This Year's Apocalypse

R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” blared from the grocery store’s speakers overhead, because somebody somehow still thinks that’s clever. Signs everywhere advertised “red sky” deals on perishable goods. “I survived Crisis 2030” t-shirts filled the seasonal racks near the entrance. I half-expected to see beach balls bouncing between the aisles.

It was – until the end – a fairly typical summer shopping trip. I played my role as a mom, making sure our purchases were moderately healthy and reasonably under budget. Shana played the eager and easily swayed child, begging for anything that was shiny, sugary, or unicorn-themed. Luke was, well, Luke – a middle-aged man with a short attention span, a weakness for enticing discounts, and aspirations to be a more cultured and adventurous eater than he truly was.

“I’ll get some fruit,” Luke said when we reached the produce section.

“Stick to the list.” I held up my phone to remind him I had texted him the full grocery list in advance. He sighed and glanced at his screen.

“Where’s your sense of adventure, Cassidy?”

“We both know how this ends, Luke.” I crossed my arms. “You pick out five or six exotic and inordinately expensive fruits, you only eat apples all week, and I have to drink kale, kohlrabi, and mango smoothies so nothing goes to waste.”

His face lit up. “Do they have kohlrabi?” he asked, scouring islands stacked high with leafy greens and bright citrus.

“You don’t even know what kohlrabi is.”

“It’s like rhubarb, right?”

He stomped away and returned moments later with a bag of apples and a bunch of bananas that were already turning brown. I placed the apples in the cart, but I pointed him back to the tropical fruit display.

“Lose the bananas,” I said. “Do you even remember the last time you ate a banana?”

He shrugged. “I don’t remember the last time you bought any.”

“Because I got tired of throwing them away once they turned black.”

This is why, when the world wasn’t ending, I preferred to go grocery shopping alone.

***

There was a time when the biggest problem we had was hurricanes.

I know plenty of people who would kill for a good Category 5 these days.

Instead, we get cosmic tsunamis, invading alien armadas, and tears in the space-time continuum. We get a debilitating magic influenza. Oceans on fire, locust swarms, zombie werewolves, etc.

The red skies are always the first sign of trouble. What I’ve read is, it’s something about a spike in dark matter in the atmosphere. I don’t know, I’m a realtor, not a scientist, but it’s an indelible sign that the natural order has gone awry.

This is what happens every summer now, like clockwork. We call them “crises,” for lack of a better term. Extinction-level events that upend everything, shake reality to its core, and are pretty cleanly resolved within a few weeks. Then we all get back to work, live our lives, and do it again the next year.

The apocalypse as an annual event, like a Toyota-thon.

***

At the meat counter, Luke tossed two packages of thick-cut, dry-rubbed bacon in the cart. Shana dutifully removed them and handed them to me. He probably would have protested if he noticed me placing them back on the shelf, but he was busy reading the recycled biodegradable packaging of some plant-based sausage substitute.

“Look at all this vegan ‘meat.’” He turned to me, angrier than I would argue was justified. “They shouldn’t be able to put it in the butcher section unless it bled when they killed it.”

I sighed. “They say it tastes like the real thing.”

“Well, they’re lying.” I had been down this road enough times to know this wasn’t the time to point out he never tried it himself. “I’m telling you, if I can’t have bacon – real, actual, pig-based bacon – the world can fucking end for all I care.”

I grabbed him by the shirt and whispered loudly into his ear. “Can we not, you know, in front of the impressionable young child?”

“Fucking,” Shana said over and over, giggling.

Once she got over the joy of shouting vulgarities in public and inviting total strangers to judge her parents, she was drawn to the ornate flower display in the back of the store.

“Mommy,” she said, reaching for a bouquet of white roses.

“We don’t need flowers, sweetie,” I said, pulling her back and giving her a gentle hug. “It’s just one more thing I have to watch die.”

“Besides, they’re not on the list,” Luke chimed in with his phone in his hand, though it dawned on him promptly that broaching the subject was a mistake.

“And why is it always our daughter who thinks to give me flowers?” I asked him.

“Because I know you suck at taking care of them?”

“Hurtful, but true,” I said, pushing the cart forward. “I’d still appreciate the gesture.”

“You are a complicated woman,” he called out behind me.

