Tiny apocalypses
My friend Simon Dingle and I decided to give ourselves a week to write each other a short story. We challenge you to do the same. Whenever you’re reading this, you’ve got one week from today to write a story about anything. Post it on Medium and submit it to our collection through the email link on that page.
Not now, is what she thinks, as the night sky turns as bright as noon and the glass of the windows dissolves. Not now, when her husband has just told her, finally, that he’s signed them up for tango classes starting next week, after years of her begging him to not let their lives get so small, that they should go out and see people, that now that the kids were out the house it was up to them to not let themselves just be tired all the time, and Dancing With the Stars has just started and it’s the semifinals and he turned to her and said, just ten minutes ago, “Well how would you feel about going next week to the class at the gym” and she smiled at him and thought maybe he’s got a few surprises left in that fat old body of his, and the music just came on and that chef chap she likes from the other show is going to do a waltz to “Bohemian Rhapsody” and she’s imagining herself twirling on a dance floor like she hasn’t done since that night in 1972 when Dickie Versveld from up the road took her to the school disco and kissed her behind the sports pavilion. She remembers that was the time when they started doing the drills at school for what to do when the A-bomb hit. Roll under your desk. Tuck your head under your hands. How silly, she thinks, taking a breath, only to notice that the air in the room is gone. But that was the eighties. We stopped being scared of the big bombs after the eighties. It can’t happen now, she thinks. Not now when it’s the semifinals and she doesn’t know whether the celebrity chef or the pop singer is going to win this season.
She had this dream last night where she was a wolf and went searching for her pack. She found them, one by one, in abandoned buildings in a dead city, human-wolf things. She tracked them down by their scents and then lay with them, in a pile of stink and warmth, and felt finally at peace with herself, like the feeling you get with MDMA but always. It’s made her shaky the whole day, this dream. On her walk to work she kept seeing people whose eyes lingered on hers just a little too long and thought, maybe them, maybe they’re one of my pack and if I sniffed them all out we could all run off together and I could stop doing this job and just belong. But then she had a meeting with a client that went badly and she forgot about her dream, until now when she’s at the grocery store picking up one of those pre-made dinners for single people and everyone is looking at her, but really staring at her now, with their mouths stretched open, and she remembers her dream and has a mad thought for a moment that they’ve come to fetch her for the pack, but it’s not just in her imagination, and something trickles down her neck and she puts her hand up to feel that her face is bleeding, and her hand, and her neck, in fact blood is just seeping through her pores from everywhere and a little boy near the rotisserie chicken starts screaming at her and clutching his own bleeding face and he’s still screaming as she falls onto the floor and her organs start melting out of her.
There’s a ball of prestick in his hand. He’s been crushing and re-crushing it between his fingers and the palm of his hand. He’s done it since he was a kid and his mother told him he was too anxious and needed to get out more and make friends. It’s an anchor mooring him back to feeling calm. Reminding him to breathe. He tears off little balls and rolls them up. He piles them into little pyramids. He squishes them back together. He likes how you can pull at the prestick and tear it and never break it. Over years of maintaining this habit he’s learned to type at full speed whilst the prestick ball gets formed and reformed in the palm of his left hand, without missing a keystroke. Not that there’s much typing to be done any more. He’s mostly watching. The virus, they’re still calling it, has already shut down the hospitals and the banks and the factories. They’ve been in the bunker for twelve days. He doesn’t hear the groaning of the generator any more. They’re watching the code as it writes itself, taking over more and more of the world. As best they can tell, it started as an algorithm for buying advertising. For getting people to buy shampoo and fizzy drinks and soon there will be none of these things to sell and no-one to sell them to. We were in such haste, he thinks. We wanted to build more perfect machines. We forgot that the machines were still operated by ligaments attached to bone, connected via little wires wrapped in fat to a mush that ionizes and flashes signals and thinks it is thinking. He squishes the prestick in his hand and thinks how beautiful it all was, those little bags of fat and flesh that thought they were angels. He realises that over all these weeks of touching the prestick it has become imbued with the oils from his hands. It is pregnant with his cells and his bacteria. It is almost something organic. He thinks of the places where the humans buried the pathogens and the bombs. The things that eat flesh and dissolve buildings. He wonders whether the code has sniffed them out yet. We made this, he thinks. We made the machines because we wanted to be better. And we made the other things because we didn’t really believe we could, and we wanted them just in case. Just in case.
Want more tiny apocalypses? Let me know what apocalypse vignettes you’d like me to write. Flooding? Bee colony collapse? If you make a suggestion I shall include your name in it.
