Breadcrumb #380

KEN VALENTI

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the apocalypse and I have this horrible fear that, when it comes, I might survive. I am hoping that, when civilization as we know it comes crashing down, the post-apocalyptic society that survives needs someone to do, like, needlepoint and embroidery, because otherwise, I’m done for.

    Not that I know how to embroider. I don’t. And I’m not a particularly fast learner. It just seems needlework would be easier to learn than Krav Maga or Hapkido or those other badass martial arts that everyone in the surviving communities seems to know.

    Trust me. I am somewhat of an expert on this. I have seen the End of Days time and again, while streaming hours and hours of Netflix. There, the apocalypse is brought on pretty much any way you might imagine. There, humanity is always on the precipice. Another 36 post-doomsday scenarios were added just in the past four days.

    No matter what the cause is, it always starts with us. It’s pollution or overuse of fuels or A.I. gone out of control. Or some unforseen agent of destruction, like overly concentrated laundry detergent.

There, the apocalypse is brought on pretty much any way you might imagine

    “Our clothes were white enough, damn you!” the hero of that last one shouts to the heavens, alone on a barren, but very sudsy, wasteland.

    In the unchecked laundry suds scenario, the has come when a Bayliner speedboat on Long Island Sound, piloted by a guy who’s been drinking, plows into a yacht occupied by a family beginning a sail to Florida. Among the items destroyed by the collision is a two-inch-long vial of the latest super-concentrated detergent that the family has taken on the trip, carefully following the instructions to use no more than a drop that can fit on the end of a toothpick -- and that for heavily soiled loads.

    With the vial smashed, the entire 1.2 ounces of detergent is loosed into the water. Within days, the Atlantic Coast from Maine to Baltimore is smothered by a glacier of fluffy white suds that show no signs of stopping. Millions drown or choke to death on soap bubbles. Millions more flee, although many linger behind, bewitched by the meadowy-fresh scent.

   But that’s besides the point. The cause of the cataclysmic event isn’t so important. Whichever way the world as we know it ends, we’re going to need skills afterward. I’m sure my abilities in public relations won’t carry over. The regional warlords who will inevitably rise will not need press releases. Marketing directors are likely to be among those survivors sectioned into the categories of “food” and “paving materials.”

    Social media pros will be in low demand when all the electricity comes from whipping the captives you’ve snatched from a nearby fiefdom as they pedal reconstituted exercise bicycles that have been hooked up to a sparking, sputtering power grid.

    (There are exceptions. Back on Netflix, one clan managed to power what looked like a classic English estate in an ingenious way. Inspired by the home science experiment where a clock is run by sticking two prongs into a potato, the group managed to grow a spud the size of Westminster Abbey. Into its white flesh, they stabbed enough metal strips to live the high life. They thrived until the day a rival tribe rolled in with an enormous deep fryer -- which they heated up, ironically, by plugging it in to the potato.)

    But no matter. When the time comes, I’m just hoping that combat skills are not absolutely essential. When the warlords rise to power, not everyone can be a warrior, right? Someone has to monogram their napkins and vestments. That could be me.

   I could serve my friend Karen. She’s a mid-level manager. Second assistant to the third vice-something-or-other in charge of stuff people don’t need but spend lots on. She’d make a great regional monarch. She’d take me in, too.

    “Sure,” she told me when I asked her about it. “You can be Secretary of Finery.”

    “Secretary of Finery,” I said, testing the sound of the title. “I’ve been called worse.”

• • •

Breadcrumb #379

CHRISTINA MANOLATOS

He stood knee deep in the pool, uncomfortably. The blue water rippled around him as he kept his body still. The sun was strong though there were a few clouds in the sky. He wished it had been darker.

    Internally he fussed over the twinkles and glints of the sun’s reflection on the water, which he felt and saw bounce off and on him. How one might feel more comfortable making love in the dark than with the lights on, he was ashamed of himself as he stood in this bizarro spotlight.

    He wanted to wade out and feel his stomach quake as the water splashed against it. He wanted to feel his limbs become buoyant as he went deeper. He wanted to submerge himself, to feel the cool heavy envelope him, he wanted to it to cover him like a blanket and hide him.

