by David McAfee
Above them, the roof creaked.
*
Jason told stories to pass the time.
“One day, papa bunny left the rabbit hole in search of a carrot,” he said. Melissa sat curled beside him, shivering under the blankets. Every hint of summer had bled out through the walls. Frost lined the inside of the windows, ash the outside.
“A big carrot?” asked Melissa.
“Biggest there ever was. And he knew where to get it, too. Old farmer Rick had this prize carrot, but he guarded it with dogs and an electric fence. But papa bunny really wanted that carrot for mama bunny. It’d feed them through the winter. Such a carrot was a dream come true. So every day he went to the garden, testing fences, racing the dogs. Every day he came back tired and worn, but still no carrot.”
“This is a sad story,” Melissa said.
“Sometimes stories are sad,” Jason said.
He stared at where the television hid in the darkness, thinking how much easier it had once made their lives. His daughter squirmed beside him.
“Well, what happened?” she asked.
“Papa bunny finally figured out a way to get that carrot. He outran the dogs. He outsmarted the farmer. He dug that carrot up and ran home, dragging it by its leafy top. But mama bunny wasn’t there. Papa bunny had been gone so long, she forgot who he was and wandered off. The carrot was so big, papa bunny couldn’t eat it by himself. It rotted, and it stank, and he couldn’t clean the smell out of the walls. So he left their rabbit hole forever. The end.”
“Is that what happened to you and mom?” Melissa asked.
He kissed her forehead.
“It’s just a story, sweetheart,” he told her.
*
Lunch was another bowl of cereal. For dinner, Jason pulled out a bag of frozen meatballs and let them thaw on the counter. After a couple of hours, they were soft enough to eat.
“Just imagine them surrounded with spaghetti,” Jason said. “All slippery and warm.”
“I hate spaghetti.”
“Spaghetti hates you too,” he said.
They slept together on the couch, their bellies full. Jason had chased what little thirst they had with a few sips of soda. Things were going to get worse, but at least they had plenty to eat while things were roughest outside. All throughout the night, the ceiling cracked and groaned.
Come the morning, Jason pulled back the giant curtain in the living room.
“Hot damn!” he shouted, an idiot smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. Melissa stirred and rubbed her eyes. Without a flashlight, he saw her do so, and he laughed again. Pouring in through the window was a dim gray light. Starlight was brighter, but compared to the thick cave-like darkness, nothing could have been more beautiful. Melissa joined her father’s side and took his hand. Together, they looked out upon the lawn.
The ash still fell, a death snow killing every blade of grass, smothering every flower, and coating every vehicle. Jason guessed at least two inches, if not more. The wind picked up, and the air clogged with thin, sand-like gusts of ash.
“Can we go out and play?” Melissa asked.
“It still isn’t safe,” Jason said. “Once it stops…snowing, we can try to get out. We’ll wear masks over our face, like ski masks. You know when your grandma smokes, and it smells bad and hurts to breathe in? It’s like that out there, just worse.”
“Nothing’s worse than grandma’s smokes,” Melissa insisted. “Except maybe Mark’s breath. It smells like boogers.”
Jason laughed on instinct. His heart wasn’t in it. Most likely grandma was dead. He’d tried not to think about it, but he saw little hope. Would anyone stay with the elderly in a nursing home after hearing the news? Perhaps a few would. He wanted to think that. But he knew otherwise. Hell, even that Mark kid was probably gone, packed into a car and driven east in a frantic bid for safety.
“I’m sure Mark’s breath is bad,” he said, turning and coughing to hide his wipe at his eyes. “Still, out there is worse. That’s why we’re staying inside. We’re safe here. We have shelter.”
Jason went through and opened all the curtains. He knew what little heat they had would escape faster, but right then it seemed light was more crucial to life than warmth. Just in case, he threw on another sweater and zipped Melissa up in a jacket. They ate the last of the cereal, then scrounged around for some games. Jason pushed aside his computer desk so they had plenty of room to play by the window.
