Trapped Between Two Rocks at the End of the World
CONTENT WARNING: Suicide ideation and grief
Legacy: noun; leg·a·cy; /ˈleɡəsē/
plural: legacies
a gift of money or property
something received from an ancestor or the past
a candidate who is given special status because of a relationship to a member of the designated organization
a mysterious human phenomenon resulting in abnormal physical anatomy and/or intangible spiritual connection
100 million years ago…
A violent collision in the Asteroid Belt beyond Mars sends a rock the size of a mountain range on a trajectory towards Earth.
A karst begins to form underneath an ancient Appalachia.
A neuron fires for the first time in the mind of a primordial mammal, creating a link between death and escape.
Voicemail: Sunday, October 19, 2008 at 7:18 pm
“You’ve reached Iskra. Can’t make it to the phone, probably because I don’t want to talk to you. Do with that what you will. I’ll get back to you, eventually.” BEEP.
“Iskra– heavy breathing. It’s me. Sorry, I just ran home to use my computer because I saw this thing on TV– heavy breathing– Have you heard about this? Probably not yet, without cell service up there in the mountains. I– I’m freaking out a little. So… so there’s— there’s an asteroid scheduled to pass Earth in a few weeks. They’re saying “pass” not “hit”, but… I know, I know, it’s probably fine. It’s just– the more I think about it, the more I wonder what we’d know– we, the public. Would we be told if there were an asteroid about to hit? Or would it be kept a secret? People would panic if they knew. And what does that serve? I can’t get this out of my head… It’s all probably fine, but I have this sick feeling like it’s the end. When will you be home again? They’re saying the asteroid is 132 miles across. You know the one that killed the dinosaurs? That one was only seven miles. Asteroids this size are mass exterminators. They’re planet-kille–” VOICEMAIL CUT OFF.
A Suburb in Appalachia
1 week later
Friday, October 24, 2008
5:00 pm 24 hours until impact
The cul-de-sac at the end of Karst Cliff Street
“Of course you have a choice, Marty, dear fellow, everyone does.” Rachel hears the black and white movie playing from the big screen TV sitting in the middle of the empty cul-de-sac. The glow of the screen lures her closer.
Once past the Prestons’ house, the sounds from the living end of the suburb start to fade away in exchange for the silence of the abandoned end. Rachel no longer hears her parents fighting six houses down. The echo of the Martins’ barking dog dissolves behind her. The dull murmur of TVs from the still populated side of the neighborhood sizzle out until Rachel can’t hear them anymore. The sounds of cars dissipate, leaving only the wind and Rachel’s footsteps against the pavement. That and the comforting drone of the TV.
Rachel sighs in the quietude, “Finally.” That’s why she’s here: for some peace and quiet at the end of the world. A hushed place where Rachel can make a crucial choice: either try to sleep through the asteroid or die sooner. Take the end into her own hands. Like her brother years ago. Like Iskra a week ago.
“A choice?” the TV drones on, casting a white light over the concrete round. “An inevitability, not a choice.”
“It’s all probably fine, but I have this sick feeling like it’s the end.”
Rachel cringes remembering the voicemail. Why did I have to scare Iskra like that?
At the dead end in front of Rachel, three vacant houses, 65, 66, and 67 Karst Cliff Street– identical in every way– surround the lone TV in the cul-de-sac. By the curb of each house stands a single, barren tree. Realty signs in front of the houses rattle in the gusts of wind that descend upon the cul-de-sac. An abandoned SUV is parked at one end of the round with a for sale sign in its windshield. Dividing the cul-de-sac from the rest of the street is a sinkhole, which Rachel is able to jump across. Crumbs of road break and fall into the hole in Rachel’s wake.
“Inevitable? Merciful, my friend,” the movie continues as Rachel pads gently to the TV and plops down in front of it. She left the TV on since last weekend and on it played– no one there to turn it off. A thin layer of brown leaves coats the top of the TV. They lift and fall in the breeze. “Merciful.”
Rachel exhales, as the sun dips below the horizon at her back, and dusk settles over the dark houses. She reaches in her pocket and drops a crumpled funeral program to the cold asphalt: Iskra Petrović. Rachel holds her face in her hands and lets her glasses fog up from her breath.
“No,” Rachel listens to the old movie play on, “there is no mercy in this kind of agony.”
She hadn’t removed her best friend’s funeral program from her pocket since the burial a few days before. But, alone in the cul-de-sac, just before the world ends, she didn’t want to carry it anymore. It shifts in the breeze before blowing over once… twice… three times… then the wind takes it away, dragging it into the sinkhole, where it disappears.
The black and white movie continues, “Ha! Pain. That’s all it is, friend. Nothing to scream over.”
Leaning back on her palms, Rachel turns her gaze up to the sky, eyes wide, scanning for movement. Would I even be able to see it yet? Few stars penetrate the light pollution of the city nearby, but Rachel can see the brightest ones. Among them, she sees something.
Is that it?... No, just a satellite.
“Screaming– what good would that do?” the old-timey voice from the TV fills the cul-de-sac.
Rachel tries to angle herself further back for a fuller view, but the hard plastic binding covering her butterfly wings press against the road and stop her. Though not large, the plastic forms a bumpy hill underneath Rachel’s gray hoodie, big enough to look like a small backpack. Her wings are crumpled and bent to fold into a tight clump at the center of her back. Then, her wings are bound in thick plastic– opaque so to keep her wings hidden and out of sight. Unuseable. Even without the plastic, Rachel knows they’d still be useless. Her parents, her doctors, her classmates, her teachers, strangers at the mall, they all see it and they all tell her the same thing: Her body is just too big. Flight is impossible. So impossible she never even tried. And so her wings are tucked away, completely broken like Knick-knacks shoved hard into a cardboard box to sit in the attic. She ignores her wings and hopes others can, too.
With each flicker of the stars, Rachel waits, eyes peeled, sensing impending impact. She scoffs at the realization that searching for the asteroid is futile. It’s too large. No matter where I am on Earth, there is no escaping it. What’s the point in looking?
Wait… is that it? No, a plane…
The movie on TV has ended and ads play before the next one.
“Escape this holiday season in a brand new vehicle from Tim Kraggle Dodge. You’ll find low prices, finance options, trade-in values, and a huge selection.”
The glow of the TV screen is bright against the oncoming night, casting a white glare on Rachel’s glasses. As Rachel’s focus glazes over, the brightness brings tears to her eyes. But this brightness is but a lightning bug compared to the asteroid, whose light will shine through her skin, so that her skeleton is visible, blasting her shadow as an afterimage on the ground. Every nuclear weapon on Earth detonating at the same time would be less powerful.
Looking at the fiery rock, Rachel’s eyes will sear– her vision blotched by dark spots and red pools of blood that quickly explode. The whites of her eyes melt with the brown of her irises, pooling first at the bottom of her glasses before dripping down her cheeks. Sticking her fingers into the empty eye sockets, she pulls on her face until her forehead hits the ground.
“Check out our 2009 Impact now for only $24,995 with 0% APR. Or choose from our lineup of trucks, starting at $29,999.”
Rachel stands quickly and glances around before looking up again to the empty sky. No asteroid. No melting eyes.
“Yet,” she mutters to herself.
In the stillness, she arches her back, stretching the tense spot where her wings meet her spine. But the pain does not abate. She fumbles in her jean pockets for a pill bottle, then swallows one dry. The ad continues,
“We’re here to serve you to the end, so come on down to Tim Kraggle Dodge, your trusted partner in car buying, located at the corner of Sevier and Endless. Escape your way at Tim Kraggle Dodge– Impact is Inevitable.”
The TV turns off. The dull pain in her back recedes as the medicine takes effect. The only light in the cul-de-sac now is from the streetlamp– a disturbing orange. A cold wind drenches the dead end, seeping through Rachel’s hoodie so that she shivers. Clutching her arms around herself, she shuffles away from the TV towards 65 Karst Cliff Street, when her phone rings.
She glances at the caller ID, closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, then answers casually, “Mom, hey–”
“I told you, I’m at Rebecca’s house tonight.”
“Nothing’s wrong.”
“I know– I’m going to church with Rebecca’s family in the morning.”
“I’ll be back tomorrow night.”
“I won’t forget.”
“... yeah, love you, too–” Rachel abruptly hangs up.
The sinkhole underneath the streetlamp groans so particularly that it draws Rachel’s attention. She steps closer. At its edges, pieces of road crumble down into the hole, echoing off the rock as they drop– this echo creating a ghostly pulse.
Will I hear the asteroid? When the asteroid hits the atmosphere, its heat will precede it— enough heat to make the rocks on the ground sing. But what would rocks singing sound like? A sound no one alive has ever heard. A sound no one would recognize.
