I Feel Fine.
There were plenty of snacks, enough popcorn and pickles for a frontier brigade. The trees were festooned with folding computer graphic banners, the tables and chairs sitting at awkward, performance-art angles on the knobby ground. And all the invitations had been clearly calligraphed: The honor of your presence is requested at 1 pm on Sunday, May 29th, in Kingston, New York, for libations and celebrations of the apocalypse. (GF options will be available.)
The Draugrs never showed. Nor did the mayor, or the cheese monger, the sleazy car dealers in their pornographic white loafers, nor any of the other townsfolk.
The only guests were two squirrels. I told them to stop digging holes in the clover while they dug more holes in the clover. “Take your adorable, tiny teacups and get off my damn lawn!”
It’s too bad it all fell apart. The end of the world was going to be amazing.
The bunkers had been built with specialized compartments for hiding and hoarding. Tunnels with the strategems mapped on the ceiling. Bedazzled kerosene lamps, bowie knives sheathed at the hip. Codes created for weeding out the conversational riffraff. I had stitched a shirt with shoddy stripes and fake honors. (They weren’t going to be fake forever! They signified the inevitability of my special purpose!)
We were going to eat creamed corn out of tin cans with the people who meant the most. We were going to be self-righteously unselfconscious amidst the blessed disarray. We were going to sing Bob Seger songs without an inch of irony, playing flashlight tag until eternity. The infinity of a campfire on a hazy, late-spring night.
The Draugrs. They didn’t even show up to curse me or eat the secret recipe of eyeballs I have stored in my head.
I tell you something, it is a strange world that makes the living less alive than the existence of the dead.