The End of the World (Part 1)
Note: Some language in the this story may make it unsuitable for younger readers.
I love my mom. Don’t misunderstand me. I love my mom. End of story. Now and forever. Amen.
She doesn’t even get on my nerves too much. (How often have you heard a thirteen-year-old boy tell you something like that?!?!) And that’s the honest-to-God truth, even if she’s the only person I saw yesterday, the only person I’ve seen today, and the only person I’ll probably see tomorrow.
Hell, she’s the only person I’ve seen for as many yesterdays as I can remember. That’s kinda strange because I don’t think we’ve been here for too long. I don’t know. Maybe the sameness of this place has numbed my memories. Who knows?
I remember my big brother used to say that he’d been having “senior moments” since he was a senior in high school. Perhaps I’m just an early bloomer when it comes to the breakdown of my brain… I’m kidding! I’m kidding! I’m as sharp as a thumbtack.
(Come to think of it, it feels like it’s been a long time since I’ve seen my big brother. I wonder how he is. Momma won’t tell me anything and, honestly, I usually forget to ask about him or anyone else.)
But my mind is sharp. That’s as sure and true as my love for my Momma. It’s also as true as what I just said about her not getting on my nerves very often at all. She really, really, REALLY doesn’t. Do you think I’m protesting too much? Well, I assure you that I am not.
But Momma’s on my nerves hard this morning. You see, she just told me to go up on the roof and wash our solar panels squeaky clean.
That is not good at all. I’m afraid of heights, and the rooftop on our big-ass, middle-of-nowhere cabin/skyscraper is more than plenty high. It’s so high it scares me shitless just to think about how high it is. I am shitless this very moment. No lie.
Momma knows all this, but still she gives me the chore, THUS (I love that old word!) I have become annoyed with her.
When she dumps the chore on me, I say, “Momma, I hate heights. I just know one of these times I’m gonna slip and fall and break my neck and be dead and everything.”
I say, “Remember that time we went to the county fair. We rode the ferris wheel together. It was my first time. And I didn’t know the seat was gonna wiggle, but it did. Every time it wiggled I could just see myself becoming extremely dead on the ground below, a dark brown stain next to the funnel cake truck.”
Momma giggles. “Yes, I remember that, DeMarco.” She giggles louder, and then throws in a little, unplanned snort. “How could I not? You were eleven. And every time the seat wiggled, you scrunched up your face and screeched, which was not the best look on you. Or the best sound coming out of you, for that matter.”
“Maybe, Momma. Maybe. But that’s not the point.”
“I know that, Son. The point is that you were fine. You didn’t fall. You didn’t become some black-skinned puddle on the parking lot concrete. You were fine. Completely, utterly fine. And you were better for the experience, boy. Better for having to overcome your fears and let them go. Trust your Momma.”
“Perhaps,” I say. “But that was then, and this is now, Momma.”
“And you were fine then, and you will be fine now, Son.”
“But you can’t guarantee that, Momma. On the ferris wheel at least I had that lap bar thingee, but when you send me up onto the roof there’s nothing between my butt and the ground besides blue jeans and thin air.”
Momma settles her giggles and tries to act serious. She holds up two fingers and deepens her voice.
“But what, DeMarco? Two things. One: I’ve got you. You’re safe here. Trust me. Trust your Momma’s love. Two: There are only two of us here. I’m old and you’re not. I, the old one, am not going up that ladder, ERGO you are going up that ladder.” She laughs again. (Like me, Momma enjoys an old word now and again.)
I cut her off mid-snicker. “You should not guarantee things you can’t control.”
“And you shouldn’t lip me, boy…. You just mentioned your delicate butt, right? Well, if you don’t scamper your butt up that ladder, you’ll find it under my palm.”
Momma’s still smiling, so I know I’m not actually in trouble. I push a little more. “Whatever. I’m thirteen. If I were Jewish, I’d be barmitzvah-ed and everything. I’d be a man. Heck, Momma, I even remember that Bible story about how Jesus ditched his mom on the streets of Jerusalem when he was only twelve. Maybe it’s high time I ditch you.”
I smile really wide when I say that last line, but that doesn’t take all the sting out of my words. I know that as soon I let the words fly. A cloud moves across her face. It looks like it wants to settle in and stay around for a thunderstorm or two, but Momma takes a deep breath and pushes it back. She sends out another smile, reaches up to rub the top of my head, and says one word -- “Get!”
