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New fiction: Birthday Party, Cheesecake, Jellybean, Boom! by Katherine Sinback

I never stopped thinking of you. I never stopped dreaming of you.

The number attached to the text was vaguely familiar, a number from another life. A number James deliberately erased from his phone, but it coiled in his mind. Julia.

Another text. From his wife, Malia: We’re at the station. Waiting.

James couldn’t pinpoint when opinion turned, couldn’t name the moment when all the social media blather and heated arguments over executive orders, when all the threats of walls and wars and demolition of nations blossomed beyond the borders of the dystopian novel tucked in your pocket to read on the subway to show everyone that you saw what was really going on. A safety pin in your lapel. In the last twenty-four hours the leftist cities that hadn’t voted for the president decided it was over. They posted. They pleaded. They raged.

Maybe it would be nuclear war started by the once-friendly dictator who, when he posted a compliment about the president they didn’t vote for, slipped in a word that set off the current chain of events: My new friend, my fellow leader, my eager accomplice.

In his perpetually addled state, the raw nerve on meth that was the president, he immediately fired back: Dogs are eager. Beavers are eager. I eat dogs and beavers for breakfast, comrade.

Discourse devolved. Quickly. The world was ending because of a word, a single word, and a man who couldn’t abide being described as keen, enthusiastic, excited, ready, willing, fervent, zealous, raring to go. Accomplice—assistant, collaborator, coconspirator, partner, abettor—to a dictator didn’t bother him one whit.

James fantasized about time travel. Since the election, going back in time to kill the baby president was the new killing the baby Hitler. In his fantasies, he would at least wait until the baby dictators toddled with crimson, bunched faces into their terrible threes, the current age of his son, Miles. Not that he could envision a world without Miles. Without Malia. Time travel assassination would ruin the lives of their mothers certainly. A slit of the toddler president’s pudgy throat, a pillow over his face. As he considered the methods of murder, James felt the dread lodged in his chest since he watched the red tide of electoral votes rush in, push up to his throat, become a lump he’d have to swallow and swallow however long this lasted.

To Malia he texted: On my way.

It was unclear if she would ever read it. Since most of the city decided the world was ending, cell service was erratic. Her text to him could have been hours old. She and Miles could have boarded the train to her parents’ house in the posh Connecticut suburbs without him, her tear-filled eyes scanning the throngs at the station while she white-knuckled Miles’ tiny hand. Unlike James, Malia did not want to wait for the end in their cramped Queens apartment. She craved the suburbs. The shopping mall oases. Flower-dotted median strips. The lawn where Miles took his first steps two summers ago during the monthly mandated visit to her parents’ house that James dreaded like a punch from a childhood bully. Malia’s parents stood as sentries to their daughter’s life and now their grandson’s. They never stopped eyeing James warily. And now that they paid for his studio, they had a stake in him. He avoided their eyes and laughed too loudly at their jokes. But he didn’t rip up the monthly rent payment.

“I thought you hated that place,” James said when Malia made her intentions to decamp to her parents’ house clear.

She looked stung. “I love my parents. That’s where I grew up. It’ll be better there. They have supplies.”

James reached for her hand. “Supplies aren’t gonna do us any good, baby.”

She pulled away and kicked a pile of Miles’ stuffed animals from the center of the cramped living room. “I’m going.”

James didn’t seriously contemplate not going. His parents were dead. His sister lived across the country in another city that hadn’t voted for the president. James tried calling her but couldn’t get through. She had friends. She wouldn’t be alone. Maybe the west coast would survive the worst of it. She could join a wily band of survivors and live off the fat of the radioactive wasteland. Guilt stabbed him. She would weep until she was hollow at the thought of not seeing James again. She was no wily survivor. She would kick herself for not coming out to see him for Christmas. But who beyond the habitual doomsayers, the preppers, the wackos with their subterranean stockpiles, who could have predicted this?

Eager. The world pivoted on the edge of the word eager.

Another text from Malia: Hurry.

Before he could join Malia, he needed his book. The journal with the few pictures he kept of his family rendered in the brown tones of seventies photography, the sketches he hadn’t yet been able to translate to paintings, a lock of Miles’ hair taped inside the cover, and the few paragraphs he’d written that he planned to stretch into essays, plays, a novel. The journal was a seed he had to ferry to his uncertain future, doomed or not. The journal sat in a pile of otherwise unremarkable books in his studio across town.

“We don’t have time,” Malia had begged.

“I can’t go without it,” he said.

“You can,” she said.

He shook his head.

The plan: she and Miles would go ahead. If things got too bad they’d board the train without him. Neither Malia nor James knew the contours of “too bad.” James imagined throngs amassing outside the train doors. The friendly faces of the crowds of the one-time marchers against the president becoming red, pinched, panicked as they pushed onto the trains, screeching pleas for sanity and help. James kept the images to himself, wondered what Malia conjured in her mind.

“You know, if it looks like there’s a real emergency like they’ll run out of coffee, you all get moving.” James had said.

