Page 207 of The End of the World As We Know It

No creature living there ever guesses the whale is not the world.

No creature living in a cornucopia is capable of imagining the horn might one day lie empty.

The cold-jellied sea keeps Grandfather fresh for a long time. For two hundred years, the whalefall will be enough to sustain this little civilization. But nothing stays easy forever.

Everything expires.

Food isn’t a problem until it’s the only problem. The decadent bloat of modernity’s corpse had enough Twinkies, beef jerky, and canned soup for all.

Until it didn’t.

In the beginning, in the Age of Miracles, just the right people seemed to find their way to just the right places at just the right time, and, well, a fair whack of farmers was never much for social interaction before, either. They took longer to get infected, longer to die. Some fields got planted right quick, but most people were happy as horses to drink deep of the corpses ofbig-box grocery and department stores, gas station snack racks, bodegas and baked bean cannery floors, suburban developments with deep pantries.

But time ate there, too.

After a decade, the pickings are both slim and risky. Salmonella, listeria, trichinosis, the boys are all in town. This new wave of death stings deep. They were supposed to have made it. They were supposed to be home free.

It’s a bad winter. They’re all bad winters for a while. The whale is gone.

But the sea remains.

They learn again, but slowly. No one knows everything, but everyone knows something. And they learn first how much sheertimeit took to stay alive before the beneficence of Our Lady of Slim Jims. The cruel equation of how many calories it costs to acquire calories. Seeding, planting, growing, harvesting, canning, drying, preserving. Catching wild chickens for eggs. Figuring out where the mackerel gather and when it’s safe to dig for clams. Convincing a cow that this time you’re only going to steal milk from her baby, not steal from her baby and shoot her in the head with a bolt gun. It all takes time. And calories no one has to spare.

Everything expires. Even the Age of Miracles. Any given clutch of folk no longer invariably has a lucky skill-spread. Tornadoes and hurricanes spin up again. Droughts, floods, dead topsoil. And so many people try to make a go of it in places they’d always loved, chosen for sentiment, not for the longest growing seasons or the most fertile soil.

If a hand had briefly reached out to put things where they belonged, it had clearly pulled back again, as it always had, after a great flood or a great fire from heaven.

Grandfather Whale gave himself to sustain the deep. But the whale could not stay forever.

Fern Ramsey saw to her King before herself. She buried Sue on a rise overlooking the river where they fished and talked about mutation. It was all she could think of. They hadn’t had long enough to makemany memories, and the others were already starting to tremble and squabble and disperse.

The hunt would come. The sharing of her pain with that girl in the woolly yellow socks. There was so much time. She was getting stronger, she could feel it. She could think sharp enough to pull anything she wanted to her.

But her arms and shoulders burned so bad when it was done Fern just sat down on the river moss and cried. She couldn’t even feel that red-ponytail girl anymore, and the cold thing in her that wanted to make that girl scream loud enough to drown out her own hollering didn’t seem to care for manual labor. It was quiet, for now.

So quiet that the warm red sun and the finches in the trees and the soft meadow green under her cheek made her forget to run from sleep.

Fern doesn’t dream of the schoolhouse this time. She doesn’t dream of the empty black and red plain under the yellow sky.

Fern dreams of falling. Falling from such a great height. Falling forever through night and glass and gravity. She twists around in midair and sees another woman falling beneath her, before her, white fabric billowing around her great belly, long white hair billowing around her face. The woman is so beautiful. So beautiful and so sad. It stops Fern’s heart how beautiful the woman really is.

A misshapen hand presses nauseatingly up out of the woman’s swollen pregnant belly. She’s so far along. Ready to pop. The shape of the hand stretching her skin seems to reach for Fern. For someone. For life.

Then they all obliterate into the ground and Fern stands alone in an endless boiling land with only great black round stones to keep her company.

The handsome man isn’t there. The handsome man isn’t there and those aren’t stones. Fern runs her hand along one. She never thought to look at them before. Preoccupied, she supposed.

They’re haystacks. Black, gargantuan, harvested, rolled and bound.

A crow pecks the germ from the stalk. A crow out of nowhere.

“You’ve been busy,” it caws.

“Are you him?” Fern asks, trembling.

The bird chortles to itself. “Fuck, no. He’s occupado. He’s got a lot of work to do and you’re not helping with your little stunts. Maybe you shouldn’t play with the other children, Ferny. They seem to get upset.”

“Do you… work for him?”