“Your computer,” Melissa said as it toppled over. “Don’t you need it?”
Jason only laughed.
They played checkers, Candyland, and a Spongebob game whose rules Melissa seemed to understand more than Jason did. They moved around markers, bumped into each other, took turns tickling one another, and then finally finished with a great roaring campfire song. Melissa giggled in his arms. She noticed the puffs of white every time she exhaled, so she put two fingers to her mouth and then blew.
“Look, I’m granny,” she said.
A loud crack startled them both. Jason lurched to the window, wiping at the frost in hopes of seeing what made the noise. It didn’t matter. The ash was too thick on the other side.
“What happened?” Melissa asked.
“It sounded like glass,” Jason said. “I’m not sure what.”
“Can you go look?” she asked.
Jason shook his head, then thumped it against the glass. A bit of the ash fell. Rolling his eyes, Jason slapped his hand against the glass, scattering more of the ash. He saw the cause immediately. The back window of his car had collapsed inward, thick ash pouring into the back seat. He bit his lip, wondering if maybe a large rock from the eruption had struck his car.
No, he thought, shaking his head. That was dumb. He knew what had happened. He’d just hoped otherwise. The ash was rock, thin rock, but rock nonetheless. Once it settled, it was like concrete, and two inches was more than enough to slowly crack and break the glass.
“What was it?” Melissa asked. She joined his side and looked out at the land of ash. “Someone throw a rock?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Come on. Let’s have a rematch at that checkers game. I think you cheated.”
“Did NOT,” she insisted.
He stole one last glance outside before sitting down. Trees lined the edge of his property, their branches hung low as if bowing in deference to the darkened sky.
*
Jason awoke to the sound of screeching metal. He rolled off the couch, banging his elbow on the table and scattering checker pieces. Melissa startled, her blankets pulled about her, her cry piercing the darkness.
“Shit,” said Jason as he clutched his elbow and sucked in his breath. He fumbled about for the flashlight. From the far side of the house, metal shrieked again, coupled with a sudden roaring of wind.
“Daddy, I’m scared, make it stop!” cried Melissa.
Jason felt the touch of plastic and curled his fingers about it. As the light flicked on, he aimed it toward the door.
“It’s alright, babe,” he said. “Daddy’s going to see what the matter is, all right?”
“What’s going on?” she asked. The sound of metal died down, but the wind remained.
“Something happened in my bedroom. You stay here and be a brave girl, okay?”
As he stepped into the kitchen, the light of his flashlight aimed toward his bedroom door, he heard Melissa sob. Feeling like an idiot, he retrieved a second flashlight from a drawer and brought it to her. He clicked it on and shone it at her hands.
“No monsters can survive a flashlight’s touch,” he told her, kissing her forehead.
“Or ghosts?”
“Not ghosts, either.”
She hugged the flashlight to her chest and looked at him, trying so hard to be brave.
“Okay. I’m all right now, dad.”
He smiled even as his heart pounded in his chest. He’d seen the bedroom door for just a brief moment, but there was no mistaking the streams of ash billowing in throug
h the cracks. Grabbing a roll of duct tape, he went back into the kitchen. Pausing before the door, his hand on the knob, he closed his eyes and prayed.
Please, God, don’t be what I think it is. Anything but that.
He shoved open the door. He looked inside. He closed the door.
“Fuck you, God,” he said.
Jason layered all four sides with duct tape, using an entire roll. The whole while, he coughed and punched the wood. He knew he must be scaring Melissa, but he didn’t care. Nothing mattered. The ceiling had collapsed, broken under the weight of the heavy ash. His fists pounded the door, and he flung the empty roll toward the overflowing trash bin. As he sobbed, he saw a beam of light from the living room circling about. Wiping his face, he followed it, feeling like a lost ship tracking a lighthouse.
Navigating the rocky course of toys, game boards, and table, Jason fell to his knees and wrapped Melissa in his arms. He felt her pat his head as if he were one of her dolls.
“You okay, daddy?” she asked. “You okay?”