Malia didn’t even try to force a smile.

After they left, James took the still-functioning subway to the studio, jiggling the keys in his pocket. He stepped into the sunlight, pulling his coat over his chest against the chill. Some streets remained normal. Stores open, coffee shops alive with the hiss of espresso, the murmur of life, people hunched over phones and laptops. James wondered if he should run through the coffee shop screaming, “Run for your life!”

But where did you run?

*****

Julia hit send. Fuck it. Her worst nightmare was unfolding as she scrolled through the feed on her phone. Stuck at her mom’s house at the end of the world. The reason her heart raced when she booked the cross-country flight every time, even before the election transformed the country into a perpetual aftershock. The haggling with her mom like a car dealer who really needed the sale.

“I can’t get away for more than a weekend.”

“But I need you here. It’s a hard time. Don’t make me grovel. Your brother can’t come out this year.” Her mom said.

“It’s been ten years since he passed, Mom. When will it not be a hard time?”

Silence. A sniffle.

Julia was not a monster. She would not make her mom suffer the tenth anniversary of her dad’s death alone. It was her turn. And now the tight three-day weekend had blossomed into a week after her mom begged her to extend her stay post-presidential meltdown. Her mom cloaked her plea in the dreaded anniversary. By herself Julia honored the date of her dad’s death with a cheeseburger, her dad’s favorite food. Her mom was more about candles and reading poetry and slide shows of their lives projected on the basement wall. Crooked toothed eight-year-old Julia beaming next to the leaning plastic tower her dad spent all night assembling. Whatever happened to Barbie’s dream house? Julia wondered.

In the next room her mom fired up a grilled cheese. In case of the end of the world: grilled cheese sandwich. Her mom wasn’t buying the hype.

“You’ll see. It’ll blow over. I remember when Kennedy was shot. We thought it was the end of the world too,” her mom said.

Julia slid her phone into her pocket and plopped onto a stool in the kitchen. “I am oh so eager for this to be over,” she said.

Her mom rolled her eyes. “When all this is over, I don’t want to hear that word ever again.”

“In a final act of dark humor, someone should paint that word on whatever nuke is aimed to take him out.” Julia said.

“Oh real funny. That bomb has our name on it too, you know,” she said.

“So you admit there’s a bomb. What did you know and when did you know it?” Julia said. How hopeful those words had once seemed. Impeachment. A promise of another life. Lock him up, she had chanted at a rally against the president.

“Of course there’s a bomb. But he’s already in a bunker somewhere with that wife of his.” The sandwich sizzled beneath the press of her spatula.

“Maybe he’ll take this opportunity to ditch the wife and finally fuck his daughter.”

“Jules!” Her mom said. Then a smirk crossed her lips. “Wouldn’t that be something.”

Just in time for the end of the world, Julia and her mom were finally having fun with each other. The pretense of being good examples for each other, the race to out good-life the other, put to rest. Julia made a big show of shaking off the shackles of her previous life as a parental pleaser by moving across the country, sliding into part-time teaching, and generally moving in the opposite direction of her mom’s advice, but it was all a shadow lamp, a dodge. The projection of a life lived to prove she wasn’t living it for her mom. In the kitchen Julia secretly thrilled at her mother’s smirk, the ring of their laughter as they considered the president huffing and puffing over his wisp of a daughter.

Julia pulled her phone from her pocket. Blank. Her message likely hadn’t transmitted. Service at her mom’s house in the patch of country beyond the suburbs where she grew up was spotty at best. Now the towers were overloaded with pleas for safety, last words, or shots in the dark like her text to James.

She hadn’t seen James in ten years, hadn’t spoken to him beyond bland comments and neutered emojis on his various social media.

On his marriage to the skinny woman with a tangle of curly hair: Mazel Tov!

On his first big gallery show: Awesome!!

On the birth of his son: Cute!!!

An increase in exclamation points inversely correlated to Julia’s true feelings.

Julia and James had promised each other it was over after their weekend together, the weekend James’ girlfriend was away and Julia was visiting her friend Rae in the city. Julia and James promised they would be friends in whatever way you could be friends with your ex-high school boyfriend, turned enemy, turned surprise guest star on your trip to New York City, turned best sex of your life and possibly love of your wasted thirties, turned regret because the weekend destroyed your actual relationship, turned face on a screen.

Julia kept her promise. She didn’t call. She didn’t text. But she didn’t erase him from her phone.

In high school during the two weeks they called each other boyfriend and girlfriend, James and Julia were roving blobs of attraction, energy without conduction. They never even kissed. Julia remembered the day when James wound his fingers through hers and led her to the stretch of lockers where the punk rock hardcore kids and the punk rock hardcore wannabes clumped around each other to hurl insults and affection between classes.

When James touched her hand, Julia felt her entire body become a shimmer of heat. Every rub of his finger on her knuckle sent a flutter through her stomach. She couldn’t even look directly in his eyes or speak. A glorious weight compressed her lungs.

Two days later they broke up.

