Bye for Now, a short story by Caitlin Brady
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Bye for Now
by Caitlin Brady
The day came but there were no real instructions for it. The dirt shifted and vibrated, rocks loosened and slid. They cascaded in waves into streets and down hillsides. Grass tore open as more dirt geysered upward in bursts. There was not one great boom but several—the direction from which they came was unclear. Then the sounds of car alarms, fire alarms, a roar across the sky, but then it was not the sky at all but the sound of several streets breaking open. Cars flipped, billboards fell backwards, sidewalks rippled, and powerlines snapped. The traffic lights, no light in them, bounced up and down on the breeze as it grew to wind that whipped the dirt into cyclones, which twirled and jumped and blew out windows with vigor that almost bordered on festive.
In Los Angeles, extreme weather is not uncommon. It takes a while to register as threatening, and if the sun eventually reappears and the temperature hovers around 70, most people accept it. Some even go for jogs, walk dogs, drink matchas in it. So maybe no one understood or took seriously that this was “it,” as in the final call, nature’s last crescendo. “It” as in Judgment Day, the one prophesied by the major religious texts and countless fringe sects, cults, abduct-us-already valley-and-desert-dwellers with matching outfits and braided-hair women praying for their jailed messiahs. All of them got it wrong. No one said it would be today, despite centuries of forecasting. They captured the overall vibe, but reality has been so much more confusing, due largely to a lack of project management. And what boggles my mind is that there’s been nothing but time to plan.
My expectations for Judgment Day were not “perfection” but I did expect more organization. I figured a horn, maybe a gold one, not like a tuba or something, but a big, beautiful horn would sound and then a booming voice would deliver instructions. It might not be God first, but an appointed party of lesser rank. There would be some flags, maybe a flow chart, and we would get in groups before the big guns came out. Again, this was my best guess because I received no agenda, no bios, no nothing.
Now, there are billions of living people to sort through and however many (ten million tons?) of dead ones. Not to mention all the ones that were burned and scattered, and whose ashes have now rapid-reassembled from every location of dispersal into gray-black blocks resembling marijuana bricks. I’ve gotten no insight into how long to stand here, in this parking lot in Elysian Park, and I’d really appreciate a status update because this is the longest line I’ve ever had to wait in. I guess the beauty is, it will also be my last.
I’d absorbed a little about Judgment Day in Sunday school, where we touched on The Book of Revelations. However, I wasn’t paying attention, I was maybe six years old, and honestly, I figured I’d miss it. It’s like the mandatory fire drill on the first day of a cruise. The basics are covered, but you don’t think you’re ever going to have to use them. You’re going to Jamaica, you’re going to do the zip line, and that is all you care about. When my family did a lifeboat evacuation drill on our Caribbean cruise, certain groups were in barracuda, others were in stingray, some were in starfish, dolphin, or porpoise zones. Each zone had a color painted on the floor and a cruise experience team member in the same color vest, shepherding us with glowsticks. Why couldn’t we have done something like that?
Besides, there have been more than a few false alarms for this, right? It was pretty surprising to me, and I didn’t know how to take it, when I heard from the ripped sky a voice boom: “Hark! The Final Day on Earth has come.” Since the message came simultaneously in a million different languages, the tandem translation intensified the cacophony, and I could barely hear a thing. I waited for the voice to follow-up with details but it didn’t. I tried Googling “what to do Judgment Day” but it was too late, Wi-Fi was out. Power was gone, cell service too. My phone battery was at 11% after a long drive with the traffic app. I stared at the screen, waiting for an official alert, anything from the city, but nothing came. I then assumed I should just go outside and leave everything behind. What would I need a passport or debit card for? All I took with me, as I wandered into the ruptured street, was a banana nut granola bar.
Not to miss the forest for the trees here, but a big executional issue is that the dead people present, who are legion, can’t talk. They don’t listen, either. If coordinating large groups of living people is difficult, managing dead ones is near impossible. I don’t know how they’re operating, stumbling in and out of lines, cutting each other. Most are obviously dead: mid-rot, skeletal, the whole nine yards. I’d say the majority are wearing some clothes, but for others, those are gone too. A lot of their eyes are stuck shut, pinned closed by morticians.
