“Stories of the Apocalypse” by Scott Lambridis
I.
The last set of tremors took our houses and our buildings, our shacks and shanties and shelters, so we scrambled to keep track of our belongings, corralling them together in bunches and packing them into dressers and drawers and cabinets until the weevils and termites, having no other food, dug around them, dug them out, and spilled our belongings back onto the hard ground. At last the weevils and termites died, when we had just finished stuffing our belongings into portable bags, sacks, duffels, and backpacks, but the glue and dust and insulation that our trembling shelters had disturbed and thrown airborne became hot and sublimated, and it mixed with the fumes given off by all the decaying exoskeletons to create an anti-epoxy that seeped into our fabrics and seams and disintegrated the glues of our zippers and snaps and all-weather stitches. Our bags and sacks and duffels and backpacks fell apart in our hands, spilling our belongings everywhere. We scrambled and stuffed what we could in our pockets, and made sacks by holding out our shirts and upending our hats, only to find that our belongings were too heavy and all our seams and fabrics and textiles stretched and snapped and frayed and became useless. Surrounded by scattered belongings, we quarreled about what was whose and tried to draw lines in the sand to separate the piles, to string strings and stretch wires, to create boundaries of sticks and sweat, while putting the smaller and flimsier belongings inside the larger, spacious, more durable ones. After some time though, with all the loose packs of nocturnal animals mussing up our boundaries, we grew weary of the constant work. We abandoned our belongings, tired of separation and of compartments, of grids and sub-groupings, of community and nation and population, and we stripped ourselves of clothing and climbed on top of each other’s naked bodies, all of us, in a heap, and we created as many fluids as we could and curled up in the angles and nooks of each other’s bodies, protected ourselves from the vultures overhead by interlocking our crooked shapes until the fluids coated us all and we were one, a planet with mountains and savannahs and tributaries and physical laws and microbiology and a vast ocean that would welcome all the infinite life-forms that should happen, someday, to rise up from inside and inhabit us.
II.
When the dirt finally reached above our noses we wondered if our hands were still holding each other’s, side by side, unable to twitch or shake or flinch, our eyes confined by a veil of sifting sediment that poured from some unnamable, unthinkable place above. Unable to contrive an answer, we marveled at the buildings and the mountains and the stones and streets that somehow continued to rise above us, shrinking us, making us wonder when we could finally call ourselves buried, and it reminded us of a time when the world was flat and able to be walked, which in turn reminded us how similar our past selves were to our present selves in our endless love of dachshunds, though we had broken all of their backs with the heights we had made by churning and compressing and stacking the dirt around them until they could no longer jump up, their backs like suspension bridges unable to bear the new terrain we had created, and so we cried and our tears did not fall down our cheeks, but stayed in front of our eyes and filtered slowly by the laws of capillary action into the tiniest of spaces left between us.
III.
We all inhaled quickly and held our breath when they came onboard, for our cells and nuclei and proteins knew that the orange skin signified something bad somewhere, though we couldn’t think of what that could be, fearing that the names of the illnesses we had discovered were really the names of the same sickness, all degenerative symptoms of the same disease, the only true disease, the disease whose recognition presupposes its own incurability, and so we named it with the only appropriate name we had: the same name we already used for that thing just after nothingness, and just before death, the only thing we knew.
IV.
There has never been a man, woman, or animal who has not loved us at first glance and would, if asked, do anything for us, and so those entering our bar for the first time – workers and salesmen and craftsmen and artisans alike – became aware of this confidence in our boisterous laughter and so regarded us with absolute and unfaltering mistrust. By the time the chub-faced bartender announced last call and wrung his mop of excess – and I mean excess – blood, we were regaling ourselves with our wisdom and keen eye for character as we wiped our mouths and burped up booze and requested the waitress place the rest of this new and beloved man’s viscera into doggy bags so we could take them home to our wives, for they would surely know how to add them to tomorrow’s breadcrumb-coated casserole.
V.
We shortened it, we translated it, we hyphenated it, we made it into an acronym. We rhymed it, we rapped it, we wrote it, we turned it into text, into bytes, into bits, and made it into slang and finally when we forgot the word it stood for, when we forgot the word it described or suggested, we called it quits and hit delete.
VI.
Eventually there was nothing to read but stories of the apocalypse; curious, depressed, bored (we each had our reasons), we impaled ourselves on spikes made from trees that hadn’t yet been turned to paper.
Copyright © 2012, Scott Lambridis