Page 202 of The End of the World As We Know It

The box was bloated and watercolory with years of un-blowered New England snow and summer heat having their way with the cardboard. Her fingers sank right through the thing like soft cheese. The careful, looping letters had faded to almost nothing, like her shirt. No ink left, just the little canyons carved in relief by a long-dry pen. But it was plenty enough to let Fern Ramsey know there was a ghost in there, and it wanted someone to talk to.

All that old, clammy box-sweat soaked into her as she hauled her new best friend down to settle in for the night. It stained Fern’s chest with a wet, black rectangle, like a door into her heart.

Thankfully, whoever had carefully and lovingly swooped thatYso nice and big, even while they were probably barfing up their whole soul and also both lungs, had also been clever enough to seal the contents of the box in a series of big gallon freezer stay-fresh plastic bags.

A few well-loved paperback books written by people whose names meant less than nothing to Fern. Photos of smiling people and crying babies and days at the beach with coolers full of beer bottles like icy green dreams. Faded children’s shirts folded as reverently as altar cloths: Spider-Man, Strawberry Shortcake, Big Bird, Future Astronaut. A heavy double-bagged tangle of jewelry.

Fern turned the snarl of gold over in her hands. There were some big fat diamonds in there, rubies, too. Maybe even real. The house wasn’tthatnice, though. Somebody probably scraped and scrimped and skipped a new winter coat to buy these. They probably meant so much to somebody, somewhen. Enough to try to crank back their throwing arm and try to lob this bomb of diamonds and rubies and feelings all the way into a far future where kids could grow up to be astronauts.

Fern tossed the gold behind her onto a stack of paint drop cloths, still stained with carefully chosen main-and-trim colors. She wasn’t after any of that. She wanted what was underneath. What she knew in her bones was underneath. A stack of loose typed pages, full of typos and pain and hope, sealed like broccoli in a freezer bag in case anyone ever gave a fuck.

Fern Ramsey gaveso manyfucks. All of them, in fact. All she had. All for whoever this was, whatever had happened to them, whatever they would never be now. For the very specific kind of one-in-a-hundred-houses kind of person who would take the time to cram a message down the neck of their house like a wine bottle and chuck it into the sea of time.

They just didn’t make ’em like that anymore.

Fern could see a sentence sticking up over the opaque white stripeon the freezer bag where you were meant to writeSpaghetti SauceorCookie Doughand the date.

My name was Kimberley Lynn McKiver.

Her heart started pinballing all over her chest. She licked her lips.Yes.There you are, pretty dead thing. Pretty dead Kim with your pretty dead heart.

Fern slid her finger down the plastic zip-seal and pulled out the pages. She lay them reverently in her lap, cool and smooth against her peach-fuzzed skin.

My name was Kimberley Lynn McKiver.

I lived in this house for twelve years before Captain Trips rang the doorbell, and thirty-three years after. I had four children, if you can believe it. I was a pharmacist. Sure did want to be a writer once upon a when, though. Guess this is my chance. Look out, Mr. Pullit, sir. Here I come.

I loved my husband. I loved my dogs. I loved my babies. I tried to bury them. I’m really sorry. I did try. I guess I should have gone to the gym more. The earth here is just so hard. Plus I screwed up and got old. Everyone seems to have gotten that one right but me.

They’re in the upstairs bedroom. Tucked in tight. Hopefully I am, too, and we’re all six of us together for always. Take anything you need from the house. It’s yours. It’s all yours now.

I existed. So did they. I mattered. So did they. It all mattered.

This is who we were. And this is how we left you.

Fern settled in to read in earnest. Six hours later, she hadn’t stood or stretched, eaten or drunk, or moved at all—except to fidget idly with her tangled mess of hair, twirling and untwirling a long curl around her finger as the sun army-crawled across a thoughtless, heartless sky.

By dusk, the girl had risen two inches above the concrete. Floatingcrisscross applesauce in the still air, hunched over her treasure, all her limbs awake.

She didn’t notice.

A crow noticed. It watched her motionlessly from the arms of an aspen tree.

Spring, 1996

A white-tailed deer and her fawn bend their heads to drink on the pebbly shore of Lake Keowee. Phlegmy streaks of stars spatter the South Carolina sky above; reflect in the water below and in the round pupilless eyes of the deer. The silent buttes of concrete cooling towers in the hills above the lake slash the night into dark and darker.

Sky and water and shadows and moonless quiet.

Cobwebs work the maintenance board at Oconee Nuclear Station. Dust supervises the shift-change. The peeling vinyl seats at the workstations dip into round, deep, comfortable hollows, as though some ghost’s hardworking rump is still waiting out the clock on retirement under burnt-out fluorescents and lifeless EXIT signs.

The control rod indicators blink on and off steadily over a swollen brown suit jacket containing the skeleton of Crew Chief Tom Fortunado. Last one out. Mouth full of blood and lungs full of crawling rot as he forces his body already quitting on him to boot the automatic systems into maintenance mode and initiate automated cooldown protocols fast enough to avoid irradiating the greater Savannah River Basin. You couldn’t just turn off a nuclear power plant like a night-light. It took years of careful, gradual processes to avoid any one of the thousand topics covered by quarterly safety drills.

The air here is always hot and wet. The bones of the man who stayed, slumped over the steam-pressure console, have grown new musculature, new skin, even new hair. Moss and mold and delicate frilled fungi swellup that old suitcoat almost to the size of Tom’s former weekend rec-league physique. Crew Chief Fortunado had submitted a fully documented formal complaint concerning the flaccid air-conditioning every single Friday of his career and not one thing ever changed. He hated this place. The metallic taste of the recycled air. The unsalted egg salad and pink sliced mystery meat in the cafeteria. The oh-so-concerned protesters hollering at him outside the main entrance every goddamned day like he personally planned to drop a couple of megatons on Charleston during the morning meeting.

Tommy Fortunado hated this place. And now he’ll never leave it.

The round lights flash on his dead shoulders like owl’s eyes. Opening and closing. Opening and closing.