A war of notes and looks in the hallway began. The origins of the break-up were still under dispute twenty years later at the dive bar where Julia and James huddled, shots of whiskey on the table in front of them.

“You were going to move, right? That’s why we broke up.” James said.

“Move?” Julia snorted. “We were never moving.”

“Your mom didn’t like my ponytail.” James smirked.

“Ponytail? You really want to go with ponytail?” Julia raised her eyebrows.

James still pulled his scraggly brown hair back into a ponytail, but it was stubbier, less of the horsetail than it was in their days of hallway desire.

“I think it may have been Cheryl,” Julia said.

“Right, Cheryl.”

“And an unauthorized make-out session in the shallow end of her parents’ pool if I’m not mistaken?”

James held up his hands. “It was purely physical.”

“That’s what you said. And you ruined my view of all men for almost a week, maybe even two weeks. I walked around in a heartbroken haze spouting my hard-earned wisdom to any fifteen-year-old girl who would listen: Men were just pussy-seeking penis missiles.”

James chuckled. “Clever. Kind of poetic.”

“I thought so.” Julia said.

“But you got over it. You forgave me.”

“For the sake of peace among the punk rock locker gang. And? I’d already moved onto Ian.”

“Ian? Oh no, not Ian.”

They were both glad they left their high school relationship unconsummated. It made their reunion all the more intense, the emotions more confusing.

The end of civilization was as good a chance as any to let Julia’s true feelings be known, especially if she would be riding out the apocalypse at her mom’s house, in the shadow bedroom her mom kept for her in the house where Julia did not grow up. The bedroom, a diorama of the scraps Julia left behind when she moved out twenty years ago and assembled by her mom into a guest room where Julia stayed during her negotiated visits home. A sun-faded poster of a golden retriever on the wall in front of her canopy bed, yearbooks mingled with peeling issues of Sassy magazine fanned on her desk, a jewelry box with the once-twirling ballerina laid to rest in one of its flowered drawers, some tattered Beverly Cleary mixed in with the romance novels her mom was too embarrassed to display on her living room bookshelves. Part tribute to Julia, part dirty secret would be the setting for Julia’s final days.

In the kitchen, her mom slid the plate of grilled cheese to Julia. “There goes your diet.”

“Whose diet?” Julia asked.

She pushed it back to her mom. “I need something.” She grabbed her coat from its heap on the dining room table. “I’ll be back.”

“Nothing’s open,” her mom said. Most of the town closed at 8:00 and the clock ticked past 9:00.

“I’ll find something,” Julia said.

“My resourceful daughter. Be careful.”

Julia stalked the aisles of the empty CVS, the beacon of civilization, in her mom’s speck of a town. Her mom moved to the country after her dad died. The suburbs stifled her. She needed rolling fields, trucks barreling down the two-lane highway that cut in front of her house, and the smell of cow shit to live her truth. To Julia, country meant redneck. But in this moment, it was both soothing and infuriating to be in the company of rednecks. They were poised in comparison to the panic of the cities. They didn’t think anything of it. They had their guns, they had their god, and apparently a sizable stock of peanut M&Ms if the bare shelves were any indication.

Julia flagged down a clerk. The clerk tapped a pricing gun against discounted corn removal pads in time to the muffled Journey crackling through the speakers. “Don’t-stop-be-lievin’,” taap—taap—tap-tap-tap.

“You got more M&Ms in the back?” Julia asked.

“No, ma’am. We ran out days ago,” she said.

“Shit,” she hissed. “Pardon my French. I just wanted to ride out the end in a haze of red wine, Peanut M&Ms and Barbecue Fritos. Remember slumber parties and throwing up Cherry Coke and making fist-sized balls of frosting from Oreos?”

“We got Oreos,” the clerk said.

Why not resume the bad habits of her misspent youth? Julia loaded her cart with anything that vaguely appealed to her: cola-flavored Lip Smacker, bags of jelly beans—both Jelly Belly and the cheap generic kind that weighed down the whorls of plastic grass in the Easter baskets of her youth—Oreos, blue fingernail polish, all the boxes of Advil (her nod to doomsday prepping practicalities), cheddar crackers, a copy of Teen People, adult diapers (she’d always wanted to give them a try), a pregnancy test (why not?), and she cleaned out the As Seen On TV section. Eggtastic egg cooker? Don’t mind if I do. Chia head of the president? At the very least she could smash it for a fleeting moment of catharsis. It was all practically free. She had room on her Visa and a bill that would come due too late for her to pay.

“You having a party?” the clerk asked while Julia unloaded her booty onto the counter.

“Party of one.”

Julia’s array was probably not the weirdest thing the clerk had seen even that day. What was it about drugstores that lured the random weirdoes, squabbling couples, and terrible parenting moments to their fluorescent-lit aisles. Julia wondered if she was an oasis of calm for the clerk or an interloper.

“Oh and throw in a couple of cartons of Camel Lights and a Marlboro Red, and do you have American Spirits?”

The clerk shook her head.