He wanted to feel his limbs become buoyant as he went deeper.

    He gazed out again across the pool at that white light sprinkled on the surface. He watched the sparkles skip and bounce, and he watched them change to grey and then quickly change to black.

    The black light breathed and mutated. His eyes flittered as the black grew antennae and legs, and crawled; like water droplets on a window migrating toward each other, the black light gathered throughout the water.

    The swarm clustered around him and hovered like a cloud. The mass began to hum and buzz. He stood knee deep in the pool, uncomfortably.

• • •

Breadcrumb #378

ANDREW MARINACCIO

“Did you pray on it?”

    “Yes. Lord, did I ever. I felt myself sorted south of sin, truth be told.”

    This was Lenora’s first deliberate attempt to shock someone in her adult life. It didn’t really
work. Her admission was cryptic and weightless. Besides, they knew each other too well.

    “Does this mean I have to start worrying about you too, Ms. Lenora?” Pastor Solino asked,
leaning into his question.

    An old-timer’s approach, meant to curb impending rebellion. She was a good one. She would
listen. She diverted.

    “You said salvation fills our sails with wind. Like, every other Sunday during your Family Mass homily. I thought I knew what that meant, and now I’m not really so sure. Nor do I care to
know.” She began to doubt her point, speaking so far from her self. “I’m anxious, father.”

    This did the trick, keeping them puzzled and dreadfully focused on the aftermath of her words.
The tension of disarmament swelled in the pastor’s office. What was said next could lack the
default geniality of conversation, and may very well be honest.

    “How you helm your vessel will determine your voyage — look within.”

    No dice. Just traditional bodies conventionally placed in a mahogany room.

    A wooden Virgin Mary was affixed to the wall behind Pastor Solino’s desk. Her eyes were
closed in mourning, but her mouth slightly curled into a smile. Lenora sat opposite the priest
across his desk and mulled over the preponderance of awkward religious art deemed socially
acceptable by the faithful. One would think they’d know the tonality of their sacred ones well
enough from the source material, but she chalked the misfires up to talent scarcity and reading
comprehension issues. Lenora liked how this Mary’s mischievous smirk worked against her
infamous heartbreak, almost as if the original embodied the figure to delicately warp its features,
revising its humanity. Perhaps she was watching their conversation through her effigy’s eyelids.
Lenora’s sights then caught her pastor’s. She immediately felt judged and fidgeted with the lapis
beads around her wrist.

    Solino was balding, the combed-over strands across his scalp ghostly and tenuous, but well-groomed nonetheless. His tall, accusatory nose that hooked over the pulpit on Sundays and whose shadow, as she thought in that moment, surely dwarfed her infant body during her baptism — there must be pictures to prove it — seemed to have grown larger and blunted with
age. He grew kinder, too, which she found exceptional in her parish.

    “Your vessel and its course, as I know you know from your days as a girl at St. Athanasius, are
not of this world alone,” he said. “Where the ship goes, the soul goes. The soul speaks its needs
to the body, and what it needs is direction towards its eternal reward. Your accordance to this
truth will determine the quality of your course. Ask yourself: how much wind am I catching if I
live this way?”

    The prospect of an eternal reward brought Lenora anxiety, like something you would arrange a
policy over. The phrase was a reminder of a type of death that left little choice in living, which pressed her further. Lenora thought such agency was extinct anyway, even beyond her faith. How could it be operable in a world that insidiously cried for her attention, compelling her energy in frivolous, expensive directions. Maybe she would think differently if she could afford to.

The phrase was a reminder of a type of death that left little choice in living, which pressed her further.

    Pauses, once returned from, change perspective on what was left behind. Latent patterns become clear; the tolerated becomes strange and ill-fitting. Life was fine until Lenora watched television last night for the first time in a year. Despite living online instead, profiled and peddled to by the internet’s phantom powers, it was in the old, oblivious screen that she saw her hunger mirrored. And everyone was hungry for her. Each commercial was a cortege, one flashing requests for her pores, another her thighs and ankles, all eulogizing what she could have been with more time and care. The world begged to make a project of her. Projects offer plans, which you needn’t consider but only follow. Saying no to plans had consequences and she had reached that botched adjustment phase of young adulthood where help denied was incalculable opportunity lost.

