Page 209 of The End of the World As We Know It

Fern Ramsey quietly slid Kimberley Lynn McKiver’s pages back into their Ziploc bag, then unzipped the Bullfrog’s orange vinyl bike trailer and lay it gently on top of the stack. Fern liked Mrs. McKiver. She liked the way she talked about things. About Lake Keowee and the whale and the elephant and the glassmaker. She liked how she could tell that lady was someone’s mother, with every word.

As Fern packed everything back where she found it (God knew why she bothered, but she always did), a sharp, shivery shock forked through her belly. There was more, down there under the manuscript. At the bottom of the swampy box. Something just for her.

Kimberley Lynn McKiver had left one last freezer bag, full to straining. A first-aid kit, blister packs full of -donesand -cillins, antiseptic wipes, water-purification tablets, a bottle of multivitamins, a crisp, folded map, and absurdly, endearingly, a couple of packets of gummy fruit snacks from some long-vanished lunch box.

Fern had snagged a fair number of these boxes, but none like this. The other boxes all said,Remember me. None said,I remembered you. None ever had a care for her, for whoever might come, whenever they might, what they might need to keep going.

Fern thought about that for a long time. About the McKivers’ peaceful bones in the upstairs bedroom dreaming the centuries down. About poor Barry burning wisdom. About Petteri’s father and his wing of flame. About the potato man treating his Yukons so tenderly. About King Sue on her throne and Tommy Fortunado’s last stand. About an old man trying so hard to change the color and the angle of light he’d never see. Of Grandfather Whale in his private hidden universe.

AboutNEEDandWANT.

Everyone gets a choice.

Out on the driveway, under the gold-blue virgin light of dawn, a crow lay crumpled and dead like a shadow.

Fern stood over it for a long time, with no expression on her face.

This Autumn

Two elephants named Layla and Sayang sway woozily in the soft, beanpod-crisp autumn light. The old corn they gorge on makes them veryunserious. They come up slowly over a rise in the long gray road and look out over the wild wrinkled plain of Missouri. Layla is so old now. Her knees hurt. And she is one of a long line of Laylas now; her son part of a chain of Sayangs.

She nudges her grown calf’s gaze. Look at the giraffes down there drinking from the thick river. Look at the caracals playing. Look at the lions snoozing under the silver arch. Hippo heads humping up out of the Mississippi.

So many. So many from so many corners and so many mating seasons since the small ones left us to roam back and forth across the cracks and stones of this continent. So many because others instinctively performed the same behaviors as Amir and Zara. The small ones were a kind of animal that did that, the way Layla trumpeted. Not all of them, oh no, certainly not. But a hefty chunk of the herd.

Some creatures got free in lucky places. Some got trapped in places that boiled under the sizzling silvery Great Elephant Bullfather’s foot that years ago came trampling down from the sky to trample the desert, to smash everything it did not burn.

Layla shuddered. Layla tries to forget the stories that have been passed down.

Layla can’t.

Layla tails the memory away like a blackfly. She bonks her head against her boy’s flank. Look long, my son. My Sayang. Breathe deep. You can still smell the horses and the dogs and hogs and mules that are long gone from this place. Their manure and their bones. The cows that got to be so many they ruined all the earth they devoured and stomped flat and then they were few enough again. You can still smell the long black broken tusks the small ones used on each other when they could not find food. You can still find them lying scattered across the new veldt like the skinny dark lines that once made the shape E N C L O S U R E.

But see rhinoceroses chomping sneezeweed in the valley. Hear the zebras thundering down there, galloping through peach orchards and soybean fields in their vast herds. The monkeys have gone, too, and more besides.But so many have taken their places. Beware the tigers in the foothills, uncowarded by our size.

Existence is a season, and soon enough done.

Layla stretches her hind legs, one, then the other. She nudges her baby, now larger than herself, toward a sturdy stick half-sunk in dark mud. Sayang curls his soft trunk around it, hesitantly, wanting with all his being to do everything right for Mama. She shows him how. She shows him the shape of the Otherwhile.

In the high-occupancy lane of Interstate 70 where Illinois becomes Missouri and winds on farther still, an elephant slowly paints a black flower exactly the way a dead woman in Cincinnati once did.

By the time Sayang finishes, there’s a small one standing next to them on the road. Wearing a shirt with shapes that sayTHE BOSSand pulling a big orange something behind her.

A few inches off the road, which isn’t how small ones are supposed to work. Layla doesn’t know what to make of her smell. Halfway between wild stink and tame.

With a very great effort, Fern Ramsey brings herself back down to earth. She stands with two feet on the ground. It hurts like a hundred thousand deaths. It hurts every single second. It will hurt every single second of her life.

But she stands.

Fern only dreams of the schoolhouse now. She strokes the schoolteacher’s white hair, and it seems to make the woman relax. The bell recedes. She thinks only dully. The pain of every millisecond’s conscious choosing hides her from the other place, from her father.

And when this long road through the plains reaches Colorado, Fern Ramsey will stay on the outskirts of the town. Just to be safe. Just to be sure. She will build a cabin with her hands. She will eat fish andapples. And she will stand a watch. She will look on them, smiling. She will watch them stumble, and struggle, and then she will watch them do okay. Sogorgeouslyokay.

Fern Ramsey will slip away in her sleep, safe and invisible, long before the wheel reaches its next zenith. No one special. No one worth noticing. Not even Fern. Maybe Fiona. Or Flora. Or Frances.

But today she is still Fern. She puts her hand, as light as forgetting, on a baby elephant’s back.

And nothing bad happens. The three of them walk on together. For a little while.