I’ve lost the argument, like I always do. So I give her a big salute, spin on my heel, head out the door with my bucket and towels and start to climb the ladder. As I rise rung by rung I wonder if washing solar panels is even a real chore. Do people really have to do that? Or is it something she’s made up just to mess with me? Does Momma make me do it because she likes to play-fight with me?
At last I get up to the roof (because – damn – it is high), and I take a few moments to do a 360 degree scan of the landscape around our compound. Looking at the scenery (or lack of it), I decide – like I always do – that washing the solar panels is a real chore.
It’s all dustiness here. Just blowing, swirling dirt as far as I can see. Every now and then in the distance I see a scrubby, grubby tree. They look like odd-shaped people eyeing me across the wasteland. I realize that this is probably how I look from there. Of course, I’d be a scrubby tree sitting on top of a weird, out-of-place building, but you know what I mean.
That’s pretty much it. No other buildings. No other people.
The desert dust we have here always strikes me as funny (funny-weird, not funny-ha-ha) because it’s not hot here. Never. On top of that, the sky’s usually a touch gray, but it hardly ever rains. It rains just enough to keep us in water. It suns just enough to keep us in lights (and video games, of course) via the solar panels I’ve been ordered to scrub.
You know, if I’d never been here, and someone showed me a picture of the land, I’d look at the deadness and the dust and figure that the weather was always set on broil. But it’s not. I guess some places just aren’t good at life, even when the typical, obvious explanations for why don’t apply.
But this place is good enough. Momma and I are here, and we’ve been making a way together for longer than I can remember.
I wash the panels until they squeak and shine. I take my sweet time. As I’m wrapping things up, I decide to give Momma a poke. I screech and then shout, “Momma! Momma! I’m falling! Help meeeeeeeeee!”
She comes out of the house for a moment and sets herself in my field of vision. She looks a bit small from my spot on the roof. (Why in the hell is this house so tall? It makes no damn sense, especially if we’re supposed to be hiding out here from something gone wrong in the rest of the world.)
Momma points at her eyes and then at me. Then she cups the palm of her right hand and raises it toward me. Her right palm is now in spanking position. Then she nods in an exaggerated fashion, points at her right palm with her left hand, and turns her left index finger my way. The message is clear – I am watching you, boy. And I am gonna…Swat. Your. Ass.
I blow her a kiss. She blows one back to me, and then goes back inside as she wipes her hands on her apron.
She’s cooking. She’s always cooking. When I ask her why she loves to cook so much, she always tells me caring for people is her love language and cooking is her favorite dialect. I always tell her that sparing people diabetes is also a way of caring for the people you love.
Then Momma always says I have nothing to worry about because she’s got a hold on me. It’s the same song and dance as the ladder debate, I guess. I lose the argument (of course), and another half-pound of sugar-n-butter goes into whatever she’s concocting on the stove.
I pack up my stuff and get ready to head down from the roof. My job is complete. A good and faithful servant I have been. It’s lunch time.
I hate the going down even more than I hate the coming up. I especially hate that desperate moment when holding my wash bucket I try to get my body torqued around and started down the ladder in a way that gives me a fighting chance of getting down alive. That’s what I’m doing when I take one last glance down to the ground beside the foot of the ladder.
You know, it’s weird how the mind works. We almost always see what we expect to see, at least at first. At the foot of the ladder I see a small, skinny form popping out from the dirt. Instantly I wonder how a tree appeared right there without me noticing.
But it’s not a tree. It’s a girl. I shiver, lose my focus, do a micro-freak-out, and almost really fall. I drop my bucket and send it tumbling down the ladder toward her. She’s staring at me, and without breaking her stare, she sidesteps the bucket as it clangs onto the ground beside her and spills the last of its contents all over her shoes.
She’s a few years younger than I am, probably about ten-years-old. She wears a white dress with frills along the bottom and gauzy stuff up around the shoulders. It looks like the kind of dress I’d expect a little girl to wear for Easter Sunday or after her baptism or when she’s play-acting her future wedding. But this girl’s dress is all beat to hell, slashed up like she’s been travelling for miles through a sea of thorns.
It goes without saying that I’ve never seen this girl before.
With a ridiculous slowness she raises the index finger of her right hand to her lips and sends a silent “Shhhh” my way. At this point I blink. When I open my eyes, she’s gone. All that remains is my bucket and an impossible patch of emerald grass exactly where the girl had been standing. The grass is even in the shape of her feet.
