In an attempt to start the year off correctly, I wrote some words.
Thank god, because there’s almost nothing to show from 2016. So here we go, to a year of good, solid progress.
Once upon a time there was a girl, and on the first day of the end of the world, she decided she wanted to go into the Wild.
Sophie Brennan didn't actually know it was the end of the world. No one did. The world began to end entirely apart from Sophie's decision to go into the Wild, and the Wild wasn't so much a destination as a mytho-poetic construction that Sophie, being almost sixteen, found romantic.
Sophie Brennan had never actually been in the sort of Wild she wanted to go to. The closest she had come were the plains and the dwindling hills, and scrubby copses of trees full of ticks and thorns that managed to eke out an existence in the endless, aching grasslands where she lived.
Before the end of the world, Sophie went to high school. She was a cheerleader. She went to church. She was quick to pick things up, but didn't try too hard at school. Her father lived somewhere else, far away, and her mother was a drug addict living on disability. The house they had was old, but it was theirs. Money was tight, and her mother yelled and hit, and sometimes threw up, and Sophie made dinner and bit her tongue and never went anywhere for fear that her mother would overdose and despite the ability to kick like a mule and whirl through the air, she never made it far in the squad.
Everyone knew her mother in their town, and they all felt sorry for her, though probably the one who felt sorriest was Sophie herself.
Then one day, about a year before the end of the world, Sophie was scrubbing up a mess her mother had left in the bathroom. First she gagged on the stench of bleach, and then she thought that perhaps she might like to go outside.
Not outside here, of course. Here, where Sophie lived, she already knew was inadequate. Here was void and emptiness. It was no water and the burning sun, and the cold mists and the ice of the winter. There were storms, too, with gales and lightning, with rain lashing the windows so hard it sounded as though they would break. The old house would creak and moan like a sinking ship, and Sophie stayed awake, listening for the scream of sirens and the roar of the wind that hailed a tornado ripping across the wide, wide plains.
It was a place where the wind blew and the sun baked and the rocks waited, but Sophie wasn't a rock. Here, the world was scouring, and for a young plant trying to grow, scouring could be deadly.
So Sophie thought about shelter, and other places she might like to see, and she thought the thing she most wanted to do was go to Alaska. She wanted to see bears, and wolves, and eagles, and whales. She wanted to see the ocean. She wanted to see trees so tall they terrified with their age. She spent her lunch periods in the library at her school, looking for books on survival and Alaska. She read one book about a boy that decided to go to Alaska, too, and live off the land in the Wild. He died.
Sophie was certain she wouldn't be that stupid. She watched YouTubes about primitive technology and how to start a fire and how to camp in the rough. She practiced knots, but didn't have any money for rope, and she couldn't start a fire but she thought that she might any day now. Her mother didn't own a gun, so Sophie started saving for one, because while she technically might know how to make a working bow from a tree branch, she had never seen the trees other people recommended to use.
Something to stop a bear, she thought. Something to scare a wolf. Sophie had never met a bear or a wolf in her life, but she was sure a gun was good enough to stop one.
She checked out a book from the local library about camping in Alaska and didn't return it until she'd copied each page she thought might be important into a notebook, because if she was going into the Wild, she was going to need a hard copy of her survival plans. She didn't think Google existed in the Wild, and even if it did Sophie wanted to fend for herself as much as possible. Just herself. No one else. For a while, at least.
She begged and borrowed. She babysat. She sold old things, like books. Bags and bags of her childhood books, most of them free from the library, and when she was done her childhood added up to about fifty dollars. She hid the money behind the cat litter bag, because she knew her mother searched her room for spare bills and change.
Then one day Sophie came home and couldn't find her cat.
"Where's Diana?" she asked her mother.
And her mother, staring at facebook on her phone said, "She died."
It was in this way Sophie had to learn that her mother had found Diana dead that morning, and that her mother had thrown her cat's dead body out the window of the car, probably while driving drunk on the way to the liquor store.
"I could have buried her," Sophie said, and her chest seemed to her to buckle as though crushed with a fist of iron.
"Too much work," her mother said. "She was just a cat."
Sophie swallowed hard and walked away very slowly, until her mother could no longer see her, then darted through the kitchen to the laundry room and opened the cupboard there.
The bag of kitty litter was gone, and the jar behind it, with all her money, was missing. She came back into the living room to find her mother ignoring her while typing on her phone. In the air unspoken words hung like smoke, tickling her throat and stinging her eyes.
Sophie didn't say anything about the money, and neither did her mother. Instead Sophie went upstairs and emptied her backpack. She put in it warm socks, a pair of jeans, a pair of leggings, two shirts, lots of underwear. A bra. Toothbrush and toothpaste, and soap. A water bottle. Her notebook, stuffed with bits and bobs of survival, copied from books and articles. Some make up. A short dress she'd bought at the Goodwill store and altered herself. A sewing kit. A knife. Every tampon and pad in the bathroom. A fresh notebook, pens, and finally her phone and charger, though she wasn't sure she could use it if her mother sent the cops after her. That was something of a big if, though.
The bag was full, and very puny. Sophie put it away and went downstairs and made dinner—a big one, as big as she could—and ate everything she could fit in her mouth while her mother told her she was getting fat, and after she tidied up the kitchen and her mother was in the living room she took anything she could find that she could carry and might give her some calories. When her mother turned on the TV, Sophie crept over to the freezer and dug out the little flask of vodka her mother kept hidden there for rainy days when she didn't want to drive to the store.
She went upstairs, finished packing, and then dressed in leggings, jeans, a shirt, a sweatshirt, and a pair of red leather boots she'd found for a bargain at the Senior Center thrift store. She laced them up over the denim, then laid down in her bed and waited for her mother to pass out.
It was dark when she got up. Sophie pulled on her coat—tight over her sweatshirt—and crept into her mother's room. While her mother snoozed downstairs, Sophie went through every nook and cranny, every hiding place, and took every last pill she found.
Then Sophie Brennan pulled her hood over her long, dark hair and walked out the front door and, full of fury and a terrible, reckless freedom, she turned toward the Wild and never looked back.
Unfortunately for Sophie and probably also for everybody else, the world was ending. Despite this, Sophie made it as far as the Woods.
