You Should Reread That Book You Hated in School

If somebody had said this to me even a year ago I would have become irrationally angry, immediately started ranting, and probably started pushing stuff around the counter with a little too much force, so if you read that title and your blood pressure spiked and you’re already thinking of all the reasons why you won’t be doing that, I understand. I get it. I lived in that headspace for…wait…uh…math…hold on…fuck, how old am I?

A long time. I lived in that headspace for a long time, and if it’s not something you want to do, whatever, I’m not your supervisor.

But you should at least consider it, and here’s why.

Reading a Book for Fun is Different

When you read that book you hate so much you were reading it for a class. Right there, that’s enough baggage to fill a lost and found at the airport. You had to read it as homework on your teacher’s schedule, so you might have been rushing to get through it. You potentially had to keep pausing the book to take notes, breaking the flow. You read it knowing there would be a class discussion, or a quiz, or the absolute worst scenario imaginable – reading that shit out loud.

Ugh.

I really hope that the only point of going around the class to read sections out loud was to give the teacher a fucking break for twenty minutes, because whatever you were supposed to get out of that, as a student, I fucking did not. Before it was my turn I wasn’t listening to the other kids read. I was panicking about my turn getting closer. During my turn all I could hear was the blood rushing through my ears, and after my turn all I did was obsess about all the ways I fucked up. If teachers do that shit because it’s seven-forty in the morning and they want to sit quietly for a few minutes and drink their coffee, all the power to them, but if there is some idea out there that the kids are getting something from this besides sheer social anxiety I’m here to tell you it’s a fucking myth.

Anyway, reading for a class also means that you have to pay attention to totally different things. Teachers want to make sure you understand themes and symbolism and foreshadowing and undertones and overtones and subtext and character development and unreliable narrators and you end up in a twenty-minute conversation about a hole in a tree.

I’m not saying learning about this stuff is a bad thing! Everybody should gain some amount of reading comprehension when they are kids, even if they aren’t going to do anything related to writing or books, because I think it makes reading for fun – or even watching movies and television – more enjoyable. Not for training your conscious brain – I don’t think everyone should be pausing in the middle of their airport paperback to go, ah, the author means for the color blue to represent times in the main character’s life that echo their childhood trauma. But it’s for training your unconscious brain. The back half of your brain picks up on way more than we realize, especially in media, and it can deepen your appreciate for a piece of art even if you don’t notice why.

As a kid you had to sit there and consciously pick at the parts of books that are supposed to be silent supports so that as an adult you gain better appreciation for the books (and other media) you choose to consume. Shouldn’t you give the books you had to pick apart a chance to be enjoyed the way they’re supposed to be?

You’re A Different Person Now

At least, I hope you are. If you are exactly the same person you were in high school, and you graduated high school more than, like, three years ago, you should be ashamed of yourself and desperately need some internal reflection.

At the bare minimum, though, you are not in school anymore, and that is fucking HUGE. I fucking hated high school, and it wasn’t even particularly traumatic for me. No bullies, no lingering trauma, nothing requiring therapy. But the whole thing just sucks. It sucks for everyone. Everyone. Anyone telling you high school didn’t suck on some level is either a liar or someone you don’t want to engage with.

Being in that shitty situation can give you shitty attitudes.

There were books I hated simply because I was forced to read them.

There were books I hated because a teacher I hated liked them.

There were books I hated because everyone loves this book! (Actually, I still sometimes do that one. Oops.)

There were books I hated because I was going through a bad period that didn’t have anything to do with the book or English class, even, but I was teenager and bad at managing my overblown emotions so I channeled it all into hating this dead French author who has done nothing to me personally due to the fact of being a) French and b) dead.

Not only are you a different person than who you were in high school, you’re a different person than the person you were trying to be in high school. Remember that? Remember how high school and college is all about trying to define yourself? And because you’re too young to have any real experiences to define you, you cling to the smallest shit that absolutely should not define an entire personality, and then make that your entire personality?

Yeah.

Maybe you never did that with literature, but I sure as shit did. I’m only starting to unpack some of it now. Turns out, I still don’t like Russian literature for all the reasons I thought I didn’t back in school. But I also vehemently said I didn’t like French literature or Beat poets, and, like…I don’t know? I don’t know. I haven’t read any of it since I was a kid, and I think I was just latching on to stuff to define my edges and I’m pretty sure I did it wrong.

A Lot of ‘Stuffy’ Classics Are Actually Really Good

You know, when you’re allowed to simply read something for the joy of it instead of having to pick it apart and get graded on how well you picked it apart. Authors don’t write shit specifically thinking of classrooms hundreds of years in the future. They write shit that meant something to them. They told stories they really wanted to tell. And while some of them are obviously only considered classics because they were written by rich white men and it was mostly rich white men who decided which were classics and which weren’t, others are Really That Good.

Also, a lot of these classics are a lot naughtier than your teachers would have you believe. They made you read all those Shakespeare plays and always breezed right over the dick jokes, hoping you wouldn’t notice they were there.

Don’t go try to read Shakespeare, though. Find a way to watch the plays. A lot of the incomprehensible lines in Shakespeare actually become perfectly clear when they are performed with the correct tone and nuance.

There Are Some Books That Aren’t Worth Revisiting

I’m writing this because for my entire life I’ve fucking hate The Stranger by Albert Camus, but I’m finally ready to admit that might just be because of where I was in high school and I’m willing to give it another shot.

On the other hand, I would rather walk on my hands and knees through glass shards and Lego pieces than read Ethan Frome again.

I am going to try my hand at the Beats, starting with Dharma Bums. But if someone ever came at me with Atlas Shrugged I would be putting up dukes.

Charles Dickens can blow me.

You’ll Never Walk Alone

The buzz buzz buzz of the intercom over her bunk was light and faint and still woke her up. Three buzzes, pause. Three buzzes, pause. Three buzzes, pause. Five cycles on this ship and that pattern was burned into her head. It would wake her up through anything.

“Meh?” she mumbled after opening the channel. The clock on the other wall said she was in the middle of her sleep cycle.

“Get up here,” was all Mick said.

It was all he needed to say.

Price shimmied into her suit as fast as she could, still zipping up the front as she clicked out of her bunk and practically ran down the hall.

It was a CAW vessel – Continuous Active Work. Everyone had overlapping shifts. Mostly everyone followed their own planet’s day-night cycle, and it worked out without too much trouble. Price slept for eight hours. Mick for three. It was only ever irritating when a Dewwed was on board. Thanks to Deww’s slow rotation one of their days lasted three of Price’s planet’s weeks. Sure, they’d be awake for two, but then they were asleep for seven days. And they slept hard. If you needed anything from a Dewwed you just hoped it could sit until they were awake.

They were awake now. Everyone was. All running. Scrambling to stations. To open laboratories. A fair amount of the crew were stumbling into the mess. Not a bad idea. The discovery of everyone’s lifetime, the primary purpose of their expedition achieved. Who would want to be distracted by a rumbling stomach?

Price wasn’t hungry. She could never eat when her nerves were exposed, and right now they were raw.

Another false alarm?

They had done this before. The whole ship activated and ready to go, only to get down-planet and find they were wrong. Had been duped. The wrong place entirely.

The tone in Mick’s voice, though. The tone had been what had stripped her nerves in the first place. That hadn’t been an I think tone.

She pushed through the crowded laboratory hall and climbed the ladders up to Observation. Grunts, as the rest of the ship called it. Price and Mick and the others, they weren’t scientists. They were just the explorers sent down first, to make sure none of the valuable people would die trying to do their work. Price didn’t really care about the name but she could tell it bothered Mick more than he let on.

“Well?” she asked, pushing up through the hatch.

Mick, Rena, and Xy all looked over at her. They were clustered on the far side of the room, in front of the collection of buttons and screens. Price’s first day, it had been nothing but brightly colored, headache-inducing gibberish. Now it was their shared secret language. All of the answers of the universe, laid out in front of them in blinking orange characters.

“Oh…wow…” was all she could get out.

The other three only nodded, still staring.

Everything was right. Every screen, every dial, every gauge. Cycles ago, they’d playfully put little tape arrows at the numbers they were looking for. And now, everything lined up.

Visualization didn’t happen for another hour, but by then it hardly mattered. Nothing had changed on the wall. The only thing seeing the growing blue and green dot through the observation panes did was give them something new to stare at.