I make an automatic decision not to tell Momma about it. Not a thing. I hurry down the ladder and act on some deep impulse. I rip up the patch of grass and bury it in the dust. I find myself crying as I do it. I take a few moments to compose my breath, my eyes, and my thudding heart. I give thanks that somehow Momma didn’t hear the tumbling of the bucket.
I go in the house to eat lunch. I sit down across from Momma at the table. She’s already eating her plate of meatloaf and green beans. There’s a little drop of lemonade dribbling off the tip of her chin.
I grab my napkin way too tightly and hold it at my lap in a desperate attempt to get my stress out in a way she won’t notice. I decide to start another of our typical play-fight games to distract my mind and keep Momma from saying anything to me that would cause me to blab my secret to her.
She takes the bait, as I knew she would. Momma and I both have a passion for stories, especially for science-fiction/fantasy/end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it stories. This is what I draw upon for my diversion.
“So, Momma, tell me something. When the world ends is it going to go down like in The Terminator? Are the robots gonna get us when they finally get smarter than us?”
“No, Son,” she says. “When the robots wake up they’ll be better than we are, so they’ll never treat us worse than we treat our house cats.”
I offer a new scenario. “So it’ll be like in The Stand or Earth Abides or The Planet of the Apes, right? Basically, we’re all going to die out in some superflu outbreak.”
“Nope. Epidemics won’t ever get enough of us to burn everything down.”
“Okay, Momma. Okay. Then it’s gonna be zombies. They’re going to chomp us up like in Night of the Living Dead or World War Z.”
“DeMarco, don’t be an idiot. Zombies are always symbols. You know that. They’re symbols for people on their smartphones all the time or whatever. Son, I used to date a guy who was a zombie – a football zombie. Every Saturday and Sunday he’d be in the living room all glazed over and brainless. He couldn’t string three words together to make a sentence. But once in a while he’d stumble into the kitchen moaning, “Guacamole! Eat! Guacamole! Eat!”
“Fair enough, Momma. But you leave me only one more option, so I’ll assume it’s the true one. The aliens will finally show up and get us. It’ll be like War of the Worlds, but they’ll take their vitamins this time and not get sick.”
“Son, the aliens don’t give a crap about us little people on this little rock. They’ve been visiting here forever. Earth is like a roughing-it vacation spot for them. You know, like when we’d go camping, real camping, sleep in the woods camping. Pitch a tent. Poop between the trees.
“The aliens are not going to get us. We’re the exotic wildlife in their campground. Getting rid of us means messin’ with their sweet, backwoods vacation spot. And rich people – alien or otherwise – never like to mess with the natural beauty of their vacation hideaways.”
With each of her responses my Momma gets more cartoonishly manic and funny. She waves her hands in the air and arches her eyebrows in fake disgust for the obvious idiocy of my naïve suggestions. She’s into it.
So I take our game to its typical turning point. I play my proper role for the appointed moment, like I always do. I fake frustration. I shrug my shoulders and extend my open palms toward her.
“All right. All right. Tell me, Wise Mother, how will the world end?”
She always says something wild and crazy here. Once she told me that turnips would gain sentience and start eating us as revenge for all those years of us eating them. Another time she told me that God would get sick of us and cause bunny rabbits to grow hands. With their new extremities, bunnies would show they really aren’t cuddly after all. Instead they’d show us they have a taste for assault rifles and killing. Momma always says something crazy and funny like that.
But not today. Today Momma goes still in a finger snap’s worth of time. Out from under her stillness she looks at me and says quietly, “DeMarco, the world will end because we’ll all hold on too tight. We’ll hold on too tight to hate and squeeze too many triggers. We’ll hold on too tight to love and trap the ones we cherish most. The end of the world will sneak up on us. It’ll be deadly and cold. The end of the world will work from the inside of our souls out to the ends of the earth.”
No homicidal rabbits? I’m stunned and just sit there. That is not the way the game is played.
“Son, why don’t you go to your room and read?” Momma says. “I need to turn in early tonight.”
I obey, but I can’t read, can’t focus on the words. I just lie there staring at the ceiling and feeling the night fall outside my window. I keep replaying the end-of-the-world game and seeing the disappearing girl at the bottom of my ladder. Then, finally, I relive the strange day our end-of-the-world game became real and Momma said the world was actually ending and so she brought me here.