When it came to the living, it was eerily quiet. I suspected some ascended directly and skipped the lines altogether, like a FastPass to eternity. My apartment is right by a cemetery, so I must’ve been lumped in with more dead. It seemed the dead and living should be in separate lines, but because the dead have been so difficult, no one is enforcing anything. No security or traffic cops. Originally, I followed a neighbor walking towards Elysian— a father carrying his sleeping daughter. I ran up to ask him questions but he held a shush finger to his mouth. He continued to rock his sleeping daughter, rocking her and walking away from me.
Another neighbor stopped me to ask if I had a backup generator. I didn’t.
“What about my tropical fish?”
I shrugged. “What about them?”
“The filters need to work or they’ll die.”
“We’re all…” and I trailed off. I didn’t want to be overly negative.
I noticed the coffee shop on my block was empty, and someone had thrown a trashcan through the front window, leaving a spray of shattered glass on the sidewalk. The tire shop with the Dodgers mural was also shuttered. Someone had graffitied over it, but I couldn’t tell if the bubble letters said “tough” or “touch.”
I’d dropped my older sister off at LAX for a flight back to New York five hours before this. Was all of it happening to her in the air? I felt a terrible fear mixed with uncertainty as to whether that would be better than the experience on the ground. Would the pilot make an announcement? Suspend in-flight service? Emergency land or keep flying till fuel ran out? She likes to watch shitty action movies on planes. I suspected she was watching one right now, and that if there were a brouhaha, hopefully it blended well with the CGI. To stay calm, I pictured her fine, eating free cookies.
After I got back from the airport, I sat alone on the couch and cried. I missed her terribly. I had only been in L.A. for a year and made exactly one friend: Cora, from my job, in Customer Excellence. I didn’t know how old she was but maybe a decade older than me—always late, several bags on her arms, texting typo nonsense because she refused to wear the glasses pushed over her forehead. Our friendship, or strategic alliance, began when she bought me lunch at a diner near the office to inform me of a power play she was making against my supervisor, Anita, whom she wanted fired for general incompetence.
“Don’t you think I’d be better?” she asked, dunking her French toast in syrup.
I stared out the window and nodded, not because I agreed, but because I didn’t really care, and Cora was buying.
My sister was not only my best friend but also a practical restorer of order. She made me lift the bed and rotate the carpet so it looked better, even if she strained her back while doing it. She wanted to cook rather than eat out and have leftovers for lunch. She needed an early bedtime and, as if daring me to get with the program, fell asleep in a Thai restaurant at 10. The one tourist excursion she demanded: a Hollywood bus tour, even if it cost us both $40 before tax and tip.
She worked as a lawyer who specialized in guardianship and end of life planning, and I think she would also be appalled by Judgment Day. In fact, this would be her worst nightmare. It was the ultimate deadline and nobody’s wishes were clear, at least not to me. I’d personally hoped to be buried, ideally with a degree of fanfare, in a tasteful crypt; today changed my mind about that. The bricks of cremated people seemed much more serene. I had no pets or children to survive me, no one would be surviving anybody anymore, though my Vitamix and fig tree would, when the earth exploded or whatever, return to the original elemental matter from which we all derived.
Also, since today was the final judgment, it would’ve been nice to have a lawyer present to remind me what not to say. Her advice often was: When in doubt, leave it out. Let counsel do the talking. Remember: you have rights. Ask yourself: Is everything I’m saying information the judge needs to know? I had no clue if there’d be a jury for this—whose standard were we using for “judgment”? This created a whole other level of anxiety I couldn’t answer with comparisons to a cruise ship.
Erin would know what to do but Erin was gone, and I would probably never see her again. I started to cry surrounded by silent dead people whose eyelids were stuck shut. A balding man in tan slacks and a golf shirt approached me. Most of his teeth were gone and he had a black eye.
“Hey, do you want a slice of pizza?” he asked, struggling to enunciate.
I was confused and shook my head no.
“I have pizza in my car,” he added, “parked over there.”
When he turned to point in the direction, I saw there was a big gash in the back of his head, he was bleeding profusely, and it was soaking the back of his polo.
“You’re bleeding,” I told him.
“Oh, I’m sure,” he laughed. “Do you want to see how big I am?”
And then he whipped his dick out, right there. I turned away and covered my eyes.
“No! No.”
“Let’s go to my car.”
“No—thank you,” I said. I had no business thanking him, but like his dick, it just came out.