They had finally found Earth.

They had finally found the humans.

From the moment the first radios in the galaxy had been built, they had been receiving signals from the humans. Loud signals. Quiet signals. Songs and conversations and private moments that they clearly hadn’t known would wiggle out into space for the rest of time. Price’s favorite recording since she was little, the one she came back to when she was sad, or tired, or bored, was a simple conversation between two wives. One was on a work trip, across the country. It was a short trip. She would be home in a couple of days. But they still spoke like they might never see each other again. She asked about the kids, and reminded her to feed the cat. They said they missed each other and made plans for dinner when the away wife returned. Such love and longing when they were only missing each other for a few days. Price had listened to that recording on repeat after every breakup, to the never ending irritation of her friends and family.

The private signals were nothing more than curiosities, collections in museums. The ones the scientists and governments cared about were the direct signals. The calls out into the void. Over and over they found these, sent over years and decades and centuries. Thousands of messages with thousands of ways to find them. Images of their solar system. Maps. Radiation signatures.  Desperate calls into the night sky, saying the same thing again, and again.

Come find us. Please answer. We don’t want to be alone.

Price examined the city through her helmet shield. The air was mostly oxygen, a near proper mix for Rena who had been seconds away from taking her helmet off before Mick reminded her that just because she could breathe on the planet didn’t mean it was safe.

“Could be all sorts of micro-nasties waiting to turn your lungs into their new home,” he said, in that dry way of his. Rena cursed a bunch and kept her helmet on.

Helmet or no, Price didn’t care. The city they were standing in the middle of was grand. Looming. Sprawling. Shining buildings that stretched up to the sky in every direction she could see.

Even their homes reached for us.

The tall buildings were overrun with greenery, trees and vines like Price had never seen. There had been roads, once.

The planet was dotted with places like these. Some were underwater. A few were on the moon.

All were empty.

All had been empty.

“For, oh, I’d say a billion years,” Xy said, examining her computer readout. “Give or take a few million on either side.”

“A billion years? That’s…I don’t have the numbers off the top of my head…millions of years before any other planet evolved intelligent life. And these buildings still stand?” Reva asked.

“Imagine how they must have been then,” Mick said.

“They should be dust. What did they build them out of?”

“That’s for the scientists to learn. You want answers, let’s start checking off boxes.”

Zy and Reva headed in one direction, sensors and collection boxes at the ready. Mick fell into step with Price.

“You’re thinking about that recording you like so much,” he said, glancing at her face.

Price bristled at being so easy to read, but ignored it and nodded. “Listened to it this morning. I keep wondering, was this their home city? Or the one she was on a work trip in?”

Mick chuckled mirthlessly. “The odds of that couple living at the end is basically zero. They probably lived hundreds of years before any of this was even built. Maybe thousands.”

“Didn’t say it was rational,” Price said. “Just…”

“Yeah. I know. There’s a particular recording I like, too. Or liked, when I was a kid. I forgot all about it, until we met.”

“Oh?”

“You loved playing that one call for people, and it made me wonder if I had any favorites, and then I remembered.”

“What is it?”

Mick laughed again, only this time it wasn’t so cold. “It’s stupid, which is why I don’t tell people. When I was a kid I thought it was funny, I guess. Now, with all we know…it’s just sort of…they were so desperate to find us, but we weren’t there yet. They were the first. First and only.”

“What was the recording, Mick?”

“It was from an advertisement, for some form of communication. Most of the details don’t matter. The only thing I remember liking was the tagline.”

He paused, and looked around at him at what was left.

“Well?”

It was only when Price truly believed he wouldn’t answer that Mick started doing something she’d never thought she’d hear.

He started singing.

Tea Shop

It was an unassuming tea shop in the middle of the city. The only reason anyone would even glance at it again was to think, ‘Huh. A tea shop. Odd. Can’t get much business.’

In fact, business was booming.

Saying all the women in the city knew about the tea shop would be a hyperbolic. New women moved in. Girls grew up. People transitioned. Every day there was someone new to learn about the tea shop.

Always, the tea shop was mentioned in hushed tones. Murmurs. Discussions in front of the bathroom mirrors and bridal parties and baby showers. Places where the men, affronted at the thought of being surrounded by pinks and purples and kept from their precious beer and sports and tractors, would never dream to  be seen.

These men were not all men, of course. There were plenty of men in the city who had no problem and even enjoyed being surrounded by and doing ‘girly things.’ These men also knew about the tea shop. These men could be customers of the tea shop, if they wanted.

The men who did not know about the tea shop were the ones the tea shop was for.

Zoey doesn’t quite know if she believes in the tea shop or not, but she has completely run out of other options. He had taken her to this city, clear on the other side of the continent, long before he let his true colors show. When the things he whispered in her ear sent shivers down her back. The little family she has are thousands of miles away, poor, and, to be frank, terrible people. If she called them for help they would probably gloat.

She has made no friends. At first, it was sweet he wanted her to stay in the house. Protect her. Zoey took care of the house and he took care of the bills. Wasn’t that a cute way to be?

In fact, couples all across the city made it a cute way to be.

He, of course, did not.

She only leaves the house to do grocery shopping now. He gives her money and expects a receipt and exact change. He will scour it. Make sure she has not pocketed any of it away. Tell her it’s for her own safety, her own good, she’s so bad with numbers.

Everything he does is deemed for her own good.

Until recently, Zoey believed it.

She was at the grocery store just yesterday. Pushing the carriage. Walking slow. Baby bump pressing against the cold metal. Hoping no one would ask her why she was wearing sunglasses inside. Prepared with the lie she had rehearsed on the walk over.

“The baby is giving me migraines, the light hurts my eyes.”

Zoey got looks, of course, but no one said anything. Not until she passed the bathroom in the back and the baby jumped on her bladder and in she ran, barely time to grab her purse from the front.

An older woman was washing her hands when she came out of the stall. By the time Zoey was washing her hands, the older woman was staring. That nosy older woman way of staring, all pointed eyes and mouth pulled in to a sour look. Zoey began to feel defensive. How dare this woman judge her!

“Do you know of the tea shop?”

“The baby is giving…me…what?”

This was not what Zoey had expected to hear.

“The tea shop. Falling Leaves? Between Eastern and Province?”

This had not been what Zoey had been expecting, and for a second her thoughts were scattered like so many dried tea leaves to the wind. She didn’t know this woman. She didn’t know the tea shop. She didn’t know what city she was in.

Slowly, with prickles, it all came back to her.

“I think I’ve seen it.” She had certainly walked down that street.

“You should go,” the woman said. She was staring directly through the sunglasses, directly to the purple and green and yellow blossoming from her left eye. “For your health. And the baby’s.”

The older woman left, the door swung shut, and Zoey dried her hands slowly, pretending she was completely confused by why the old woman had recommended a tea shop of all things.

Yes, she must be confused. Because if she wasn’t confused, well, the whole thing made less sense than it already did!

Here she is, though, at the tea shop. Falling Leaves, between Eastern and Province, just like the older woman said. She doesn’t know why she’s here. If he finds out, he’ll…he’ll…

That’s why you’re here.

She ignores the thought and goes inside.

It is a tea shop. Sitting on old wooden shelves covered in delicate lace doilies are large jars filled with loose leaf tea. A table with paper bags and a scale sit nearby. Pick your tea. Scoop your tea. Pay for your tea. Easy enough.

The woman behind the counter looks up from a magazine as the bell rings and she smiles. The smiles falters as she catches the colors bleeding from Zoey’s eye.

And then it becomes wider.

Not the sort of wide smiles she catches from other men in public. Sharks’ smiles. No, this is a safe smile. A calm smile. A smile that tells Zoey everything will be okay.

“You are new,” the woman behind the counter says. “Step up to the counter. Let me tell you how it works.”

“I think I can see,” Zoey says. But she dutifully steps up to the counter.

“For the most part,” the woman says. She is beautiful. Handsome. A good chin and strong cheekbones and so tall! She wears no makeup but has a nose ring and a piercing at her eyebrow and so much metal in her ears.

“Pick your tea…or whatever tea he would drink,” the woman says.

“He?”

The woman winks at her, the eyebrow piercing flicking. “We must keep the men happy, mustn’t we?”