She doesn’t even get on my nerves too much. (How often have you heard a thirteen-year-old boy tell you something like that?!?!) And that’s the honest-to-God truth, even if she’s the only person I saw yesterday, the only person I’ve seen today, and the only person I’ll probably see tomorrow.
Hell, she’s the only person I’ve seen for as many yesterdays as I can remember. That’s kinda strange because I don’t think we’ve been here for too long. I don’t know. Maybe the sameness of this place has numbed my memories. Who knows?
I remember my big brother used to say that he’d been having “senior moments” since he was a senior in high school. Perhaps I’m just an early bloomer when it comes to the breakdown of my brain… I’m kidding! I’m kidding! I’m as sharp as a thumbtack.
(Come to think of it, it feels like it’s been a long time since I’ve seen my big brother. I wonder how he is. Momma won’t tell me anything and, honestly, I usually forget to ask about him or anyone else.)
But my mind is sharp. That’s as sure and true as my love for my Momma. It’s also as true as what I just said about her not getting on my nerves very often at all. She really, really, REALLY doesn’t. Do you think I’m protesting too much? Well, I assure you that I am not.
But Momma’s on my nerves hard this morning. You see, she just told me to go up on the roof and wash our solar panels squeaky clean.
That is not good at all. I’m afraid of heights, and the rooftop on our big-ass, middle-of-nowhere cabin/skyscraper is more than plenty high. It’s so high it scares me shitless just to think about how high it is. I am shitless this very moment. No lie.
Momma knows all this, but still she gives me the chore, THUS (I love that old word!) I have become annoyed with her.
When she dumps the chore on me, I say, “Momma, I hate heights. I just know one of these times I’m gonna slip and fall and break my neck and be dead and everything.”
I say, “Remember that time we went to the county fair. We rode the ferris wheel together. It was my first time. And I didn’t know the seat was gonna wiggle, but it did. Every time it wiggled I could just see myself becoming extremely dead on the ground below, a dark brown stain next to the funnel cake truck.”
Momma giggles. “Yes, I remember that, DeMarco.” She giggles louder, and then throws in a little, unplanned snort. “How could I not? You were eleven. And every time the seat wiggled, you scrunched up your face and screeched, which was not the best look on you. Or the best sound coming out of you, for that matter.”
“Maybe, Momma. Maybe. But that’s not the point.”
“I know that, Son. The point is that you were fine. You didn’t fall. You didn’t become some black-skinned puddle on the parking lot concrete. You were fine. Completely, utterly fine. And you were better for the experience, boy. Better for having to overcome your fears and let them go. Trust your Momma.”
“Perhaps,” I say. “But that was then, and this is now, Momma.”
“And you were fine then, and you will be fine now, Son.”
“But you can’t guarantee that, Momma. On the ferris wheel at least I had that lap bar thingee, but when you send me up onto the roof there’s nothing between my butt and the ground besides blue jeans and thin air.”
Momma settles her giggles and tries to act serious. She holds up two fingers and deepens her voice.
“But what, DeMarco? Two things. One: I’ve got you. You’re safe here. Trust me. Trust your Momma’s love. Two: There are only two of us here. I’m old and you’re not. I, the old one, am not going up that ladder, ERGO you are going up that ladder.” She laughs again. (Like me, Momma enjoys an old word now and again.)
I cut her off mid-snicker. “You should not guarantee things you can’t control.”
“And you shouldn’t lip me, boy…. You just mentioned your delicate butt, right? Well, if you don’t scamper your butt up that ladder, you’ll find it under my palm.”
Momma’s still smiling, so I know I’m not actually in trouble. I push a little more. “Whatever. I’m thirteen. If I were Jewish, I’d be barmitzvah-ed and everything. I’d be a man. Heck, Momma, I even remember that Bible story about how Jesus ditched his mom on the streets of Jerusalem when he was only twelve. Maybe it’s high time I ditch you.”
I smile really wide when I say that last line, but that doesn’t take all the sting out of my words. I know that as soon I let the words fly. A cloud moves across her face. It looks like it wants to settle in and stay around for a thunderstorm or two, but Momma takes a deep breath and pushes it back. She sends out another smile, reaches up to rub the top of my head, and says one word -- “Get!”
