Normalocalypse

When the world has ended and nobody knows

I open my eyes a few times before I wake up. Glimpses of Eithne, lolling her head about, eyes shut. I pull her closer, back into the tight embrace we’ve drifted away from as we dreamed. Half awake she squirms free, pulls me close, and then shifts away again.

I open my eyes again and hers are open too. We both notice, but we’re both unwilling to acknowledge this, and close our eyes again for a few more minutes of restless slumber. When she speaks it’s in the full sentences of someone who’s been awake for a while.

Dreams, and the patterns of them. I tell her about rising water and she tells me about smoke as the ashes of the dead. Fire as the inevitable end of deforestation. Deforestation as indicative of everything wrong.

She’s not wrong, and I listen to her passion with sleep glazed eyes - wanting to add my piece, the practicalities of what it serves us to believe, and what we can change, but she would take that as an attack,and I have not the skill to speak it well. I stay silent, wishing that we could talk about other things. Remembering how I’d fallen asleep last night “How are you?” She’d asked.

“Tired,” I’d answered - a simile of the truth.

Then we’re up - too soon. I go into the kitchen and find that she has no eggs, nothing green, and only a single tiny onion. Not very much to work with.

I get started on pancakes. She wants them fluffier - something I have so far failed to provide. Today, I decide to do away with sourdough altogether. I make baking powder pancakes with half white flour and half gluten free, sprinkled with cocoa powder to hide the weird texture of water instead of milk. I do this - even though I won’t enjoy them - because I want something extra, unusual.

We borrow her housemate’s eggs, and she gets me kale from the communal garden. Then she reads out loud to me as I cook. This story is about fire and burning trees, an echo of the smoke that billows outside our windows from forest fires to the south, east, and north

Then we eat. We talk about salt, and work, and bugs and normal things. She notices the fluffiness of the pancakes and comments on it, but not as excitedly as I’d hoped. I wish, as I sit and talk, that she would be warmer. Maybe I should insist, like my mother does, on having the food complimented before every meal. She could have said thank you.

“Thank you so much for breakfast,” she says, after taking our plates over to the sink. She pulls me into a close, warm hug, which ends in a loving kiss. We linger a moment, and then she has to be off to work. She leaves, and I’m right out the door after her.

As I head to the Co-op I begin to notice my anger. It’s in the heat in my fists, the tightness in my eyes, the stirring in my chest. I wonder if I’m angry at Eithne but I can’t figure out why I would be. So I just notice - this unfocused fire misting my mind like smoke.

I park a little too close to the car on my right, and head inside to get eggs for Eithne , and four dozen more for Mama. I stop by her house, unload the eggs, and drop a carton on the ground where it bursts open, scattering eggs across the road and breaking all but one.

I greet Mama with “A carton of eggs broke,” she gives me a bowl to go scoop the remains into. I navigate around the moving boxes and loose debris of the rapidly emptying house, and gather what I can, rubbing the remaining sticky mess into the dirt.

“Before I give you a lecture on laundry, let’s see if you can tell me what I’m about to lecture you about,” she says when the bowel is emptied.
“Don’t overfill the laundry machine, split it into two loads.”
“Why don’t we overfill it?”
“Because the clothes won’t get clean.”
“And what about the dryer?”
“The dryer works by spinning and heating the clothes and whoooping the air out so it all evaporates off. If there are too many clothes in there, the dryer can’t whooop,” I say articulating the action with my arms.”
“The clothes in the middle don’t even get any of the warmth of the edges,” she adds.

“I did it because all the clothes were theoretically clean, they’ve just been sitting for I don’t know how long on Papa’s shelf,” I explain.
“You should really get rid of those black sheets,” she adds.
“Why?”
“It’s just bad to sleep in black sheets.”
“What about brown sheets?” I ask - Papa’s other pair currently on my bed because they’re so soft.
“That’s fine, but black - no racism meant here - it’s all the colors mixed together, it just sucks the energy out of things. See . . . “ she walks over and grabs a white hat and a black coat. “Close your eyes.”
I dutifully do so.
“Now feel the energy of this one,” she says letting my hand wave above something, “and now this one.”
“The first one felt heavier,” I say.
Mama frowns. “The first one was the white hat - Maybe this isn’t the best example. C wears this hat and thinks heavy thoughts.”

We hug, and then she forgets we just hugged and hugs me again.

“I should head off. I just stopped by to grab my laundry.”
“What are you doing after this?” She asks.
“I’m off to go do chainsawing.”
“Not alone.”
“Yes alone.”
“Pan, you need someone else there. What if you cut off your leg or something?”
“It’s time sensitive. I can’t wait for someone to be home. I have my phone. I could call a neighbor.”
She looks dubious.

“My immediate task is getting my chainsaw unstuck from the log with my axe,” I distract.
“How did it get stuck?”
“The log shifted.”
“Here, let’s google how to get a chainsaw out of a log.”
“I really have to go . . .”
“These people are very smart.”
“Mama, no, I’m leaving.”
“Just wait a moment.”
“No”
“Just . . .”
“I’m going to go grab my laundry.”