Zoey walks the aisles, thinking. He doesn’t drink tea. Never tea. Coffee and beer, mostly. Whiskey and energy drinks sometimes. Never tea. But maybe he doesn’t have to drink the tea. Maybe he doesn’t have to know its there at all. There. A big jar of lavender. She stops and stares at it for a few seconds, and then feel compelled to look at the woman again.

“He doesn’t drink tea,” she says. “But it’s summer, and do you know what he loves?’

The woman gives her a look that says, yes. I can see what he loves.

“He loves lavender lemonade. With vodka. It’s his favorite summer cocktail. I learned how to make it.”

“Sounds perfect.”

Zoey scoops up lavender into a little bag and doesn’t bother to weigh it. It’s only as she reaches the counter that she wonders if she has enough.

He doesn’t let her have money. But he does let her walk. People still drop change, even in this day and age. Over a few years, she has managed to collect five dollars of pennies and dimes and the occasional quarter into an old coffee canister.

“You won’t pay with that,” the woman says, pointing at the canister.

“I won’t?”

“You’ll pay by telling someone.”

Zoey’s heart turns to ice. “Telling someone?”

The woman laughs, understanding. “Not telling anyone that. You never have to tell anyone that. You will tell someone about the tea shop. Someday, you will see someone, and you will understand, and you will tell them.”

Zoey laughs. “I still don’t understand.”

The woman only nods at her. Zoey may not understand, but the woman does.

The tea Zoey has picked sits between them, and the woman stares at the bag.

“Take it home,” she says, not looking away. “And as you are going home, hold it in your hands. Imagine what would be easiest for you. Whatever that is, imagine it over and over. Chant it to yourself. In your head, of course, we don’t want people to think you’re crazy. Whatever is easiest. That is what you think of. Whatever is easiest.”

It’s a fifteen minute walk back to the little apartment, and Zoey does what she’s told. She brews the tea, gets the lemons, and when he has come home, his favorite summer cocktail is waiting for him.

He doesn’t think anything is wrong as he drinks one. Two. Three. All of it. All of it gone.

Zoey watches him closely, unsure what to expect. She doesn’t drink any. He doesn’t think that’s odd. She is, after all, very pregnant. He’d stopped letting her drink years ago, anyway.

Whatever is easiest, the woman had said. Zoey hadn’t had to think hard about it.

He works at the paper mill. Zoey has heard horror stories, mostly from him. There are tanks. Pulpers, they are called. Big open tanks, full of a boiling caustic solution and spinning blades. If someone were to fall in there, there would be nothing left.

If someone were to fall in there, their family would get money from the company.

The next day, Zoey is humming to herself when she gets the phone call.

She cries very well at his funeral. He has made her a very good crier.

It does not take long for her to pay her price. She gives birth a few weeks later. A healthy baby boy. One who will know about the tea shop when he grows up, she will make sure of it.

But that will be in a few years. For now, one of her nurses is trying to hide bruises under scrub sleeves and has a mousy way of looking at everything. Zoey waits until they are alone before she asks.

“Do you know of the tea shop?”

Ladies Brunch

Ladies brunch. The silly little thing they did every other Sunday. Patricia’s Big Breakfast, in the middle of the city. In the middle of all of them. So hard to get together. Being an adult sucked. But they all tried to make Patricia’s.

This Sunday Ladies Brunch at Patricia’s was not so silly. Wendy and Lilah and Penny all were exchanging glances behind Hannah’s back, when she was talking to the waitress or picking out fruit or making those awful smiles into her phone.

They knew who those smiles were for.

“Hannah?” Wendy said finally, after getting daggers stabbed into her face and abdomen from Lilah and Penny’s eyes. “There’s something we need to talk about.”

Hannah kept looking at her phone for a few more seconds. Hit the ‘send’ button on whatever cutesy message she had just sent and then finally put the black brick down on the table. She gave Wendy a smile. “I know!”

“You know?”

Hannah nodded while she sipped at her mimosa. “Bachelorette party planning! I can’t believe your wedding is coming up so soon! Crazy how the time flies. Anyway, I wasn’t sure how much input you wanted-”

“No,” Lilah said, once she realized that Wendy was simply going to let Hannah take the conversation away from the real topic. The one they had all agreed on. The talk that had to happen. Today. Lilah had begged crazy favors from that bitch Jeanette at work to switch shifts with her for this, and they were going to talk about it. Damn it.

Hannah’s excited expression soured just a little, like milk with a drop of a lemon.

“No?”

Wendy shook her head, hoping to hide the mechanical way she was moving. Her nerves had turned her into a robot.

We never do this. It’s a rule not to do this. Maybe we can-

Penny cut directly through her second-guessing.

“We need to talk about Adam.”

Nervous laughter bubbled out of Wendy, and she reached for her mimosa so suddenly she nearly knocked the damn thing over. She managed to get the glass to her lips and downed half of it while Hannah slowly realized that, no, Adam was not coming to the bachelorette party.

“Adam? What about him?”

“Well, you see,” Wendy started, “I know we don’t usually comment on boyfriends or anything, you know, so…I mean, we’re not ganging up on you or anything! And I want you to know that you’re loved…by us…but…well…there’s some things about Adam that…well, they make us feel…um…I mean-”

Penny finished her Bloody Mary. “We’re all pretty sure Adam is a psychopath who wants to kill you and wear your skin like a suit.”

Lilah almost spit out her drink. Wendy’s eyes went wide. Hannah sat back, crossing her arms in front of her.

“Damn it, Pen. We said we were going to be gentle.”

“Well?” Penny said, gesturing toward Wendy. “She couldn’t even get the words out. I think its best to rip the band aid off.”

“You don’t like Adam?” Hannah asked Penny. She looked to the other women. “None of you do?”

For three glorious seconds, it seemed like they might be able to have a simple conversation with Hannah about her boyfriend. Just a conversation. It was why they had wanted to approach this gently. It wasn’t an attack…at least, not on her. And if Hannah was receptive to what they had to say, maybe she would at least consider dumping this guy before he dropped something in her drink.

Then Hannah crossed her legs, picked up her drink and swirled it around.

“You never want me to be happy.”

Groans from around the table.

“Hannah, I’m sorry Penny started out that way,” Lilah said. “But this is serious. We love you, and we don’t want to see you hurt!”

“I thought we didn’t discuss boyfriends. As a rule.”

“We feel strongly enough about this guy to break it,” Wendy said.

“What could he possibly have done-”

“He hates cats!”

Everyone stared at Wendy. A furious blush turned her cheeks an angry red, but she held her head up and her shoulders back.

Hannah nodded once. “He…hates…cats?”

Lilah sighed. “We said we wouldn’t start with the cat thing.”

“This is going great,” Penny muttered.

“I’m completely serious,” Wendy said, getting defensive. “Men who hate cats can’t be trusted. Cats are independent creatures, and men who can’t handle that can’t handle an independent woman.”

“Steve doesn’t like cats.”

“Steve nothings cats. Nothing. Not hate. There’s a difference.”

“I don’t understand how there’s a difference. What-”

“It’s not about the cats!” Lilah said. “Hannah, Adam is not a good guy. He’s possessive-”

“He just wants to spend time with me!”

“He’s jealous.”

“He wants me to know how much he cares.”

“I’ve seen the way he talks to you.”

“Inside jokes!”

“Inside jokes? Is it an inside joke to tell you your worthless when you bring him the wrong beer?”

Hannah shrugged. “He didn’t mean that.”

“We heard your quitting your job,” Penny said. “I thought you loved that job.”

“Adam said I don’t need,” Hannah said quietly. “He makes enough for both of us.”

“But what if something happens?” Lilah asked. “What if you want to leave, but you don’t have an income anymore?”

“I won’t want to leave!” Hannah shouted, making other tables turn to stare. “I love him, and he loves me! You all are…you all are just jealous.”

The other three stared at her the same way they would have stared if she had managed to slap all of them at the same time with her sandal.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Penny asked.

“Penny…” Wendy’s voice was water.

“What the fuck could we possibly be jealous of?” Lilah asked. “His roid-rage body? His cheap car? His sexist jokes?”

“Lilah…”

“You see our love,” Hannah said, standing up, “And you know you’ll never have it!”

“Hannah, please,” Wendy said. “Please sit, and we can talk like adults. We really want-”

“No! This isn’t a conversation! This is an attack, and I won’t be attacked!”

Hannah tried to pick up her purse but it was hooked on her chair. After struggling for a few seconds, pulling and pushing and dragging the chair around, she finally got the purse free and stomped off through the gate and down the street.

