Anna Stacy is an actor and writer from New York. Their work has appeared in Calyx and Intima, and on-screen in the series Dead-Enders. Anna finishes medical school this spring and is compiling a short-story collection in the meantime. Visit annastacy.com
The last day is a Tuesday, which makes sense because your mom says that according to scripture, the first day was a Tuesday, so there’s a sort of satisfying symmetry to it, but it also works out because today (Tuesday) is when you’re supposed to take your Spanish final and present an oral report on the French and Indian War, so the timing is pretty great, all things considered. Not that there would ever be a good time for the end of the world, necessarily, but if it has to end, and it does, then today is a pretty good day for it.
You thought your mom would have made something special for breakfast to mark the occasion, waffles or maybe even French toast, but when you get downstairs, the counter is empty and your parents are hard at work at the dining table, a pile of poster boards stacked where you would have put your plate. “There’s cereal,” your mom says without looking up, gesturing vaguely at the pantry with a magic marker, so you pour yourself a bowl and eat it hunched over the kitchen island.
“Does ‘resurrection’ have one R or two?” your dad asks. He squints at his sign as if trying to picture the word on it.
“Two,” your mom says. “Well, three. But two in a row.”
You watch your dad write R-E-S-U-R, then hesitate before adding another thin squiggly R. He frowns at it, then nods and continues. Next to him, your mom is coloring in large bubble letters that spell out “CRY MIGHTILY UNTO GOD!”
“Shake a leg, June,” your dad says. “We gotta hit the road by eight.”
“Okay,” you say in a tone that would have made your dad say, “Hey, attitude!” if he weren’t trying to squish the T-I-O-N into the remaining space on his sign.
You go to wash your bowl, but then you remember that there’s no point, what with the world ending and all, so you just leave it in the sink. As you walk up the stairs to brush your teeth, you realize that that was your last breakfast ever, and that all across the world, people had their last breakfasts ever today without realizing it, because they didn’t know what you and your family know, and maybe if they had known, they would have had something different, but you did know and you just had frosted mini-wheats anyway, and it’s not like frosted mini-wheats are bad or anything, but it’s just that they’re not special enough to be your last breakfast ever, and you’re so absorbed by this thought that you almost run into Callie in her pineapple pajamas as you round the corner.
“Ow,” she says, scowling, rubbing her small fists into her eyes.
“Sorry,” you say.
Callie yawns a big yawn. “Where’s Mom and Dad?” she asks.
“Downstairs. Making signs.”
Her scowl returns. “Are we going crusading?”
“Yeah.”
She groans. “It’s gonna be like a hundred degrees today!”
“I know,” you say. “Maybe Reverend Allen’ll bring popsicles.”
“He always brings the bad ones!” she says.
She’s twisting the hem of her pineapple shirt.
“Hey,” you say. “It’s gonna be fine. We’re Enlightened. It’s gonna be great.”
Callie drops the hem. “Yeah, I know,” she says in a tone that would have made your dad say, “See, June, your sister picks up on your attitude.”
“Okay,” you say. “Hey, there’s cereal downstairs—Mom and Dad want to get out of here by eight.”
Callie holds up her finger in a pretty spot-on imitation of your mom. “Timeliness is next to godliness!” she preaches, and you laugh as she thunders down the stairs.
You get back to your room just in time to see the bus stop in front of your house. It idles there for a second, exhaust fumes wiggling and warping the already hot nearly-summer air. In the third window from the back, you see hair that could be MacKayla’s. On any other day she would have saved you a seat so you could sit together on the ride to school. Then you would have gone to your locker, put away your algebra textbook, then looked over your Spanish homework with Tori before walking strategically past locker forty-four on your way to first period in order to catch a glimpse of Justin. But today, the last day, MacKayla is probably sitting with Samantha, your algebra textbook is in your backpack, which is on the floor next to your bed, your worksheet on por and para is blank, and you would just die if you saw Justin after what you told him yesterday.
The bus goes on, and you are officially missing school.
You want to wear something nice, even though Reverend Allen says that everyone is given the same thing to wear in Heaven (would you show up naked? that would be enough to make you die all over again), but it’s too hot for your favorite top and too important for your favorite skirt, so you compromise with a dress that you’ve definitely outgrown but feels comfy and familiar, which is just right. You think about wearing your white sneakers, which you’ve never worn because you were saving them for a special occasion and wanted to keep them clean, but that wouldn’t be good for all the standing and walking, so you put them back in the closet and shut the door.