Even with the light of the lamp above her, Rachel cannot see the bottom of the abysmal sinkhole– only blackness. Rachel leans over the edge of the hole, gazing deeper and deeper, ensorcelled by the nothing. Without knowing, Rachel bends into the hole’s mouth. If she falls off balance even a little, she will be swallowed.
Swallowed by rock.
“They couldn’t retrieve the body from the cave,” Rachel overheard a few old women chatting behind her at Iskra’s funeral a few days ago. “Poor thing.”
“Yes, poor dear,” another agreed.
“That casket is empty?”
“Oh, yes– empty.”
“They say she was stuck so deep in that crevice they couldn’t reach her,” one whispered. “That’s why they left her there.”
“They sealed her in there, bless her heart” another commented. “Poured cement into the crevice right on top of her.”
Rachel’s hands quivered in her lap.
“What could have pushed her to do it?” One questioned with a smile at the end, eyes wide and hungry for the dark gossip.
“Broken brain,” another answered bluntly, tapping a finger to her head. The other women nodded and agreed in unison. “It was only a matter of time.”
“Mmmm–mmmm—-mm,” another exhaled, shaking her head.
Rachel clamped her lips shut and blinked hard to clear the tears.
“Now, she’ll forever be there. Swallowed by rock.”
Rachel got up from her seat, but, instead of tossing a handful of dirt into the hole like the other mourners, she walked away, back to her car. She expected the weeping to start once alone, but she felt nothing and drove home in a trance.
I will be swallowed by rock, too. It’s only a matter of time.
Saturday, October 25, 2008
5:00 am 12 hours until impact
The cul-de-sac at the end of Karst Cliff Street
Rachel jerks awake face-first in the gutter outside 65.
Half-in the gutter, she can hear the soft drizzle of rain, then smells the dank water dripping onto her head and grimaces. Sore from sleeping on the street, Rachel awkwardly scoots out of the gutter, scratching her back and wings against the concrete, and kneels before standing up. In the rain, the air is chilly and Rachel’s throat is scratchy. She eyes the gutter.
What was I trying to hide from?
Immediately, Rachel shoots her focus up. Out of the gray, the asteroid becomes visible, taking over the entire sky above her. The sight drops her stomach to the ground. Even before impact, the weight of the asteroid mounts on top of her. Its massive tonnage forces itself upon her, crushing her until she vaporizes, until her skin burns off, until the water inside her body evaporates, until her skeleton dissolves. And the final terrible pain shoots through the spot she can’t reach, where her wings connect with her spine. It hurts so bad it itches. She wants to gnaw it at, bite so hard she pierces the plastic binding, then shreds her wings to reach the itch. She feels it all in her back– all of it ending.
When Rachel opens her eyes again, she is sitting at the lip of the sinkhole, legs dangling over the edge. The cold of the void beneath her licks at Rachel’s ankles. Reflexively, she lifts both legs out of the hole, then scoots backwards.
Trembling, she stands, then takes a pill from her pocket. It gets stuck inside her throat as she looks for other side of the street, on the other side of the sinkhole. She expects to see the rest of her neighborhood— two lines of houses bordering the wide street, cars parked along the curbs and in driveways, even hedges between each house. But, as Rachel stares ahead, her mouth drops.
The other side of the street is nowhere to be seen: the sinkhole has grown overnight. It stretches in front of her the breadth of an ocean. Through the foggy morning, she seeks the horizon, but it isn’t there. She seeks anything through the fog, across the depths, but finds nothing staring back at her. And the longer she looks, the more sinister it feels.
Am I trapped here?
Rachel turns her gaze back upon the houses. Through the alleyways between each house, Rachel can see the nine foot tall cement wall that borders the entire cul-de-sac. Past the wall she knows is a steep drop leading to a road down the hill.
“I could climb down the cliff, then circle back to the entrance of the neighborhood,” she rationalizes, though knows descending the rocky hill is dangerous.
Rachel wanders towards 65, then passes through the alley to reach the back yard. Past the emptied pool, she finds the edge of the cement wall. Kudzu reaches up over the wall from the other side, invading now that no one is there to cut it back.
Once face-to-face with the wall, Rachel grips the corner and peers around it to see the cliff she knows is on the other side. But as her gaze finds the other side of the wall, her heart races. It’s not the cliffside she sees.
She stares at the exact same cul-de-sac– a copy, existing parallel to her. The same circle of houses, the same cement wall, and, next to that wall, she spots someone standing there. The figure is far off, but she can tell the person is facing away from her, looking around their own wall, searching for the cliff. But it isn’t there.
The person turns and sees Rachel staring.
Rachel jumps backward, away from the wall, stumbling to the ground. Without a second glance, she wrestles to standing and runs back to the street, where her eyes dart all around. There’s no other way out.
“I’m trapped here.”
In the silence that follows, Rachel’s skin runs cold as the branches of the barren trees shake in the wind. But then, she chuckles. “What does it matter?” She scoffs. Trapped here– trapped there. I’m still trapped on Earth. The asteroid is coming, no matter where I am.
Then, that itch– that horrid itch from earlier, right at the center of her spine. No matter how she arches or stretches her arms over and under her shoulders, she can’t reach it. Extending as hard as she can, her fingers begin to cramp, yet the itch is just out of reach.
“Arghh,” Rachel grumbles, stepping around herself in a circle, perpetually reaching back. This unfamiliar pain confuses Rachel. The plastic around her wings has always caused some minor itchiness. But nothing like this. This itch has fangs.
Desperate, she lies on the cold ground, rubbing the bump on her back as hard as she can against the asphalt. “Hmmph,” she struggles, moving forward and backward awkwardly on her back, rolling like a dog. But the itch remains. And, alongside that itch, now, the odd pleasure of scratching. She can’t stop. Harder and harder she presses.
SNAP! One of the frames in Rachel’s butterfly wings breaks, even underneath the plastic armor. “Ow!” She rolls over onto her stomach and stands up again, shaking off the pain that flows in waves outward from her spine. But the storm doesn’t calm.
Quivering, she dives a hand into her pocket and swallows another pill, begging for the relief to come. The unfamiliar itching and aching disturbs her. Maybe it’s just from sleeping outside. Despite her convincing, she knows that there’s something else going on– something she doesn’t understand.
As a cold gust of wind makes Rachel shiver, she heads inside 65 Karst Cliff Street. Stepping over the welcome mat, Rachel enters the foyer. Up the stairs are a few bedrooms. Straight ahead is the kitchen. To Rachel’s left is the dining room. To her right, the primary bedroom. Then the living room sits behind the dining room, in a dark little corner of the house.
Rachel turns on the light above the foyer. A shadow dips behind the wall of the dark kitchen. Rachel’s eyebrows furrow. “Hello?” She tentatively walks to the kitchen door and peeks inside. The light from the foyer stops dead in the doorway, leaving the kitchen completely dark.
CRUNCH. Something moves on the counter. Hurriedly, Rachel flips the light switch.
“Pervert,” she sighs, stroking the orange cat’s back as he arches in response. He meows aggressively.
“I know, I know,” Rachel heads for the pantry where she finds the bag of cat food she and Iskra bought for Pervert, when they realized he had been left behind when his owners got evicted.
Rachel pours the kibble into a plastic bowl on the counter, fending off a hungry Pervert until she’s done. “God!” Rachel exclaims teasingly. “Hungry, hungry hippo.”
While Pervert scarfs down his food, Rachel grabs a bag of chips from the pantry and munches on a handful as she enters the living room. The previous owners left their couch behind— a gigantic couch that she and Iskra could both sleep in together. With a sigh, she drops into the fluffy couch and lies on her side. Without Iskra the couch feels impossibly huge. In the corner of the room a dark lava lamp sits unplugged. It’s the only other thing in the room aside from the couch and the coffee table. The light from the kitchen lands on the carpet and it fills Rachel with such loneliness that she closes her eyes.
Within moments, the ground starts shaking. The trembling starts gently, like someone slamming the door shut. But as it mounts, the shaking kicks Rachel off the couch so that she wakes when she hits the floor.
But when she opens her eyes, she is back outside, lying face down on the road. The sinkhole is a few feet in front of her, and she hears more of the asphalt falling into it as the ground shakes.
Stumbling to standing, Rachel cranes her neck back, looking up for the asteroid. “Did it hit?” She blurts, scanning all around herself.
When the asteroid hits, the earth’s crust will explode, sending rocks as big as skyscrapers into the air, rising ominously like raindrops falling backward. The ground beneath Rachel’s feet will be ripped up like old carpet, forming a wave of concrete and rock so tall that its head will be in the atmosphere.
With the rock sent into the sky will be trash. Millions of tons of trash bags, furniture, asbestos, compacted cars, and nuclear waste will be excavated from their hiding places and will fall from the heavens, cratering the earth. As acid rains down, anything beneath it will disintegrate, including bone. Sewage will rocket into the air to be vaporized or to be sent back down upon our heads before we die. With the explosion, plastic byproducts will incinerate, releasing toxins into the air, to be inhaled, then choked on. To breathe it in is to burn from the inside out.