“Well, we tried,” Penny said.

“We fucked it all up, is what we did,” Wendy said.

“Hopefully she realizes we’re right before we see her name in the news.”

I Am Not Okay

Y’all mind if I use you for a free therapy session? Great, thanks.

A MOTHERFUCKING BAT GOT INTO MY BATHROOM OVER THE WEEKEND.

And I am not okay.

This very specific thing has been a weird fear of mine for years. Weird, but strong. Like, I’ve been telling everyone it’s a ‘top five fear’ but I’ve been thinking about it and I honestly can’t think of another four fears that even match this. And I’m afraid of a lot. I’m not so much a human as I am a high-functioning bag of screaming cats, and most days I spend at least an hour worrying about one thing or another. There’s a lot to choose from, right?

But none of it compares to my fear of, and I cannot stress this enough, the exact fucking scenario that happened to me over the weekend.

I guess what makes it so bad is that, even though I was afraid of it, I still thought it wasn’t really going to happen? Like, I was afraid of it like I’m afraid of the Yellowstone Caldera blowing up. Less an actual fear I can take steps toward managing and more a wild plaything I pull out and fascinate over when I should be trying to go to sleep. Which made sense when I was living in the suburbs, or the city.

But guess what? I live in the fucking woods. Do you have any idea how many animals I’ve seen directly out of my own windows? I’ll tell you: deer, elk, turkeys, foxes, rabbits, bobcats, and a fucking bear. Close neighbors have reported seeing mountain lions. I’m basically living in West Mountain Bumfuck and was still in this fantasy headspace where my fear of a bat getting into my house while I sleep was just some horror movie that could never actually happen to me.

It fucking happened to me.

And in the most horror movie way possible. Jordan Peele couldn’t have done it better. I get woken up out of a deep sleep by…this sound. I can’t even describe it properly. Chirping. Beeping. Pinging. Fast and high pitched and it sounds sort of like an electronic alarm but its coming through the open door to my bathroom and there’s nothing in there that should be making that sound and I’m still half asleep and I stumble around the bed and look into the bathroom and I can make out…shapes.

One shape is my cat, Bruce. He is nothing more than a dark shape even in broad daylight, so at this moment I only recognize it’s him because he meows at me.

The other shape is on the floor next to him, about six inches across and oblong, and is making the weird pinging noises.

At this point I know what has happened. But I don’t want to know – and I certainly don’t want it to be true – so I deny it to myself as I frantically try to get Bruce out of the fucking bathroom. This other shape is his new best friend so of course he doesn’t budge, and continues to sit over this beeping thing.

I go to get my glasses. My husband is finally awake and aware that A Situation Is Happening. The sounds haven’t stopped and also I am starting to freak the fuck out.

In order to see what the shape is I have to turn the bathroom light on. And to turn the bathroom light on, I have to go past and around the shape.

Because I am still convincing myself that what I know to be true is wrong, I manage to do it, all the while the shape is still beeping it’s head off.

Lights on.

Motherfucking bat.

On its back, wings out wide, beep beep beeping away.

My brain sets itself on fire. I scream, it’s a bat! and run out of the bathroom as fast as possible.

Thank God my husband can keep his shit together. He manages to trap the bat in a trash bin without touching it. I would have picked up cat, slammed the door shut, and called it a day.

So now it’s two in the morning and I’m trying to figure out who to call about the actual God Damned Bat in my fucking bathroom.

Actually, up until this point in my life I wasn’t afraid of bats. I am now, obviously, but my very specific fear wasn’t just the bat. It was the bat, in my bedroom (or adjoined bathroom with the door open) at night, while I was asleep, and then the bat bites me but I don’t know the bat bit me, and then I get rabies.

Oh, did you not know this is a thing that can happen? Turns out a lot of people don’t. Every official and doctor I’ve had to talk to in the past few days has been some varying degree of surprised that I knew, sort of, what to do.

It’s not common. There’s an average of three cases of human rabies reported in the US every year. Three. Not three hundred, or even thirty. Three. For a couple of years recently there were zero, and when there were five in 2021 health officials were sort of freaking out. But death by rabies is so incredibly horrible that the very second your chances of contracting it is a non-zero number it is highly fucking recommended you start getting rabies vaccine shots.

Being asleep in the same room as an untested bat puts you in that non-zero category.

I have a tendency to freak out about a lot of small things (flashback to me crying in front of the broken furnace on New Year’s Day because I’d called three separate companies and no one would come on a holiday) so even my husband didn’t understand we were in Big Deal territory until he overheard the dude at the health department on the phone at two in the morning treat my story as serious as a car crash. Animal control was at the house before noon to take the bat. Results on the rabies testing wasn’t going to be back until Tuesday, so everyone – and I mean everyone – that we talked to about this told us to start getting shots right the fuck now go go go why aren’t you going.

So, instead of the lazy Sunday we were looking forward to, we ended up at the local ER.

I’m only able to write about this at all because the bat tested negative yesterday. And I’ve still got this lingering, irrational fear that Animal Control will call me back and tell me they were wrong.

Fucking Little House on the Prairie. And Reddit, man. Fuck Reddit.

So, anyway, that’s where I’m at mentally. And physically. My husband and I decided to keep on with the rabies vaccine shots so if this happens again – I LIVE IN THE FUCKING WOODS, THIS COULD HAPPEN AGAIN, OH MY GOD – we’re at least protected.

Now I need to stop writing because just thinking about this for too long gets me paranoid again.

Anyway, if a bat gets into your house while you’re asleep and you can’t say with one hundred percent certainty that you didn’t get bit, you need to trap the bat so animal control can test it for rabies. If the bat gets away, you need to start rabies shots.

I need a drink.

How The Beginning Was Ruined

Here’s where I think everything went wrong:

You’ve got this tiny group of hunters and gatherers. They’ve always been hunters and gatherers, like their parents and grandparents before them. But one day they’re out in the sweltering summer heat trying to pin down a couple of antelope for dinner or whatever, and one of them gets what is possibly the best idea for mankind since fire and the wheel.

Motherfucking Agriculture.

So they catch some animals and start breeding them (perverts) and instead of gathering what’s around they find some stuff they can grow reliably and after a few generations they’ve got a nice thing going on. No one has to go out of town to find the meat they want, they have stores of grain and food to last them through the winter, and existence has become pretty damn chill.

This becomes the problem.

I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this, but some humans are reliably Not Chill. They wake up in the morning and they have to do something. They have to be productive. They have to accomplish accomplishments. And they have to do it before mid-morning or they start feeling all sweaty and antsy and gross. It’s a fucking compulsion. It’s a nice day, the weather is cool, it’s sort of cloudy, and everyone is looking forward to doing maybe an hour or two of weeding and watering the crops and feeding and water the animals and then lounging. Play some music, kick the ball around, talk shit. You know. The usual.

Everyone, that is, except Wallace.

See, Wallace is one of these chronically Not Chill people. Wallace needs to be doing something. And not just anything. Playing music or games is not enough for Wallace, oh no. He needs to be improving shit. He needs to see results. While everyone else finishes up what they need to do to continue survival around ten in the morning and settle into enjoying life, Wallace is hard at work.

“We need to fix these tents,” Wallace says.

Sebastian hears him and looks up from whatever he was whittling, and then turns to look at Wallace’s tent.

“What happened? Did yours rip or something?”

“No,” Wallace said, “But we’re living in tents!”

“And?”

“And…and we’re better than that!”

At this point Sebastian stares at Wallace. Wallace is a known pill, and Sebastian knows if he engages anymore than Wallace is going to somehow become even more unpleasant.

Piper doesn’t notice and says, “But we’ve always lived in tents! It’s worked so far.”

As Sebastian closes his eyes, Wallace claps his hands together.

“Yes, that’s the point. We’ve always lived in tents! Come on, people, we can do better than that!”

“Well,” Piper asks even as Sebastian is screaming at her with his mind to shut up. “What do you think we should live in?”

“Stone houses.”

“Stone?”

“What’s a house?”

“It’s what we’re going to be living in, once we finish the work! The stone will insulate us better than the canvas. Cool in the summer, warm in the winter, and there will be more privacy. You can’t hear dick through stone!”