You feel too tall for your room. Or maybe the room is too small for you. The You that knows about Life and Death and Resurrection and Truth is too big, too heavy, too old for this purple room with the framed Les Mis poster and the old dollhouse that you definitely don’t still play with. You’re almost embarrassed by the room, like when MacKayla had found Bunny and said, “You still sleep with this?” But you’re fond of it, the way you’re fond of Callie, like when MacKayla left and you put Bunny back between the pillows and pet his velvet ears with the backs of your fingers.
The bed isn’t made because you knew your mom wouldn’t check, and you almost leave it that way, but then you imagine the room empty, all by itself in the half-light of the un-curtained window, and that makes you sad, so you straighten the sheets, fold over the hem, tuck the corners in so that it looks perfect for its very last moments.
“Girls!” your mom calls. “We gotta go!”
You give your room a very last lookover, making sure your eyes touch every surface and every corner so that there can never be a part of it you haven’t seen. Then you take a breath and shut the door.
On your way to the stairs, you peer carefully into Callie’s room. She’s placing her stuffed animals on her bed, one at a time, whispering secret goodbyes to each with a grateful, tender kiss.
Your parents are wearing visors, as they always do for crusades. Your dad is packing water bottles into a green backpack while your mom does up the velcro on her sandals. “You’re wearing that?” she says when she sees you.
“Leave it, Mari,” your dad says to her. “We gotta go.”
“What’s wrong with this?” you ask.
“Nothing,” says your mom. “Just that I bought it for you two years ago.”
“Mari,” says your dad again. Then he calls, “Callie! Let’s go!”
“In a second!” she shrieks from upstairs, and your dad sighs like he’s amazed at his own patience. Then he untucks the signs from under his arm and shuffles through them for you to see. “Which one do you want?” he asks.
You pick one that says, “WHO SHALL STAND WHEN HE APPEARETH?” in your mom’s block lettering, black against a bright yellow poster board. Callie sees it when she comes downstairs and sticks out her lip.
“That one’s my favorite,” she says.
“Well, you should have come down sooner,” says your dad. “Here, you can have second pick.”
She selects the one you’d seen your dad working on (“REPENTANCE = RESURRECTION”), then before you know it, you and Callie are in the car, your mom is locking up the door, your dad is loading up the trunk, and you’re on the road by the time you realize that you’ll never see the house again.
. . .
It had been a month of lasts. Last time eating pizza. Last time going to Walgreens. Last time getting your hair cut, last time peeling an orange, last time watching TV, last time seeing rain. Last times you hadn’t even known were last times. You had tried to savor all of them, carefully, to be deliberate about your enjoyment of them, even the bad things. Last math quiz. Last school dance.
Yesterday after fifth period, you ran to the cafeteria right when the bell rang so that you could grab a whole table for just your friends for the last lunch together. They took their sweet time on the lunch line as you picked at your fruit salad (last fruit salad) and waited for them all to get settled before making your announcement.
“This is our last time having lunch together,” you told them. They already knew about the end of days. You’d been talking about it all year.
“What time is it supposed to happen?” Samantha asked.
“Noon,” you said.
“That’s in the middle of fourth period,” said Tori, who always had the schedule memorized for some reason.
Then MacKayla gasped dramatically, and you wondered if this sort of gasp was why she had gotten to play Marian Paroo in The Music Man last spring. “Oh my goddddd,” she moaned. “I have English fourth period! I don’t want to die in Mrs. Batucci’s class!” And she laughed. And off her cue, the rest of them laughed with her, like it was some kind of big joke. Like you and your mom and your dad and your little sister were some kind of big joke.
You pass the post office. The supermarket. The parking lot where the drama club had done that car wash. The field you played soccer in that one season your mom forced you to do sports. The house your family lived in when you first moved here for the Church. The gas station. The dollar store where Samantha had once dared you to steal a barrette. The playground where you had buried the barrette minutes later because you were scared the crime would be traced back to you. Tori’s house. The graveyard. The school.
First-period gym is just starting. You can see figures stretching and chatting as they warm up to run the mile. Behind them is Coach Donovan, stretched out on the bleachers where apparently Kathryne McClinty gave Gabe Jones a blowjob. You have no idea if this is true or not. Kathryne McClinty had been in your homeroom last semester, but you don’t know her well enough to know if she was the kind of person to give blowjobs on the bleachers. You also don’t know anything about people who give blowjobs, so pretty much the whole situation is a total black box.