Iskra’s last breath in the crevice.
Rachel’s eyes shoot open. She stands in 65’s foyer again. The shaking has stopped, but the itch is back.
6:00 pm 11 hours until impact
65 Karst Cliff Street
What could be causing it?
Rachel paces in one of the upstairs bedrooms– a teenage girl’s room, left in immaculate condition– as if she took nothing with her when they left. Wall-to-wall the room is pink with zebra-stripe accents. Lime green pops here and there, but pink overwhelms. The curtains, the alarm clock, the TV, the collection of lip glosses, all pink.
A body-length mirror with square photos taped around the edges stands by the bed. Rachel steps closer to the glass. Lisa Frank stickers pepper the mirror with vibrant color– less vibrant under the harsh overhead light.
She twists her back, trying to evade the itch. “Maybe there’s something jabbed into the binding,” she guesses. A pointy edge could be causing discomfort.
She tilts forward to get a better view of her back in the mirror, but she can only see the bump of her binding– nothing is sticking out. She tries to ignore the itch as it mounts again. But it digs its fingers into the inflamed skin of her back. It starts small in the center, then ripples outward to be just barely within reach. But when Rachel scratches there at the edge of the pain, it’s so morbidly unsatisfying that she can only paw at her flesh harder.
Out of breath, she stops and lets her head hang down. “What else could it be?” Her heart is racing.
Gently, her hand reaches for her jeans pocket for the pill bottle, but she stops. “Could it be a side effect?” If it is a side effect, then why didn’t it start itching before now? She shakes her head. No, that doesn’t make sense.
Her heart plummets. “Mold,” she mutters. The rain. I slept in the rain.
Lifting her head, she looks in the mirror. “No,” she assures herself, “the plastic binding is too thick to let moisture in.” Unless there’s a hole. A chill runs down her neck. “But… But how? They said…” The doctors who applied the binding four years ago told her that the plastic was too thick to break without special equipment. “A hole would be impossible…” Rachel sighs, “Unless…”
Rachel gazes at the strings of photobooth photos taped to the edges of the mirror. They are of two friends, posing back-to-back, sometimes laughing and other times pouting their lips.
“I wish we had pics like this,” Rachel commented to Iskra one evening a few months ago. She found herself smiling back at the two girls in the pictures, but her smile dropped as Iskra sharply replied, “What like you and your theater friends?”
Iskra is lying on the carpet, texting with their phone held up close to their eyes. When Rachel looked at Iskra, Iskra didn't look back, their expression deadpan. There was no reading them. After years of trying, Rachel knew better.
“Well,” Rachel returned, “I know you and your soccer friends do it.”
No response.
Rachel laughed to shake it off and mimicked Iskra with their friends posing for pictures with peace signs close to their faces and kissy, fish lips. When Iskra laughed, it flipped Rachel’s heart in her chest. But Iskra didn’t laugh. They didn’t even peel their eyes away from the phone. Rachel inhaled deeply and with her exhale, sat on the bed, back to Iskra.
“You’re going in your hoodie again, aren’t you?” Iskra asked from the floor, their voice flat and accusing. Almost annoyed.
“What?” Rachel examined Iskra, seeking their face from behind the phone.
“To homecoming,” Iskra elaborated, finally sitting up to face Rachel. “You’re going to wear your hoodie. Right?”
Rachel cringed under the directness of the accusation. “Well… um… yeah, I guess so,” Rachel stammered. “I hadn’t thought about what I’d wear to the dance yet.”
“You could let the theater troupe choose your outfit. That sounds… zany,” Iskra added sarcastically, dropping their phone to the ground and standing up. They scrutinized the collection of body spray bottles on the vanity. After picking one, they sprayed it into the air. “How about this,” Iskra began, stepping into the shower of body spray. “You get your friends to pick for you and I’ll get my friends to pick for me.” Iskra grabbed a magazine from a stack and plopped down into a pink inflatable mini-sofa.
Rachel studied her bristly friend closely. “Look, I’m only going with my friends because it’s homecoming– it’s not prom. We can still go together. Like we always do.”
Iskra said nothing, flipping the page.
“It’s not like you don’t have anyone to go with,” Rachel muttered.
A spell of silence fell between them until Iskra finally spoke. “My thing is… like, are you really going to wear your hoodie?”
Rachel threw her hands up in the air. “It’s a goddamn hoodie! Why do you care?”
Iskra tilted their chin down and flashed a hurt look in their eyes. “You wear it at every single dance each year– no, you wear it every single day.”
“But, I mean,” Rachel interjected, “you have your favorite socks, your favorite jacket.”
“This is not the same, and you know that,” Iskra’s voice was cold. A pregnant pause followed as the two looked at each other.
“You act like you don’t know why I wear it,” Rachel finally responded in frustration.
Iskra waited for more.
Rachel’s mouth gaped as the words failed her, before shrugging her shoulders and standing up from the bed.
“You want to know something I learned?” Iskra pressed as Rachel headed for the door. She opened it and stopped, turning back around to Iskra.
“You’re supposed to remove your wing binding every 3 months.”
Rachel’s brow furrowed. “Okay…”
Iskra raised an eyebrow. “When was the last time you took it off?”
Rachel scoffed, and left the room. Iskra followed behind, down the stairs.
“I did some research,” Iskra explained at her back. “You’re not the only person in the world with a legacy, you know. You’re not the only one to bind their wings. Lots of times it’s the parents or the school or the church that encourage it– like with you.”
Rachel didn’t stop at the front door, and strode out into the street.
“You’re not taking care of yourself,” Iskra insisted and then finally stopped following. “Why don’t you ever want to talk about it?”
As Rachel recalls this memory, she wishes she had turned around and answered Iskra’s question. But that’s not what she did. Instead, she walked away, without another word, leaving Iskra alone in the cul-de-sac.
“Unless Iskra was right.” Rachel finishes, staring into the mirror months later. After a long pause, she adds, “Goddammit.”
It’s only as she notices the scissors on the desk that the idea of cutting off her binding actually occurs to her.
“There’s no way those scissors would work,” she dismisses. But the itch contorts her body, as she maneuvers the act of scratching. She turns around and slams her back against the corner of the wall, rising and falling to rub the itch away. But with the plastic binding, there’s no relief.
In complete desperation, she removes her hoodie, revealing her white t-shirt underneath– a shirt with a giant hole in the back for her wings in the binding to fit through. A shiver runs down her bare arms.
As the itch barrages her, Rachel begins cutting the plastic. She must angle her body in the mirror to see properly. Once in position, she opens the scissors and closes them around the topmost tip of the plastic, away from her wing. It’s a struggle at first, but, to Rachel’s amazement, when she opens the scissors again, there is a new tear in the plastic.
“There’s no way…” she begins in surprise, cutting into the plastic again in a different spot with the same result. She chuckles curtly, “So much for special equipment.”
In earnest, she thinks she is able to tear the plastic by hand, but the sharp pains lighting up all over her wings force her back to using the slower method: scissors. Furiously cutting away, Rachel thinks about all the adults in her life who never informed her of the necessity of removing and replacing the binding every three months. They were just wrapping her up to never be opened again. Because Iskra had been right; she’d never removed the binding.
As the plastic falls away, it gets snagged on different parts of her wings, tilting her off center the heavier it gets. The minutes pass and the pile of plastic on the floor is growing.
The more Rachel exposes her wings, the more problems she sees. The frames of her wings are bent and broken to fit the binding, rips and holes in the chitin abound, and her vibrant orange color is now pale, like a cave salamander.
As the last strip is peeled away, Rachel is disgusted by the limp, desecrated butterfly wings hanging off her back, dragging on the floor. A sense of permanence invades, while inspecting her battered wings. There’s no fixing this.
“No mold…” Rachel notices, scanning her wings carefully for the source of the itch. To her despair, she finds none.
Rachel hangs her head. Though she feels lighter without the plastic, the dead weight of her wings pulls her down, anchored by the spot at the center of her back. And the itch is relentless.
As she turns to walk toward the bed, the movement shifts a broken frame on her left wing. “Ow!” She recoils, tensing her body to stop from moving, but the stinging echoes.
The itch evolves into a burning pain of brokenness cascading up and down the web of her frames, leading to the center of her spine. Electrifying, this new pain dazzles Rachel, bringing her to her knees, then face-first in the carpet. It buries inside her so deep she gags, her head spinning, though she lies still on the floor. Sweat brims her hairline, then her neck, then down her arms– a chill shakes her.
Her eyes widen. There’s no fixing this. She seizes in terror, pupils shrunken, staring at the baseboard. The pain is incessant, making her squirm. She whimpers and swallows two pills at the same time, desperate for relief.
