It's Not The End Of The World

(This was written for a high-school English class, circa 1998 - unaccountably, I'm still fond of it.)


     The day was hot and sunny, possibly due to global warming. Jane Palmer was in her back yard, reading a book and considering the laws of physics when her best friend, Lisa, came out. “Hullo, Lisa,” Jane said responsibly.

“Hello, Jane,” Lisa replied.

“Want a book?” asked Jane, pointing to a small pile of them on the grass beside her sun chair.

“No thanks.” She demurred.

“Sure? I’ve got Plato.” Jane dangled the small drab book tantalizingly, as though it were an enticement irresistible to any normal person.

Lisa considered. “Thanks anyway.”

“Suit yourself.” Jane went back to her book.

In the two minutes of silence that followed, one hundred eleven people all over the world died of causes natural and unnatural. However, one hundred eighteen were born. Jane read three pages in her book. Also, Lisa slapped a bug crawling on her leg.

Jane looked up. “Yes?”

“I slapped a bug.”

“Oh.” Another brief silence.

“Let’s go to the mall,” Lisa suggested hopefully.

“All right. It’s about time for me to check my experiment.” Jane marked her place carefully, set the book aside, and stood up. “I’ll get my materials and meet you out front.”

Lisa was already on her bike when Jane came out the front door armed with a clipboard and several notebooks. These she put in the wire basket attached to the back of her bike. She got on, and pedaled out into the street. Lisa followed.

The girls coasted down Macadamia Street into the warm afternoon breeze. The pavement was dappled with the shadows of the oak trees which stood on either side of the road. As they turned out onto Walnut Boulevard, a decrepit car full of teenaged boys sped past them. Someone threw a red thing out the window, and shouted something indecipherable which sounded like “midgets” over the roar of the unmuffled engine.

Jane stopped her bike and got off, leaning it against a nearby streetlight. She searched through the notebooks in her bike’s basket until she found the one she wanted and pulled it out. She wrote for a few moments, paused, and looked up. “Midgets,” she mused. “I don’t know whether to be glad that the youth of America are still capable of polysyllabic words or frightened that there are people out there with valid driver’s licenses who have absolutely no sense of depth perception.”

The rest of the ride to the mall was uneventful, but as they parked their bikes at the bike rack outside the mall’s main entrance, they were approached by a homeless man who asked them for change. Lisa quickly dug out a quarter and held it out at arm’s length. He took it with a grubby hand, thanked them ungraciously, and wandered off.

“You shouldn’t do that, Lisa,” Jane admonished. “In the long run, it’s better for the economy to spend the money on ourselves. Someday, the homeless people will thank us for not giving them money.”

They entered the mall through automatic sliding glass doors, stepping into a white and tile world where the recirculated air always smelled of consumerism and the taco franchise next to the toy shop. Neon signs flashed insistently, drawing the people laden with their shopping bags to the stores like insects to a blue bug light, cares and worries being obliterated not with a brief zap and flash of light, but with the sound of wallets being emptied and registers pinging.

The girls split up just inside the doors. Jane, carrying her notebooks in an olive-green knapsack, walked purposefully into Safeway, Lisa into Nordstrom's. They met up again at the mall’s food court, and ate lunch at one of the small formica tables.

“So, anyway,” Lisa said through a mouthful of Whopper, “I said to the clerk--” She broke off, swallowed with some difficulty, and stared at Jane. “Are you listening?”

Jane, engaged in what appeared to be rapt contemplation of a small unidentifiable morsel of food impaled on her beige plastic fork, looked up. “Huh?”

“I asked if you were listening. What’s that you have there anyway?”

“I don’t know, I got it from that small Thai food stand. I’m not sure, but I think I saw it move.”

Lisa sighed in exasperation. “Why do you do things like this? Why can’t you just eat something normal like a hamburger?”

“But, Lisa,” Jane explained earnestly, “just think how wonderful it is to have the opportunity to try the food of another culture. Why, a hundred years ago, only the people in Thailand knew that their food was inedible! Now, people all across the globe are coming to the same conclusion!” She gesticulated excitedly, causing the bit of food to fly off the fork and hurtle through the air. It landed, skidded and bounced its way to the middle of an aisle where it sat conspicuously, accusingly.

“Jane, you’re making a scene,” hissed Lisa.

“Sorry,” Jane replied, unchastened. “Can I have some of your burger?”

After lunch, they sat on a bench in the mall courtyard and compared purchases, next to the fountain which shot water up in long arcing streams, where it sparkled momentarily before it was overcome by gravity and fell back to earth.

Lisa, from her Nordstrom’s bag, pulled a pair of jeans and a small black ribbed tank top. “Aren’t these great? They were on sale, and I just couldn’t resist, even though I knew I should be saving the money to have my room redone. So, what did you buy?”