“It’s the last day! Come on honey, one last time, while we can. I want to go out hard.”
He grabbed my arm but I pushed him off. When he reached for me again, I shoved a dead guy into him. They both fell backwards, the polo man shouting in agony, and I ran further up the line.
I jumped into a spot between two dead ladies, one whose wig was pushed way back—her bangs started mid-head—and the other’s skirt suit blended with her gray-green skin. She was rotted, but her sparkly gold pumps were immaculate.
“Excuse me,” I told them, “I was here before but had to use the restroom.”
Neither of them said anything. I’m sure they would understand if I told them the truth, but I didn’t want to relive it right now. The idea that a man could misread the situation so totally while remaining so confident unsettled me, and of course, made me wonder what my work coworkers were up to.
I worked as a claims adjuster (department transferrable) at a large insurance company in downtown L.A., right above Skid Row. As I stood here in line, hour number whatever, I realized I had nothing to say about this job as it pertained to my values or the bigger picture of my life, things I suspected a judge might want to hear. I did, however, take in the damage around me, particularly to vehicles, with a solid estimate range.
We sold Act of God Insurance, but we did not cover all Acts of God. To determine which Acts of God were covered for you, you had to get a quote based on your property. You might have to purchase separate policies in addition to your base policy, because our Essential Act of God plans only covered hurricanes, tornadoes, and lightning storms. Earthquake or flood, both of which seemed to be happening right now, cost extra and were up to the property owner’s probabilistic assessment of which Act of God was most likely to occur for them based on their zip code. There was no policy sold at this time based on property damage perpetuated by reanimated dead individuals, or reanimated dead individuals acting as a group, and when it came to whether or not some of the wind I was experiencing qualified as tornado- or hurricane-force, I would probably escalate that to my boss, Anita.
Anita would tell me, and this is a guess, but I’m betting Anita would say to check the Fujita Tornado Scale, which should be saved, as always, in the General Resources: Wind file on the C Drive. The scale starts at:
F0 Gale (40 – 72 mph winds), general damage to chimneys and trees
and goes to
F1 Moderate (beginning of hurricane wind speed, mobile homes overturned and damaged), to
F2 Significant (mobile homes crushed with no potential for re-habitation; light missile objects, aka missiles weighing less than 40 pounds, are generated), and then
F3 Severe (trains overturned, at least 63% of forest trees over the age of 25 uprooted) to
F4 Devastating (houses with concrete foundations destroyed, large missile objects generated of 40 pounds-plus) to, finally,
F5 Incredible (strong frame houses lifted off concrete foundations and carried a distance of at least 10 miles, with automobile-sized missiles generated)
Anita would also say: if it’s 62% of trees, it’s not covered. If the tree is 24 years old, it’s not covered. If a missile under 40 pounds breaks a window, that window is not covered. If the house is carried eight miles—not covered. As a good rule of thumb, nothing less than F2 Significant, and then with all terms met, would be covered. And even if all terms were met, it was likely we would try to find someone else to bill for it first, based on who planted the trees and what type of soil they were planted in, or who manufactured the object that became the missile and what it was made of.
Thinking of how many claims would come in if anyone survived today, I stopped being upset and really hoped this was in fact the end. We were already understaffed, and I had a number of open cases boomeranging back to me on top of all the pending ones. I had actually hidden a small manila folder of claims halfway behind a file cabinet, close to a trash can, hoping someone would mistakenly throw it away. Anita said she couldn’t get me any support because there was a hiring freeze due to budgetary issues, and even if I were efficient enough to clear exceptional case volume on my own, bonus incentives were off the table this year.
Judgment Day was itself a kind of performance review, and I’d been through those before. How, when it was my turn, would I assess my time on earth? It was tough because, the more I thought about it, and I had a lot of time to think in this line, the more it occurred to me there had been no clear goals defined at the outset of my life, nor any pre-agreed standards or duration-contingent parameters to live it by.
At my previous company, a utilization metric decided our fate. This metric was defined as the amount of time an employee was actively ‘utilized’ and was comprised of variables related to case volume cleared, speed at which it was cleared, number of questions asked in its clearing (questions resulted in score deductions), as well as monitored keystrokes and active computer usage. If I ever had questions, which I knew would lower my score, I would sit and type nonstop gibberish, rows of nonsensical numbers and letters, to re-elevate it with active computer usage. Case type or nature was not among the determinant variables, which I always found odd given its direct impact on the time necessary to clear it. We were also filmed in the office, surveilled, though the camera system was expensive to maintain and a couple of them were always on the fritz. Because I couldn’t be sure, though, I sat there straight-backed, type type typing in my chair.