***

A couple years back, honest-to-god leprechauns took over Manhattan. They rode rainbows into battle and fired luck cannons at fighter jets. Gold coins fell from the sky like hail, shattering windows, breaking bones, and wreaking havoc on global financial markets.

There was the summer the Atlanteans invaded the U.S. and blue-skinned fish-men rode skyscraper-sized sea monsters across the Great Plains.

There was the time the sun outright disappeared for a week. Temperatures plunged, gravity went haywire, and the Earth was briefly on a direct collision course with Mars.

Killer clowns. Sentient volcanoes. An army of sadistic nanobots.

With time and repetition, you can grow numb to virtually anything.

At least, that’s what I tell myself when I look back and wonder why we stayed behind when the evacuation sirens droned over Raleigh. As I recall, it wasn’t even an argument. Luke made the declaration that we weren’t evacuating when he got home from his shift at the bookstore, and as much as I want to believe I pushed back, the truth is, I was relieved.

***

In the cereal aisle, Shana lifted a box of cookie-shaped puffs with a cartoon wombat on the front. I shook my head and she sighed, hanging her head as she slid it back onto the shelf.

So much of parenting is bargaining.

She can’t have chocolate ice cream, but she can have cotton candy yogurt. We’ll get the Pop-Tarts, but only the ones that ostensibly have fruit in them. The small box of the thin Oreos is okay, but not the double-stuffs. You draw arbitrary lines in quicksand because you’ve read books and articles that tell you kids need boundaries and discipline.

I yoinked a box of chocolate-covered chocolate chip granola bars from her hands and offered her oatmeal protein bites instead. We liked to convince ourselves the kids’ protein bars were much healthier than the ones that looked like a glorified Baby Ruth. The trick was to never actually look at the nutritional information to check.

My concern about the long-term health risks of sugar and cholesterol and our family’s history of heart disease feels almost quaint now.

Before Shana could protest, a woman screamed for help in the next aisle.

“Go see what’s happening,” I told Luke.

He nodded, shuffled a box of the chocolate granola bars behind his back into the cart, and winked at Shana. She laughed as he ran down the aisle.

“I saw that,” I said.

Luke returned a couple minutes later, scratching his head with one hand and carrying a six-pack of beer in the other.

“Lady’s husband is gone,” he said.

“Gone?”

“Like, poof.” He made a gesture approximating magic. “There one minute, then not.”

He hefted the beer – some locally brewed seasonal orange creamsicle whatever – into the cart. I cleared my throat to get his attention.

“You have half a case of beer in the closet at home.”

“That stuff has gone bad by now.” He waved his hand.

“‘I never drank the last batch I bought’ isn’t the killer argument for buying more of something that you think it is.”

He thought about it for a moment, lifted the six-pack, and sulked back down the aisle to return it. Shana silently gave me a high-five. You take your victories where you can get them.

***

Of course, staying behind meant stocking up on food and supplies for an indeterminate period of chaos, power failures, and disrupted supply chains.

Grocery shopping with a child can be a test of will and endurance under the best of circumstances. Doing it in the middle of the night while evacuation sirens drone, military jets scramble across the sky, and unspecified horror looms on the horizon does not make it easier. The riots in parking lots that followed the earliest crises were a thing of the past, but the aisles were still certain to be slammed with people in varying stages of panic and desperation.

We didn’t get off to a great start. Shana had been quite vocal about her preference to ride in the carts shaped like an ambulance, but those had all been taken. So Luke lifted our visibly disappointed child into a standard cart with a squeaky rear wheel and pushed her toward the entrance, ignoring her frowns and grumbles. These crises were especially hard on children. You could shield them from the worst of the headlines, but it’s not like you can convince them nothing is wrong when fundamental truths like “the sky is blue” are no longer operational. Still, being able to stay home with her toys instead of sitting in a car in bumper-to-bumper traffic for six-plus hours with her dad’s favorite late-90s grunge spewing from the radio just to sleep on a cot in some warehouse or gymnasium had brightened Shana’s mood.

***

We continued up the next aisle while Luke predictably searched for something else we didn’t need. As the cart rattled past shelves of elaborately shaped pasta made with various grains and legumes, Shana bopped her head to some cheerful song she was humming. Interrupting, I showed her two jars of canned sauce.