The complete tour of Julia’s cigarette brands would be incomplete. Her chest collapsed at the thought.

Suddenly her phone buzzed to life in her pocket. All the notifications lost in the ether for the past twelve hours clamored for her attention. 109 likes for her post of the REM classic, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It and I Feel Fine.” A text from her brother that spilled from bubble to bubble: first joking about the presidential spiral into dementia then panic. Before her eyes skipped ahead to the next round of texts, she fingered a message back to her brother: With Mom. All fine. Whatever that means.

Then her eyes landed on the final text in the list: Where r u? I remember 2. Julia loathed text shorthand. When adults her age used it, she pictured middle-aged men in backwards baseball caps shot-gunning cans of Milwaukee’s Best. But when the younger generation didn’t use it, she felt like they condescended to her like she was too old to comprehend the meaning of LOL.

She typed a message to James and hit send then looked up to see the clerk extending the cartons of cigarettes to her, balanced on her arm like a waiter’s tray.

****

At the subway entrance, James’ phone hummed in his pocket.

From Malia: Where r u? Gotta go.

From Julia: Mom’s house. Waiting.

James felt the same surge that overtook him when Julia detoured his life for a weekend ten years ago. His dad was dying. His mom already dead. He had been at the center of a ball of twine that wound tighter, thicker around him each day. So when he bumped into Julia at her friend’s art show, then drank deeply from the free wine passed around at the gallery, then followed her to a dive down the street, back when dives were tucked into every corner of the city, and they drank enough shots of whiskey to provide cover if he ever decided to tell Malia—he hadn’t—it felt like a sign. And when Julia slid into the booth next to him, almost knocking him over, he cooed, “You smell amazing.”

“I’m not wearing underwear.”

James talked a big talk about the guilt, the flashes of Malia’s face that came to him over the course of the weekend when he wasn’t drunk on Julia, and the hole burrowed deep in his gut when, weeks later, he surprised Malia and himself by asking her to marry him. He talked it to himself. He talked it to the random guy he spilled all to at the dive bar where he and Julia had plied themselves with the courage to commandeer her friend’s guest room and fuck the weekend away. The weekend stood as a monument to what he would do when he had everything and nothing to lose. Of the shadow person that lurked beneath the surface of the dad who danced a wailing Miles around the kitchen in the bloodshot hours of the night when his son couldn’t sleep, the husband who brought Malia a roll of Butterscotch Lifesavers whenever he stopped by the neighborhood bodega for the cigarettes he was supposed to have quit when Miles was born.

“This your penance?” Malia asked when he slid the roll into her hand.

“Your favorite.” He kissed her forehead.

Too tired to fight, she pretended not to smell the must of his jacket, but she drew the line at Miles, pulling him to her chest whenever James tried to kiss him in his soiled smoker clothing. “Not until you’re clean,” she had said.

James imagined Malia at the station, fending off the crush, jiggling Miles in the baby backpack he’d outgrown months ago, but which she’d strapped on like a life jacket before she left the apartment. The lump that would form on her back, a muscle spasm from carrying all thirty-five pounds of Miles through the subway tunnels, the maze of crowds, the lines to buy a ticket to her parents’ house. Her eyes scanning the crowds for a familiar face, for the flat plane of James’ forehead that grew larger with each passing year and failed follicle. He imagined it then let the image go, a photo fluttering to the pavement while around him sirens screamed from the line of police cars racing down the block.

He typed. Go on. I’ll catch up. Love you. He added a heart emoji at the end and a fire truck for Miles.

To Julia: Send address. I’ll find you.

****

Could she fuck James in her shadow bedroom? A ridiculous giddiness bubbled inside of Julia as she read and reread the message on her screen. She lit a second cigarette from the first. The bags of her CVS loot spread around the sidewalk at her feet, an audience to this unexpected victory.

Ten years ago Julia felt terrible leaving her friend Rae’s guest room like she did: thick with the funk of a weekend of unbridled mixing of her body with James’. Their mouths found every hidden corner, every nook of their bodies. They were liberated from the press of the future, of having to actually forge a relationship of desire and inside jokes and not hating each other’s face after seeing it every morning. He teetered on the precipice of marriage. She lived on the west coast, had a boyfriend, declared she would never get saddled with the title of wife. Their meeting was a fluke. The best kind of fluke.

Rae stopped speaking to Julia after the weekend. Emails unanswered. Apologies unacknowledged. That weekend was supposed to be their girls’ weekend, Rae’s triumphant first semi-major gallery show. Julia still felt a tug of regret. Over the years Rae had gotten big enough that her art life spilled into newspapers and reviews in The New Yorker that Julia thumbed through while taking a shit. But Julia would have done it again, no question.

The CVS security guard circled the building then stopped a few feet from Julia. “You need assistance with your bags, ma’am?”

Julia exhaled a stream of smoke through her recently cola-glossed lips. His nametag caught the light of the glowing red letters above them. She squinted.