He held her tighter.
*
“Don’t we need to save food?” she asked. Jason only smiled. He’d cracked open a can of ravioli, the sauce thick and cold. They took turns dipping in their spoons and slurping the stuff down. The living room had taken on a gray hue from the dim light piercing the windows.
“Think Spongebob has room for us in his pineapple?” he asked her.
“Stop being silly.”
Outside, glass shattered, coupled with a sound of bending metal. Melissa jumped.
“What was that?” she asked.
“Just the car,” Jason said, dipping his spoon into the can and scooping out the bottom. “Just the dumb old car. You packed?”
Melissa nodded.
“I have everything,” she said.
“Let me see.”
Beside her lay a pink backpack she’d taken with her to first grade. He unzipped it and reached in his hand. He pulled out a Barbie doll, the checkerboard and its pieces, a box of cookies, two flashlights, and a teddy bear.
“Yup,” Jason said, kissing her nose. “That’s everything.”
They both wore layers of shirts and pants, plus ski caps and winter coats. Jason hoisted his own backpack, filled with food, flashlights, bottles of water, and a gun. He set it down on the couch and went to the kitchen, returning holding several washcloths.
“Now this is very important,” Jason said. “Probably the most important thing ever, alright? You keep this across your face at all times, and never breathe through anything other than the cloth. You understand, sweetie?”
“Yeah.”
He tied a yellow cloth around her face, double-knotting it behind her head. When he stood, she looked up at him, her eyes sparkling with wonder. While she watched, he tied one around his own face.
“We’re going out there, aren’t we?” Melissa asked. “Into the warm snow?”
Jason chuckled.
“We are.”
He ripped the tape off the sides of the front door, curling it up into a giant sticky wad. Once enough was gone, he grabbed the door knob and pulled. Biting air swirled in, angry in its cold. Ash stung their eyes, and already Jason fought a cough.
“You ready?” he asked. Melissa nodded.
Hand in hand, they abandoned their shelter.
Beach Puppies
By Daniel Arenson
They sat on the beach, beers in hands, on the night their island ended.
“There goes another one,” Sean whispered, gazing into the sky where a jet plane, headlights cutting through the darkness, airlifted another five hundred refugees to safety. “Seventy-third since we got here.”
Harvey watched his friend. Sean was a small man, rail thin, a man whose round glasses and goatee made him look like a fiery intellectual--an island Trotsky, if you will--but Harvey still remembered him as that scrawny kid the bullies picked on. Sean had always loved numbers, as a child prodigy and now as a professor of number theory, and today he was the only one counting.
In fact, Harvey thought, he was the only one watching at all. He had always been the nervous one, Sean.
Jess and Mike, now, they were your happy couple. Yes, they stretched out on their futons, ran their toes through the sand, and laughed between bottles of beer. Mike had his shirt off, revealing a tattoo of the Cheshire Cat climbing his arm. Jess wore jean shorts and a bikini top, sporting tattoos of ten dark roses, her flower of the night. She punched Mike, who laughed and took another swig of beer. She lit a joint, passed it to him, and their laughter grew.
Looking at them, Harvey thought, you’d never know the fire was coming. Or maybe you would know. Maybe that was exactly how you should look on the night you, your friends, your entire island died.
“Hell,” Jess said and tossed an empty bottle into the waves ahead, those waves whispering in the darkness, only their foamy crests visible in the night. “We gonna die tonight, right? So we die laughing, eh?”
“Damn right!” Mike said, raising a bottle for this Pacific jewel, this dying land. He emptied it, tried to throw it into the water, but hit his foot instead. Jess howled with laughter. Around them puppies scampered, pets abandoned by their owners, those owners airlifted overhead. The pups were happy too, unaware that they were sacrificed to fire; ignorance, like booze, was bliss.
Harvey envied Mike and Jess, as he’d always envied their spirit, their carelessness, their ability to stare the world in the face and tell it to go to hell. They did that now too, just instead of giving the world the finger, they thrust it up at death. For them, life had always been a party. Death was just its final bash.