Now, it’s not that Sebastian doesn’t believe Wallace on how much better stone housing would be. It’s more than he doesn’t care enough to do the work to make it happen. He likes his tent. It keeps him warm and dry and he decorated it up really nice and it’s easy to move. It keeps him alive. Why would he want to do anything else?

He passes on building the stone houses, but Wallace manages to get a few other Go-Get-Em types to come with him. A year or so passes, and now the town is made up of stone and wood buildings. They are better than the tents and everyone is a little more comfortable. They go back to getting what needs to be done by ten and then enjoying existence for the rest of the day.

Everyone except Wallace.

Wallace, of course, never stops finding things he thinks he can improve on. While the others spend their days in the water or laughing with each other he’s out there, building better fences and windows and all sorts of shit that’s, like, nice, but not really necessary. Everyone just leaves Wallace alone to work, though. Live and let live, right?

Except, Wallace is starting to get a little weird about it. He wakes up, he stretches and eats breakfast, and then he gets to work. And all these other people? Why, they’re just sitting around! Talking to each other! Not accomplishing a God Damned Thing while Wallace is busting his hump from sun up to sun down! And he’s getting mighty sick of it.

“You people need to help me!” he screams at them one morning.

“Oh, no thank you,” says Sebastian.

“I wasn’t offering! This is ridiculous! I’m the only one working in this town!”

“Yeah, but, like, you don’t have to be. We don’t need these things to survive. We took care of all that before ten. Now we’re enjoying ourselves.”

Wallace sputters a bunch, getting redder in the face, because he can’t think of a good reason why everyone should be working as hard as he is all the time. But they totally should! So unfair.

See, Wallace has decided that because he always has this drive to be doing something than that makes him better than the others. He’s more dedicated to the cause or some bullshit. They’re all just lazy assholes profiting off all of his hard work. He sees people sitting down and enjoying their time on earth and laughing while he’s slaving away (at some completely not necessary task) and thinks that something is wrong with them. How dare they be happy with what they have? Don’t they know they’re constantly supposed to want better? More?

Wallace isn’t only the sort who has to be constantly doing something.

Wallace is also an asshole.

Wallace starts scheming. He is going to find a way to get those lazy bums off their butts and doing the work that he has decided needs to be done.

Anyway, from here you can picture any sort of scenario you want, because they all happened at some point.

Wallace decided he was in charge and started ordering everyone else around.

Wallace gathered a few flunkies and made an army and started ordering everyone else around.

Wallace told everyone there was a man in the sky who would give them paradise but only if they worked all day and also followed all of Wallace’s orders.

Wallace invaded a neighboring town and made those people work.

Wherever there are people enjoying their existence, there is a Wallace.

And Wallace is an asshole.

Fuck Wallace.

Some Thoughts on 1996’s Independence Day

I Have Always Unironically Loved This Movie

I mean, I first saw it as a kid. But now I’m thirty or forty years old and I still think this movie is rad. I think it gets a seat with the other Great Nineties Action/Adventure Movies That Still Hold Up, like The Mummy and Men in Black. Back when it came out, a lot of people thought it was Big Stupid. And it completely is. It is Big Stupid on many levels. The only dude who figured out the aliens were about to obliterate all the cities their saucers were sitting over was the guy who works for DirecTV? The whole world was seemingly just sitting on their thumbs waiting for America to come up with a solution? The advanced space aliens were using an operating system that Jeff Goldblum was able to hack into?

Yeah. Big Dumb. And I understand where those arguments are coming from. My thing is, plot holes happen all the fucking time. The only thing that really matters is, is the rest of the movie entertaining enough to gloss over those plots holes? For me, seeing Will Smith punch an alien in the mouth is worth, like, two to three plot holes all on its own.

The Best Scene is When Steve Hiller Sees the Saucer for the First Time

Honestly, this scene might be better than the entire rest of the movie, and I am not kidding, and – again – I fucking love this movie.

Up until this point, Steve and Jasmine have both completely missed the aliens’ arrival. It’s still early on the west coast, they mistakenly thought tremors from the saucer latching itself in place over LA was a cheap earthquake, and they just…haven’t looked outside yet. Even in the YouTube comments people are all, hOw DoEs He NoT sEe ThE gIaNt SaUcEr, but, like…how often do you really look at your surroundings? Especially when it’s early morning, you’re barely awake, and the lawn is littered with kids toys that keep taking your attention?

The scene is a perfect encapsulation of Alfred Hitchcock’s Bomb Under the Table quote. If Steve opens the door and just sees the saucer, that immediately defuses all of the suspense. Instead, we the audience know exactly what Steve is missing, and we’re sitting there waiting for the inevitable moment he finally notices. The escalating tension of Steve very slowly figuring out something is wrong makes the scene feel like it belongs in a horror movie. The glances to his left and right as he notices that all of the neighbors are panicking, followed by him hearing the helicopter and following it with his eyes and that’s how he finally sees the saucer is fucking poetry. The soundtrack, nothing more than a sort of low, droning hum, swells into punctuating horns as the camera pushes in on Steve, finally understanding that his holiday weekend is now completely fubar.

If that isn’t cinema I don’t know what is.

Connie Doesn’t Get Enough Heat

David’s ex-wife and the White House Communication’s Director (I had to fucking look that up just now, I never understood what her role was, exactly, besides ‘follow the President around and try to fix shit’), Constance Spano is, for most of the movie, good at her job and a quick thinker. It’s this one thing, though, that has been bothered me for over two decades.

David figures out that the aliens plan on blowing up all the cities they are hovering over with seven hours to go. Knowing that his ex-wife is probably elbow-to-elbow with a man who can talk to all of America at any time he calls her, trying to warn her. She listens to him on the phone for all of ten seconds, doesn’t actually hear anything he’s saying, gets mad at him and hangs up.

Now, I get that there are a lot of factors going on here. The movie has already made it clear David is still hung up on his Connie, four years after the divorce, and we don’t know how often he calls her trying to get her to leave his job for him. The President is at that very moment in the middle of addressing the nation and a pissy woman keeps shushing her. Fucking aliens just showed up and there’s a saucer hovering directly over her head at that very moment so obviously she’s not in a great headspace.

This is how the conversation goes:

Connie: What do you want?

David: You’ve got to leave the White House.

Connie: This is hardly the time or the place to be having that same old discussion.

David: You don’t understand, you’ve got to leave Washington.

Connie: Well, in case you haven’t noticed, we are having a little bit of a crisis here.

David: They’re communicating with a hidden signal, they’re going to attack.

Connie: You are just being paranoid.

David: It’s not paranoia! The embedding is very subtle, it’s probably been overlooked! If-

Dial tone

I know there’s history there, but…lady. Seriously. Huge alien saucers have positioned themselves over the most populated cities and government centers in the world. Your ex-husband, who you know is good with modern technology, is calling to warn you they’re going to attack, and you call him paranoid? She doesn’t let him get a word of explanation out before she hangs up and goes back to listening to the President finish his address to the people, asking them to stay in their homes and not to evacuate the cities.

Six hours later David finally reaches the White House, and now that he’s gone to all this effort Connie is finally willing to listen and immediately believes him. The President orders evacuations but there’s only thirty minutes left to Kaboom Time. Sitting on Air Force One after barely escaping alive himself, he beats himself up for telling people to do the wrong the thing, and wonders how many lives could have been saved if he had told people to evacuate earlier.

And Connie just sits there. Staring at him. Probably never mentions that David tried to warn her earlier. The way the movie frames it, in fact, she seemingly has completely forgotten. If Connie had listened to David the first time, people would have had seven extra hours to get out of the cities instead of twenty minutes, but the movie itself ignores that fact. I’m not asking for her to get strung up or jailed or anything. Just a little bit of remorse would be nice.

Oh My God, The Special Effects Are Still So Damn Good

I’m not one of those people who think practical effects are always better, but I do think, in retrospect, we started using CGI in movies way too early. Movies made in the nineties and even early two-thousands that used computer graphics have aged like heavy cream in the sun. Meanwhile, Independence Day still looks amazing, because they did everything the old fashioned way: they spent days building a shit-ton of meticulous, to-scale models of New York, LA, and the White House, and then they blew them all up.

The movie really lets the destruction stand on its own, too. The soundtrack drops out shortly after David’s ominous “Time’s Up,” and for the next two minutes and twenty seconds the only sounds are the explosions and the screams. A few quick shots pull back to show the destruction from afar and only feature eerie howling. This crew spent hours upon hours getting these scenes right, and you were going to appreciate them, God damn it.

