Page 201 of The End of the World As We Know It
She walked home, then stood at her front door, ignoring the thudding pain any head movement caused behind her eye patch, and studied the darkening sky. The stars were emerging one by one, hard and clear and precisely where they should be. No tear, no wound.
Seeing proved nothing, of course, and if magic had flowed back into the world it might still be there, but she still sighed at the stars, and went inside, and that night enjoyed a deep and dreamless sleep.
CAME THE LAST NIGHT OF SADNESS
Catherynne M. Valente
Fern Ramsey sat crisscross applesauce on the cold concrete floor of a dead stranger’s garage, left foot squished tight between her long, thin leg and the slab, right foot plopped up on her opposite knee, waggle-tapping along to the song in her head. There was always a song in Fern’s head; always had been. Always the same song, in point of fact, even though she didn’t know what it was called, or understand the words too much, or remember where she could ever have heard it. She supposed she’d made it up herself when she was littler and just forgotten it, like you forgot all kinds of things about being littler once you got big.
Oh well.
Not that Fern was all that big. She figured she was somewhere in the general neighborhood of seventeen, but maybe fifteen and maybe twenty. It never seemed like an important enough fact to hold on to. Like where exactly she was. Most of those big metalWELCOME TO THE STATE OF BLANK [INSERT STUPID NONSENSE MOTTO HERE]signs were still scarecrowing it up where they always had, but mostsmall places didn’t have names anymore, not really. And if this one did, it wasn’t fessing up.
Fern just thought of wherever she ended up as Somewhere. Probably. Maybe. Probably, Virginia. Maybe, Ohio. Somewhere, Maine. Even though everywhere was the same and it didn’t matter one bit what you called things anymore.
Some facts that did seem important enough for Fern to hold on to:
A long, long time ago, there were a lot of human people in every single place you could get to, but not anymore.
Then there was an Age of Miracles, whenneedandfindweren’t so far apart and for one fucking second it seemed like the things that happened to you had some kind of reason, some basic rhythm. But not anymore.
Just because something is canned and the seal looks all right doesn’t mean the food hasn’t up and turned into poison in there.
A big red paintedXinside a big red paintedOon the side of a barn or a house or a city hall or a bus means people got the bad sick there. Not a long, long time ago, either, so stay away. There’s other symbols, too. A blue smiley face means the water’s safe. A blackVwith a line through the middle means there’s folk here, but they don’t play well with others. That sort of thing.
You can do fine as long as you know how to read and have a knife, a map, a fishing pole, and a bicycle—as long as you know how to fix the last two.
Just about every single person who ever met Fern Ramsey ditched her within a few days. Fake Granddad, King Sue, Big Barry Bullfrog, everybody. She knew there was nothing wrong withher, at least no more than what was wrong with all the rest of everything, so her carefully considered opinion was fuck them if they wanted to be like that.
If a bottle has a word that ends in-cillinon it, those are antibiotics and you should swipe some. If it ends in-done, those are painkillers,and you should swipe all of them. Are they still good? Maybe! An infected puncture wound definitely isn’t good, though. A chance is better than none.
The thing is, everything expires. But that doesn’t always mean it’s gone bad. Most of the time it’s just gone different. Like how you can’t use gasoline anymore, but that marmalade jelly it likes to turn into makes pretty quick work of anything that gets in your way.
It’s hard to ride a zebra, but not as hard as the library encyclopedias, say. Just have a little belief in yourself, for fuck’s sake.
The sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Rivers mostly flow north to south. Stick to those and the highways. The mountains and plains in the middle are best. Northeast is mostly safe and good. Don’t go southeast. And the farther west, the closer to hell.
There are some things you just can’t ever get back, even if you do everything right.
Outside, the buzzy still heat of late summer clung to every goddamned thing like wet tape. Birds screamed like crazy from elms and oaks and pines, millions of them. Too many birds now, because too many bugs, too many bugs because the civilized world is an awful big corpse to munch on. But in the carless, dust-cozied garage, it was nothing but cool and shady and nice. The door to this particular garage lay on the weedy driveway like a squashed turtle, upside down, baking helplessly in the sun, scraped and dented all to hell, leaving an open cave of (maybe) useful wonders for anyone to find.
And Fern Ramsey was very good at finding useful things. Like the tattered cutoff denim shorts she’d been wearing for a good while now, liberated from a dead girl’s dead bedroom with rainbow butterfly stickers all over its dead walls. Like the water-stiffened cowboy boots (and the knife inside them) she’d fished out of a river back in Somewhere, Iowa, toes curling up out of the current to kick at the moon. Like the frayed and fraying shirt she’d called up to the big game froma picked-over airport mezzanine in Nowhere Special, New Jersey, with its mysterious, hermetic design so faded only stick-figure silhouettes remained where big spangled letters had once proclaimed:THE BOSS.
Like people, when Fern wanted people. Like animals, when she needed animals.
Her ankle was falling asleep. The cold concrete stuck to the backs of her thighs; fuzzy cactus-prickles crept out from her squashed foot up the back of her blackberry-scratched calf, but Fern didn’t care.Comfort is the enemy of progress, an old man who called himself her granddad for a little while had told Fern. A long time ago, and somewhere else. But he said it in a rocking chair with his feet up on the porch rail and a big old tumbler of fresh moose milk in his paw, so Fern privately thought he was just about entirely full of shit on that one. And anyway, what had fake granddads ever known about anything? How to fuck everything straight up forever? Fern could handle that all by herself.
She couldn’t feel a thing but coppery static in her legs. She didn’t twitch. Not because Fern had taken a shine to comfort or progress in her advanced age. But moving meant taking her eyes off her prize and that just wasn’t gonna happen. Maybe one in a hundred empty shitbox houses had what that girl was after. Mostly they were just sad husks. Garages and sheds and basements full of workbenches where no one was ever going to finish fixing up their downstairs radiator and the rusted clamp-on vises gripped nothing but shadows. Dead drills and dead cars and dead chain saws and dead snowblowers and dead lawn mowers and plastic canisters of dead gasoline for said cars and chain saws and snowblowers and lawn mowers. And sometimes dead people. They weren’t much more than crumbly skeletons now, dry and companionable and anonymous. Still, you didn’t want to think too much about that, especially when live people weren’t exactly thick on the ground.
But every once in a while, one of these old cracked shells had a walnut in it, and everything shone.
She’d been coming up pretty dry lately. Nothing but nothing formonths. So when Fern ducked off the county road into this big dumb brick-and-brass Cape Cod and its detached two-car, she’d told herself not to expect too much. Maybe a replacement for the disintegrating hot-weather shirt she’d called up to the big game from a quiet bungalow in Somewhere, Vermont. She liked it mighty fine. Just a huge open screaming mouth with its tongue out, splattered in stars and bloody stripes of red.
Oh well.
But she hadn’t even found anything that useful. Just a nice, picked-clean garage with nothing much to say. Finally, she’d stacked up a bunch of thick hardcover books with burst spines and swollen pages and climbed on top to grope around on the top shelf of a steel storage rack. And there it was. All the way up there where you’d have to look to find it, where you’d have towantto find it: a half-congealed cardboard box someone with awful-pretty handwriting had labeledFor Whoever You Are.Fern’s sweaty mosquito-gnawed skin went all over cold and electric.
Boxes, trunks, tubs, suitcases; always labeled, and always with stuff like that.If Anyone Comes Asking. To Be Opened When It’s Over. Here Lies Us. For the Living.People got real poetic back then. Fern guessed the end of the world would do that to you. But then again, Fern found one back west about seven hundred miles that just saidHI!and she thought that was somehow the prettiest one of all.