There had been a rumor going around in April that MacKayla had let Felix Leung feel her up in the prop closet, which you were pretty sure hadn’t happened, but MacKayla never said anything to dissuade it and instead offered vague responses like, “Why not, Felix is cute!” and “What’s the big deal, it’s just hand stuff,” which made her sound very daring and nonchalant. There had been a rumor last year about Tori getting a boob job (false, she just had a growth spurt), and a rumor back in the fall about Samantha being a lesbian (true, but you and Tori are the only ones who know), but to your knowledge, there had never been one about you. Just what people called the cult thing, which wasn’t so much a rumor as ignorance. Sometimes kids would hold up pens in the shape of a cross and brandish them at you like priests performing an exorcism as you passed in the hallway, but that was it. Their loss, you thought, most of the time.
Callie dozes lightly in the seat next to you. Your parents are talking logistics in the front. So you look out the window and imagine the end of days and wonder if you’ll be more scared or less scared than you are right now.
Last car ride.
After a while, your dad turns off the highway, and you’re at the site. It’s a little after nine. The sun is beating down, already, horrible Arizona heat that makes you nostalgic for the house your family lived in back in New Hampshire, the one your mom says you can’t possibly remember, you were too young, Callie was a baby, but you remember it, you’re pretty sure. The heat was rounder there. This is flat. You shield your eyes as Reverend Allen approaches.
“Bayani clan!” he calls with a bright smile. He’s wearing essentially the same thing as your dad, but on Reverend Allen it gives him a sort of casual elegance while your dad looks like a Disneyland tourist. Your mom gets out of the car and hoists the water bottle backpack onto her shoulder, but the Reverend gives her a faux-stern look and says, reprovingly, “I got it, Mari, come on. You do too much.”
Your mom shakes her head in just-as-faux exasperation and hands it to him.
“Callie!” the Reverend says as she rolls grumpily out of the car. “Today’s the day! Look alive!”
Your dad laughs hard. Callie glares up at the Reverend.
“It’s boiling,” she tells him.
“Is it?” asks the Reverend. “I wouldn’t know, I have all these popsicles keeping me cool over by the tent. Come on, I’ll race you.”
The prospect of competition is enough to get Callie going and she takes off after the Reverend, her little flip-flops kicking up the dirt. You and your parents follow, making your way to the white fairground-style canopy.
Marsha and Bob are sitting there in cloth folding chairs with their signs at their feet, fanning themselves with NECC pamphlets. Marsha grins when she sees you.
“June,” she says, like you just got home from a long trip and she’s been waiting for you. “Let’s see your sign.”
You hold it up. “My mom made it,” you say.
“I’ve always liked that verse,” she says.
“Me, too.”
The tent is nearly empty. “Where is everyone?” you ask.
“By the highway,” says Bob. “We came back to hold down the fort. Got a bit overheated.”
“Hey,” says Marsha as you make to join the others. “How did it go, yesterday?”
You don’t want to get into it around your parents, so you try to put all that hurt into a small shrug.
Marsha gives you a little smile, her eyes soft and warm. “His loss,” she says, as if it’s the truest thing in the world, but you can only shrug again before going off to join the group.
You find a spot by Cordelia and Alonzo and Mart, all of whom are sporting big white signs that, when pieced together like a group promposal, read “JUDGE-MENT-DAY.” Further up the strip, you see your parents and Reverend Allen unfurling the large purple New Enlightened Church of Christ banner.
Callie slips in beside you, popsicle juice running slick down her arm. You grimace. “Ew, is that grape?”
“They were out of strawberry,” she says.
You make a gagging sound in the back of your throat. “I wouldn’t want my last popsicle to be grape.”
Callie doesn’t say anything, so you look down at her and watch in horror as her face gets all scrunched up. “They don’t have popsicles in Heaven?” she asks.
A bulb of sweat drips down into your eyebrow. “Why would they?” you say.
This is not the right thing to have said. Callie drops her popsicle and disappears. You watch it melt to nothing in ten seconds flat, then lift up your sign. The neon yellow looks almost triumphant held up like that against the sunlight.