“This is important,” I told her. “With pasta sauce, you get what you pay for. A seven-dollar jar imported from Italy does make a superior meal to the three-dollar store brand. So which do we buy?”

She scratched her head and studied the two jars before confidently crossing her arms.

“It’s a trick question,” she said. “The one on the left is imported and costs more, but it’s Alfredo, and you always say canned cream sauce is a crime against humanity.”

“Exactly,” I said, giving her a kiss on the cheek. “You make me so proud.”

As I placed the store brand tomato sauce in the cart, Luke startled me from behind with three massive bags of pork rinds in his arms.

“Hey, babe,” he said, dumping them into the cart. “I know what you’re thinking, but they’re buy-two, get-one-free.”

“Do we even need one?” I asked, trying to get my hands around all three bags to shove them back to him.

“Ugh, mom,” Shana banged on the cart. “You’re leaving money on the table here.”

“What have you been teaching our child?” I asked Luke.

“Math.” He winked.

Luke lifted Shana out of the cart and carried her down the aisle on his shoulders. She often brought out a joy and playfulness in him that I rarely saw otherwise, like she unlocked his secret reservoir of dad energy. She looked back at me with a wide smile on her face before they turned the corner to go up the next aisle. I deleted sauce and pasta from the list, stuffed the pork rinds into whatever free space I could find on the racks beside me, and followed close behind.

***

Even before all this started, you would talk to married couples who were like, “Oh no, we’d never bring a child into this world.” Climate change, rampant inequality, gun violence – there were all sorts of existential threats future generations would be burdened with solving or suffering through. I had a few friends from college who insisted they would feel too guilty foisting that responsibility onto some innocent child. That always struck me as something people who didn’t want to be parents said to make themselves feel better about their life choices, the same way couples who didn’t want to deal with the hassles of home ownership would say they refused to buy in a crisis-driven market.

As if some peaceful, stable market was ever going to exist again.

***

When we were ready to check out, the shortest line extended halfway down the frozen food aisle. Sensing her frustration as we waited, Luke offered Shana a Snickers bar.

“Not going anywhere for a while?” he said with a wide grin, seemingly oblivious to the likelihood that she wouldn’t get the reference to a 20-year-old ad campaign.

She didn’t laugh, but she took the candy.

As the line inched along, people around us buzzed with speculation and morbid excitement about what might be coming. The rumors were predictable but infuriating nonetheless. Social media had long since become a morass of nonsense and deepfakes, so nobody truly knew anything. Everybody had something to say just the same.

“Anyone hear what this is all about?” an elderly bald man behind me asked as we neared the front of the line.

“I heard dinosaurs,” a woman in the next line over chimed in.

“Folks on Twitter say the leprechauns are back,” a younger man in front of her said, eying the box of Lucky Charms in his cart with suspicion.

“Guy I ran into at the gas station said the Great Lakes are burning,” the man ahead of me said, tilting his head back.

“Monkeys,” the bald man muttered. “I never trusted monkeys.”

Once we paid for our groceries, we beelined for the parking lot. Shana rode on the front of the cart in outright defiance of the safety warning on the seat. There was a time when I might have scolded her about that and demanded she sit down, but there are certain risks you choose to live with. She hopped off when we reached the SUV. The rear door chirped as Luke popped it open with the button on the key fob.

Shana tossed the last of the chocolate bar into her mouth.

Above us, the crimson sky flashed bright white.

When the momentary blindness passed and our vision returned, Luke and I were alone.

Shana was gone. The Snickers wrapper wafted away in the wind.

***

When I say “gone,” I mean there was no trace of her whatsoever.

The booster seat in the back of the car was missing, as were the toys and books we kept back there to occupy her on long rides. The wallpaper on the homepage of my phone, once one of her earliest baby pictures, was now a generic cityscape. Luke heaved groceries out of the cart toward the pavement, lifting items and moving bags around, as if she might somehow be hidden beneath a loaf of bread.

Panic set in like I hadn’t felt since I went into labor nearly two months early, Luke racing me to the hospital on icy roads in an early-morning snowstorm. I spent hours in emergency surgery and Shana spent weeks in the NICU after that.

I realized I had no idea how long ago that was.