“I’m good, Desmond. That’s a cool name. Really like seventies punk or mod or something. If there was even the slightest chance that I could or would breed, I would definitely name my brat Desmond. Seriously dude, love that name.”

“Thanks, ma’am.” He straightened his upside-down teardrop of a torso. “Ma’am you need to move along if your CVS business is done.”

Julia made a show of looking around the empty parking lot. Darkness broken up by dim pools of light around the streetlamps. The parking spaces empty boxes.

“I’m not sure you got the memo, big D, but these are the fucking end times. That shit-bag you and the rest of these slack-jawed bible fuckers gave the reins to this country is about to yee-haw us off a cliff because his best comrade called him a bad name that fizzled out his big-boy boner. So, in light of this turd of a country going down in flames at any moment, Desmond, I think you have bigger fish to fry than the CVS corporation’s property rights.

Desmond’s shoulders slumped. “Ma’am this is my first night here. I don’t wanna start anything. Please just go. I can carry your bags.”

Julia halted him with her hand. She flicked her cigarette butt to the pavement and ground it under the toe of her boot. She bent over and rooted around in the bags.

“Can I get you a Snickers? Jellybean? TV Guide? Graham cracker crust? Adult diaper?”

“Ma’am,” he said. “Please.”

Julia hadn’t thought to pick up condoms, the usual reason she ambled the aisles of CVS. Maybe they kept them behind the counter so the teenage jezebels had to bathe in shame before the pharmacist would sell them. Julia bet condom stocks took a dive since the start of the end of the world.

****

The street, usually bustling with late night revelers, was empty. People were going. Spilling out of the city in floods. As James walked the streets, contemplating what he was about to do, what he wasn’t doing, he bore witness to exodus and denial. Cars groaned down clogged avenues, their loads of mattresses, boxes, plastic water bottles about to topple while old men cradling forties of malt liquor cheered their departure from stoops in front of buildings.

Finally, James reached his destination. A few lights flickered in the windows of the apartment building that stretched above him. A long shot, he knew. That Julia’s friend hadn’t moved in ten years, that she was here, that she would open the door to him. He remembered the weight of her stare as he slipped down her hallway to the bathroom during the weekend with Julia. James and the friend still saw each other around at shows, at parties. They were friends of friends of friends, but had never figured out how they were wrapped in each other’s social web. They were a decade-long study in mutual avoidance. He had toyed with talking to her now that she was a semi-big shot in the world where he was still small potatoes. Medium potatoes at best.

But after he grabbed his journal from the studio, after he had tried texting the friends he knew had cars only to find out that they had already fled or had no plans to leave, his mind fell on her. Rae. She had a car. Had joked about how a car in the city was the ultimate in futility, but she couldn’t give it up.

James rang the buzzer. The apartment was rent-controlled, a bequest from a dead aunt, so he couldn’t imagine anyone giving that up. Not since the waves of gentrification had started to topple artist enclaves like dominoes.

James buzzed again. Another text vibrated his pocket. He whipped out his phone. A picture of an inner thigh, clean-shaven flesh bulged above the dimple of her knee. And for some reason, a riot of jellybeans in the background. This slice of flesh let him know that Julia’s body had not pressed pause in the last ten years. They no longer dwelled in the adulthood border-town of their thirties. But the picture awakened the memories of the weekend, the feel of her as she climbed on top of him. The thought went straight to his groin.

The door opened. It was Rae. Shorter hair, dyed black, more lines spreading from her pinprick eyes, but her. He shifted his pants, a quick boner masquerade that drew more attention to the memory that caused it: James thrusting into Julia from behind, inside the door to the building now opened in front of him when, that first time, they couldn’t wait to run up the stairs to Rae’s apartment.

The friend looked annoyed. But not puzzled. “What?” she said.

“Hey, how are you doing? Long time—“

“Seriously, what? What. The. Fuck.” Rae’s face was red, her eyes raw.

“Uh, you know, all this stuff happening,” James stuttered, still trying to rid himself of the unrelenting hard-on.

“Are you looking for fucking Julia?”

“No, uh, sorta, what’s new with you?”

It was a slow-motion collapse. First her forehead wrinkled then her face fell into despair then her squat body leaned against him as sobs wracked her body. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide his hard-on.

Recognition flickered across her eyes. Confusion. “Are you getting hard?” She pulled away, her legs finding their grounding after a brief moment of rubber.

Then something cracked further inside of her and she hunched over as barking laughter wracked her shoulders.

“Is that a gun in your pocket or—“ she snorted and buried her face in her hands. “Are you just happy to—“

James put a hand on her shoulder. “Girl, are you okay?”

She shook her head and leaned against him. He couldn’t tell if she shook from laughter or tears, what the next emotion to spill from her would be. Out of her jeans pocket slipped a ring of keys.

“We should get out of here,” he said, bending over and picking up the keys. He eyed each jagged edge until he landed on the key with a black plastic ring around it. Honda.

She muttered. “It’s happening. It’s really happening.”

James flicked the key between his finger and looped an arm around her shoulder. “Stay with me, girl. I got you. Let’s do this.”

