by Lucy Corin
FERTILE CRESCENT
Starting over ours was the valley that became the next fertile crescent. This was in my own lifetime. The people in the projects I live next to rioted and burned the city, but my house and Sam’s were in a special bubble, so we’re unscathed to the bitter end.
I’m cultivating dark earth, and with a quick pan you can see, furrow after furrow, how much I’ve already accomplished. Still, this vague unease under it that I participated in or even started the riots with a rock, or a can, or a rumor. Then it’s as if I led the rioters away from my house, but I can’t remember. There’s my house at the edge of the furrows.
Even with my hoe and my spade I keep thinking about Allende, just as an example, shooting himself in a room that keeps looking like the oval office. He’s shooting himself just as the soldiers peep their heads in the windows after climbing a rose trellis outside. He’s shooting himself because he tried something and now this.
Despite everything, after the apocalypse there are hardly any suicides, no matter what we’ve done or failed to do. I suppose our minds assure us we can handle it. I mean God only gives you… I mean God only lets you do what you can live with after the apocalypse. After the apocalypse, we’re just living with ourselves.
FUNERAL
When everyone’s favorite leader died, everyone lined up to see him. They filled the flowery valley and filed by for weeks. It’s understandable that they wanted to see him, still and eternal, in his coffin. But after days and nights, when the line showed no sign of ending, some of the guards suspected that some people were getting back in line and filing by again.
They started stamping people’s hands and gave that some time to work, but maybe people rubbed the ink off, and word had not come down about how to decide where to put an end to it, the line. This was a very great leader. What if you were the last one to file by or the first one refused? Could you be the one to make that happen, even with the official hat? It would be like holding one person above everyone else, plus everyone’s love of the leader was equal; that’s what made him so great. It’s important, in a ceremony like this, to be anonymous so that you can represent everyone who can’t make it (though in this case it was hard to picture, with all the people lining up, that anyone might not have made it). They felt that if they drew the line it’d be so arbitrary, and the man still made people feel that even if the world was arbitrary, he’d forge a path for them through it. Maybe the people felt this too, that if there was an end of the line they’d throw the meaning of the man off balance, because people kept getting on line. Guards were getting on line in their hats. They loved the man, too, like everyone. You could look and look and not be able to tell how the line went; it coiled for a while but then it was just a buzzing wad of people that only dissipated, presumably, in the mountains, wherever the flowers petered out. But time was marching on. Once the leader started to decay they thought maybe that would end it, but perfume vendors appeared like flies and at first people used their pocket change for perfume, but soon it became a matter of bravado to see him, to endure or wallow in the loosed particles of him that created the smell. People breathed him. They watched each other breathe him so that they could breathe him together, and they felt he lived again as part of them. Ending it would be like performing an execution.
Then they thought: Wait a cotton-pickin’ minute. He is dead. This is out of control. They formed a new line so that they could approach the old line. They drew their guns. Now it was us and them.
JAGUAR (NOT THE CAR)
I had just seen the jungle for the first time in my rotten life, centuries-old ferns everywhere, so moving. When you are in the jungle you have to remember the herds of pigs: hundreds, possibly thousands, will chase a jaguar up a tree and piss on the tree through the night until the ammonia makes the cat pass out and fall from the tree, and they eat him in a pile of hooves and spots.
As he is disintegrating, these are my old pal Tony’s last words of advice to me from his days in Nicaragua: tie your ass to the tree. Then, as we used to say, he was gone.
When the dust cleared there I was, and on the horizon, there’s the tree, as if he knew all along. I hadn’t seen him since we were young turks. We were letting bygones be gone but I could see certain pains in his eyes. Some left over from when I left. When the rumbling started we were pretty drunk and we loved the band. Now I eye the tree across the border, in Nicaragua, his past, my future. I’m so wiped out from the whole experience, I don’t know what to do in this bald new vista. I wonder if I really have to head out to it, to that one tree I can see, just because it’s still there. Then I hear rumbling. Possibly aftershock. I hear the roar of what could be thousands.
BODY
After graduation, their daughter’s madness burst from her head full-grown. By the time she was pronounced dead of medications, she was bloated with fluids and bubble-wrapped in the watery light of the ICU, with tubes and the green hum of numbers reflecting on the walls. Blisters like jellyfish rose on her knuckles from being pressed to the carpet under her body weight. No one is blaming the people lined up for organs. The mother and the father stood over her in every way you can think of. The father put ointment on her eyes and closed the lids. Next is a line about the father that I can’t write. Next is a line about the mother. Next is a line about there and not there. Then on the morning of the fourth day, their daughter woke up. She made noise through her tube. She said, “I drowned?” She pointed out some hallucinations. When she saw her fingers down the blanket, she guessed carrots. The carrots were down at the edge of her body, over near her parents as part of the skyline, pointing at any number of endings.