Burying her face in the carpet, she struggles to inhale deeply. Behind her closed eyes, bursts of light and color dance off her dizziness. “Something feels wrong,” she speaks into the fibres and dust mites. There’s no fixing this.
And then the question— the terrible question: Should I just end it now? Instead of suffering until the asteroid comes, just end it. There’s no fixing this. The medicine isn’t working, blinding Rachel with pain.
The scissors lie next to her on the floor. Rachel grips the handle and drags them to her body. Pulling her forearm free from underneath her, Rachel takes the sharp end of the scissors and presses into her skin at a point. When she stops pressing, she sees an indentation where the scissors had been. But no blood. She tries again, pressing harder. But the scissors are too thick and dull. She presses so hard she starts to shake.
Just do it.
In frustration, Rachel starts hitting the sharp edge against her forearm, stabbing at it in a delirium. At first, nothing happens, but then she starts tearing her skin. “Just do it,” she quivers, stabbing over and over until blood drips down her arm. The minor scrapes bleed enough to convince a barely-conscious Rachel. Breathing rapidly, she lays her head back down and lets her eyes close.
This is it. Her breathing slows, her body relaxes, and she drifts away.
9:00 pm 8 hours until impact
65 Karst Cliff Street
When she wakes, Rachel’s arm is covered in dried blood, and there’s a stain on the carpet. “What?” She grips her forearm, confused, until she remembers.
She sighs, “It didn’t work.” Now dry, Rachel can see that the wounds on her arm are superficial. The bleeding appeared far worse than it was. Looking at her arm, it seems like she got in a mild bike accident— not a life-threatening wound. Defeated, she pulls herself onto the bed. The cuts on her arms sting, but they pale in comparison to the broken wings upon her back.
Wings dangling in the air above her like torn and tattered sails, Rachel lies flat on the pink and zebra bed. The broken frames of her wings jut out like tree branches, while the pale chitin droops, wrinkled and displaced. Some of the frames are completely broken in two, whereas others cling together by a thread. She shifts to move her arm into a different position, but immediately recoils as a sharp pain etches across Rachel’s back. She breathes heavily into the crook of her bloody arm, devastated by the unyielding pain.
With the binding, Rachel’s wings were suspended in plastic, which completely supported their weight. The remaining pain was a perpetual soreness just where her wings meet her spine– liveable. But now that the binding is cut off, a much sharper pain replaces the soreness. Every centimeter she moves throws her spine into agony. And it isn’t going away.
The wind blows outside the bedroom window, howling and shaking the loose gutters just above her. A dying fire alarm battery beeps every few minutes downstairs, loud enough to be grating but quiet enough to want to ignore. Beep. The pink TV drones on in the background.
“Escape this holiday season in a brand new vehicle from Tim Kraggle Dodge. You’ll find low prices, finance options, trade-in values, and a huge selection. Check out our 2009 Impact now for only $24,995 with 0% APR. Or choose from our lineup of trucks, starting at $29,999. We’re here to serve you to the end, so come on down to Tim Kraggle Dodge, your trusted partner in car buying, located at the corner of Sevier and Endless. Escape your way at Tim Kraggle Dodge–”
Rachel mouths the last words of the ad, “Impact is Inevitable.”
Beep.
Staring off, Rachel’s fingers search for her pill bottle open by her head, but when she only feels one remaining, her stomach drops. She glares into the bottle. “No, no, no,” she chants, but she already knows it’s true. “Ugh,” she sighs loudly, then places the last pill in her dry mouth. She swallows, but it doesn’t go down right away. After a few attempts, it worms down her esophagus and lodges itself in her chest.
Beep.
“I can’t get more. I’m trapped.”
Beep.
Without any more medicine, how am I supposed to sleep through the asteroid now?
After impact, after the earth has been shaken, it will be fire that razes continents. Wildfires so strong they generate their own winds will devour everything from the plains to the sea, so that one could run hundreds of miles to escape only to be met with rough waters. No relief, but to cling to the rocky shore underneath the lip of fire, begging for fuel to run out before the ocean swallows everything. But Rachel won’t live that long.
The TV turns off, like someone unplugged it. But Rachel only notices the silence when it is broken.
A voice echoes from downstairs. “It’s all probably fine, but I have this sick feeling like it’s the end.”
Rachel jolts to a seated position on the bed and immediately doubles over as her snapped wing frames grate against each other. After wincing, she listens. Rachel heard the voice as if it was in the house.
What did they say? In the surprise of hearing the voice, she hadn’t retained the words, but knows they are familiar– her own words. But not her voice.
Beep.
Slowly, she stands up from the bed and steps out of the bedroom, leaning over the balcony at the top of the stairs above the foyer, listening for any signs of life downstairs. She is tempted to call out, “Hello?” but doesn’t, holding her breath. All she hears is the wind outside.
Beep.
After a few minutes of quiet, Rachel relaxes, leaning fully on the bannister and letting her back arch. I must’ve dozed off somehow… dreaming what I heard.
Then, a gentle creak from downstairs. Just one. Like a footstep taken followed by a pause long enough to be suspicious. Rachel’s head jerks up and her brow furrows as she listens again. I’ve been alone this whole time.
Right…?
10:00 pm 7 hours until impact
65 Karst Cliff Street
Rachel’s phone rings in her back pocket. “Fuck,” she jumps, clutching her hand to her heart. Fumbling with her phone, Rachel hurriedly silences the ring, but the vibrate is still obnoxiously loud. She can only silence it by answering.
“Hello?” She whispers as she creeps into the upstairs bathroom, closes the door, and crouches behind the toilet.
“Rachel?” Margo’s assured voice is just as loud as the vibrate. “Rachel, why are you whispering?”
“I– I…” Rachel stammers.
“Oh, lord, it’s a little late, huh?” Margo scoffs, “I just got off work and forgot what time it was. Did I wake you?”
“Kinda,” Rachel responds in a hushed voice.
“Well, the reason I’m calling is Iskra– I heard about what happened and I know you two were close. You haven’t been to the suicide support group lately, so I felt I needed to check in on you.”
Rachel turns her neck, which triggers another shot of pain down her back. She winces and Margo hears. “Are you in pain?” the older woman’s voice grows concerned.
With her mind shocked by the fresh wave of affliction, Rachel isn’t clever enough to lie. “Yes,” she whispers, her voice cracking. The tears surprise her, brimming quicker than she can fight them off. “Yes,” she repeats.
“What happened?”
Rachel slowly rises from the corner and tip toes out of the bathroom, back to the stairs. She doesn’t hear anything, except Margo repeating her question. Before answering, Rachel descends the stairs, keeping her back against the wall, then cautiously looks around the first floor.
“Rachel? Can you hear me?”
Rachel stands in the kitchen, alone, and exhales. “Sorry,” Rachel replies at a normal volume. “I thought I heard something.”
She paces the perimeter of the room as she listens to Margo. “Ouch” she blurts, tripping over something on the floor. A plastic clattering sound follows.
“Pervert’s bowl?” She mumbles. I thought I left it on the counter.
“It’s okay,” Margo assures her, “Just tell me what happened.”
“I–” Since cutting off her binding, Rachel hadn’t considered how she would tell people. “Uh… okay, if– if I tell you, will you promise to keep it between us?”
“... within reason.” Margo answers honestly. Not the response Rachel prefers.
“Understood…” Rachel begins cautiously, “So, I– earlier today, um… I may have cut my wings out of their binding…”
Margo’s silence rings in Rachel’s ear. “I thought there was mold,” Rachel hurries to explain. “I worried I may have punctured a hole in the plastic and… somehow mold got in.”
“You did this yourself?” Margo sounds stupefied. “Why not go to a doctor?”
Rachel doesn’t know how to tell Margo about the asteroid or the cul-de-sac or the sinkhole. If I tell Margo about the asteroid, who’s to say she wouldn’t respond like Iskra did? Desperate people do desperate things. Is it better to warn her or let her live in peace until the end comes in the morning?
“You know what,” Margo goes on, her tone accepting and neutral, “doesn’t matter why. Are your wings hurt?”
“Yes,” Rachel exhales. “They’re– they’re broken and– and torn and… I ran out of my pain meds and I… I can’t get more.”
“Describe the pain to me,” Margo’s doctor voice comes out.
“Um… Well, it’s sort of… like–...” Rachel stumbles. Margo patiently waits in silence, as if she has a pen at the ready to take note of Rachel’s symptoms. “I– I don’t know how to describe it.”
A light out of the corner of Rachel’s eye draws her attention. She finds the living room lit up bright pink from one corner. Rachel wanders into the room and kneels by the lava lamp, lifting the cord in her fingers. Did I plug it in? She can’t remember.
Margo inhales. “I’ve never had a patient with wings before. So it’s important that I know what kind of pain you’re in.”