And there, behind this laughing couple, sat David. He was smiling softly. His hair was long, his face unshaven. Watercolors stained his pants, for David was the artist among them, their seeker of colors and life. He raised his eyes to the full moon, and his smile widened as he saw the birds that fled.
“Doves,” he said. “I haven’t seen doves in so long.”
Yes, for David, this last night was for beauty. In his eyes, he saw only the moonlight on the water, the seashells glinting on the sand, the puppies that played around them.
Harvey envied them all: David, for finding these last glimmers of beauty; Jess and Mike, for being so happy or shallow; Sean, for his intelligence, his perfect understanding of their place in history, the significance of these planes that keep roaring overhead.
Because, Harvey thought, I feel nothing.
“Eighty-four,” Sean whispered, watching from behind those round glasses, and Harvey watched the plane too. It was low enough to see clearly, even in the dark, and Harvey thought of the people inside, the people who’d won the raffle. The people who’d won life.
He looked at his friends. The unfortunate. The lottery losers. The dying.
For the first time that evening, Harvey smiled, because he loved them and even though his insides quivered, he knew there was no better way to die.
He had always held them together, hadn’t he? Not quite their leader, no, but... maybe their glue. Harvey reached into his pocket and felt the paper there. His winning ticket. His plane ticket out. The possibility of life in the remnants of the freezing world.
Harvey closed his eyes. Not without them. He crumbled the paper in his fist, pulled it from his pocket, and tossed it to the water. In the darkness, he couldn’t see it disappear in the ocean. It was better that way.
“One hundred,” Sean soon said, barely audible over the joking and singing of the happy, drunk couple. “I think that’s the last one.”
Harvey took a swig of beer when he noticed that not only planes blotted the stars. A darkness spread in the east, moving fast, like tar spilled across the sky.
“Hey, I heard a good one the other night,” Jess said, bottle in hand. “A rabbi and a priest walk into a bar, and....”
The roar of ash soon drowned out her voice, and Harvey turned his eyes away. He looked at the beach puppies and smiled as the darkness and fire came cr
ashing down.
Toward the Storm
by David Dalglish
It was always storming to the northwest. Gertrude decided that was why she struggled to maintain a cheery attitude through the long, dreary day. Before the ash had swept across her Kentucky home, she’d been bright as the morning sun when hosting potlucks and meeting with their church choir, of which she had been the undisputed leader. Now she walked with a stoop, her skin a permanent gray, her hair a scraggly stiff mess no comb had a hell’s chance of fixing. Every day, she travelled west, toward the forever looming gray wall.
Through her weeks of travel, Gertrude had made it to I-44. She almost felt like laughing sometimes when she looked around her. Before, she’d always been too scared to drive on the interstate, not feeling comfortable going above fifty, let alone anywhere near the ninety it seemed the other drivers wished her to go. Now she had it all to herself, and at walking speed no less. Vehicles rested on the sides, some wrecked, most not. When the ash had hit, the cars, trucks, and semis had sputtered and stalled, their engines ruined and their drivers blinded.
“Oh goodness,” Gertrude said, coming upon a particularly vicious wreck. A small sportscar lay perpendicular to the road. Sprawled further ahead was an ash-covered lump, most certainly a body. Gertrude wiped a hand across the twisted metal, cleaning away until she could see the color.
“Always red,” Gertrude said, her voice muffled by the thick scarf she wore wrapped around her face. “The careless ones always drive red. A smart driver picks blue.”
She peered through the broken windows, looking for anything useful. A suitcase lay half-open on the floor, full of clothes, a broken laptop beside it. Gertrude shook her head. Careless and ill-prepared. She doubted she’d have gotten along with him when he was alive.
“May God be kinder toward you than I would ever be,” she said to the lump as she walked on by. If there was one thing good about the ash, it was how it slowly, steadily buried the dead. That was just like God. He’d made his mess, and now he was helping to clean it up.