I go downstairs and load up, she comes out to the porch. “Loggers recommend chainsawing out your chainsaw with another chainsaw.”
“Of course they do.”
“I love you!”
“And I love you.”

My car is loaded completely full of boxes that I rescued from the recycling yesterday to pack Papa’s books in so I can give them away. The laundry basket makes it so I can’t see anything through the back window, and I back up carefully. It was yesterday in this spot, using just my side mirrors, that I almost backed over a neighbor with crutches.

I go and park at the Park & Ride, and walk to the bank. Not trusting myself to park somewhere else I’d have to back out of. As I walk, brisk purposeful stride, I imagine how I must look from the outside. Confident, strong, beautiful, together. I puff myself up a little “I am -” Powerful? Together? Chosen? “- Pan” I finish. Devotee of life - and lo does she treat her chosen hard.

From the bank I walk to the hardware store and get premixed gas for the chainsaw. Someday I’ll mix my own, but right now I’ll take the easy way.

As I’m heading to the cash register one of Eithne’s neighbors comes over.
“I haven’t seen you in a while.”
“I haven’t been in your part of the world. Eithne’s been gone.”
“And now she’s spending lots of time at your place - right? I’ve hardly seen her since she got back from her trip.”
“Well, not really, but . .”
“You live out - out . . “
“On Berry Hill - it’s off of Eaglemount.”
“Yeah . . . I’ve been out there. I know James and Terry,” he says, confidently butchering my neighbor’s name. “Beautiful place.”
“That’s where I grew up.”
“Oh really!? You’re a real local then.”
“That I am.”
“Well it was nice seeing you,” he says, and darts off.

I finally make it back to my overstuffed car and head home. I can’t reach my speaker buried under the mountains of cardboard, so I put my phone on its highest volume and shuffle music all the way home.

As soon as I hit Eaglemont, something shifts inside of me. I feel it acutely, like something that was out of place shifting back the way it’s supposed to be. I start thinking about the fictional piece I had begun writing about Eaglemont, where I made all of my neighbors into mythical creatures, and gave my protagonist a trial by fire.

I stop and get the mail, dodge a neighbor who rolls down his window and smiles at me, but I pretend not to notice, and finally pull into my spot. I get out and start pulling boxes out of the car. I find my speaker and turn it on, amplifying the music and setting it on top of my car.

Then I go let my chickens out. Sweetness hurls herself against the door when she sees me. I go check for eggs and again there are none. It’s been almost a month. Something is definitely wrong.

I go back to the car. The shuffling music is halfway through Regina spectre’s The Call, the song that took me though Shine’s breakup three years ago. A dangerous song.

I grimace in some combination of discomfort and humor about it. Shine. I miss her less than I used to but she still stands alone among the women I have loved. Sometimes I call Eithne ‘love of my life,’ but deep down I know that only one woman will hold that title. A woman who left me before I could learn to hate her - even a little.

Eithne. I sit down in the back seat of the car. Door open. Boxes behind me. I go over this morning again. The combative coldness. The explicit warmth. There is nothing upsetting here. It’s just the sort of day any couple has. Days where you don’t connect all the time. That’s normal.

How can this be normal? I think. How can anything be normal. Don’t they know the world has ended?

It hits me then. The normality. My heroic attempts to be a functional human being. This moment between getting home and going out to chainsaw up firewood for the winter. As if my biggest concern is being warm. As if the world had not ended.

“I miss him.” I say out loud.
Then, unexpectedly, I feel tears welling up. I’ve cried in other people’s arms - always women - in Eithne’s less than a week ago - but never alone, not since I was. . . eleven?

I rest my head against the doorframe, and let it come - an overwhelming rush of emotion, rising into blurry eyes.

“Do you know that I love you?” I asked him.
“No”
“Well, I do.”
“I believe you,” he said.

“I miss you,” I say out loud.

The music shifts into Love Over Gold - one of the songs we all listened to together just before Papa died. I find myself laughing. Of course this song would come up now. Then the laughter turns seamlessly into gentle sobs. There is nothing overwhelming here. I could stop anytime I wanted to. This is not my body taking over, it’s a fragile quiet thing.

The music transitions again - into Crescent Noon, the first of the three songs we listened to just before his death. My eyes are burning so I wipe them with my handkerchief, and no more tears come. I sit there with my head against the doorframe, in this quiet moment between moments - this time when what’s actually important rises above the normality.

Don’t you know that the world has ended? How are you still going on as of nothing has changed? Everything has changed.

I consider giving up this day. One more sacrifice to the gods of grief. I’ve accomplished enough that I could lose today. But how long can I keep giving up days of my precious life? I have only so much life. I know that now.

“Do you know that I love you?”
“No”
“Well, I do.”
“I believe you.”

The music shifts into a piece from Inanna's descent. I look up into the smoke filled sky of a world that looks like it is ending, and I smile.

You cannot live every day as if it were going to be your last. You have to live as if life is so much more certain than it is. Make plans. Start things that will outlast you.

“I love you,” I whisper into the fire filled sky.
The music turns into something pop. I get up - and go chainsaw wood for the winter.