As I considered what I’d accomplished in my life outside of work, it was hard since I never took time off. Time off is a very big deal. A big no-no. Managers know to tell you to take it, and that’s what they’re told to say, but every time you do, the stick migrates further up their assholes to the point they gag. When I asked for three days off to spend with Erin, over a month ago, Anita looked at me with grave concern. “Which three days?”
“The 11th, 12th, and 13th,” I said.
“And those days are what?”
“Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.”
“You’re aware that Monday is a national holiday, right?”
“Yes, that’s why Erin is flying in—”
“Oh dear,” she said.
“Greg will be in those days,” I reassured her. Greg worked the same job as me, three cubicles over, and was also department transferrable.
“Greg is out the 11th for a non-covered religious holiday.”
“Well, he didn’t tell me that before I put in the PTO request.”
“You already put in the PTO request? Before talking to me?” She sighed even louder.
“Fine,” she said, muffled because her head was in her hands.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m saying fine!”
“I’ll have my cell.”
“I have a meeting in five. Shut my door?”
I considered telling Anita about Cora’s coup, tipping her off to the threat, but then I thought, sure, let’s see what Cora can do. Maybe she will be better. Maybe a coup would be the best thing to ever happen to Anita.
I forgot all about them as I took vacation time with Erin and drank a $16 beauty juice made of carrots, ginger, collagen, and something else. She and I were fueling up for the celebrity bus tour. We got a prime parking spot on Sunset and all the meters were free, both of which I found very unusual.
“It’s a holiday,” Erin reminded me.
I saw seven geese fly over us in an odd formation, like a seven-pointed star. I guessed they were heading to Echo Park. Then, seven hawks followed them, in the exact same formation. “Wow,” I said. “All the birds are like, flying.”
“They’re birds,” Erin answered. “What do you want them to do?”
Behind her, the sky was growing gray with a single jagged orange streak above the mountains. The bright white dome of Griffith Observatory was barely visible.
“Do you think it’ll rain?” I asked.
We’d been in a drought for months, but maybe this ominous orange light meant a storm.
“Bring your umbrella and it won’t.”
A couple hours later we snaked our way up Mulholland in an open-windowed shuttle bus. The driver wore basketball shorts and a backwards baseball cap, talking to Erin, me, a couple from Illinois, and a large crowd of Canadians through his headset. He took the steep hills faster than I liked and as we inched close to the edge of the cliffs for “the best views of any bus tour in Los Angeles,” I closed my eyes. I could hear the Canadians oohing and ahhing; a middle-aged man among them was recording a video. I imagined us all dying together, our screams discordant but harmonizing right before the crush of metal.
The bus suddenly jerked to a stop and the driver told us to get out for a VIPs-only photo op with the Hollywood sign. What made this a VIPs-only photo op was the fact no other bus drove this close to the cliffside, on a hairpin curve. He threw open the van door, and I felt it tremble. We all stepped directly out into a large pile of garbage, which we maneuvered around single file to get closer to the fence.
“I’m also the best photographer of any bus tour,” he informed us.
I asked him to take a picture of Erin and me.
“Three, two, one.” He hit the button right as a gust of wind blew my bucket hat off into the gorge.
In the picture you can barely see it flying from the edge of the frame. Erin and I smiled wide, sunglasses on, and the orange streak over the mountains had grown much larger. The sun, reddish, had broken through cloud as the bus driver told the Canadians how LA smog meant world-class sunsets.
The rest of the tour turned out to be 90% slow-cruising past the closed, gated driveways of dead celebrities whose homes had since been demolished or sold to private citizens—plus, I guess, Drew Carey.
The Canadians snapped photos of Drew Carey’s gate. We then drove to another tall gate, with an elaborate iron design.
“On your right ladies and gentlemen, you’ve got the house where Michael Jackson died. Yes folks, right there. We can’t stop because I’ve gotten in trouble for doing that before, but that’s where Michael Jackson died everybody. Drugs, everybody.”
The Canadians complained their photos were blurry.