****

Instant regret the moment Julia hit send. Pleasures await. Her recently-shaven thigh against a backdrop of jellybeans.

She was definitely feeling that fourth tumbler of wine. She wasn’t a sex-ter. In fact, this was her first sext. She associated sexting with clueless teenagers weeping in regret about pictures of their shaved pussies circulating around the locker room. The youth of today. Kids, full of faux-savvy and brio, bungling around the internet.

Like the kids who at an impromptu march at the airport, bandanas wrapped around their faces like punk rock banditos, lectured Julia and the other forty-and-up white women who dared come to the impromptu protest of the president’s latest rollback on civil rights.

“You’re the fucking problem,” the boy said, his voice muffled by the bandana. He jabbed his finger in their direction. The women stood in a semi-circle, their palms getting sweaty from clutching signs. Not My President.

White women had fucked everything up, voted for the president in higher numbers than Julia could comprehend. We could give self-hating Jews a run for their money, she thought when the percentages popped up in her social media feeds.

The bandana boy continued, “You aren’t willing to give anything up. You think your whiteness protects you! It doesn’t! You’re gonna get raped and fucked and lose your healthcare!” His eyes sparkled in his black bloc costume.

Julia muttered, “Your whiteness protects you too, asshole.”

But she and her friends still carried the burden of their sisters’ poor taste in candidates on their shoulders. She had to admit that she had fallen asleep at the switch. Most recently lulled into a state of careless satisfaction by the eight years of the first good president of her life. When she saw a picture of him now, she felt a painful longing. The last Republican president who lied the country into war, and could barely string two sentences together without relying on a folksy chuckle to get him through a speech, seemed quaint now.

But hadn’t Julia rocked against Reagan? Marched for choice and stood up for animal rights? She was aware of the whiteness that buoyed her normal even now as the normal descended into chaos. She hadn’t done enough over the last sixteen years, but she was here, now, ready to protest, welcome immigrants, stand up for reproductive rights, push back against every word that dripped from the psychopath president’s parched lips. She’d traded her combat boots for comfort sneakers, her mildewed, patched sweatshirt for a raincoat. She was here and she wanted to punch the boy in the bandana as he berated them for their complacency. “Where were you when we marched for Devante?” He yelled.

She was probably thinking that she should be marching for Devante while sipping a ten-dollar Merlot and watching Netflix.

What futility it all seemed now. Shouting into the darkness, not even a north star to lead the angry masses.

That she was reduced to sexting James was another stone to hurl at the president. She rubbed a hand over her thigh, stroking the dimple by her knee. She swept a hand along the jellybeans pooled in the middle of her bed, back into the bag. Her phone buzzed.

On our way.

Our way? Our? Was James hauling the family along with him?

We? She texted back.

“Jules?” Her mom pushed her door open a crack. She was bleary-eyed, ten minutes into her nightly Xanax.

“Yeah?”

“I’m turning in. Need anything?”

“No thanks. I’m good. I gorged on jellybeans and don’t plan on having my next meal until we are post-apocalypse. I hear nukes take at least twenty pounds off. All fat!”

“Oh sweetie, stop talking like that. It’ll all get sorted. We survived Kennedy.”

“Yeah, okay.” Forcing her mom to believe the end was nigh was not high on Julia’s priorities. Let her mom slip into a dreamless, anxiety-free sleep. Julia hadn’t mentioned James’ impending arrival lest her mom either freak out and forbid it or whir into hyper cleaning mode.

Her mom walked over and planted a kiss on Julia’s forehead. “Don’t stay up all night planning your demise.”

In the late nights of Julia’s soul, her tangles with insomnia, and three a.m. mental treadmill runs where she pondered the uselessness of this life, her life, of hauling herself to yoga class to keep sane enough to be a cog in the university machine, teaching the mildly intelligentsia how to compose an essay without the use of emojis. For what? The weekend with James stood as a beacon of aliveness. One that she could not replicate when she returned home. Knowing that he was out there, that those feelings were out there, that she was capable of more than simply maintaining, simultaneously brought her joy and a deep unshakable sadness.

But she had kept the promise for ten years. She hadn’t called. She hadn’t interrupted his life. Although she always wondered what the weekend had been to him. From the timing of his engagement announcement, the weekend was the final straw to push him into marrying the waif who gazed from the photos he posted. But he was coming now. Coming to share in either the atomic flash that instantly annihilated them or the ragged survival slog where they would have to make the daily decision between suicide or the stubborn will to live on expired canned corn. Julia prayed for annihilation. Annihilation after James.

****

The first hundred miles were rough. Rae kept up a stream of alternately excited and devastated babble. (“Rae Michaels is a revelation! They called me a revelation. ArtForum!”) She seemed relieved to be getting out of the city, “getting back to my roots” then desolate that her show wouldn’t make it through its full run.

“But you were at the opening, right? Great opening! Only the best wine, the funkiest cheese, the classiest crackers,” she said, imitating the president.