I’ve lost the argument, like I always do. So I give her a big salute, spin on my heel, head out the door with my bucket and towels and start to climb the ladder. As I rise rung by rung I wonder if washing solar panels is even a real chore. Do people really have to do that? Or is it something she’s made up just to mess with me? Does Momma make me do it because she likes to play-fight with me?
At last I get up to the roof (because – damn – it is high), and I take a few moments to do a 360 degree scan of the landscape around our compound. Looking at the scenery (or lack of it), I decide – like I always do – that washing the solar panels is a real chore.
It’s all dustiness here. Just blowing, swirling dirt as far as I can see. Every now and then in the distance I see a scrubby, grubby tree. They look like odd-shaped people eyeing me across the wasteland. I realize that this is probably how I look from there. Of course, I’d be a scrubby tree sitting on top of a weird, out-of-place building, but you know what I mean.
That’s pretty much it. No other buildings. No other people.
The desert dust we have here always strikes me as funny (funny-weird, not funny-ha-ha) because it’s not hot here. Never. On top of that, the sky’s usually a touch gray, but it hardly ever rains. It rains just enough to keep us in water. It suns just enough to keep us in lights (and video games, of course) via the solar panels I’ve been ordered to scrub.
You know, if I’d never been here, and someone showed me a picture of the land, I’d look at the deadness and the dust and figure that the weather was always set on broil. But it’s not. I guess some places just aren’t good at life, even when the typical, obvious explanations for why don’t apply.
But this place is good enough. Momma and I are here, and we’ve been making a way together for longer than I can remember.
I wash the panels until they squeak and shine. I take my sweet time. As I’m wrapping things up, I decide to give Momma a poke. I screech and then shout, “Momma! Momma! I’m falling! Help meeeeeeeeee!”
She comes out of the house for a moment and sets herself in my field of vision. She looks a bit small from my spot on the roof. (Why in the hell is this house so tall? It makes no damn sense, especially if we’re supposed to be hiding out here from something gone wrong in the rest of the world.)
Momma points at her eyes and then at me. Then she cups the palm of her right hand and raises it toward me. Her right palm is now in spanking position. Then she nods in an exaggerated fashion, points at her right palm with her left hand, and turns her left index finger my way. The message is clear – I am watching you, boy. And I am gonna…Swat. Your. Ass.
I blow her a kiss. She blows one back to me, and then goes back inside as she wipes her hands on her apron.
She’s cooking. She’s always cooking. When I ask her why she loves to cook so much, she always tells me caring for people is her love language and cooking is her favorite dialect. I always tell her that sparing people diabetes is also a way of caring for the people you love.
Then Momma always says I have nothing to worry about because she’s got a hold on me. It’s the same song and dance as the ladder debate, I guess. I lose the argument (of course), and another half-pound of sugar-n-butter goes into whatever she’s concocting on the stove.
I pack up my stuff and get ready to head down from the roof. My job is complete. A good and faithful servant I have been. It’s lunch time.
I hate the going down even more than I hate the coming up. I especially hate that desperate moment when holding my wash bucket I try to get my body torqued around and started down the ladder in a way that gives me a fighting chance of getting down alive. That’s what I’m doing when I take one last glance down to the ground beside the foot of the ladder.
You know, it’s weird how the mind works. We almost always see what we expect to see, at least at first. At the foot of the ladder I see a small, skinny form popping out from the dirt. Instantly I wonder how a tree appeared right there without me noticing.
But it’s not a tree. It’s a girl. I shiver, lose my focus, do a micro-freak-out, and almost really fall. I drop my bucket and send it tumbling down the ladder toward her. She’s staring at me, and without breaking her stare, she sidesteps the bucket as it clangs onto the ground beside her and spills the last of its contents all over her shoes.
She’s a few years younger than I am, probably about ten-years-old. She wears a white dress with frills along the bottom and gauzy stuff up around the shoulders. It looks like the kind of dress I’d expect a little girl to wear for Easter Sunday or after her baptism or when she’s play-acting her future wedding. But this girl’s dress is all beat to hell, slashed up like she’s been travelling for miles through a sea of thorns.
It goes without saying that I’ve never seen this girl before.
With a ridiculous slowness she raises the index finger of her right hand to her lips and sends a silent “Shhhh” my way. At this point I blink. When I open my eyes, she’s gone. All that remains is my bucket and an impossible patch of emerald grass exactly where the girl had been standing. The grass is even in the shape of her feet.