Even the shots of the aerial battles against the little alien ships are fucking amazing for the late nineties. Again, no expert, but I think because they’re constantly in motion and that masks any obvious Uncanny Valley shit the eye might otherwise pick up on. The scenes with David and Steve in the alien mothership are the most-obviously fake, but there’s still an incredible amount of physical sets and props and what was done in a computer was done with two-tones in low light, and again I think that really helps the eye gloss over the imperfections.

The COVID Pandemic Has Proven These Are the Most Realistic Parts of the Movie

  1. Jasmine’s shitty boss making her work even as an entire flying saucer is hovering menacingly over the city.
  2. The large contingent of people who decided the aliens were No Big Deal and threw a big party directly in the middle of the problem and got a space-laser to the face.

Siren

It was some kind of rainy day the second time I saw her. That sort of rainy where it ain’t, not really, but it kind of is. Mist of rain so fine its almost fog. But it ain’t. That sort of day.

It was a Sunday, and I was where I always was on a Sunday: the Gulp ‘n’ Go on the outskirts of town, ‘bout a mile down from the trailer park. Mrs. Lopez two trailers down and I had a thing going. She’d spend Saturday making as many red and green burritos as she could before her arthritis would set in, and I’d sit outside the Gulp ‘n’ Go at my little folding table and sell them for two bucks each. We’d split the profits, forty-sixty on account of her doing all the kitchen work and me being a kid and all, but forty percent was enough to keep me in hot lunches all week and let me put a little in the base of the ceramic lamp next to my bed.

I had a piggy bank, but I also had three older brothers.

No one inside ever seemed to mind me as long as I set up my table away from the big window. This was way back, when it was still owned by that guy with the hook arm and glass eye. Darryl, I think his name was, I don’t know for sure ‘cause he was never there. But if he knew about me he didn’t care, and he told his staff not to care, neither. It was small, then, nothing more than the counter and a couple rows of chips and snack cakes and jerky and a couple coolers of sodas and beers. No air conditioning in the summer and an overworked heater in the winter. No hot food. Naw, they wouldn’t get hot food until that national chain, the one that makes their employees wear those stupid paper hats, bought it up, tore it down, and built that ugly thing twice as big in the same place. Now that place would never let a broke kid from the trailer park sell two dollar burritos out front, but Darryl? Darryl didn’t mind nothing.

I was at my little table, and the rain was sort of happening and sort of not, and I was almost out of burritos which was good because most of my clothes were soaked through, when she sort of just…appeared. She probably came from somewhere. Probably walked up the road and I didn’t notice her. Probably.

She stepped up to the glass, under the gas station awning, and I thought she’d go in but she didn’t. She had long hair, brown, loose, down her back over a brown leather jacket, and tight pants that hugged her hips and then flared out down around her ankles and boots. She hugged the window, leaning up against it, and pulled a pack of cigarettes out of the jacket.

Her lighter wouldn’t light. Maybe she never would have spoken to me if her lighter would have worked. But it didn’t. Flick, nothing. Flick, nothing. Flick, nothing. Her nails were painted a bright red, same as her lips, and over and over those painted nails went across the wheel.

Nothing.

I had a tiny little butane lamp, the sort you put under a tin foil tray of red and green burritos.

“Hey. Kid.”

I looked at her like I hadn’t been looking at her that whole time. She gestured with her cigarette, then at the little blue flame. I shrugged, and she ducked her cigarette under the tray.

“Thanks.”

We was silent for a little bit. She looked like she was waiting for someone and I wasn’t too good at talking to anyone. Still ain’t, I guess, only now it matters less. Whoever she was waiting for still hadn’t rolled in by the time she finished her first cigarette, so she lit the second without asking.

“What you selling, anyway?” she asked.

“Burritos.”

“You make ‘em?”

“Nah. Mrs. Lopez does.”

“That’s good. You’re kinda white. To be selling burritos. They any good?”

Because I knew who she was (and didn’t know if she knew I knew) I lifted the corner of the tin foil lid.

“Free sample.”

She shrugged, stubbed out her cigarette early, and took one.

“I know what you are.”

To this day, I don’t know why I said it. Maybe I thought she remembered me and was pretending she didn’t. Maybe I thought I’d be next. Maybe I was an awkward kid and couldn’t hold a conversation to save my life. Don’t remember.

She squinted at me and swallowed a bite. “Who am I, then?”

“A siren.”

“Like that alarm that goes off when there’s a twister around?”

I shook my head. I could have said nothing. I didn’t.

“No, like the creature. You lure men in. Bad men. Until you’re alone.”

Half her mouth went up in a smile. The other half didn’t move. “And then?”

In for a penny, or whatever.

“You kill them.”

“And why am I killing them?”

“To eat them.”

She gestured at her burrito, already half eaten, and I understood the point she was trying to make.

“I eat lots of candy,” I said. “But I know that’s not good for me.”

I shouldn’t have been saying any of that, but I kept on talking. I’ve always wondered, was it her magic working on me? I knew sirens could draw men in, further, further, past the point of hope, but maybe it wasn’t something she could fully control. Maybe it was always there, pulsing out of her, and just standing next to me for ten minutes was enough to sink into my brain. Or something.

She looked at me. Really looked at me. I should have been scared, but I wasn’t. Sirens went after bad men, and I wasn’t bad. Not really. I’d seen the men she went after.

“And why do you think I’m a siren?” she asked.

“Because I saw you,” I said. “Two Sundays ago. You left here with that man, the one with the red puffy hat and the mustache that goes like this.”

I drew two lines down from under my nose to the bottom of my chin.

“And then two days later, I saw him on the news ‘cause he was missing. Then the next day he was dead. Found him in the quarry.”

She’d eaten the burrito while we’d been talking and turned the foil wrapped into a tight, perfect little ball. Slowly, like she didn’t even know she was doing it, she rolled that ball of foil between her palms, around and around and around.

“I think you killed my uncle, too. About three years back? He died the same way, and he didn’t have no business being by that quarry.”

“It’s a good drinking spot,” the woman said.

“He did all his drinking at my house.”

The ball stopped. She took a step closer. I think maybe she was trying to intimidate me, but like I said. I wasn’t that bad.

“And what. You gonna tell someone?”

I shook my head. “Naw. They was bad men. Well, my uncle definitely was, anyway. And that man from two weeks ago…I ain’t never seen him before, but I saw him then. I saw the way he grabbed your behind. Pushed you in the car. He didn’t seem like a nice man, neither.”

She really looked at me again. The rain was letting up. My butane lantern was on fumes and I was cold.

The siren opened up her purse and pulled out a couple of singles.

“Money for the food,” she said. “Advice for free. Next time you think you’re talking to a killer of men? Keep your mouth shut.”

An ugly blue car pulled in right then, and whatever had gone on between us dried up like the rain. She was in his car, the two of them peeling out of the parking lot, before I even finished packing up.

I took her advice to heart, anyway. Now when I see monsters, I keep my fool mouth shut.

Ezra Miller Alarm

“Hey, Tina, check it out!”

Tina pulled off the sunglasses she had been trying on and looked further down the block. Chet held up something toxic-pink in a green paper cup.

“Shave ice!” he yelled, pumping his other fist.

“That’s nice, honey!”

“You want some?”

“Uh, no, thank you. I’m still full from the last shave ice cart we found.”

“This one has new flavors!”

Luckily, it wasn’t an enticement. Just Chet being Chet. Something Tina was finding more and more…annoying.

“Still going to break it off?” Brittany asked, watching over Tina’s shoulder as Chet and her fiancé, Hank, counted to three and each shoved the entire cup of ice and syrup into their faces at the same time.

“I mean…” Tina said, gesturing.

“You used to think that sort of stupid thing was cute,” Brittany said.

“I know. That was when we were in college and still doing molly at festivals,” Tina said. She pulled a new pair of sunglasses off the rack and tried them on in the little mirror. “I had to grow up. I guess Chet didn’t.”

Both of their current partners began moaning, palming their foreheads.

“Ice cream headache!” Hank yelled.

“Shave ice headache!”

“One more?”

“You’re on.”

Tina turned back to Brittany to catch her wearing a small smile. The other woman could only shrug.

“I still find his stupid antics charming. Sue me.”