“Bonus points if you remember the lady, very beautiful lady, who died the same day,” the driver added. “Same day as Michael Jackson.”
The bus was silent.
“Roller skates? She wore roller skates?”
Nothing.
“Farah Fawcett, everybody. Farah Fawcett. Cancer, everybody. Cancer. Get yourselves checked out.”
I got a text from Erin, which read: He’s terrible at this.
In front of the Spelling mansion, we waited breathlessly as a massive gate inched open and a lone yard man walked out of its shadow. The gate then closed behind him.
“You folks are very lucky,” the driver informed us. “That was special. A special view for my VIPs.”
I wanted to enjoy these enormous, deserted-looking houses but couldn’t help wondering what it would take to adequately insure them. To justify my job and the policies we sold, I sometimes wished for horrible disasters to happen—but specifically, to people like this. Just enough disaster to make a point, because if a sinkhole opened and swallowed the whole block, no one living here would struggle to bail themselves out. They could take the losses, build another chateau somewhere else. By the way we didn’t cover sinkholes—almost no one does. I didn’t get paid enough by this job to justify how it ruined my ability to enjoy things. Sometimes, I just wanted God, chaos to win.
Self-disgust dissolved into disdain for the celebrities who weren’t even home because they had other houses and hotels to be in, and disdain for the Canadians who thought these houses were anything to admire, and mild but still present disdain for the Illinois couple who remained unmoved by any of it, and then self-disgust again for spending $16 on a juice. I wanted to pull my bucket hat down over my eyes but it was gone, and so I looked at Erin, who pointed out the window at an enormous inflatable dragon on someone’s lawn.
“This is the fourth dragon he’s shown us,” she said. “He’s showing us random people’s yards. He is showing us the same Costco dragon, over and over.”
The dragon was bright red with a yellow striped belly and small yellow wings, shrunken raptor arms with purple talons.
“If he shows us one more dragon,” she said, “we’re taking a photo with it.”
We were stopped in traffic as she started to laugh. She wiped her eyes under her sunglasses. This is what I wanted to keep forever: this view of Erin laughing at the end of the tour, backlit by red sun on Beverly Boulevard.
A sputtering, liquid sound snapped me back to reality. I’d had my eyes closed, remembering, but the smell caused me to open them and see a substance strongly resembling cat vomit pouring out from between the legs of the lady with the pushed-back wig. It kept coming, like a faucet turned on. I moved backwards and bumped into a dead man. One of his eyes was shut but the other partly open, nothing but black inside.
I’m not positive it was shit—that’s not my field of expertise. Whatever it was, it smelled foul, and set off a debate in my mind about my commitment to staying in this line, behind this lady spraying her skirt, legs, and loafers in excrement. I had already waited a long time, and though there was nobody monitoring the lines, I did not want to lose my spot and risk cutting again. I should’ve been in a living-only line. That would’ve made some sense. But how could I have known if nobody told me where to go? I’d followed the herd and congregated where they congregated. I was hitting my limit for the smells, though, and before I knew it, I ran up a dirt trail out of the parking lot and into the hills.
It was not easy to find footing with dirt flowing down the hillside. I was on my hands and knees and had to crawl. The sky was a very dark gray, with black clouds bleeding into a higher tier the color of fire. A hole had opened in the center of the sky where the sun should be. It was even blacker than the dead man’s eye socket, with a mix of gray and red-pink cloud rotating slowly around it. The air was thick with something, at least up here, and it was hard to keep my eyes open. The smell of the lady’s shit had actually shielded me from a host of other terrible smells, and now I was higher up, I was experiencing them. One was the smell of rotting eggs, another was burning, chemical, unfamiliar to me. The wind blew dirt into my eyes, and as I grabbed for a tree root to steady myself, I could not see that it was in fact an exposed electrical wire.
There was a great burst of white behind my eyes and then blackness. Tumbling, tumbling. Ripping. Breaking. Tumbling. Stillness. Quiet. Silence. A distant, faint sensation, slow but rhythmic—a heartbeat? My heart? I opened my eyes. The black hole in the sky still hovered over me, clouds rotating around it, but they looked foggier. The rhythmic sensation turned out to be a giant bird, a vulture, perched on my chest, pecking away. It was eating the banana nut granola bar in my front pocket. I tried to wave it off, but my arms were limp and noodle-like. I managed to connect one with the vulture’s head, but when it nipped my hand and batted its great wings, I felt nothing. Its beak was open, its nasty little vulture tongue out, but I heard nothing, either.
