by Patrick Parr
You are on your fifty-first can of beans as the sky continues to crack and groan. You’re in your basement, or the basement below the basement. It’s a bunker you built nine years ago, right before the turn of the century. Though difficult to later admit, you were one of the dozens who took Y2K seriously. You dug an eight by twelve hole, reinforced the edges and slapped a thick metal door on top of it. The engineers who helped you said you could live inside it for seventy days. After that you’d run out of air. At the moment, you have no choice. It’s been forty-three days since you first (and last) heard the report of worldwide annihilation. Since that day you’ve remained in your bunker, listening to the sky sound like mountains breaking.
Your basement is gone. All you can see from the cassette-sized window is a thick, pale yellow cloud floating across the ground. You promised yourself you’d wait until everything settled. Then you’d check. You’d check for your boy.
Around you are dozens of soup cans, beans, and three crates of bottled water. You have a stack of books (dystopian, of course) and read seven hours a day. You’ve lost too much weight. Your belt is on the last notch. One thing you regret is not storing more clothes. You’ve been wearing the same blue jeans and black t-shirt, the same tiger boxers and white socks, for the last 1032 hours now. Presently you have no clothes, no house, no city, no state, no country. You haven’t heard any sounds of galloping horsemen, nor were you relegated heaven-bound for being a good person.
No, you’re still here, eating beans, reading George Orwell. You want to write your own ‘end-of-the-world’ novel.
Now you have the entire story.
You remember throwing a football to him the day before it happened. But the ball was too large, and he had trouble catching it. Still, even at seven, the boy wanted to be like you. He wanted to be everything you wanted him to be. God bless him, you think. All you ever wanted was for him to be happy.
The day it did happen, his mother took him shopping for school clothes. She wanted him to look sharp for the second grade. You didn’t see any reason for it. Kids that age don’t really care what they wear. They’re just happy. But you knew the rules. You got him on weekends; she got him on weekdays. Though you disagreed, you followed the judge’s order.
But now there is no judge. Not even a courthouse.
On the forty-fourth day, after finishing a set of push-ups, the sky is quiet. You look out the tiny window and see a spot of blue in the sky. You put on a yellow suit, a gas mask you bought from a Russian at a General Store in 1999. You push open the metal door and pop out like a gopher from a hole. What was once your house now surrounds you in a circle of rubble. Except for the spot of blue (no larger than a full moon), the sky remains thick with pale yellow clouds that collide against each other. Above the clouds you see a red glow. It stretches the horizon and every once and a while glows light like a spark.
You walk two miles into the city. Towers once twelve stories are now two, businesses piled into melted brick, neon signs scorched black.
The shadows are along the sidewalk: shoppers from the supermarket, bags on their arms.
You stand above the shadow of a child–eight years old, you guess–a child holding his mother’s hand.
His shoe is untied. You kneel down and slide your finger up and down the boy’s leg. You know this leg. You know because you see his mother’s hair. Her hair has been permed, and you can see the largeness, the small bulges. You also know her shoulders. They are narrow, slightly curved. You know it’s her, which means you know it’s him.
You press your foot against the chest of your boy’s shadow. You want to cry, but everything you see, or don’t see, is too big, too unreal. You think about praying to God, but for what? We just stabbed Him in the heart.
You remember Hiroshima, and the shadow of a person sitting on a set of stairs before it happened. You felt like you could have had a conversation with that shadow, even now, a half century after it had disintegrated.
You want more than anything to touch that shadow. You want to make it real in your mind, to understand this was once a person, a life, a history.
You press your foot against the child’s chest. Before cursing Him, before calling us a mistake, before apologizing for not holding on to your boy, you give up. You lie inside your child’s shadow. Suddenly, as your eyes close gently, all you hear are opinions, voices from the past.
And all they do together, they disagree.