“Hey! Babes! Come look at-”

Chet’s call was cut off by a sound. At first, Tina couldn’t even tell where the sound was coming from. If it was a small sound close by or a loud sound far off. If it was an animal or human or machine. It definitely wasn’t a hallucination. Up and down the street people had stopped in their tracks, and in her shock Brittany had gripped Tina’s arm.

“Ow, Brit, your nails.”

The sound solidified. A loud sound. Far off. From above. Like a siren. Yes, it sort of sounded like a tornado siren. Only it wasn’t quite the same. And did they get tornados here?

Tina noticed that some of the locals were already reacting. The owner of the store she and Brittany had been looking at started frantically packing up, slamming cases closed and dragging the sunglasses rack into the shop.

“What the fuck?” Brittany asked. “What’s happening?”

“This is not a drill,” a voice said over a loud speaker Tina couldn’t find. “I repeat, this is not a drill. Ezra Miller has been spotted in the vicinity. This is an Ezra Miller alarm.”

“Ezra Miller?” Tina asked. “The actor?”

Brittany shrugged.

Suddenly Chet and Hank were there next to them, shuffling the women down the street.

“Hey, what are you doing?”

“Didn’t you hear the alarm, babe? We have to go!”

“He has been spotted coming from the airport,” she caught the voice over the loudspeaker saying. “His hair is greasy and standing in every direction and he is slurring his words. He speed is reported at approximately thirty miles at an hour and he is headed for town. This is a Code Red Ezra Miller Alarm. Please seek shelter immediately.”

“We have to get inside!” Hanke yelled, pushing Brittany in front of her.

“Everyone is closing their doors!” Chet pulled on the door to a coffee shop. Inside frightened faces peered out. No one moved to unlock the doors for them.

“Seriously, what the hell is happening?”

“It’s Ezra Miller, babe! Haven’t you heard?”

“That guy from those weird Harry Potter movies?” Brittany asked.

“Yes! Him!”

“He’s just a guy!” Tina yelled, trying to get Chet to stop pulling her down the street.

“No,” Chet said. He paused long enough to pull his sunglasses off his face as he peered down the street, straining to find something among the sea of panicking tourists. “He’s a force of fucking nature. And we’re in the middle of his path.”

“Didn’t you check his location before we got here?” Hank practically squealed at him.

“Of course I did! The day before we landed here he went to Paris. I thought we were safe!”

Hank grabbed Chet by the lapels of his brightly colored shirt. “You fool! It’s Ezra Miller! Nowhere is ever fully safe!”

“Stop panicking, man!” Chet pushed him back and slapped him across the face.

“Chet!” Brittany screamed.

“We have to get to the hotel!”

Tina still had no idea what the hell was going on. But she’d never seen Chet or Hank this freaked out, and the hotel was only a couple blocks north.

“This way!” Chet charged up the street, and the rest of them followed.

“He’s just one guy,” Brittany said through heavy panting. “How could he-”

From somewhere east, toward the airport. A dull roar soared over the town, eliciting screams from people who jostled against them. Then, shadows.

“What are…” Tina saw, and gasped.

“Get under something!” Hank screamed.

The four of them managed to get into a bus shelter seconds before a volley of chairs rained down on the street.

“How…” Tina swallowed. “How the fuck did he do that?”

“Keep moving!” Chet yelled, pulling them down toward the hotel. “If we’re still on the street by the time he gets here, chairs will be the least of our worries!”

It was hard now. Everyone was running everywhere. Some people were spread out on the street, either unconscious or dead. As they wove through the panicked crowd, people in front of a fancy French bakery started banging on the windows with some of the fallen chairs, trying to break in.

“Why won’t they help?” Brittany screamed.

“We unleashed him!” Chet dodged around a knocked over gyro stand just as another roar, this one much closer, washed over them.

Close enough to make Tina and Brittany cover their ears.

“There’s the door to the hotel!” Hank yelled.

They had to push through a crowd of desperate tourists, all trying to convince the four bellboys on the other side of the glass doors to let them through.

“Guests only! Guests only!” they shouted. Chet and Hank tore through the crowd and Brittany and Tina stayed close behind, pushing away hands that tried to tear at them.

“We’re guests! We’re guests!”

“Keys! Let me see keys!”

Hank managed to pull out his wallet first, keeping it overhead as others clawed at it. Finally, it was out, and Hank slapped it against the window.

Another roar, and then a worse sound.

Single, individual screams.

“Ow, fuck, he just slapped me!”

“He choked out my boyfriend!”

“He just crushed that car!”

“No, I won’t sleep with you! Perv!”

Hank pounded the glass with the key.

“Just let us in man! He’s coming! He’s coming!”

The bellboys looked at each other, and in a single motion all fled deeper into the hotel.

Tina had finally managed to get her key out from where she’d shoved it into her bra earlier that day, and she’d wiggled through the crowd to get to the key slot. After finally managed to push a chubby twelve-year old out of her way, she got the key in. It lit up green and made a sad chirp sound.

The door released.

The crowd fell in as air conditioning rolled out.

“Go!” Chet yelled, pushing people into the hotel in front of him. “Go!”

It was the single most heroic thing Tina had ever seen him do. After the last couple was in, he gave her a dashing smile.

“Your turn.”

“Chet, I-”

“WHO WANTS AN AUTOGRAPH.”

Tina screamed.

“Tina, no!”

Chet spun around Tina, getting between her and the unhinged ball of fame and various uppers that was barreling down on them. With a smooth motion he picked her up and tossed her into the hotel.

Slamming the door behind her.

“Chet!” Tina screamed.

“I love you,” Chet said through the glass door.

Then he was gone, whisked away by a large ball of cocaine, hair, and Taco Bell wrappers.

“I’M THE FLASH. BARRY SOMETHING OR OTHER. FUCK DC. OR MARVEL? WHO CARES.”

Tina pounded against the window, watching as her boyfriend was dragged down the street.

“Damn you, Ezra Miller!”

Ready for Anything

This is a foil to my previous post The World Thins. Which means while it’s much lighter in tone it’s still about COVID-19, so if reading anything about that right now isn’t your jam I’d take off.

Carl Vance looked around his little cabin. It had served him well these last two and a half years. Long, isolated two and a half years. Necessary two and a half years. But now it was all over. His food rations were almost completely gone, barely enough for the next week, and he’d never really gotten the hang of hunting the way he thought he would have (all that time at the firing range and he had never once considered that he didn’t actually know what to do with a carcass to turn it from a dead animal into food). His water purification system had recently started to break down, and he was noticing more sediment – and more panicked trips to the outhouse. His generator had crapped out almost immediately, followed by a freak rain storm that had driven a branch into one of his closets and drowned out all of his batteries, so he’d been without electronics for over two years. He’d read all his books twice. He’d walked the woods around his cabin so many times he knew every tree and bush and rivulet. Carl was, to be completely frank, bored.

All of this added up to a single conclusion: it was time to discover the new world order.

Carl Vance was a smart man. An everyman. A Renaissance man. He was a scholar, a gentleman, using all his free time for his own research on the internet. But he was also a hard man, a man’s man, able to swing a hammer and pull a saw. He was a forward thinker. A man of foresight. And insight. And all sorts of other sights English didn’t have the words for. He was the most clever man he personally knew. And based off the reactions to his Facebook posts, a lot of his friends would agree.

Some things, though, you don’t share. For your own protection. The entire eight years he was building and preparing his cabin he didn’t say a single thing. Came up with excuses for all his weekends away. Hikes. Family two states over. Work trips. Anything to keep people from knowing the truth the way he did.

All of his research pointed to the same conclusion: an end was coming. What sort of end, no one was sure, but it was coming. And only the prepared would survive. The last thing Carl Vance needed was a bunch of Facebook friends begging for a spot in his cabin. Taking up his space. Eating his food. Making risk of detection that much higher. No, no. He liked his friends. Not that much.

When whispers of the virus began, his friends laughed it off. Said it was no big deal. Would never come to the states. Would be like that last SARS thing from a decade or so back – blink and you miss it. Carl wasn’t so sure. He waited. He watched. He laughed with his friends at the jokes, but inside he was a watchdog in the night, keeping his eyes to the forest edge.

The very second he heard of a case on American soil, Carl called work and quit with no explanation. He packed up everything in his main house he gave two damns about, and in the middle of the night drove out of town and up the mountain trail toward his cabin.

The end had finally happened. And Carl Vance was going to ride it out in style.