The crowd begins a chant of “Judgment Day is nigh! Enlighten now or die!” and you join in, your high voice strong among the chorus. You’ve always liked this part of crusading. The uniting for the purpose of Justice. The pride and strength of belonging to a Greater Cause. The Certainty of it. The Saving. The cars drive past without any acknowledgement and you feel a fresh twinge of fear in your stomach at the thought of all those people dying without a fair chance.
Then a car passes and something flies out the window at you and you jump out of the way and feel something cold and wet splash onto your legs. Cordelia’s hand is on your arm. She pulls you back, away from the road, and says “What was that? Let me see.”
You look down. Your shoes and socks are damp, your legs sticky. Near the spot you’d been standing, where Alonzo and Mart are standing now with their -MENT-DAY signs at their sides like fallen flags, there’s a large movie theater-sized plastic cup, its contents dribbling into the dry dirt.
“Just soda,” says Cordelia. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” you say. “I’m fine. Just surprised me.”
“Just soda!” Cordelia calls to the others, some of whom have paused their chanting to watch you, and the crowd turns back to the road.
“What else would it be?” you ask.
Cordelia shakes her head. “You don’t want to know. They can be very creative. They usually don’t go after kids, though. They must be scared. They don’t want us to be right.”
“Why would we be doing this if we weren’t right?” you ask.
“I don’t know,” she says wearily. She’s taken a wet wipe out of her fanny pack and is wiping down your sugary ankles and you’re a little embarrassed at the thought of her seeing the small sparse hairs that have cropped up there recently. “It’s always been like this. They laugh at us. Tease us. Do their best to intimidate us. They think we’re nuts.” She moves to the other ankle.
You look at her bowed head, the lines of gray among the dark red-brown of her hair. “Does that ever make you want them to not make it?” you ask. Not a question you would have normally asked a grown-up, too personal, but today is the last day.
Cordelia straightens up. “No,” she says, thoughtfully. “I can’t fault them for their fear. I joined the Church later in life, too, just like your parents, so I know how hard it is to learn to believe in something so big, so unfathomable, so scary. But now I realize—and you do, too—that all endings are beginnings. There’s nothing to be afraid of. People are afraid of the unknown, but we know that after this, there is peace. Dignity. Enlightenment. His return is joyous. We know this as certainly as we know anything. But this knowledge doesn’t make us somehow superior. We’re just lucky, we’ve just been taught. So, we need to do what we can to help save as many people as possible.”
As you and Cordelia rejoin the group at the road, you try to imagine what it would be like to believe that the world isn’t ending today, but you can’t fully wrap your mind around it, and it hurts a bit to imagine so you try to stop, but your brain is already going. You imagine not spending weekends crusading with your family, not carefully choosing your words at the end of each conversation in case it’s the last one you’ll ever have with that person, not living the last several years as truthfully and responsibly as you can to ensure you’d get to stay with your little sister for all eternity, not staying up late, unable to sleep because you can’t stop thinking about all the things you won’t get to do.
Finish high school.
Get a job.
Do a handstand without falling.
See an eclipse.
Be in a band.
Write a play.
Fall in love.
Dye your hair.
Drive across the country.
Learn to sew.
Back in April, you realized you were probably going to die without ever being kissed, and then you thought about that every day for weeks, wondering if this would somehow make you a better candidate for Heaven or if you should just find someone and get it over with. Neither sounded like the right option, and what you really wanted, anyway, was for Justin to suddenly realize (without you having to ask) that he had always had feelings for you and for him to come up to you at your locker and hold your face in his hands and kiss you right there in front of everybody and somehow you know what to do and you kiss him back, but eventually you guessed this was probably unrealistic and decided a few weeks ago, in your last month on Earth, to tell him how you feel.
You instantly regretted sharing your plan with your friends. Whenever he was around, they would nudge you towards him, whispering, “Go, June, he’s right there!” as if that would make you want to tell him. You promised them you’d tell him on your last day in school, more to keep you accountable than anything, but you hadn’t seen him all day yesterday and were starting to think that was probably for the best when your friends sidled up to you at the bus pickup after seventh period.
“Go, June!” Tori had said. “This is your last chance!”
“Yeah, until tomorrow,” MacKayla said, then turned to you with her hands up defensively like you were going to say something about it. “I’m kidding.”
“It’s fine,” you told your friends. “I don’t need to tell him.”
Samantha made bok-bok-bok chicken noises and everyone else joined in and you were worried that the spectacle would draw attention to you so you hissed, “Stop! Okay, fine!” and forced your legs to walk you over to a group of boys by the basketball hoops.