I sat up abruptly and it flapped away, hopping a short distance where it could keep an eye on me. As I leaned forward, a jet of blood shot from my mouth into my lap. I hadn’t felt the blood in my throat, nor had I choked on it. I touched it, but it didn’t feel wet. I touched my hands to my face—they came away with darker blood and dirt. I tried to touch around my head but could not feel where anything might be missing or torn. As for my legs, the right one was bent in a backwards direction. My right foot was also missing a shoe, revealing a shocking blue sock printed with llamas. The left leg had a piece of metal pipe sticking out of the thigh, and that pant leg was soaked in blood.
The good news was I had found the line for the living, it was just over the ridge. Several families huddled together, not so much in a line but a circle. I must have fallen down the other side of the hill, where these living people had set up a makeshift shelter with chairs, water, food, and blankets. Children were together, chasing each other; some were playing with toys and others clung anxiously to their parents. The adults, looking severe, sat at a plastic table with emergency lanterns. I rolled onto my side and noticed my hand, the one which had gripped the wire, had a vivid sear mark, the skin charred and peeled back. But when I used it to push myself up, I felt no pain.
I had to drag the broken, shoeless leg, and it was very difficult to stand upright. While I wanted to pull the pipe out of my other leg, I worried doing so would destabilize me more. It took tremendous, slow effort to get to the circle of people. A young girl saw me first and screamed. A toddler beside her burst into tears. A man, their father I guess, got up and approached me, waving a lacrosse stick. He was shouting, but I couldn’t hear him.
“I’m alive,” I wanted to yell, “I’m alive but injured! Help me, everything is numb!”
But no voice came out. I tried to scream, but there was no air in my lungs.
I had died and realized this right as a woman, wincing at my gore, held up a notepad on which was written: “Wrong Line.”
The man kept me at lacrosse-stick length. I couldn’t join them, so I turned away. I dragged myself back toward the hazard-filled hill that had killed me. I still had my thoughts and memories, though they were distant. Faces drifted into mind but without the names or places, their link to me was just out of reach. Though my physical sensations were gone, my emotions were closer than ever before, concentrated in my chest, mouth, and for some reason, digestive tract. Though the dead couldn’t cry, we could excrete. It was in fact our only mode of expression.
I hadn’t given dead people enough credit. Living people were arrogant, fearful pricks, shooing us away with sporting equipment. Meanwhile it took us great energy to move ourselves, control our limbs. Further, we had no control over any other bodily function, and by the way our feelings were about to burst at any moment, even as we were deaf and speechless, horribly confused, summoned here despite the supposed respite of eternal thoughtlessness, the profoundest sleep, which had been revoked without warning. And oh yeah, we had to shoot out of the ground! Defy gravity! Where was appreciation for that? Fuck living people! They could all go to wherever it was we were all going shortly.
This hill was going to be even harder to climb as a dead person, though at least the dirt blowing in my eyes didn’t bother me anymore. As I dragged myself upwards, I turned around and saw one blue llama sock had come off, curled in the dirt several feet below. I froze and stared at it, alone in the rubble, and the other sock, bloodied but still on my foot. Inch by inch, I dragged myself back down towards its missing partner.
I have no idea how long this took. When I finally had the sock within reach, I grabbed it and shook it out. I noticed my exposed foot was, though not the same shade as the sock, also blue. It had bruising and was darker blue under the toenails. I pulled the foot towards me and felt a bone jolt in my body, but I continued pulling the sock over my toes, the arch, toward my heel, and finally up my swollen purple ankle. Since this took much more dexterity than body dragging, it took even longer. There was plenty of time, though, since I was dead, and there was still no ETA on Judgment.
While getting the sock on, I hadn’t noticed a coyote approach. It bit the back of my arm, but I didn’t feel it, so I sort of flopped over in surprise. It was snarling, foam dripping from its mouth, and its eyes were strange. I wasn’t sure if it was also back from the dead or had eaten some bad trash. I could lay back and just let it eat some more, there was no dying left for me to do. Maybe it would feel like a massage or something. But I wasn’t in the mood, so I pulled the pipe from my thigh and smacked it on the head. It stopped chewing and I hit it again, harder. It snarled but retreated. I felt victorious, but my insides churned. I’d definitely shit myself. Unsure what to do with the pipe, I put it back in my leg and kept climbing.