He’d been keeping his pickup in tune in case he ever needed it, so it turned over after two or three tries and then he was sailing down the dirt road back into town. Time to find out what was left.

The road smoothed out and he glanced at the radio. He’d never dared to turn it on, afraid of messing with the battery somehow, but now seemed as good a time as ever. Most likely it was going to be nothing but static across the band. But maybe some survivors had set up a settlement and were broadcasting a call to stragglers. Carl certainly wasn’t joining up with anyone, oh, no, isolation had turned him into a mountain man, but if there was a place nearby he could trade that would be mighty helpful.

Bracing himself, he punch the ‘on’ button.

“Sooyyyy un perado. I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t you kill me…”

Carl almost jerked the truck entirely off the road. In his panic he managed to keep the tires on the hardpack and swat at the volume knob, turning the music down from a holler to an inside voice. The song faded as his heart started beating again.

“You’re in the middle of ninety-minutes of nonstop music, with Tom Anderson!”

Carl Vance stepped on the breaks and stared at the radio as some Journey song started playing.

“Maybe someone is broadcasting old tapes,” he said to himself. “Yeah, yeah. That’s it. Someone with a little nostalgia.”

He spun the tuner knob to the next station, still fully expecting static.

“Okay, we got some new music coming at you now!” an energetic voice practically chanted at him. “Who’s ready for some Lizzo out there? She’s coming to the Pepsi Center, two weeks from now, July 30th, so let’s get pumped!”

A song Carl had never heard in his entire life washed over him as he did quick math. He’d been keeping track of time with a rudimentary calendar carved into his wall. If he had kept time as well as he thought he had – perfectly, of course – than that lined up with what the hyped-up woman on the radio said. July 30th would be in two weeks.

“Odd coincidence,” Carl said as he flicked the radio off. He rode the rest of the way to what remained of town in silence.

As he approached what would usually be the busiest intersection in his little mountain town he began to feel the pangs of nostalgia. No more would these streets see so many cars. No more would horns honk. No more would children cry for their mothers. No more-

He blew the stop sign and barely missed hitting a bright green Kia Sorento on the cross street. The woman driving laid on the horn and flipped him off but didn’t stop.

Carl Vance stared at the car, eyes wide, practically forming tears.

“To find another survivor so soon!” he said. “What luck!”

Another horn made him jump. He turned around to find a man in a pickup glaring at him. The man rolled down his window and leaned out.

“Get out of the intersection you fucking moron!”

The man drove around, also laying on his horn and flipping him off.

“Hardened survivors,” Carl said. “Only the toughest survived.”

The General Store by the lake was his destination. Even if the owner didn’t survive, someone else had surely taken up the cause. It was central in the town, once filled with supplies, and offered good defenses with the lake right behind it. It would be the central hub of survivors, he was sure of it, a modern day watering hole akin to old saloons in the west.

On the way, though, he was having a hard time ignoring the fact that his little mountain town seemed just as populated as it had in the before times. Cars passed him on a regular basis. Business were open, parking lots full. There was only one conclusion – the mountain town had become the refuge for survivors from all over.

“Of course people would come together!” Carl said to himself. “Humans are naturally social! I bet all of the other surrounding towns are empty, nothing but the breeze through broken windows!”

The General Store was just as he expected it. As he climbed out of the truck a woman and a small child came out, the little girl giggling over a soft serve cone covered in sprinkles. Carl Vance felt inspired. If this little child could weather the storm of the end of the world so well, then so could he. With a deep breath, he entered the store.

A bell tinkled overhead. Music played softly from overhead speakers. There, behind the counter, was a miracle – the old man who had run the General Store years before! He had made it! Carl Vance took a few steps toward him, happy to see a friendly face.

The old man took a look at him and frowned. “Excuse me, sir, can you please put on a mask?”

Carl stopped. Frowned. Thought about it. Noticed finally that the old man was wearing a cloth mask over his mouth and nose. Thought some more.

Finally, he asked, “Mask?”

The old man put up hands as though he were soothing some thorny situation. “I know, I know, the mask mandates are over. But I got my brother in law living with me, and he’s immunocompromised, so we’re still taking precautions here at the General Store.”

All Carl could think to say was, “I don’t have a mask.”

The old man nodded and gestured back to the door. “I keep some disposable ones at the front. I know it can be a big ask.”

Sure enough, right next to the front door was a metal stand. A box of blue disposable masks with some sort of container of soap or something above it. Carl, not wanting to make waves with other survivors, pulled out a mask. After a few seconds, he figured out how to put it on.

“Thank you, sir. I understand it’s a charged request.”

Carl shook off his confusion and approached the man behind the counter.

“Please, I’ve been up in the mountains. Cut off. Please, tell me, how many people survived?”

The old man frowned. “Survived?”

“Yeah, the disease. I think they were calling it…Corid? Codid? Something like that.”

The old man scratched at the whiskers on his face. “Covid?”

“Yes! That was it! How many people survived?”

“Well, a lot. Most. I guess the real question is how many people died. Globally, I think the number is five million?”

A sinking feeling in Carl’s gut. “That’s it?”

The old man didn’t hear. He had turned around to face a door on the other side of the counter.

“Charly?” he called.

An old woman poked her head out the door. “Yeah, Dave?”

“How many people have died from Covid so far.”

“Oh, uh, I think NPR said over six million, now.”

“Ah, six, right, I thought it was higher. Thanks, hon.” Dave turned back to Carl and nodded. “Of course, that’s the global number. Nationally we reached a million a while back, not sure where we are now. And, double of course, cases are underreported, so who knows what the actual number is.”

“Oh, well,” Carl said, brightening. “Of course. I did expect a much bigger number.”

“A bigger number?” Charly asked, coming out to join her husband. “Why a bigger number?”

“He says he’s been up in the mountains this whole time,” Dave said. “Missed everything.”

“That must have been lovely,” Charly said.

Carl tried to think fast. So, the disease hadn’t been the planet killer he had thought it would be. At least he had protected himself. Yeah,  yeah. He had protected himself. Hadn’t died. Never came face to face with it. It wasn’t all for naught.

“How long as it been over?”

Dave chuckled mirthlessly. “Over? It’s not over.”

“It’s not?”

“Hell, no! Everybody wants to act like it’s over, but this wave is probably the biggest yet!”

“Wave?”

“Why do you think I ask people to wear masks?”

It finally sunk in.

“Wait. Covid is still out there? People are still getting it?”

“Sure are! The vaccines help, of course, but this latest mutation seems to have gotten away from the vaccines.”

Blood was rushing through his ears. He realized he was on the verge of hyperventilating and tried to control his breathing.

“I came back too soon!”

Charly looked at him with sympathy. “Son, I don’t think this is one you can wait out.”

“It’s not?”

“All those scientists think it’s going to be like the cold or the flu going forward. Hopefully the cold, but who knows. It’ll hang around, mutate…maybe we all get yearly vaccines or something.”

Carl took a couple of deep breaths. “Not a planet killer, then. A…a planet complicator.”

Charly and Dave laughed like he had made a joke.

“Planet complicator!” Dave repeated. “I like that. Anyway, son, was there anything I could get you?”

Carl swallowed, his throat suddenly gone dry. “I…I don’t have any money…didn’t think I’d need money…I guess I should go home.”

“You mean your cabin?” Charly asked.

“No, I have a home in town. On Fisher Street.”

Charly and Dave exchanged a look Carl didn’t like.

“It wasn’t a small blue place, with a yellow door?”

“How did you know that?”

“I hate to be the one to tell you, but that place is gone. Yeah, I guess what happened first is teenagers figured out it was abandoned so they broke in and started drinking and smoking and whatnot in there. Then a bunch of meth-heads took it over. Started cooking. Only lasted a few months before something exploded. Sent the roof sky high. What was left burnt to the ground. That was…how long ago was that, Charly?”

“Last fall,” she said. “Just after Halloween.”

“That’s right, just after Halloween.”

If Carl was understanding everything right: the world hadn’t ended, the virus had killed a lot of people but not a lot of people, it was still hanging around, he had no money, no job, no insurance, and his house had been burned down by tweakers almost a year ago.

“I thought this would be the end…”

Dave shrugged. “If it makes you feel any better, we’re still in the middle of a climate emergency.”

Carl Vance balked. “Wow, are we still pretending that’s a real thing?”