Page 129 of The End of the World As We Know It

My fingers slip, but I try again, clutching on tight.

The canoe is moving away from me, and if I slip I will fall into the water.

I imagine hundreds oftiburonesswimming in circles beneath me, waiting to pull me apart, arms and legs, my head and torso.

Then I remember, there are notiburones.

There is nothing. There’s only dead people and dead animals and if I don’t get on this boat and get to Florida and cross over to Nebraska, that funny name and funny shape on the map, and cross overoeste, west, to Nebraska to meet the old woman on the farm, then I will be dead, too.

I push my body up. Everything is shaking. Everything hurts, but still, I slide onto the boat and I look down at my hands. They are all red, but not pretty like Mrs. Reyes’s hands.

The birds continue to caw, screeching from the beach. I stand and face them and scream.

I scream for Mrs. Reyes and I scream for Mami and Papi and I even scream for stupid Jonathan. I especially scream for Choco.

I run to the cabin, hoping to find a key, anything to turn this boat on. Then I see him, a man seated at the wheel, his mouth is wide open and fat yellow worms are crawling in and out. His eyes are bulging out of their sockets, and liquid is leaking out and running down his temples. His skin is burnt under the sun, red and black and blistered. All down his white shirt and white pants is dried, caked vomit.

I think of the pirates Papi told me about, dead and lost at sea.

A crow flutters down and lands on the dead man’s head.

I take a step back.

Another bird lands on his shoulder, and then another on his other shoulder.

I turn my head, and see the island, and I wonder,Is it better to die there or to die here?

Another bird lands, beating its large wings, and another.

Now one flaps toward my face, pecking at my cheeks. Stabbing into my fat.

I feel sharp and cold and stinging all the same.

I raise my arms, shriek and cry, but there’s more sharp pain. I feel fine stabs in my flesh, talons sinking into me, pecking at my elbows.

There’s more digging into my body, my neck, my forehead, clamping down at my fingers, my lips, my eyes. The world is blurred, and I can’t see. I hear cawing and ocean waves. The beating of wings.

I’m stepping back and stepping back and there’s water, and I’m in the water and I’m reaching all around, hoping I’ll find Choco.

THE LEGION OF SWINE

S. A. Cosby

Woodrow stepped out onto his porch and stretched his arms to the sky as the morning sun caressed his cheek. The air was crisp and cool but held the promise of heat and sweat to come later in the day. Blue jays and sparrows sang as they perched on the branches of trees in the forest that surrounded his house and his property like the slow embrace of an aged aunt.

Woodrow touched his brow. It was pretty close to impossible to diagnose a fever in yourself, but it was a habit he couldn’t seem to break. He touched his neck and felt for swelling, but all he felt was the rough bristles of a beard he was debating growing.

When Mae had gotten sick her forehead had burned with fever like a cast-iron woodstove gone rageful red. Then her neck had swollen to three or four times its normal size. It looked like her head and neck had turned into a sausage. He wanted to take her to the hospital, but by then all the hospitals were closed. They’d even stopped putting the dead in refrigerated trucks because they’d run out of space to park them. He did his best to comfort her. He put cold compresses on her brow and tried to get her to eat. He stayed with her day and night,not caring if he got sick. Part of him actually wanted to catch it so he could join her. Just be a few steps behind her like back when they used to drive over to Roanoke and go to the mall.

He’d trail behind her now and then just to watch her walk. Watch the gentle sway of her hips or the way she did a little shimmy when she saw something in a store window that caught her fancy. Her brown shoulder blades glistening from the generous amount of lotion he’d rubbed on them after her bath. The straps of her sundress gently laying across her flesh that undulated as she moved. That was usually on a Saturday when he was off from the bottling plant in Staunton. They’d drive down off the mountain and go over to Roanoke and look at things they couldn’t afford and dream dreams they knew would never come true, but isn’t that what makes a dream a precious thing? It’s both real and an illusion at the same time.

The pigs heard him step on the porch and that set them to snorting and squealing with a fierceness that telegraphed their hunger.

Woodrow stepped down off the porch and walked through the tall grass that had taken over his front yard and headed for the faded red corncrib he and his daddy had built when they had finished the house. They’d built both the summer he and Mae had married. He didn’t know it then, but Mae was already pregnant with Joshua. They’d go on to have three more children. Mary-Ellen, Thomas, and Junius.

He hoped Joshua was still alive.

He’d left home a year before the sickness came upon them. He joined the army and got out of Stuart’s Holler as fast as the eastbound train could carry him.