    And this was to say nothing of her self-assessment. She had a liberal education. She read Baudrillard while a crucifix hung from her neck. She knew she’s been, in some unseen but nervously felt way, bought and sold ad nauseam since the day she was born. She just couldn’t understand why that struck her so raw and nervously now, why she felt so handled and heavied by the world. She saw a mirror and hunger changed her face, the sinister variables of a screen that morphed its icons of desire as it did the shape of the empty spaces inside her. She’d shudder to think what it would feel like once the chemistry stabilized, shaping its image and her into a perfect fit.

    “There’s no need for confession,” said Pastor Solino. “Penance isn’t helpful here, and I won’t
ask you what you want because that’s of little interest to God.” He gave a weathered smile. “But
I will ask you what you believe you need.” He lowered his voice here, stretching sincerity over
every hushed syllable. The parochial lullaby of priestly admonishment.

    Lenora thought there was something spiritual, perhaps ascetic to the way she behaved in the
world. Those that followed plastic plans, she realized, and failed, won at least a sliver of
experience only they knew in living. Could she ask for that alternative?

    “It’s just that I feel as though I’ve learned all I can from altar service, from lecturing, from
eucharistic ministry. Even from summer missions. I feel as though others have not traveled their
course as well as I have and yet here I am —”

    “It is not your place to judge, Lenora--” said the pastor.

    “Is there some benefit they’re allowed, and I’m not?,” she interrupted. “At least give me a habit
so I can make sense of myself. ”

    Solino cocked an eyebrow toward his combover. “You’re good, Ms. Lenora, but I’m not sure if
you’re cut for the nunnery.”

    “Why is that?”

    “You talk too much.”

    “Nuns wear habits, not bridles, father.”

    She was mortified and covered her face, beginning to giggle. At least she got a decent bon mot in that wasn’t preceded by a sequence of stuttering half-thoughts. After her joke, angels descended from behind wooden Mary’s frozen cloak and kissed Lenora’s forehead, and chuckled in relief. She felt in turn, and didn’t care to stop speaking now. “God conspires not to bridle us,” she concluded, smiling and soul-drunk. Solino was tired, but agreed. He’d make a call to the
convent.

• • •

Breadcrumb #377

CHRISTINE QUATTRO

My parents remind me that it’s much better to be alone and happy, than paired off and miserable. It’s not that I think of leaving my partner often, if at all.  It’s that I already know leaving is a remedy for pain.

    Maybe, because I have been the third person in my parents’ marriage, I won’t ever have to leave mine at all. I’ll be so spent from leaving my parents—or watching them choose one another over me—that I’ll be too tired to leave the couch in the house I share with a man who has never done anything to warrant my leaving. Maybe, by the time we are old and graying around the edges, I won’t feel like I have to leave anything at all.

    What’s in the running, for me, is safety. Who will I be when I don’t have to leave anymore? Packing my car in the middle of the night, leaving California for the unknown of another state. That chaotic slipstream of cool air that weightlessly carries my car across six lane highways and through intersections and into neighborhoods I might inhabit if I was staying in my hometown. There is the look on my best friend’s face when she opens her front door, sees my manic eyes and my anxious dog and my baggage. She knows I am leaving and that I cannot return. She sees our future. The rest of our lives, transformed into a million cross country fragments. The next decade contorted.  The two of us driving to meet at picnic tables in front of cold water lakes under big skies, hugging goodbye and not wanting to let go. There is how she always made me feel like I was home, though I otherwise felt lost.

    The day we became friends was Parent’s Day. We were eleven.  My mother said she wasn’t bringing me a lunch from somewhere just to sit in a cafeteria with other parents she didn’t care to know. So I packed my lunch and was the most obvious outcast in what would be a sea of McDonald’s bags. My friend, the best I’ve ever had, asked what my parents were bringing. Upon finding out I would be alone, she called her father. “What kind of McFlurry do you want? You’re eating with us.”  A million thank-you’s, still feels insufficient.