James said, “Yeah. I don’t know. Probably.”

He used to go to all the shows, cadge wine and hors d’oeuvres from the openings, but Miles had slowed his roll through the galleries. Malia never caught on to the art world. She was a dancer, now a dance teacher of pre-anorexic prep school girls. When they first started dating, James liked that she was unimpressed by the art world—which she dismissed as masturbatory and incestuous—that had enveloped him since college. When he first brought her to his studio, she looked at a painting, tilted her head to the side and said, “Cool. I don’t get it.”

Cool, I don’t get it became a well-worn phrase, the first thing they said to each other after witnessing each other’s art.

Unconsciously he said the words, interrupting Rae’s stream.

“What?” she asked.

“You wouldn’t get it,” he said.

He glanced at his phone jammed in the cup holder of the Honda. He tapped the screen. Four bubbles from Malia. She had moved on from worry to rage since she made it safely to her parents’ suburban nest.

Motherfucker, where r u?

He typed, glancing back and forth between the street lines bulleting beneath the car as they sped down the interstate and the screen.

Don’t worry. I’m fine. Delayed.

Rae grabbed for the wheel. “Don’t text and drive! You’ll kill us.” She pulled harder than James could steady. He jammed on the breaks. The headlights skittered across the dark road landing on the trees that lined the road as they skidded to a stop.

“Jesus Christ! Don’t fucking do that!” James yelled.

“Ain’t no Jesus gonna save anyone. No Jesus. No peace, motherfucker.”

He caught his breath and started patting around the dark floor for the phone. He turned and ran his hand over the back seat. He found it tucked into the backseat cushions, blinking alive with a new message from Julia.

Top right window.

****

Julia’s mom left the TV news blaring while she snored gently in the pool of light thrown from the talking heads debating the means of their destruction. Julia stumbled down the dark hallway and flicked her radio on. She poured the last of her second bottle of wine into the plastic tumbler decorated with a chipped picture of her college’s mascot, a dog dressed like a king.

“Your highness,” she mumbled as she toasted the empty room.

BBC World Update announced the next show, a break from their schedule: “This Is It, Isn’t It?” She lay back on her pillow and contemplated the golden retriever poster on her wall. A mother dog nudged her puppy as light sparked from her sun-drenched coat. How Julia had lobbied her parents for a dog. The promises to pick up poop, take it on walks, brush its shaggy coat every week. All broken. She begged and she got Misty. The dog, dog-lovers loved to hate. Incontinent, snippy, and a perpetual leg-humper. Misty was Julia’s first encounter with be careful what you wish for.

Her blinks lingered. The wine finally claimed victory over the anxious buzzing in her chest. She slipped into restless sleep while clipped voices debated death on her radio. She was sweaty and cold all at once.

A crash startled her awake. Breaking glass and a rush of cold air. Nausea washed over her as she rolled to her side onto the stray jellybeans that didn’t make it into the bag. A bomb. The answer to the British-accented woman’s question. Yes, this is it. A breeze hit her cheek. A jagged outline of the darkness outside in the left corner of her windowpane. She crawled over the carnage of her night strewn on the bed.

“Julia! Julia?” a voice hissed outside.

Her initial confusion, her drunk doze started to un-crumple. She sat back, swiped a finger under her eyes at the mascara that had surely pooled there. She pushed herself up from the bed, felt a sharp prick in the side of her foot and then remembered the glass. Broken glass fallout near the window and a rock the size of a fist. She ignored the pinch of pain and navigated to the bedroom door. She would meet her fate head-on and half-dressed. No time for trawling through her drawers for lacy bits of underwear that would only get lost in the rolls of her hips. A t-shirt and boxer shorts hung baggy on her.

She took the steps two at a time. As she opened the door, the weather-stripping peeled from the frame, sounding like two lovers pulling apart.

James shuffled to the front step. The porch light hollowed shadows beneath his cheekbones. His eyes were lost beneath the shelf of his thick eyebrows. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” she said.

They took in the reality of each other, the years of memories, expectations, masturbation fantasies distilled into flesh, bodies that had slid from the glow of confident late young adulthood into early middle age. The suggestions of lines on their faces had deepened to wrinkles. Dark circles puffed below their eyes. They worried over their own failing bodies. Julia’s hips swelling below the t-shirt, her thighs rubbing as she stepped toward him. The pooch of James’ belly beneath the layers of flannel and fleece. They searched for the person each remembered, the way the rope of his neck vein sent Julia into paroxysms of desire, how his hand turned electric when it found the swoop of her ass.

Julia extended her hand to James. “It’s getting cold, come in.”

She looked over his shoulder and saw a person in the passenger seat. “Is she?”

“Sleeping. I couldn’t wake her up. She was pretty wound up.”

“Is that?”

“Don’t worry about her,” James said.

Rae had finally fallen asleep when they were an hour away from Julia. He tried to wake her, find out where he could drop her off, but she pushed his hand away and mumbled incomprehensible scraps of sounds. He felt a fleeting moment of affection for this lonely, accomplished artist. Before, he would have chatted her up, attempted to insinuate himself onto her level (“Got any group shows coming up?”), but that was beyond mattering. They were all stumbling bags of meat now.

