The temperature refuses to drop
like the the leaves that hang cozy
in their green without worry,
quiverless in the stilling humidity—
the only trees leaking their colors
are those yanked down by storms,
not yet introduced to the churning
jaws of waiting woodchippers,
hungry as the unbudging season.
There’s a beehive in the doorframe of our laundry room. I imagine the honeycomb like menudo tripe, not golden, but burning and hot and red. The laundry room has lost its pulse in our little green courtyard. We watch it empty from our apartment windows. We have to walk two blocks to do our wash and dry. We tug our dresses at our feet in pillowcases and carry yellowed towels in baskets at our hips.
*
I slash brown on my mouth as we wait for our polka dots and stripes to dry and watch him fold his khakis and shirts. I sting him with my eyes and he reciprocates. The dryers whir and stop and whir and stop.
*
We feel his shadow fall and catch and fall and catch. Our baskets and sacks make their own shadows on the sidewalk, our earbuds hang around our necks, our hair frizzing from heat. I walk in front, my basket on my head, wires knotting my curls, sugar sticky crystals my mouth. We are home, in the trees and the clouds and the sun, the hive set free, thousands of beads, furry and fat and shiny then black, strand his wrists and his eyes and his stomach and our dresses dance on the grass and fall and hum and fall and hum.
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.”
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.
“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.