The End Is Now

I think your city wasn’t obliterated; your loft wasn’t vaporized. You were too far from the coast to get swept away. I think you felt good about yourself, while you still had time to feel. You couldn’t believe in a god that put Fifty Shades of Grey on the bestseller list, but a god that turned twenty million people to dust and left you still tapping ashes out of your hand-carved corncob pipe, I think that’s a god you could get behind. I think it wasn’t until the nukes started flying that you got in trouble, chaos breeds chaos you used to say, tapping on the pipe, and it only takes one madman with a nuclear code and nothing to lose, and I guess once you’ve lost the sky, what’s left. I think you got a full blast of poison and your skin started falling off in patches, you heaved up everything inside of you until you were hollow, you went full zombie, scaly and moaning, radiation cannibalizing your brain along with everything else, I think you tried to kill yourself by drinking a mug of fountain pen ink because you thought it would be a poetic way to go, but you threw that up, too, and died praying to your nonexistent fucking god that the pain would stop.

Love,

Heather

* * *

Dear No Strings Attached,

It would have been a pretty big fucking string, our baby. Our un-baby, our cell grouping, our medical waste. Less a string than a cord. Or one of the ropes they use to tie up boats. Knotted, rough to the touch, stinking of fish.

The ropes they used to use, I guess I should say.

Hard to get used to that.

You didn’t have to tell me you didn’t want it. That once it was inside me, you didn’t want me, either, no matter how fast I got it scraped out. You didn’t have to tell me I would be a shitty mother.

These are things I already knew.

You didn’t have to pay for it, either, and so you didn’t. You could at least have offered.

Would I have been a shitty mother? I guess I’ll have my chance to find out, if I stay here.

You like how I said that, if I stay? The superfluous if, as in, I’ll meet you for coffee tomorrow, if the sun rises; I’ll hurt when it’s over, if it ends.

If gravity takes hold, I’ll break when I hit the ground.

Be fruitful and multiply, that’s the plan. Grow the compound until it’s safe to leave it behind. Repopulate the Earth. Not yet, Isaac says, but soon.

He says that about the two of us, too. Soon. That we won’t marry tonight with the others. We’ll wait until he turns thirteen, and then we will be joined. In all ways, we will be joined.

I told him I was old enough to be his mother, though I didn’t add that you don’t have to be Freud to see the relevance there. I told him there was no reason for him to hurry. That he had plenty of time to become a man.

He told me not to speak to him like a child.

He told me I understood him, and we would come to love each other. God would make it so.

He told me God wants him to have a son.

It’s possible that he’s making this shit up, but I’m pretty sure he believes it. Which is not better.

If you don’t believe in Isaac, and say it out loud, they put you out.

If you don’t fulfill your responsibilities, they put you out.

If you sin against the Lord, or some big mouth accuses you of doing so because she wants those chocolate bars you’re hoarding, they put you out.

If I were a mother, I would make sure my daughter knew that you do what you have to do. Even if it means letting the kid shove himself into you, enduring one scraping thrust and a whiplash jerk, the blown wad, the wilting dick, the tears.

Yes, I’ve thought about it. Am thinking about it.

But maybe, if I were a mother, when I am a mother, I’ll hide the baby under my coat and steal her away from the Ark, and raise her in the world. Maybe, because she will be born into the after, she will have evolved to survive it. Or I could leave her when I go, if I went, leave her where she could be safe and tended to, if not loved, and let her accept how life is supposed to be without me there to whisper in her ear that she should want more, that once there was more.

Or maybe Isaac is right, and God will stick me with a son.

Love,

Heather

P.S. Did you think I forgot? I’d guess you died, gutshot, intestines on the ground, mouth gibbering with surprise, when you got desperate enough to take food from your neighbor and she didn’t want to share. She’s dead now too, I’m guessing, the one you used to spy on with binoculars when you pretended you were birdwatching, because you liked the way she bulged and jiggled when she was naked, even though you always told me I should lose weight. Not, like, in a shallow way, you said. For my health.

* * *

Dear guy in the Arcade Fire t-shirt with the stain on the collar,

You were nice. That’s most of what I remember. You bought me drinks, but not too many, and didn’t say anything when I bought myself a few more.