A creak behind Rachel pulls her eyes back to the kitchen, but she sees nothing. Her chest rises and falls rapidly with her breath.
“Who’s there?” Rachel blurts, but her tenor trembles.
“Who’s there?” Margo repeats. “Rachel, are you safe?”
Rachel waits quietly, but when nothing happens, she says into the phone, “No– no, everything is fine. I– I just…” she sighs, “I just want to sleep. But the pain won’t let me.”
“Well, can you fix your wings with any of the materials around you?”
Surprised, Rachel isn’t sure what to say. “Fix?” Why didn’t I think of that? “I don’t know… um…” She looks around lamely.
“There’s a lot I don’t know,” Margo admits, “But what I do know is that if you can fix what’s broken the pain will abate.” Margo continues, “Where are you? I can come to you.”
“No, you– you can’t.” Forgetfully, Rachel turns to look at the sinkhole outside the dining room window and her vertebrae by her wings tighten together and almost crack. “Ow,” she recoils, dropping her phone into the carpet where it disappears.
Kneeling down, she brushes her hands over the carpet in search of the phone, but all she feels is soft fiber. She slides over to look under the couch, thinking it fell down there, but all she sees are a pair of hello kitty slippers, a string of Chuck E. Cheese tickets, and an old vitamin bottle.
“What the hell?” Rachel grumbles, looking all over the living room for the phone with no luck. “It couldn’t have just disappeared.” She checks underneath the couch cushions, she checks the glass table in front of the couch, she checks everywhere in the living room. Even with the overhead light on, there’s no sign of the phone. She can’t even hear the muffled sound of Margo’s voice on the line. Whatever remaining chances Rachel had to warn Margo about the asteroid are gone with that phone.
All she cares about now is sleep. Time is running out.
11:00 pm 6 hours until impact
65 Karst Cliff Street
When the house begins to shake again, Rachel ignores it.
If you can fix what’s broken, the pain will abate. But how to fix her wings? Trapped in the cul-de-sac, Rachel can only use the materials immediately at her disposal. She paces between the living room and the dining room. How can I fix them? How can I fix them?
There is no fixing this.
“Margo doesn’t know the extent of the problem,” Rachel murmurs to herself. “Maybe she’s wrong and there’s nothing that can be done.” But for sleep’s sake, I must try.
CRRRRRKKKK CRRRRRKKKKK
The ceiling above Rachel cracks. Then, part of the floor sinks in on itself.
Rushing over to the dining room window, Rachel looks out and can see part of the sinkhole next to the house. It’s dark out, so Rachel struggles to discern between what’s a shadow and what’s the sinkhole.
Has it grown?
Bearing down, Rachel grits her teeth and rushes through the onslaught of pain, through the foyer, and out the front door, where she finds the sinkhole eating the side of 65.
Like a predator caught with fresh prey, the sinkhole snarls at her warningly– do not interrupt my meal. 65’s bloody innards spill out the side of the gaping hole in its flesh, as the house moans.
Mouth agape, Rachel hurries to 66 next door. As she slams the door shut, she listens to the crash of 65, crumbling into the sinkhole’s gullet. She can’t bear to see it, as if being out of sight makes it not real. Will the neighborhood even still be here by the time the asteroid comes?
The crashing sound of the cul-de-sac’s destruction mimics the sound of total obliteration when the asteroid comes. It will be the sound of impact, much more than the sight, that will crush our feeble minds– the violent meeting of two celestial giants. Nothing so loud will have ever been heard by human ears. The depravity will warp us irrevocably.
Temporarily safe in 66, Rachel listens until the curl-de-sac quietens again. She exhales but then with her next inhale, clasps a hand over her nose and mouth. “Ugh! What is that smell?”
11:30 pm 5 ½ hours until impact
66 Karst Cliff Street
Rachel heads directly into the kitchen and turns on the harsh fluorescent overhead. As the dingy, white light lands on the kitchen, Rachel immediately sees the culprit: rotten take-out she and Iskra had left there from three weeks ago.
“Gross!” She exclaims into her hand, but that’s when she sees them: chopsticks.
Rachel's eyes widen.
Still with a hand covering her nose, she rushes over to the utensil drawer and digs out two handfuls of reusable silver chopsticks– left behind by the previous owners along with the rest of the silverware. She carries them to the dining room, away from the stench so that she can use both hands to experiment.
Taking one chopstick in her hand, she feels over her shoulder for one of her wings’ broken frames. As her fingers find a break, she places the chopstick along the length of the snapped frame. Pinching the chopstick and frame together tightly, Rachel breathes unevenly– the pain will not relent. But, braced by the chopstick, the one broken frame comes back together. Now, all she needs is something to glue the chopsticks to the frames.
Tape would just fall apart. Probably wouldn’t even stick. Back muscles twitching and trembling, Rachel returns to the kitchen and digs through the junk drawer. No glue. There are rubber bands, but she’d have to tie them through a hole in the chitin. She considers sticky substances, like syrup, but there aren’t any in the cul-de-sac.
Feeling defeated, Rachel lets her head hang down, stretching her tense neck muscles. The wind blows against the side of the house, causing it to creak though nothing inside moves. The eerie sensation of the walls shifting raises the hairs on the back of Rachel’s neck. The howl of the wind is all she hears as she closes her eyes.
But, after impact, the howl of the ejecta cloud will roar compared to the wind, bursting our eardrums. When the asteroid hits, the ejecta cloud of dust, smoke, and glass will radiate outward from impact, moving at 10,000 miles per hour, covering every inch of the globe after a few hours.
As Rachel stands there in the cul-de-sac, she will see the ejecta cloud coming from hundreds of miles away. She will be unable to look away as the monstrous storm charges at her. By the time it reaches her, the cloud will burn her like a blowtorch. After a few minutes, the ground temperature will reach 300 degrees fahrenheit. But she’ll have been burned alive long before then. Her skin will be ripped off in the blast, leaving her muscles and veins exposed to the oven she stands in. As the moisture evaporates out of her body, her skeleton will shrivel and her fat will melt–
Melt…
Rachel opens her eyes again in the kitchen of 66. Melt… “Wax.”
Sunday, October 26, 2008
12:00 am 5 hours until impact
66 Karst Cliff Street
Rachel limps cautiously from the counter across the kitchen to the dark stairwell leading down to the basement. “Ouch, ouch,” she repeats with each step. At the top of the stairs, she pauses; it’s dark down there. Though the light from the kitchen is enough to illuminate the stairwell, everything downstairs remains shrouded in darkness.
She descends carefully. From the bottom of the stairs and the bottom of the light, she can vaguely make out the left behind contents of the craftroom. Big, bulky cabinets line part of the wall. A wide desk sits beside an even larger counter workspace, which takes up most of the room. Strewn over the counter are material scraps, a few fabric pens, and pieces of notebook paper with scribbled designs. All the fabrics were taken, but the supplies had been abandoned. Including paper cement.
At the bottom of the stairs, as Rachel reaches to turn on the light, she stops and stares into the dark basement. Standing in the far corner is a figure completely veiled in shadow.
Rachel slits her eyes, peering into the black room, colder than upstairs. Though she cannot see its face, she knows the figure is facing away from her, shoulders slumped, lingering in the corner. The longer she stares, the more it looks like it's breathing. She can’t blink, fearing she’ll miss the most miniscule of movements to prove the thing is alive.
Rachel lets out an involuntary gasp. As if it heard her, the figure stops breathing, standing there frozen. Rachel considers fleeing back up the stairs, but can’t move. Her fingers quiver above the light switch, indecisive as to whether to continue in the dark, in the safety of this moment, or to turn on the light and watch as the figure runs towards her.
Heart thudding, she finally flicks the light on.
“Oh,” she remarks with a scoff.
The figure is a mannequin upon a stand, draped partially in a project long forgotten. Stepping lightly, she crosses the room and runs her fingers over the mannequin’s soft skin. She rolls her eyes at herself. “Scared over nothing,” she scolds, turning her attention back to the countertop, where she finds the paper cement.
“Ha,” Rachel celebrates as she palms the bottle of glue. “Found you.” Taking the chopstick again in one hand and aligning it with the broken frame, she paints the glue brush over the braced spot. She holds it in place as it dries, tapping her foot anxiously as she waits. This won’t work. There’s no way. This won’t work.
Slowly, she pulls her fingers away from the frame and waits for the snap, but the wax holds. Her breath mounts as the minutes pass and the frame remains intact. It’s working.
The house trembles as the sinkhole once again grows. Then, darkness descends on the house as the electricity powers down. The light from the kitchen at the top of the stairs turns off, dropping the entire house into the blackness of night.