James twined his fingers in Julia’s and stepped inside the house. TV voices barked in a distant room. Dry heat enveloped them. The closing door sealed them inside. He wound his body around Julia, pressed his mouth over hers and they remembered. Their bodies remembered. She led him up the dark stairway and warned him of glass as they crossed the threshold to her room.

As he rolled her t-shirt over her, took her slack breasts in his mouth, a thought kept resurfacing. Why hadn’t he just rung the doorbell? The doorbell would have broken the spell. He couldn’t break it now. He’d made his choice. Julia was the only thing tethering him to this world. The more he pushed Malia and Miles away, they resurfaced into his fluttering chest. As he drove farther from the city, they didn’t grow smaller but became flashes in the dark, stabs in his side. He couldn’t make a life without them. They were life. But this was death, and death brought out a different part of him. They were safe. He was safe. He kept telling himself this was all that mattered in the moment.

Or he could have broken the window because breaking felt good right now. He craved power over his destruction.

Julia pulled him inside her and they moved, awkwardly, punching with their hips at first but then fell into a slow rhythm that was nothing like their last time together. And when it was done, they fell asleep without speaking. The exhaustion of the day at last dragged them into a depthless dark.

****

Julia shivered against James. Cold air pumped in through the broken corner of her window. A line of sun cut across her eyelids. Before she opened them she first wondered—who was this body that was tangled against her? Her mind fell on four possibilities before she remembered his name, an oddity: James.

A moment later, her mom knocked. “Jules? Jules are you in there?”

Julia wiped a hand across her dry mouth, massaged a raging temple. Then her mom pounded, a panic in her voice. “Jules, I’m opening the—“

“No, Mom, stop!” Julia pushed onto her elbows.

James’ eyes flickered open. He squinted against the sunlight.

Her mom cracked the door. “Sweetie, there’s a woman here. She says there’s somebody in here that she needs to talk to.”

“I’m leaving! We’re going back right now. I don’t know how you conned me into this,” Rae yelled from the bottom of the stairs.

“She’s uh, she’s upset.” Her mom whispered.

Julia rolled her eyes at James. He sprung into action, gathering his clothes from the piles at the bottom of the bed. “Yeah, okay, okay,” he said.

“Is that Ma--?” Julia asked.

“No!” James spat before she could finish Malia’s name. “It’s your friend. Rae or whatever.”

“Huh, now that’s something.”

The radio crackled low at the side of her bed. The British accents traded for the regular morning announcers. “—threat is over—summit to figure out how we moved so close to the brink of destruction—“

Julia leaned over and turned up the volume, listening while James scrambled into his pants. The president’s ego had been soothed. World leaders pledged to work together. Social media would be the scapegoat. There was already talk of bans, new algorithms. It wasn’t the fault of humans, never humans.

She surveyed the window damage, the wine stains on the carpet, the jellybean flakes on her sheets. Her mom returned downstairs and made small talk with Rae while Julia contemplated if a tearful reunion with Rae was in order or if she should let it lie. She sat up and grabbed a t-shirt. A wave of nausea gripped her. She jumped from the bed and ran to the bathroom to spill the previous night’s revelry into the toilet.

James hovered in the doorway. “Thanks. It was—“

Julia pushed herself up from the bathroom floor. “Have a safe trip. I hope it all—“

“I’ll figure it out.”

On the drive home Rae’s outrage cooled to a simmer. She seethed silently, punching messages into her phone. He wasn’t sure why he drove, but as Julia’s mom closed the door behind them, Rae had tossed him the keys. “Let’s go.”

James had hours to craft the speech for Malia, to decide what portion of the truth to include, to ponder the nature of his soul and if he would be better off driving north until he hit Canada, tossing his phone out the window at the border.

Julia would rebook a flight home and spend the next month wondering why, after she’d started to lose her taste for wine a few weeks later, that the nausea clung to her. And when the president was finally impeached, the entire executive branch replaced in the perp walk to end all perp walks, Julia’s rejoicing could only last a day until the thing she knew to be true, the thing she felt come alive inside her that most terrible and wonderful of all her mornings, was confirmed by peeing on the stick of the pregnancy test she’d tossed in her cart on the last night in the world.

END

Katherine Sinback’s work has appeared in The Rumpus, daCunha, Gravel, Foliate Oak, Clackamas Literary Review, The Hunger Journal, and Oyster River Pages. She publishes her zine Crudbucket and writes two blogs: the online companion to Crudbucket, and Peabody Project Chronicles 2: Adventures in Pregnancy After Miscarriage. Crudbucket was featured in the 2007 Multnomah County Library “Zinesters Talking” series and was included in the 2016 Alien She exhibit at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Born and raised in Virginia, Katherine lives in Portland, Oregon with her family. She can be found on Twitter @kt_sinback.

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