I make an automatic decision not to tell Momma about it. Not a thing. I hurry down the ladder and act on some deep impulse. I rip up the patch of grass and bury it in the dust. I find myself crying as I do it. I take a few moments to compose my breath, my eyes, and my thudding heart. I give thanks that somehow Momma didn’t hear the tumbling of the bucket.
I go in the house to eat lunch. I sit down across from Momma at the table. She’s already eating her plate of meatloaf and green beans. There’s a little drop of lemonade dribbling off the tip of her chin.
I grab my napkin way too tightly and hold it at my lap in a desperate attempt to get my stress out in a way she won’t notice. I decide to start another of our typical play-fight games to distract my mind and keep Momma from saying anything to me that would cause me to blab my secret to her.
She takes the bait, as I knew she would. Momma and I both have a passion for stories, especially for science-fiction/fantasy/end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it stories. This is what I draw upon for my diversion.
“So, Momma, tell me something. When the world ends is it going to go down like in The Terminator? Are the robots gonna get us when they finally get smarter than us?”
“No, Son,” she says. “When the robots wake up they’ll be better than we are, so they’ll never treat us worse than we treat our house cats.”
I offer a new scenario. “So it’ll be like in The Stand or Earth Abides or The Planet of the Apes, right? Basically, we’re all going to die out in some superflu outbreak.”
“Nope. Epidemics won’t ever get enough of us to burn everything down.”
“Okay, Momma. Okay. Then it’s gonna be zombies. They’re going to chomp us up like in Night of the Living Dead or World War Z.”
“DeMarco, don’t be an idiot. Zombies are always symbols. You know that. They’re symbols for people on their smartphones all the time or whatever. Son, I used to date a guy who was a zombie – a football zombie. Every Saturday and Sunday he’d be in the living room all glazed over and brainless. He couldn’t string three words together to make a sentence. But once in a while he’d stumble into the kitchen moaning, “Guacamole! Eat! Guacamole! Eat!”
“Fair enough, Momma. But you leave me only one more option, so I’ll assume it’s the true one. The aliens will finally show up and get us. It’ll be like War of the Worlds, but they’ll take their vitamins this time and not get sick.”
“Son, the aliens don’t give a crap about us little people on this little rock. They’ve been visiting here forever. Earth is like a roughing-it vacation spot for them. You know, like when we’d go camping, real camping, sleep in the woods camping. Pitch a tent. Poop between the trees.
“The aliens are not going to get us. We’re the exotic wildlife in their campground. Getting rid of us means messin’ with their sweet, backwoods vacation spot. And rich people – alien or otherwise – never like to mess with the natural beauty of their vacation hideaways.”
With each of her responses my Momma gets more cartoonishly manic and funny. She waves her hands in the air and arches her eyebrows in fake disgust for the obvious idiocy of my naïve suggestions. She’s into it.
So I take our game to its typical turning point. I play my proper role for the appointed moment, like I always do. I fake frustration. I shrug my shoulders and extend my open palms toward her.
“All right. All right. Tell me, Wise Mother, how will the world end?”
She always says something wild and crazy here. Once she told me that turnips would gain sentience and start eating us as revenge for all those years of us eating them. Another time she told me that God would get sick of us and cause bunny rabbits to grow hands. With their new extremities, bunnies would show they really aren’t cuddly after all. Instead they’d show us they have a taste for assault rifles and killing. Momma always says something crazy and funny like that.
But not today. Today Momma goes still in a finger snap’s worth of time. Out from under her stillness she looks at me and says quietly, “DeMarco, the world will end because we’ll all hold on too tight. We’ll hold on too tight to hate and squeeze too many triggers. We’ll hold on too tight to love and trap the ones we cherish most. The end of the world will sneak up on us. It’ll be deadly and cold. The end of the world will work from the inside of our souls out to the ends of the earth.”
No homicidal rabbits? I’m stunned and just sit there. That is not the way the game is played.
“Son, why don’t you go to your room and read?” Momma says. “I need to turn in early tonight.”
I obey, but I can’t read, can’t focus on the words. I just lie there staring at the ceiling and feeling the night fall outside my window. I keep replaying the end-of-the-world game and seeing the disappearing girl at the bottom of my ladder. Then, finally, I relive the strange day our end-of-the-world game became real and Momma said the world was actually ending and so she brought me here.