    The point of all this is to say, there was a moment I recognized it was a problem.  I taught myself how to not feel it. There is a point where the rains in California show up right after a fire, and water beats down on black charred earth until it’s a mudslide. A school counselor would let me come to her office when I felt overwhelmed. I didn’t often cry. Instead I simply told her, what was happening to my life. If I did cry, it was always at the end when all of it had been laid out at her feet, thinking that nice Mrs. Freeto with her kind face would tell me how to get out from under it all.

    This only lasted for a moment, but I was thankful for that chance to empty out.

    Mrs. Freeto told me my bucket was overflowing and I could only carry so much in it.  We both knew there was nothing she could do and nothing I was capable of either. Since I couldn’t escape, and it would likely follow me for the rest of my life, she would just write a memo to tell all my teachers there were problems at home, please be aware. As if they needed to be reminded.

    My parents couldn’t simply divorce like the other parents, they had to engage in an all-out dog fight for dominance that bled into everything I did. Even in their incompatibility they were hopelessly deadlocked.  I had to live in this limbo with them. There was the weight of each of their own over-flowing buckets that sat on opposite ends of a yoke around my neck.  Every time I left Mrs. Freeto’s office, we both knew I would be back in another two weeks, to relay the next chapter in the saga of my parents who could not parent. These parents who took for granted I could understand this didn’t negate the idea of their love. My hyperbolic mother and my hiding father. When the door to Mrs. Freeto’s office closed on the way out, I would wrap up all of my feelings, put them in a little box, and shelve that box in the back of my mind.

    They keep telling us Californians that fire season is important.  Without destruction of the old, new life cannot grow. It is a natural, oftentimes unnaturally triggered, cleansing of trees and brush. Without all that foliage being ushered into its afterlife, there might not be a chance for those young trees to be spread, planted, and grow. What those droplets and the charred earth they fall upon create is the slipping of mountainsides. These silent giants simply cannot hold themselves up anymore. It is out of their control. Mountains are hard to move but once they are in motion they are unstoppable. The day I started to cry, I could not stop myself.  I cried at dogs on the street, my partner’s eyelashes moving in sleep, a man speaking about his daughter.

    I did not start out this way.

Without all that foliage being ushered into its afterlife, there might not be a chance for those young trees to be spread, planted, and grow.

    I was closed off and funny. I had jokes. I was angry, and I was safe in that anger. It protected me like a shield, a glorious invisible cloak of rage that I would put on in the mornings and never take off. It propelled me through my days. Now I cried at HGTV home-makeovers. Those shows where everything is pretend. I sat with my eyes filling for an infinite amount of television hours, as people found the homes they’d always been searching for. I gorged myself on their joy. They just wanted to make their children happy.

    They say that one day the overachiever will look around from the highest mountaintop, and spy another peak more desirable across the range.  I woke up one day in a life full of great things I built for myself and saw what I had yet to conquer. It offended me to admit it how it might not be normal for parents to forsake their child as many times as mine had. How it was not okay that a father left his child to care for the woman he himself could not handle.

    Where do they push all the remnants from a mudslide? They spend hours sifting through them, recovering bodies, pieces of metal, blown out frames of cars. Then, there’s things they cannot recover: all that has been pulverized on the way down the mountainside. They push into a pile the inanimate mush that once was someone’s home. And they haul it away.  

• • •

Breadcrumb #376

KIM DIETZ

I missed you last night
I’ve missed you every night since

We arranged the flowers on the bedside table
Lit candles that smelled of peonies and poppy
We held the funeral buried in bed
Draped ourselves in the laughing shadows
With bottom shelf whiskey tucked in beside us
Washing it all away with the starless night

I’ve missed you every night since you’ve lost
The voice in the cavern of your throat that lulled us to sleep
Like a trapped ghost in the depths of your belly
Since my sheets were last glazed with tobacco and cinnamon and honey
Tasting the breakfast you’ve made me on your lips
You resound on my palate

Like a last meal
One I was asked to choose
A bed-sheet fit as a tablecloth
A blood-orange leaking--
Sweet with thick blushed skin
Peel shedding like a borrowed mask
And I can’t seem to contain it in one place
It keeps dripping and running and weeping down my wrist
Fighting to be held so close

And I’ve missed you every night since.

• • •