They finally did it. They turned the power off in the cul-de-sac. Rachel rolls her eyes again, remembering that Iskra had been right about something else, too: that eventually the power company would shut off the electricity of the dead end where no one lived anymore. Rachel had always assumed things would continue to be normal indefinitely, like their small corner of the universe could be forgotten and available as their utopia. But Iskra had known otherwise. The place the two friends ran off to every weekend to just exist together– alone together– was to be a brief sanctuary. The utility companies would eventually catch up to them.
Or the sinkhole ate the powerlines…
“Fuck,” Rachel groans. “Now how can I fix my wings if I can’t see?”
CREEEAAAAKKK… thump… thump… thump.
Something is coming down the stairs. But Rachel remains where she stands, clutching the paper cement to her chest. Goosebumps spread over her exposed arms, then down her neck, until they reach her wings, where they feel like droplets of cold water. Her chest rises and falls.
Thump… thump…
In the complete dark, Rachel cannot see what it is.
Thump… thump… It stops at the bottom of the stairs. Rachel trembles, waiting, but nothing happens.
“Who– Who’s there?” Rachel stammers weakly.
The only answer she receives is a soft creak as whatever it is shifts its stance. But she can’t hear anything else– no breathing, no crinkle of clothing, no joints cracking, no swallowing. The silence is inhuman.
Out of the dark, a recording plays: “You’ve reached Iskra. Can’t make it to the phone, probably because I don’t want to talk to you. Do with that what you will. I’ll get back to you, eventually.” BEEP.
Rachel’s breathing accelerates, as she steps backward, away from the stairs, towards the back door. She stumbles blindly, tripping over a stool and a few boxes, trying to get out.
Thump- thump-thump-thump- the footsteps head for her again, faster now.
Rachel screams, as she grasps the door handle and flings herself outside into the cold night air. She runs, then stumbles, and turns around to look at the back door from about 15 feet away.
Catching her breath, she watches the door, peering through the cover of darkness for any sign of movement. As her eyes finally begin to adjust, she can make out the door frame, then, she sees it— a hand.
A hand is wrapped around the doorframe.
She cannot make out what the hand is attached to, but with a sickening feeling, she recognizes it.
Out of the darkness, a red glow descends upon the backyard, bathing everything in neon blood. It colors the hand, and, at first, Rachel can’t look away. The hand doesn’t move. With each blink, Rachel expects to find a plausible explanation— there is no hand, just a trick of the light— but the hand remains there still.
Her face lined with panic, Rachel turns her attention to 67 nextdoor to find the source of the red light. As it lands upon her face and front, her broken wings capture the color and blend it with shadow. A soft hum pulses from the glow. Rachel stares. Floating there in the backyard is an open door, red and glowing from the inside.
Rachel steps closer, but her footsteps are muted. All she hears is the hum. The door floats there, solitary, opening up for Rachel, and inviting her into the red light. Standing inches from it, she wonders where it leads and, in a moment of carelessness, simply steps inside and enters the door.
Out of the red, she finds herself inside the foyer of 67, as 66’s backyard crumbles into the sinkhole licking at her heels. She didn’t know the sinkhole had been behind her the whole time.
1:00 am 4 hours until impact
67 Karst Cliff Street
Without power, Rachel stands in the dark, empty house. For a moment, she doesn’t move. The interior is freezing cold. Once her eyes adjust, she steps into the dining room and feels a breeze.
“Oh, shit,” Rachel recalls, closing the dining room window, which she and Iskra had left open the last time they were there.
Rachel shivers.
The sound of her footsteps fills the house as she turns around and walks to the primary bedroom. Blindly, she stumbles into the room and feels her way to the armoire left behind by the owners. As the flat of her hand grazes the table top, she sets down the paper cement and retrieves the chopsticks from her back pocket. She gazes into the vanity mirror, though she cannot see her reflection in the dark.
After the asteroid’s impact, after the initial waves of devastation, it will always be dark like this. The ejecta cloud will block the sun’s light, making a dark day permanent. Even if Rachel managed to survive everything else, she would starve when nothing grows. It will smell like rotten eggs as toxic gasses leak into the air. The only thing to thrive will be fungi– everything else will die, most likely alone.
Just like Rachel will.
“If I want to fall asleep before the asteroid comes,” Rachel rationalizes, “I need to fix my wings blind. And quickly.”
But, God, it hurts. Every time she touches a break in her wings, she recoils, but her fingers diligently glide along the frames, seeking bends and gaps. She pinches a piece of dislocated chitin to the chopstick she attached earlier and douses it in paper cement that quickly hardens, joining them together.
More of the cul-de-sac crashes into the sinkhole outside. 67 stands alone now, upon a thin column of rock, surrounded by an unending hole. Tucked inside 67, Rachel knows she is only temporarily safe. Now, sleep is her only escape.
As Rachel blindly follows the path of her frames, gluing broken pieces every which way, she mutters absentmindedly to herself, “Escape this holiday season in a brand new vehicle from Tim Kraggle Dodge.”
She works from the top of her wings down. Her breathing is uneven.
“You’ll find low prices, finance options, trade-in values, and a huge selection.”
Every time she grips a broken frame, pain rips through her wings and down her spine. But Rachel keeps going, biting her lip until it bleeds. After she braces the frame, she feels around for ripped chitin, which she also repairs with glue. What a mess. She has no idea whether she is actually fixing her wings or only further damaging them.
“Check out our 2009 Impact now for only $24,995 with 0% APR.” Rachel’s eyelids are heavy, eager to close and to sleep, once the pain lessens. She shakes her head to stay awake.
“We’re here to serve you to the end…” The wax is sticky upon her fingers. She is running low on chopsticks and knows she must finish soon.
“...so come on down to Tim Kraggle Dodge, your trusted partner in car buying, located at the corner of Sevier and Endless.” She nears the very bottom of her wings, then feels for any spots she may have missed. There are a few big frames still broken, but she has done all she can.
“Escape your way.” With the last broken frame splinted, she observes her handiwork through touch. The frames hold her wings upright in an erect position.
“Impact is Inevitable.”
In the mirror, she can make out her shape and comments with a smile-less chuckle, “You’re larger than I remember.” On the day they crumpled her wings into the binding, they gave her laughing gas, saying that anesthesia was unnecessary. So when they snapped her frames into tiny fragments, Rachel laughed. She laughed until tears came out of her eyes. Then, too, she begged for sleep. But it didn’t come.
The spot connecting her wings to her back still aches, but the shooting pain is dulled. She takes a deep breath without wincing. When she exhales, she lies down, face in the carpet.
“Finally,” she whispers, turning her cheek to the side. “Finally I can rest.”
She drags herself to the bed, reaches an arm over the side, and pulls herself to a kneeling position. As she tries to lift herself into bed, her hand drops down onto the mattress– no, not a mattress. It’s a waterbed.
“How did I not notice this before?” She wearily asks as she presses the surface of the water letting it dance under her palm. With dark circles under her eyes, she awkwardly lowers herself into the bed, lying on her side. The waves jostle underneath her, then calm as her body stills, her back relaxing for the first time since she arrived in the cul-de-sac.
Eyes closed, Rachel lets the darkness overtake her. The calcification in her spine melts, as she completely sinks into the bed. The stinging, the aching, the cramping– all of that noise in her body– just floats away. She is not asleep, but she can’t open her eyes.
This might be the last time I ever sleep. The last time I’m ever awake. If I’m lucky.
But what Rachel didn’t expect was to still be unable to sleep. Though her body no longer hurts, she still lays there conscious. Her eyes are closed, but her mind refuses to quieten. Frustration builds inside her, but she wipes it away, hoping for peace of mind. But the asteroid torments her.
She has imagined impact dozens of times, but the exact moment when rock hits rock replays over and over. That terrible first contact between the cosmos and earth. Up from impact comes a chant— one Rachel can’t discern at first.
Then she hears it.
Broken brain. Broken brain. Broken brain. Broken brain. Broken brain.
Rachel opens her eyes and she is sitting in a church basement with the suicide support group. They are gathered in a circle, but instead of facing inward, they’re all facing away; their backs are to Rachel. She quickly glances at them, expecting them to shift in their seats or turn to look at her, but none of them move a hair.
“Rachel,” Margo addresses her sharply. She’s sitting directly across from Rachel and is the only other one facing into the circle.
Rachel jumps. “Uh, ye—yeah?”
“You’re missing a shoe…” Margo points out. Rachel looks down and sees her bare foot on the rough, stain-resistant carpet.
Before Rachel can look around for the shoe, Margo continues, “Tell us about Iskra.”
Rachel is surprised by the directness of the demand. The soothing gentleness of her typical tone is gone, but no one else seems to notice.
“Did they have a broken brain?” Margo asks.
“Uh—”
“A broken brain,” Margo interrupts curtly, “or was it your fault?”
Rachel’s skin goes cold. “What?” Is all she can lamely say.
