Page 105 of The End of the World As We Know It

“Tak Tak Tak,” I say, awed. “It is the place of the ancestors.” Waving grass stretches in all directions. Small trees rustle in the prairie wind. The land rolls on and on, vast and made for running and jumping.

Tak Tak Tak looks at me and touches me with his nose. For the first time since the dark place, he kisses me. “It’s not that place,” he says, “but it’s very much like it, yes.”

“Let’s go and find the WIVES,” I say. “The Dholes. They must be out there somewhere. We shouldn’t keep them waiting.”

Together we go into the burning sunrise.

TILL HUMAN VOICES WAKE US, AND WE DROWN

Poppy Z. Brite

The first time Seth saw him, the old man was sitting on Menemsha Beach playing with a disgusting thing. He was spare and angular, this old man, and looked as if he might have spent his whole life on this brief stretch of up-island shoreline; sand clung to him in a faint glittering aura and salt lined the many creases of his face. The disgusting thing he held was perhaps eight inches long, brown and sere. It had a rudimentary, wicked-looking little face, a long spiny tail, and what appeared to be a pair of wings. It looked as if it had been alive at some point, but was now very, very dead.

“Jenny Haniver,” the old man said when he saw Seth looking, and made the thing nod.

“Uh… Seth Harris,” Seth said, thinking the man was introducing himself.

The old man’s face wrinkled in contempt. “Notme. This creature here is called a Jenny Haniver. People used to think they was dried mermaids.” His tone became singsong. “Mermaid, mermaid, down by the docks, I see her titties, but where’s her box?”

It was rare these days to run across a talking person on Martha’s Vineyard. Most of the summer people had left when the flu started ramping up, though a few had hunkered down in their luxurious homes and died. Almost all the remaining people were locals, and they tended to keep to themselves. Seth knew some of them and checked on them from time to time. Most of them were crazy. This old man sounded crazy, but possibly interesting.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Stingray. You catch the little ones and cut em up so it looks like a body. Nostrils are the eyes, mouth is the mouth. Hang ’em up to dry a while, then varnish ’em and sell ’em to the tourists. My father used to have a good little sideline in Jenny Hanivers.” The old man cackled. “Take home a dried mermaid, boy, you really had a souvenir. Kid like you wouldn’t remember that.”

“No, I don’t,” Seth admitted. “My parents never had much luck selling anything to the tourists. They tried to start a sushi restaurant, but people come here to eat lobster and clams, not raw fish.”

The old man looked searchingly at Seth. His eyes were an undimmed brilliant blue in his seamed brown face. “You Japanese?”

“No. My mom was half-Japanese. My dad was Black. I’m just an islander.”

“Had a buddy whose ship was sunk by a Jap torpedo in the Big One.”

“I’m nineteen and I’ve never even been to Japan, okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, keep your hair on, I got no problem with you… Sean?”

“Seth. I’m Seth. What’s your name?”

“You don’t need to know my real name. Some folks used to call me Mole, ’cause I got a lot of ’em.” The old man set the Jenny Haniver carefully on the sand and pulled up the sleeve of his jacket, revealing a constellation of brown spots on his forearm. “Got ’em on my legs, too. Hell, got ’em on myass, for that matter.” He cackled again. “Or so the ladies always told me. Can’t see my own ass, y’know.”

They stared out at the slaty waters of Menemsha Bight. The late summer sun was westering, beginning to bleed into the sea. After a few minutes, Mole said, “Now Jenny, there, people used to say she could protect you from getting sick. She couldn’t do it, of course, but a real mermaid could.”

“A real mermaid,” Seth said.

Mole nodded.

“There’s no such thing.”

“Wasn’t any such thing as the superflu, either, till there was. Government making a plague that killed everybody in the world? Who’d have believed it? Government made this AIDS thing, you know. Wanted to wipe out the homosexuals. And what for? Were they bothering anybody? No, but the government always wants a scapegoat. Democrat, Republican, what have you, they all want to blame someone else for the messes they make. Nobody left to take the blame now, though. Nobody much left to do the blaming, for that matter.”

“There are still people on the mainland.”

“Yeah, and most of ’em are headed west, to one place or another. I got no use for either of their places. I’m staying right here.”

“Were you a fisherman, before?”

Everyone understoodbefore. The single word was enough to denote all the pain it carried: before you watched your family choke on snot and die, before you had to break into the stores for food, before the world ended.