VACATION
The only cars left are tour vans and taxis. The visitors are from the country that provided the military. It’s upstairs-downstairs but continents. The last thing we remember is the sheen of all possible vacations. I was in the gift shop, choosing between a colorful calendar (Girls of the Apocalypse) and a colorful coffee-table book (Voices from the Apocalypse). The guides, no matter who they’re working for, share a special language of their own. Empty mountains echoed with their calls.
ISLANDS
We were drifting closer and closer to those islands in the shapes of continents off the coast of Dubai where you could buy Africa or someplace and put your house on it, dock a yacht. From above, the shape of our continent of plastic bags and bottles was the shape of one really desolate guy. He used to be the size of Manhattan, but between that and the whole USA we’d lost perspective.
MINDLESS
When the globe that meant the world to me fell from my hands and burst, I left the room, and when my love, or whatever I meant by her, came into the room accidentally, she saw that the air conditioning was like those videos of rock bands in vacant fields, deserts, with their hats, rocky outcroppings of emotion, no one listening out there but the fans.
AFTER
What was left? An enormous collection of transparencies. We couldn’t be more minimal. That plastic cup, including the ice. Your lenses. A stack of tracing paper, also tracing paper in the wind, and wind. Think of the bottles and bottles of water. Including thinking. A matter of clear glass vs. clear plastic, vs. gin vs. vodka vs. tap vs. Voss. A room with two doors in shotgun fashion. I’ll stand in this one. I couldn’t care less. It looks like static coming down hand over fist. Now, if you stood in that opening you’d ruin it. You can’t even come in because of the enormous collection wobbling invisibly.
WHAT IT WAS LIKE WAS
Stars fell in unison, and in a mossy grove on the hill, the Apocalyptasaurus was having the last sex on earth. I headed to the mobile unit. I hadn’t brought any animals because that’s how shortsighted I am. Something will provide, I seemed to be thinking, but who knows anymore, I haven’t had to think in so long I don’t even know when I’m doing it or not. I drifted away. Unpeopling, repeopling, all in the past with the automatic sprinklers, and soon the cries of leftover apocalypses were all that remained. Some of the things we knew were
true. I’d only wanted to keep the bells ringing.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
“Eyes of Dogs” first appeared in Conjunctions online and is a version of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Tinderbox.”
“Madmen” first appeared in American Short Fiction. The scenes that take place in the asylum “gallery” paraphrase or collage sections from Seeing the Insane by Sander Gilman (University of Nebraska Press, 1996). Occasional lines are paraphrased from the first chapters of Michel Foucault’s History of Madness.
“Godzilla Versus the Smog Monster” (now much altered) first appeared in Gargoyle.
Some of the apocalypses first appeared, most in different form, along with additional apocalypses, in the following publications: The Apocalypse Reader, Black Warrior Review, Caliban, Devil’s Lake, Diagram, Eleven Eleven, Filter, Gulf Coast, Hobart, The Huffington Post, The Laurel Review, The Massachusetts Review, Quarter After Eight, Rampike, Sou’Wester, Swink, Tarpaulin Sky, Tin House (flash fiction blog), West Branch, Wigleaf.
Thanks to the 2009 Radar Productions Akumal Lab Rats and so many others who shared their apocalypses and helped me wrestle with mine, including: Joe Atkins, Lisa Hanks Baxter, Kate Bernheimer, Suzanne Bost, Shannon Cain, Andrea Cohen, Nicole J. Georges, Emily Hochman, Howard Hochman, Pam Houston, Laurie Lewis, Ali Liebegott, Melissa Malouf, John Marx, Shelly Oria, Beth Pickens, Tim Ramick, Christine Schutt, Michael Snediker, Justin Taylor, Laura Egley Taylor, Michelle Tea, John Vincent, and Kevin Wilson.
Thanks especially to PJ Mark and Ethan Nosowsky.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lucy Corin is the author of the short story collection The Entire Predicament and the novel Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls. She won the 2012 American Academy of Arts and Letters Rome Prize and was the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in San Francisco and teaches at the University of California at Davis.
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