“It’s very simple if you think about it,” Margo explains, while she puts a mask over her head, one that droops off her face like melted wax.
“With suicide, it’s one of two things: it’s either your fault or it’s not.” She scoots her chair an inch closer to Rachel. Rachel jerks at the sudden movement.
Margo goes on, “If Iskra’s brain was broken, then their death was inevitable— nothing you could have done about it, except maybe give them more time.”
Margo scoots closer again. Rachel feels the urge to flee.
“Or it was a choice,” Margo scoots. “If it was a choice… it could be your fault.”
A sick feeling rises in Rachel’s stomach and up her throat. When Margo is only a few feet in front of her, Rachel instinctively scoots her own chair backward.
“You did call Iskra the night they died.” Margo scoots until she is close enough to touch Rachel. “Didn’t you?”
“Stop,” Rachel pleads, as she tries to scoot back again, only to find her back tight to a corner. Nowhere to run.
“You called Iskra not to ask how they were doing, reeling after their father’s suicide, nor did you call to make sure Iskra wasn’t at risk.”
“Stop it.”
“No,” Margo starts. breathing really loudly. “No, you called Iskra to… what, scare them? Scare them about the end of the world as if their world hadn’t already ended?”
The rest of the support group has disappeared. The church basement is dark and empty, save Rachel and Margo.
“I didn’t mean to scare them,” Rachel excuses as she desperately presses herself into the corner at her back, away from Margo’s breath that smells like death.
Margo laughs. “What else did you think would happen with that voicemail? Or, what if Iskra actually picked up the phone— how would that not have scared them?”
“I was scared,” Rachel’s voice trembles. “I just wanted to spend the end of the world with Iskra.”
Margo’s mask drips on Rachel’s knees. “Did it ever occur to you that you might be wrong?”
Rachel stutters, “I—I— I don’t— uh—” She tries to lift herself out of the chair, but her legs have fallen asleep. No matter how she struggles, she can’t move.
“God,” Margo scoffs, “what would be worse: for the asteroid to really hit or for you to be wrong?”
Rachel’s throat burns holding back tears.
“All this for nothing.” With her nose centimeters from Rachel’s, Margo sticks her fingers in Rachel’s mouth.
“So,” Margo goes on, as her fingers wriggle deeper, “is it a broken brain or is it your fault?” Margo’s whole hand is pressed against Rachel’s tongue. Rachel struggles to breathe, and tries to squirm free, but the harder she resists, the deeper Margo pushes.
“Your brother had a broken brain, too, didn’t he?” Margo asks. As Rachel gags on Margo’s hand, she grips Margo’s forearm and tugs as hard as she can, but Margo’s skin is wet and slippery.
“They say it’s hereditary. So, well, we all know what’s going to happen to you.”
Pinned at her front, Rachel frantically attempts escape from behind, pounding on the walls until they are pockmarked with fist-sized holes.
“When the time comes,” Margo pushes her arm deeper in, reaching down Rachel’s throat, “you’ll do it.”
Closing her eyes, Rachel wrestles but to no avail.
Then, as she opens her eyes again, she doesn’t see Margo sitting there. It’s Iskra who’s hand is in her mouth.
“Don’t,” Iskra growls.
In surprise, with a quick inhale, Rachel rockets to a standing position. Iskra’s hand slips out of her mouth, and Rachel bolts up out of the waterbed. In a delirium, she trips out of the bedroom. Breathing heavily, she darts her eyes all around, confused and unsure where she is. The dark house tells her nothing.
“Iskra,” Rachel says to the empty house. Briefly, Rachel thinks she hears Iskra walking around upstairs.
“There you are,” Rachel sighs, as though Iskra had only been in the bathroom this whole time.
But it isn’t Iskra upstairs. And Rachel realizes that quickly as her dream state fades. She stands frozen in the foyer, listening, but the noise doesn’t return.
Don’t.
Yet Rachel’s feet carry her towards the stairs. The first step creaks loudly under her. She pauses, listening for movement upstairs, but the house remains silent. Upward she goes, taking each stair one at a time. Her sweaty hand grips the bannister.
There’s no one up there. But her hands shake. At the top of the stairs, she pauses, wondering which bedroom to check first.
Why am I even checking? There’s no one here.
But she turns to the right and grabs the door handle to the bedroom. Taped up and down the door are kids’ crayon drawings— odd shapes that imply a cat or a person, but aren’t quite right. Rachel leans in closer to the drawings, listening for anything on the other side of the door. Nothing but the sound of her own rapid breathing.
Just do it.
She opens the door, just a crack at first, then slowly pushes until she can see the whole room. In the doorway, Rachel stands completely still, her eyes wide and mouth open. From surprise, her expression morphs to disturbed. “What the fuck?” She whispers, then clutches her mouth shut.
Found inside is a full home space compressed into one room. An amalgamation of random items litters the floor: an old ICEE cup, paper plates, a small TV set atop a crate, a few cardboard boxes, socks without their pair, crunched-on sunflower shells, crumpled up McDonald’s bags, magazines, used tissues, and in the corner are two large jugs of water. Beside the closet is a futon with blankets strewn over it. Left on the ceiling is a sky full of glow in the dark stars.
Rachel tenderly kneels down and runs her finger over the towel on the ground at her feet. It’s wet.
Rachel falls backward against the wall of the hallway, unable to look away from the room.
Someone has been here. The whole time… someone was here.
BUMP. Rachel jerks her attention down the hall towards the other bedroom.
They’re still here…
Without further investigation, Rachel bolts down the stairs, through the foyer, and then out the front door, not looking back or forward. Breathing heavily, the night greets her briefly before she loses her footing and sees– far too late– the sinkhole’s open mouth just inches off the curb.
She plummets down its throat, into darkness.
3:00 am 2 hours until impact
The sinkhole of Karst Cliff Street
In the cold, black sinkhole, Rachel falls down and down and down. Her lids flutter against the surface of her eyeballs. The air presses hard against the flat of her horizontal body, arching her neck upward, where she sees a sliver of light fast disappearing behind a wall of rock.
Anticipating impact any moment, Rachel falls and waits, falls and waits. But on she drops, plummeting faster and faster each second. In the absolute darkness, she can perceive nothing, but feels everything– especially unrelenting shame.
It’s my fault.
Unable to escape it, Rachel waits for impact– for it all to end.
But it isn’t rock she collides with at the bottom. When she hits freezing water, the air is knocked out of her chest and her skin burns from slapping against the hard surface. Gasping for air and unable to touch the ground, Rachel splashes desperately in the water. Blind, she can’t tell which direction she swims in. There is nothing around her to grab. No shore to swim toward. There is just nothingness.
She didn’t die. The epiphany drowns Rachel in sorrow– now, only more suffering awaits her. If the fall and water don’t kill me, the asteroid will. More violence will come. Defeat weighs her down. Out of breath after flailing about, she treads, letting the waves from her splashing fade and ripple. This water has only known her movement– underground and away from things that move. Only her ripples have grazed the surface. The water’s single other companion is the rock itself as it crumbles.
“Ow,” Rachel garbles, hitting her back against a rock. She splashes, trying to find it again, briefly panicking when she can’t feel it. Desperate, she flings her hands back to the spot. Choking, Rachel manages to haul herself out of the water and onto the rock, where she lies coughing. Only as the pain in her lungs and skin subsides does she notice the back pain again.
“My wings!” She sits upright, grasping blindly above and behind her, feeling for breaks in the frame. Colliding with the water broke the frames in some places, but to Rachel, in the dark, they feel completely destroyed. All my hard work for nothing.
Rachel curls into a ball. Now I won’t be able to sleep through it; the pain is too great. The asteroid will be here soon. But how long have I been down here? She has no way to know the time and thus the asteroid’s arrival at 5am. Each moment passing could be her last. Her body tenses in the cold and anticipation. She waits for the ground to quake around her, for the implosive sound of impact.
“It’s very simple if you think about it. With suicide, it’s one of two things: it’s either your fault or it’s not.”
It’s my fault.
Rachel weeps.
It erupts from her unexpectedly but ferociously. She sucks in for air, but chokes, the crying stuck in her chest. Gasping, she lets the sobbing out in short breaths, her chest aching. As her body convulses, stinging pain rips her back, like someone cutting off her wings. And all Rachel can do is experience it. Into the darkness around her, there is no running away. The guilt burns her skin, but she cannot retract her hand from the flame.
“I’m sorry,” Rachel whispers through her tears. “I’m so sorry. It’s my fault.”
The only sound comes from water dripping off Rachel’s wings. There, of course, is no answer to Rachel’s apology.
Then, a twinkle. A light glimmers in the distance, like a star– so far away. From the corner of her eye, Rachel thinks it’s a lightning bug all the way down there with her. But as she stares, the light remains.
Is it a way out?