“Hey, Justin?” you asked, your ears thudding like a bad cold. “Can I talk to you?”
He looked over at his friends. They hit him with kissy faces.
“Yeah,” he said. “Sure.” And the two of you went over to the track as his friends jeered. Your friends were huddled together, throwing you covert glances. MacKayla flashed you a thumbs up that you had no idea how to interpret but made you feel very alone. You turned your back on the group and rounded on Justin.
“Okay, so,” you said. “So, as you may have heard, the world is going to end tomorrow.”
Justin smiled and you felt like you were going to vomit. “Yeah,” he said. “I heard about that.”
“Right,” you said. “So, because of that, I figured I should tell you—because I don’t want to die with any regrets or anything and I’ve wanted to say this for a long time but. Okay.”
Justin raised an eyebrow.
“I like you, Justin,” you said, your tongue like a buttered brick. “And—it’s okay. If you don’t feel the same way. I just—I just really needed to tell you.”
You took a deep breath. Justin grimaced.
“Look, June,” he said. “You’re really nice.”
“You, too,” you said.
“And I think it’s really cool that you told me.”
“Oh, yeah, no problem,” you said.
“But I don’t like you like that.”
“Oh, yeah,” you said again, your ears ringing like the world was ending a day early. “Yeah, of course. It’s fine.”
“Sorry,” Justin said.
“No, it’s. Really fine. It’s okay. It’s fine.” Then you shook your head back and forth to show him how fine it was.
Justin thrusted his hands into his pockets. His thumbs stuck out, making him look very cool, which sucked. “I should head back,” he said. “My bus is gonna be here soon.”
“Oh, yeah.” It was hard to think of other words. “Of course. I’m just gonna.” You pointed at your shoes. “Tie my shoes.”
“Alright,” Justin said. “Good luck with the whole apocalypse thing.”
“Rapture,” you corrected, not that it mattered, and Justin bounded off as you pretended to do up your laces. Then you went back to your friends, who asked you what happened, and you told them the truth (“Nothing”), and then the bus came and you barely said a word the whole ride home.
Last bus ride.
. . .
After a while, the chanting crowd begins to thin. The signs come down and the group trickles in twos and threes back to the tent. Cordelia and Alonzo and Mart walk back together and you fill in the space they’ve left behind. Up the road, all the way by the turn onto the lot with the tent, you spot your parents rolling up the large purple banner. Callie’s trying to help but the banner’s too big for her to be useful, but she’s got her hands on one corner anyway. You watch them walk back to the lot and your shoulders ache and the sun is beating down, almost directly overhead in the cloudless sky, but you haven’t seen a single car turn at the corner to get more information about the Church or the Rapture so you stay out there at the road, chanting “The truth will make you free!” until you’re the last one left.
You hear the crunching of footfalls behind you, but a minivan is about to drive past, so you don’t dare turn around. As the van whizzes away, you catch a glimpse of a kid no older than Callie sitting in the backseat, his head hanging out the window like a dog. You brandish the sign at him, holding it up even when the car is all the way down the road in case he can somehow read it all the way over there.
Marsha is standing next to you. For a moment, she doesn’t say anything and the two of you watch a gang of geese land on the median.
“June,” she finally says, tenderly. “Let’s go get ready.”
You don’t look at her. You keep your eyes glued to the road. Your jaw aches.
“It’s eleven,” she says.
“I know,” you say. A station wagon whizzes past. “Repent now!” you scream at it desperately.
“June,” Marsha says again. She puts a hand on your wrist and gently brings it down. The sign dangles limply at your ankles, a corner in the dust. “It’s okay. You did all you could do. You did it. Time to rest.”
You feel pressure well behind your eyes and your face is hot, but maybe that’s the sun, and your jaw hurts from being clenched so hard, but you don’t want to cry, and seeing Marsha’s face will make you cry, so you turn away and take as deep a breath as you can.
“I couldn’t Save them,” you say. Your voice is small and stupid.
“Maybe you saved some of them,” Marsha offers.