Jane smiled a secretive smile, brought out the flimsy white plastic bag, and extracted a bag of 48 hair curlers (extra large), two blank audio cassettes (90 minutes each), a new notebook (double spiral bound), and seven packs of assorted chewing gum, which she arranged ceremoniously in a sunburst formation. Finished, she sat back, and waited expectantly for Lisa’s response.

A few moments of silence passed, then Lisa said “All right, I give. What’s it all for?”

“The coming apocalypse.” Jane said serenely, her voice ringing with the conviction that can only be managed by the truly deranged. “You see, all my research indicates that we are nearing a time of great change.” She opened one of her notebooks, thumbing through the pages rapidly. “If you take all these minor events together, they show a rapid degeneration in the modern social structure, which is not exterior, but interior. It’s rotting away from the inside. There is evidence of this all around us, if you merely look for it. Take for example, Jerry Springer... Or Mariah Carey. And not two weeks ago, in a recent public broadcast, Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, wore a yellow tie. Yellow. You know what that means, don’t you?” She paused for a moment to catch her breath, then proceeded in a hushed, conspiratorial tone. “Of course, this could all be circumstantial. I wasn’t totally sure about any of it, until earlier this afternoon, when those teenaged boys yelled at us. Now, all I need is access to the University’s supercomputer to tie it all together and determine when exactly it will happen.”

Lisa shook her head sadly. “I’m afraid I just don’t see it, Jane.”

“That’s all right Lisa. The gift of foresight is often--” Jane broke off. “Did you hear something?”

Lisa cocked her head, listened intently. “No, I don’t think so.”

“I could have sworn that there was something...” She stopped again as the sky was illuminated with a brilliant white flash of light, like the shutter of some cosmic Nikon. In that moment, the entire world was reduced to the contrast of black against white. The water of the fountain shone unbearably bright for a fraction of an instant, then vaporized. A brief eternity of silence, then a growing subsonic rumble, which rushed from the distance like an approaching express train, shaking the foundations of the mall building, the whole world shuddering violently, tiles falling and floors upheaving.

As quickly as it had come, it was gone. The flash. The quake. The girls sat in the shattered mall courtyard, beside the dry fountain and brown wilted plants, under the graying, red-tainted sky. A hot suppressing breeze blew from somewhere and in the utter stillness, the mushroom cloud peeped up over the top of the mall building, demented and gleeful, as if exclaiming “Found you!”

“Well, I don’t suppose these will be necessary any longer,” said Jane quietly, gathering up her notebooks and dropping them into a battered gray garbage can, where they landed with a hollow bang among the fast food boxes and discarded papers. “Come on, we’ll get our bikes and leave.”

Inside, neon lights dangled in doorways, flickering spasmodically. The racks of merchandise in the shops were overturned, commodities strewn over the buckled floors. The ceiling had fallen in some places, and weak shafts of unhealthy light pierced the dimness, illuminating rubble on the ground, purposeless spotlights. They exited through the sliding doors which no longer slid, stepping carefully through the broken panes, which still had shards of glass stuck in the putty. Standing outside on the cracked sidewalk, Jane paused and surveyed the landscape. “It’s funny,” she ruminated, “I always thought a nuclear war would be, well... Bigger.”

When they reached the bike rack, all that remained of their bikes were almost indistinguishable tangles of charred metal dripping puddles of gooey rubber from the melted tires, from which protruded here and there a spoke or piece of twisted wheel.

“I should have guessed this would happen.” Jane shook her head. “Damn those spiteful homeless people. This is what happens when you give money to them!” She bent over to lace her shoes, and continued speaking. “I don’t suppose we’ll ever know what caused it all, will we? And with all this time on our hands, I suppose we should figure out what to do.”

“Jane, look there,” Lisa whispered, tapping her friend’s shoulder.

Jane straightened up and followed Lisa’s pointing finger, to the corner of 3rd and Whistler, 2 blocks down, where a shining white tour bus was rounding the corner and traveling towards them. They watched in silence as it coasted down the street, pulling to a solemn stop in front of them, brakes hissing. The doors opened with a rush of air. The driver, an elderly man with a white mustache and glasses, called to them “Get on in, and don’t worry about exact change; We’ve had exactly enough change as it is for one day.”

“Where are you going?” Lisa asked.

“Oh, all over the place!” He cried. “New York, Alaska, England, China! Just about everywhere!” He laughed happily and tooted the bus horn.

Jane and Lisa looked at each other, then back at the bus, which sat idling at the curb. It seemed somehow more present than the rest of the world, brighter and more three-dimensional. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve always wanted to tour the world.” Jane said. “And it’s not really like we have anything better to do, is it?”

“No, I suppose not,” agreed Lisa dubiously, following Jane up the bus stairs. The driver tipped his blue and gold old-time uniform cap at them, closed the doors, and they set off into the world.