But, even if it is, Rachel begins to wonder if it’s worth it. Out– out where? Out– back to the surface to face another rock. The asteroid, the sinkhole, they are the same end. Futility stuck between the two. I’m trapped between two rocks at the end of the world.
What’s the point in moving? What’s the point trying to get to the light? Rachel even laughs at the insanity of it. She closes her eyes, seeking sleep. Stubbornly, she pursues it, elusive as it is. She grits her teeth against the stinging pain shooting through her wings. If I keep my eyes closed, sleep will eventually come. But it doesn’t. It resists her as stubbornly as she seeks it out.
After a few minutes, which may as well have been hours, in weary frustration, she sits up. The rock is too uncomfortable to sleep on. Sleep is impossible down here.
That leaves the choice: wait for the asteroid or don’t. But how would I do it down here? She imagines sinking into the water and letting it overtake her, or slamming her head against the rock. Those are her options.
When her eyes open, they find the distant light again. Maybe there’s something over there I can use. No matter what it is, it could give her options.
Still lying flat on the rock, Rachel reaches her hands as far as she can in each direction around her, searching for the edges of the rock she sits on. When the rock extends beyond her fingers, she inches forward on her side, carefully seeking out the invisible edge– the drop back into the dreaded waters.
She stops every few inches, shivering as her drenched body dries. Her wings dangling above her mimic cave stalactites as the water travels down and drips off the ends of her wing tips. She eyes the light up ahead.
With her fingertips growing sore and tattered, and the rock has still yet to end, Rachel stands up and takes a cautious step forward. Her foot lands on solid ground. She tries another. Then another. Until she is walking– tenderly, still– heading for the light. With every step, suicide gets closer and closer, yet it still isn’t real for Rachel. Clarity will come with the light.
Time ripples through the sinkhole. The further she goes forward, the deeper she takes herself back in time– back a few hours, then a few days, a week. Though she cannot hear or see the surface world, the rock tells her. The abyss of the sinkhole goes on and on. And no matter how long she walks, the light does not grow larger.
Suddenly, she drops again into cold water, which fills her lungs and chills her wings. “Ah!!” She spits as she breaches the surface. She flops around until eventually hitting rock once more, where she can pull herself out.
Rachel grows accustomed to the pattern as time passes: walk, swim, walk, swim, walk, swim, walk. Though it surprises her everytime she doesn’t feel the ground under her foot, the panic in the water simmers, as she comes to learn that there is always another rock.
She feels the hole tremble around her. At first, she thinks it’s the asteroid, but then understands. No, I’m under the highway. The cars speeding up above rattle the cavern and Rachel in it. That means I’m near the mountains.
Deeper she goes. Until soon the light shines a bit brighter– closer. Rachel follows the sinkhole’s tunnel into the mountains, into ancient rock, underneath blue hills and smoky forests. The light leads the way.
Almost without noticing, Rachel stumbles into the source of the light: the abandoned car from the cul-de-sac. Its headlights are on, shining up like spotlights. Having tumbled down into the hole with the other houses, somehow it landed here, providing the only source of light in the entire sinkhole.
But the headlights are not helpful. The walls of the hole are too far away to be illuminated and, with the direction they are pointing, they don’t reveal the ground under Rachel’s feet. They are a beacon and that is all.
Rachel tries to get inside the car to look for anything that she could use, but it’s too smashed from the fall— the doors won’t even open. Anything inside is probably destroyed.
“Fuck,” Rachel whines, defeated and so weary. Her eyes are heavy, and she sometimes can’t tell when they are closed because of the darkness. But sleep has turned its back on her.
She leans against the crumpled hood of the car.
The asteroid will be here momentarily. The cave above her will collapse and as the earth is ripped open, it will fall into new depths, Iskra’s body with it. For that’s where Rachel now stands: underneath the cave where Iskra’s body remains swallowed by rock. There, down in the abyss, Rachel is alone with the choice. The same choice Iskra faced two weeks ago.
Do it.
Rachel shivers and shakes her head. She wants to say no, but instead the question forms: How?
A faint whistle rises up from below Rachel. Automatically she turns her head and looks around, though it is silly in the face of the darkness. Stretching out her arms in front of her, she tentatively walks just a few feet away to the left, where she feels a gentle breeze tickle the underside of her hands. She retracts, then slowly extends her arms again, back to the breeze.
Where is the wind coming from? Her foot shifts and finds the edge of the rock, except it isn’t water; it’s another hole. The wind blows up out of it.
Rachel can’t tell how big the hole is. She skirts the rim, but has no way to discern the true size. The wind picks up just enough to lift Rachel’s hair around her face. It dries her wet body. When she stands too close to the rim, her wings twitch instinctively, though she knows they could never carry her if she were to fall into the hole.
This could be my answer. I could jump and let the fall kill me.
“Iskra…” Rachel whispers. The wind continues to blow out of the hole, brushing against her front. But all else is silent.
In the abyss, the dark thoughts multiply exponentially– reflections so caustic they burn a hole through the compartment Rachel hides them away in, leaking out of her brain in a hot, bloody goo.
Iskra abandoned you. Left you here alone to face the asteroid by yourself.
I’m running out of time. A pebble slips at Rachel’s feet, inching her closer to the edge. The breath rises in her chest. The moment she’s been waiting for all weekend. A moment of choice: wait to die or die. Was this how Iskra felt? Standing underneath Iskra’s cave, tears run down Rachel’s cheeks.
“Iskra…” Rachel repeats, her voice quivering. Her feet slip another inch closer to the hole.
The inevitability of it all hits her. “Iskra,” she whispers calmly. Still with no answer, she lets herself slip off the edge, dropping into the hole.
It’ll be over soon. The air rushes around Rachel’s ears as she falls. Her wings, tattered and broken, crumple under the weight of the wind. Down and down she goes, waiting for impact. It’s coming– the end.
Suddenly, the air catches in Rachel’s wings. Part of the chitin Rachel repaired lifts and holds the rising wind. Both her wings snatch her roughly, like a deployed parachute, jerking her out of downward motion, and lifting her up. The pain rushes through Rachel’s back and wings like electricity. She hangs limp as the wind embraces her. For a moment, she believes the pain to be impact. But as it subsides, and she feels the wind against her, she marvels at this strange flight.
The wind never falters– strong but gentle with Rachel– lifting her up and up. Feeling the air rush against her, she smiles into it, loving it as a friend. A friend. Familiar.
“Is that you?” Rachel asks.
Iskra’s long, dark hair tickled Rachel’s forehead, as she slept in class with Iskra sitting in front of her. Iskra’s arms were full with snacks from the gas station as they hurried through the rain back to the car. Iskra coughed after taking a hit in the mall bathroom. Iskra’s head landed on Rachel’s shoulder as they sat on the side of the road way past curfew with a busted tire, waiting for the tow truck.
Rachel’s body grazes the roof of the cavern as it narrows. She walks her hands along the rock, guiding herself out. Feeling the rock walls, she can now tell that the sinkhole is an upside down funnel: wide at the bottom, narrower at the top.
“Why are you helping me, if it was my fault?” Rachel wonders out loud, speaking into Iskra’s last breath as it carries her upward.
Orange streaks light up around Rachel, like plumes of smoke but bright orange in the black sinkhole. Her wide eyes remark them, the glow reflecting in the black of her dilated pupils.
“Unless…” Rachel’s voice echoes in the sinkhole, “Unless, I was wrong.”
Then, light. This time, sunlight— still far away. As Rachel floats on Iskra’s wind, the hole opens up, sunlight striving to reach for her. She breathes in fresh air.
“The sun has risen,” Rachel realizes.
Despite the chill of the sinkhole, her forearms and legs warm, as if next to a fire. She looks down at herself. Orange paints her forearms to the elbow, white and black dots peppered like stars.
Lengthening her arms, reaching her fingertips, the transformation comes like a stretch after a long confinement. She feels the warmth in her face– her cheeks and over her eyes. In the daylight, orange colors cross her face, white and black spots like freckles. Thin black lines criss-cross the orange, like streams of darkness cutting through the glow.
“It wasn’t inevitable.”
Nearing the surface, the light washes over her wings. Radiance. The chitin’s color returns and Rachel bathes in ecstasy. She imagines passing the asteroid as it falls, her wings lifting her as the rock falls in the opposite direction. Her own luminosity matches the plasma burning off the asteroid. They mirror one another. But instead of witnessing impact, Rachel sees a cave from a distance, from whence a massive flock of birds flies out into the daylight– every color blending together into one vision of survival, of return and renewal.
Rachel opens her eyes as she breaches the surface of the earth. The sinkhole had shrunk back to the size it was when Rachel arrived in the cul-de-sac. As the wind gently sets her down on the other side, Pervert the cat rubs against her legs before scampering forward, down the road.
The sun rises beyond the suburb and into it, Rachel smiles. “It wasn’t inevitable.”