and have my way with her but… “I haven’t even showered yet.” Because of course I’m really way too neurotic for actual spontaneity.

  She laughed. “Well good because I sort of wanted to wear them for more than a few minutes.”

  I started past her, stopped and just looked her up and down.

  “Damn, baby, I…”

  “Yeah. Go get a bath and we’ll talk,” she said, and kissed my cheek.

  When I walked to the bathroom Billy met me in the hall. He smiled knowingly at me. “I’m guessing from the way Lucy looks she forgot that she was going to cut you off.”

  “Ha, ha,” I said. Mostly because I couldn’t actually think of anything else to say. Let’s face it; as much as kids don’t want to think about their parents doing it, well that’s how much we don’t want our kids to know that we’re doing it. I ducked into the bathroom and shut the door, trying to think of something—anything that I could do that would be special. I mean, come on, she had gotten all dressed up for me and she was hotter than hell and what did I have to bring to the table? I’d been lying there in my sweaty thermal drawers. Even after I showered I’d basically have a fresh clean scent and minty-fresh breath and my old, slightly-flabby, drooping body to offer. And not a whole lot more.

  I probably would have spent more time trying to think of something, anything, that I could do that might be the least bit special but seriously what could I have thought of anyway? Besides, I just wanted to get back to my room, look at how good she looked, then strip her naked and just rub my body all over hers and… Well you know. I threw my robe on and practically ran to our room.

  When I opened the door she was just sort of standing there striking a pose. She started slinking across the room towards me while I fumbled around closing and locking the door. I started towards her but she put up her hand indicating that I should stop where I was. Which I did, wondering if she had remembered the whole cutting me off thing and had just gotten all dolled up to make it that much more of a punishment. Then she started walking slower and unbuttoning that blouse till I could see her nipples and… Why was it so sexy to watch her take her clothes off? I take my clothes off; it’s not sexy at all. Hell I think everything I just said sort of explains that I didn’t have a clue how to make it sexy, but Lucy sure did. By the time she actually let me touch her she had next to nothing on and I could hardly breathe.