“No,” you say, because you know that’s not true. “And now they’ll have to suffer, forever, and it’s not their fault, they haven’t done anything wrong, and it’s not like I’m better than anybody else, it’s not like I deserve happiness more than anyone else, it’s not like I’m an especially good person, which is terrifying because maybe I haven’t done enough Good and then you all will go on without me and I’ll be left here, alone, and I thought maybe by now I’d be ready, but I’m terrified I’m still not Good enough. I lie and I say things to make people feel bad on purpose and I cheat off my neighbor’s paper sometimes in math and I think mean things about my parents and about strangers and about my friends and I can’t Save even one person which means I won’t have done anything at all with my time on Earth, I’ve wasted it all, I’ve put things off and left them for later and decided I wasn’t brave enough to try things and I—I’m just not enough! I’m not enough.”
This is more words than Marsha has ever heard you say. More words than you’ve ever said at once, maybe. You’re exhausted by the force of them. You bring a hand up to your face and smudge the tears away roughly before wiping them on your dress. Marsha hasn’t moved. She’s just standing there, her thin lips together in a sad smile.
She sighs. A deep, heavy sigh. This makes you realize that you’re holding your breath. You let it out, slowly. Some weird part of you feels like laughing, but not enough for you to actually laugh. You take another deep breath and let it out. Then you look up at Marsha.
“Okay?” she asks.
You nod. “Okay,” you say.
Marsha holds her hand out to you and you hesitate for a second, trying to remember which hand you’d touched your snot with (the other one), then take her hand, and the two of you walk back to the tent. Your shadows stretch long and thin ahead of you, like twin aliens on a foreign sand.
Reverend Allen is standing on the platform, the congregation gathered in front of him. You and Marsha slip into the back of the group.
“—Just as it was foretold,” Reverend Allen is saying. “Just as it was writ: We will rise in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air.”
You feel an excited surge behind your heart. Maybe your soul will feel the rush of wind against its starry skin as it lifts into the clouds, wet and dewy cold.
When Reverend Allen finishes his sermon (last sermon), the crowd disperses, and you and Marsha join up with your family and Bob, who are all standing together by the folding chairs.
“Mart told us someone threw soda at you,” Callie says to me.
“Yeah,” you say, showing her your legs. Then, turning away from your parents so that only Callie can hear, you say, “I’m sorry about the popsicle thing. I shouldn’t have said that.”
Callie shrugs the way they do in cartoons, lifting the flats of her palms up to the sky. “It’s okay,” she says. “I forgive you.”
The congregation moves as one out into the lot. Grass pokes up sparsely along the dusty ground, cracked and dry under the not-quite-summer sun. You jog to catch up with your dad and hug his arm as the two of you walk, and he scrunches up your hair like he used to do when you were a kid. He doesn’t look scared. In the shadow of his visor, he looks almost triumphant, his face set and determined. Your mom’s face is placid. Calm. Ready. 11:32.
The group forms a large circle, stretched out until everybody can see everyone else. 11:36.
Reverend Allen calls for final Earthly goodbyes. Your mother holds you tight and whispers that the greatest joy of her life has been being your mother. Your father kisses your cheek and tells you he loves you and that he’ll see you soon. You and Callie hug like you’re starved for it—you lift her off her feet and into the air as she presses her wet face onto yours. 11:52.
The horn sounds and you fall back into place along the circumference, your heart shuddering like a leaf in the wind, the beats too fast to count, your breath so shallow and fast that it makes your fingers numb. Beside you, Callie sobs and sobs. You take her small hand in yours. 11:57.
The air vibrates with heat. The ground looks like it’s shimmering. In the distance, a single cloud.
It’s nearly time, so you say your last words, the ones you picked out years ago when you first came to Arizona, the ones you’ve practiced every morning in the mirror and every night in bed. You wet your lips and, like a prayer, you softly say, “I did my best.”
Reverend Allen raises his arms, his palms open wide as if he’s waiting to be lifted into the sky. Without a word, the motion moves around the circle until all of you are standing there together with your ready hands waiting, like a curtain call, like peace.
You shut your eyes.
The alarm goes off.
At first, there is nothing.
And then there is everything.
You open your eyes.
Your father is standing next to you. He takes off his visor and gazes bewildered at his own hands. All around you, the congregation copies him.
Your hands are here. You move them, bend them, hold them to your sweating face as you look around to see the lot, the grass, the white plastic tent, your sister crying, the crowd looking at one another in panic as the sun blazes down into the ordinary lot on the world that turns and turns and turns, still here.
You can hardly move. Your chest moves up and down with shallow breaths that echo in your ears, your fingers buzzing with the thrumming heartbeat of I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.
Your parents start to cry.
You’re fourteen years old and suddenly, you have to keep on living.
