Page 205 of The End of the World As We Know It

Sometimes folks didn’t actually do a whole lot wrong. Nobody stole or hoarded or feuded or made the powerfully bold choice to fuck somebody else’s man when there wasn’t really any compelling reason not to pick up a gun about that anymore. But the town burst like a rotten grapefruit all the same.

When Fern went down to Maybe, Vermont, last summer, she was perfectly fucking polite to the guy minding the potatoes he planted in the town square’s flower beds and dried-up fountain bowl.Hey, mister, Dr. Martinez at the sick tent said you had more of those Yukons than you need, wanna trade? I got a jar of buttons and half a pound of skunk jerky.The potato man narrowed his eyes and turned his back like she’d pissed in his dirt fountain. Like she wasn’t eventhere. Pretended like he was actually doing something with that stupid trowel of his. A few days later, the potato man climbed up to the water tower his own grandfather had worked so hard to reconnect to the municipal system and drowned his idiot raccoon self in there. His rot came out in sinks and bathtubs and gurgling up drains and after all those years keeping their backs against the wheel, the last to leavepainted a bigXover the blue smiley face on the big boulder outside town that once announced the water was safe, and that was just about it for Maybe, Vermont.

By the time the potatoes came in, the houses all stood empty, the sick tent collapsed, and Fern got her spuds for free.

Oh well.

Fern liked it pretty fine in Wherever, Pennsylvania, for a while. She wasn’tfantasticat people, but she was little and alone and that rarely added up to a consistently good time. You had to try. She even met a boy there her own age who called himself Big Barry Bullfrog. People called themselves any old thing nowadays. But Barry was nice enough. He knew how to sew (sutures included)andraise Helsinki on an eldritch hand-crank CB radio he strapped into an ugly orange vinyl trailer and hauled up hills behind his bike to get a good signal.

They lay out under the April stars. After Barry coaxed a charge through the hand-crank, Fern held somebody’s hand for the first time. She didn’t really like it. And it went onforever. Barry laced his fingers through hers and they felt like old hot dogs. The radio crackled through the channels.

“I don’t think I believe you can really talk to somebody on the other side of the ocean with that thing.” Fern sniffed.

“Sure you can. I talk to Petteri all the time. Well, when it works.”

Fern could not imagine making this much effort just to talk to a person. Talking to people was enough effort all by itself. “What do you talk about?” she said in genuine bafflement.

“Nothing. I don’t know. Comic books. He likes a bunch of French stuff from when he was a kid I never heard of. One time he read me a recipe for reindeer pizza. That was cool.”

“That’s it?”

Big Barry Bullfrog lowered his voice as if they weren’t half a mile outside the settlement and anyone would care if they did hear. “OncePetteri told me what happened to his grandfather in Rome,” he said softly. “He doesn’t like to talk about it. He says nobody does. Like Vegas over here. I asked Petteri how close his granddad was when it happened, but he just kept saying close enough. His pops lost all his hair even on his legs, and he told Petteri it looked like a swan’s wing. A swan’s wing made of fire, reaching across the river of Tuonela to sweep the world of the living into the land of the dead. He said that’s out of the Kalevala. I think that’s a book. Petteri’s old. He’s hard to follow sometimes.”

“I don’t like that story,” Fern said to the stars. “It sounds made-up.”

“It’s not,” the kid said flatly.

He took his hot dog hand back and Fern didn’t care. The radio didn’t give up the goods that night. Petteri and Helsinki slept in a sea of static.

The morning the first cherry blossoms opened, before anyone got up for chores, Big Barry Bullfrog marched through town with a full box of matches and set fire to the library. He stood there smiling and watching it burn with his hands stuck in his back pockets, and that crazy stupid raccoon didn’t even move when the flames jumped the courtyard and took him, too.

But maybe Wherever, Pennsylvania, could’ve kept going without being able to learn how to build anything so easy ever again. Except, after the fire, half the town started coughing and wheezing and glaring furiously at the other half over their useless cupped hands. They hid in their houses and died anyway or lit out before they could find out if they got lucky twice. Paying the price of gathering two or more together. Human bodies still got the big sick from time to time, and they still died. Human bodies still got the big sick quite a damned bit, in point of fact, and they still diedall the fucking time.

That happened a lot when Fern tried to join the civilized world. Or it had ripped through just before she got there. Or right after she left.

But the worst was Wisconsin. The farthest west Fern ever dared.

Probably, Wisconsin, a sweetheart of a hamlet ruled by a hard, smart, weather-beaten old warlord named King Sue. King Sue had two big industrial storage containers, spray-painted in black across the sides: one saidNEED, one saidWANT. You do right by the King, she’d bang the steel-curtain door with her fist and it’d roll up on heaven. One packed to the brim with Tampax for every flow, the other with case after case of name-brand cigarettes. Christ, they were justsobeautiful. Fern almost wept the first time she stood in the presence ofNEEDandWANT.

That, plus lots and lots of milk bottles sloshing with corn alcohol she made herself in the engine block of a Buick carcass and a shit ton of guns, was how Sue got to be King of a couple of square miles of dirt and a legend everywhere else.

King Sue’d come from as far west as it was safe to come from, raiding every drugstore along the way to make her play. And when dribs and drabs of drifters and lonely hearts and grief puppets came a-wandering by, salivating for a taste of theirNEEDSand theirWANTS, Ol’ King Sue said,Sure, babies, I’ll trade you for loyalty, no problem.

King Sue proclaimed her decrees on a throne of tires wearing her beat-ass Cleveland Indians jersey like a cloak of ermine, all the Probably people at her feet like rose petals, and Fern flat-outadoredher. This was someone strong enough to keep her safe. Maybe she could even keep the dreams away. And King SuelikedFern. She didn’t try to bother her or take anything off her or flinch if Fern stood too close. Maybe a King wouldn’t ditch her. Maybe Fern finally had someone to teach her and hug her and set stuff on fire with her when she was sad.

The King took her down to the river to fish a week after she hit town. Fern talked like a little kid, a million different thoughts piled into each sentence. She told the King about Pennsylvania. She told her about the pages hidden in the houses. She told her about theschoolhouse dream… but not the other. It felt good and right and clean and lovely.

“Is that the junk in your bike trailer? Binders and notebooks and sacks of… loose reams, I guess?”

“Yeah,” Fern answered. Her shoulders tensed up, waiting to be told how stupid it was to lug that thing from Nowhere to Somewhere and back. But it didn’t come.

“I dunno… sometimes, you know… some people… some kinds of people… don’t want to die without saying some things. And I think they should get to. Because everyone should get to say what they meant by living before they stop doing it. So they write down whatever happened to them, whatever was important, whatever they thought they knew. And they leave it somewhere it won’t get wrecked, but not so hidden a person couldn’t find it someday. Me. Where I could find it. I… like them. I collect them. I learn from them. About what being alive used to be. About what I gotta do to pull it off now. I look for them and I take them with me.”

“Baby love, why? That’s weird. What does it matter what some housewife said about the end of the world? They all died. The end.”

Fern blushed. She didn’t even know she could blush before right then. “I dunno,” she mumbled. “I guess… they make me feel needed. They’re my… they’re my friends.”

Her Majesty shrugged and cast a line. “Hey, far be it from me to judge. I spent three years collecting tampons. Gotta make your own fun.”