Page 203 of The End of the World As We Know It

Green. White. Green. White. Then solid white, and, with an almost relieved pause, yellow. Faster, Faster. Faster toward red. Weak, wheezy Klaxons sound in the dark stillness. All the boards light up under the watchful eyes of beaming hard-hatted workers on a moldering workplace safety poster as they point purposefully into the middle distance, into the future:

At ONS We PowerPROGRESS!

The temperature readouts inch past equilibrium. The skimmer wall separating the clean lake water from the contaminated cooling ponds quietly gives up its long fight. A shiver of blue light glows out of Oconee Nuclear Station, and it is not alone.

A few days from now, the deer drinking untroubled from the starlit water will die with their bellies full of tulip buds and sores ringing their soft white throats like ruby necklaces.

A few weeks after that, Catawba Nuclear Station goes.

It’s high summer before the Watts Bar Plant in Chattanooga and the Grand Gulf Station in Port Gibson, Mississippi, sound their death rattles.

By the time the millennium turns over, the American Southeast writhes in a wash of invisible, hungry fire that will not go out for four hundred years.

Everything expires.

There were many, many things wrong with Fern Ramsey.

She was stronger than most other people, including boys. She could rip a log in half with her bare hands, and not an old rotten one, either.

Coarse, silvery hair covered most all of her skin but palms and soles; not so thick as you’d notice it if you weren’t touching on someone you shouldn’t, but it was there all the same.

Her toes looked like ladies’ toes used to look from spending seventy years smashed up inside high heels, even though Fern hadn’t ever even seen high heels, let alone done that silliness to herself.

One of her eyes was a fair bit bigger and darker than the other, but she didn’t see so good out of that big boy.

And out of the nape of her neck, one single long, thin lock of brilliant white hair snaked out in all the black like a skunk’s stripe.

Despite all that, Fern Ramsey was uncommon pretty. Allprettyreally meant these days was peoplebotheringall over her if ever they could catch her, which they usually could on account of those hoofed-up feet.

Sometimes, not very often, but sometimes, Fern could make things, but only little things, happen just by thinking sharp enough. That’s what she called it, when she had to call it something. Thinking sharp. She didn’t understand why or how, but she was used to that.

Fern assumed she had parents at some point. My stars, doesn’t everyone? But she didn’t remember any. She didn’t remember where she started out in this big broken board game of a world. She reckoned they died, but that wasn’t the problem. Fern didn’t remember being little or learning to read or something bad happening to good old Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey. She didn’t even remember ever specifically deciding to live her life walking instead of pedaling or galloping or skating, or none of the above, just circling this great last drain toward one of the teeny handful of places where people who still remembered how to be people went to be people at each other as long as they could stand it.

Walking just felt good. And Fern tried to only do things that felt good. Like hunting critters rather than settling down and getting smart with a vegetable garden and a cow like an asshole. Like giving squirrels or rabbits or minks cute names as soon as she spotted them in the brush so she could feel close and snuggly about them before gutting them herself and eating them raw in open-plan kitchens full of skeletons.

Fern couldn’t really stand people most of the time. Not anymore. They weren’t any kind of reliable. They all wanted to take something from you, but always pretended they didn’t right up until the snatching and the struggling. To Fern’s mind, that was pure raccoon behavior and she had no truck with raccoons. Sometimes she thought she’d never met a real actual person in her whole life excepting her own self, just a wide and diverse variety of raccoons.

She knew a pile of things she had no coherent reason to know, like what a Cape Cod house looked like, or what spaghetti sauce and high heels were, or what the wordcoherentmeant. Not everything, but the pile was not small. It was just as much of a mystery to her as to anybody who didn’t understand what she meant byastronaut. When Fern needed to know certain things, they just turned up in her head like second socks.

Fern couldn’t remember even once feeling full or satisfied. She’d been hungry her whole life. Even that one day a couple years back in Somewhere, Michigan, when the unpicked apple trees bent down breaking under the weight and the salmon were running up the river so fast and happy every white splash sounded likehome home home.

Fern’d stuck her hands in the water like a big joyful bear, over and over, giggling, pulling fillets out of the water as easy as a grocery store freezer. She ate so many apples and fish her belly looked six months along. She’d sat out under the stars licking gobs of soft, shiny orange salmon eggs off her fingers and eventhenFern was plain starving. There was a hole in her nothing filled up. Nothing really even interested it. Except those little cairns of pages she hunted through housesand garages and sheds and office building lobbies. The people who couldn’t run away from her. The dead pleading for her attention from a grave full of ink.

But the worst wrong thing was the dreams. Fern’s dreams could get bad.Realbad. Wake-up-screaming-biting-on-your-own-tongue bad. These days a bed looked no different than a knife to that girl. Either one meant to get inside her and start twisting.

Always the same. The same places, one or the other. A fresh clean whitewash and scrubbed-pine schoolroom. Tall cross-sashed windows ran down the walls. Five rows of tidy little desks waited empty, the kind with chairs bolted on so you couldn’t ever really get comfortable. The tardy sunshine let itself in politely through the window glass, the hills outside slept gently through their lessons, and the bright brass school bell hung down from a spiderless hollow belfry. Bigger than any bell had a right to be, bigger than any schoolhouse could hope to contain, bigger than a dead star hanging in space, casting no shadow on the slick wood floor.

Or a treeless plain where the earth glowered black and red. Where great stones lanced the boil of the land and nothing grew, nothing ever evenwantedto grow. A place where the nicotine-colored sky felt all the time like it was just about ready to pull back its rictus lips and she’d see the teeth behind the whole world.

Trouble was, no matter which nightmare jumped her in the night, the dreaming felt so bright and true and clear and correct that everything un-dreaming seemed fake, and thin, and small. Like an old sign with a photorealistic picture of a girl’s life on it, but take one big step around the back and it’s two inches thick, held up by nothing but a beam of plywood crawling with black bugs who meant to chew it clear through.

Some nights Fern dreamed a teacher for the schoolroom. But that didn’t make it better. The miss stood with her back to Fern, staring at a spotless green chalkboard in a long pale nightgown and no shoes on her muddy cold feet. No matter how many times Fern tried totalk to her, her voice wouldn’t come out. And no matter how many times Fern walked all the way around the miss to find a friendly face, she only saw long white hair falling flat and heavy to her waist, flat and heavy to her belly, flat and heavy over each shoulder to each hip.

But in the other place, she was never alone. Across that black-red scalded desert, a man came walking. The same every time. That one who downrightlovedto show his face. Shaggy hair all round his skull like a yellow flame using up a match head. Eyes that dug into Fern’s face like fingernails. Denim jacket. Denim jeans. A handsome man, but the handsomewrithedsometimes. It tried tocrawloff him, but it couldn’t get away.

“Whoareyou?!” he roared at her. Or crooned. Or sang. Or whispered against her neck like he had the right. So many times. So many ways. Like he enjoyed saying it. Sucking the juice off every syllable. He liked snagging her chin in his big calloused hand while he kept on listening to himself talk, a handful of phrases over and over like a hymn.

Who sent you, wonderful girl?