One of us must have called 911, or maybe some bystander watching us frantically scour the area around our car did, I can’t recall exactly, but a patrol car raced to the scene, pulling up next to us in the parking lot. Two police officers exited and approached the SUV. When I hurriedly explained that my child had vanished, they exchanged a knowing glance. One took notes on a small pad as I spoke.

“What is your daughter’s name?” the other officer asked Luke.

He turned to me, his eyes wide. He could not remember.

***

The death toll of some of these incidents is, on its face, staggering: tens of thousands of people or more wiped out, sometimes in a matter of minutes. But when you factor in the size of the American population, the odds of dying in a crisis are practically nonexistent, like being struck by lightning or eaten by a shark. That’s especially true if you live far from a major city, which for whatever reason is where the majority of the chaos and destruction typically occurs.

The fact that such a thing is extraordinarily rare doesn’t make it easier to accept.

“Your child is no longer in continuity, ma’am,” is a sentence I will never be able to wipe from my mind, even as a lot of other memories get shuffled and scattered.

After a decade of biblical-scale plagues, I guess it was only a matter of time until something came for the children. In this case, rather than the Angel of Death going door-to-door hunting the first-borns of Egypt, it was waves of chronal energy rewriting events and lives at random. Over the course of a week, millions of people simply ceased to exist. Scientists say it primarily affected kids because their timelines were less fixed, or something. The phenomenon respected no geographical boundaries. From New York to Texas to California, families grieved loved ones they could barely remember.

You’d think it would be different when the victims are mostly kids. It is and it isn’t. The vigils and fundraisers went on a bit longer, the statements from public officials slightly more emotional. Memorial armbands were briefly a thing again for the first time in years, but eventually everyone has to start worrying about the next apocalypse.

I don’t know if going to a shelter would have made a difference. The FEMA goons on TV insisted they had faraday cages in place that would have shielded people from the chronal flares, but I heard from friends of friends that was bullshit. Kids went missing from the shelters too, and there’s no guarantee we even would have made it to one before Shana got zapped.

In the end, it doesn’t matter.

Every morning, I wake up and write her name in a notebook. I scribble down little details and stray memories that haven’t faded. I sketch her face or her eyes. Luke says those pages will probably disappear eventually too, like the thousands of photos and videos that ceased to exist.

I try to convince myself our relationship has weathered worse, but that’s obviously not true. I don’t want to blame Luke, but of course I do. He blames himself too, even if he covers it up with bad jokes and worse whiskey.

The experts tell us we’ll simply forget Shana soon. That seems almost merciful, but I expect something will always be there between us. An empty seat at the table. A spare room we’re not quite sure what to do with. This isn’t a hole that gets filled up by the passage of time or the machinations of quantum physics.

“This child grew inside me for seven months,” I recall telling my doctor, incredulous.

“Not anymore,” he responded.

***

Once the skies cleared, I spent a lot of time on the porch staring at the endless blue abyss above, replaying that final grocery trip in my head, as if the repetition would help preserve the memory. Pieces of the story were already slipping away, though.

Luke sequestered himself in the basement more often than not, scurrying between his longboxes of old comic books in his arms like a disheveled mouse. He found some minor comfort in immersing himself in fictional worlds where stories followed long-established formulas and promised an eventual happy ending. When he did come upstairs, he had taken to haphazardly recapping epic stories for me in a few jumbled sentences. I knew about Zero Hour and Flashpoint. Superboy punching the walls of reality. Spider-Man and his clone.

“In this one,” Luke said, greeting me in the kitchen when I returned from an open house one afternoon, holding up a dog-eared paperback with what I gathered was Thor on the cover, “the entire city of Paris gets turned to stone. Then Odin shows up at the end and brings millions of people back with a wave of his hand.”

I glanced at the barren refrigerator door, likely once plastered with her artwork, and briefly allowed myself to wonder what she liked to draw. Pacing the cold hardwood floor, I imagined all the toys that were at some point strewn about the living room and dining room. I’m sure I was frequently furious with her for not cleaning up after herself. Now, the halls of the house were uncomfortably silent and disappointingly sterile.

“I don’t know what you want me to do with that information,” I said.

As Luke sulked back to the basement with his books, I trodded upstairs alone.