There was a large vibration, maybe from an explosion I couldn’t hear. Fire rained from the sky, sparks and burning debris. The hole overhead was larger now, and the clouds around it fanned outward, symmetrically, like rays. There was still no update, but I interpreted this like the bells at intermission to return to your seat. If that were the case, there was no way I was going to make it back to my correct line in time. The coyote had done some damage, and I didn’t want to keep staggering, falling, and dragging my broken leg. I saw a toppled billboard, bent against the pole. An upside-down model was ass-out in high-cut bikini underwear posed provocatively in an office chair. Her legs were wide, her lips parted barely, perhaps with a sexy sigh, and a missile, one I strongly suspect weighed more than 40 pounds, had blown through the logo of whatever brand she was hocking.
Under her bent shape, I laid myself down. I thought about the living people’s tents and safety lanterns as the fiery wind whipped by me. I remembered the faraway story of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus cold in a Bethlehem barn and wondered why shit always went down like this. People probably bullshitted them left and right about being at “full capacity,” like El Condor on Sunset with tables marked “reserved” that were clearly wide open. Wrong line schmong line and good riddance humanity with your big fancy gates and utilization metrics, your aggressive lacrosse sticks and “totally full” inns. I closed my eyes but could not sleep, though this was all I wanted. When I opened them again, I saw more fire raining from the sky and a small black cat licking my bloody leg.
It watched me with bright green eyes, licked more blood then licked its paws, running them back and forth over its ears. I was amazed any creature would get this close given my smell and state. A thump rattled the earth—the cat paused. I thought it would flee, but instead it crawled closer, using my body as a shield from whatever the thump might be. I reached my hand out for it to smell; it rubbed its head against it. Though I could not feel, its fur looked soft, and I petted its spine, scratched under its chin.
It was a nice moment before the billboard caught fire. I picked up the cat and staggered away, only to see the whole hillside ablaze. Where was Drew Carey? Was he safe? For a moment I felt this was my fault for wishing disaster would humble him and all the inflatable dragon owners. It wasn’t supposed to take me, this cat, and everyone else too. But it had, the lines between neighborhoods were lost under rubble. The damage compounded to keep damaging the damage with no regard for the damaged. I couldn’t speak for what was happening to those who’d stayed in their correct lines in the parking lot, but this was the scene for those of us who’d left them.
I had nowhere to run. At least the cat was small and easy to carry; I put him in my sweatshirt, hoping my guts weren’t hanging out. The wind picked up, spreading the flames quickly. Smoke saturated the air. The black hole in the sky had grown wider, and stuff like yard chairs, baby pools, Christmas lights, and Dodgers flags were getting sucked into the clouds around it and trapped in the rotation. I spotted a lookout point with a bench where one would normally take in the views. Out of ideas, I sat there and clutched my sweatshirt. A burning tree swayed and snapped. I didn’t hear it, but the cat did and was going nuts.
“Calm down,” I wanted to say, but there was no argument for calm. Shhh, I said, as if it were my sleeping daughter.
Then came a steady rain. There was no fire in it and it was cool, real rain. The cat hated that part and couldn’t see like I could how the rain refreshed the charred land below: green was sprouting from all the ruptures and overturned broken things as it was touched by light now coming from the giant hole, which had turned blue, a normal shade of L.A. sky.
The hole held every time of day at once. I won’t call it a pie chart because it was much more beautiful than that. Where one part had a rich red sunset, another held pale yellow dawn; the moon was rising in another section surrounded by stars, and in another, the sun was full. There was a breeze from somewhere—burnt debris circled the bench. I spotted something riding the wind, a floppy shape. It was hard to tell how big or small it was, but it drifted closer and closer. It twirled upward and downward, floating delicately before landing at my feet. It was my bucket hat.
I touched my stiff fingers to it, managed to get it on my head. Then I heard a voice within and beyond me like a thunderbolt split the air. Quiet came over us, there was no fear anymore, and together, finally, we listened.
Caitlin Brady is a writer from Texas whose work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Rumpus, Misery Tourism, Artillery, and Writer's Digest, where it won the 91st Annual Writing Competition in the literary short story category. She has an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University.