fiction: cold pluto
- T.S. Elliot
It all ends quietly and a little faster than I expected. We didn’t know each other yet; I don’t know how it went down for you, you don’t really talk about it much. But I watched the news with my dog Ziggy sitting by me on the couch, his head in my lap while I feed him cheese-nips. It started with some sick people in Nebraska. One town quarantined, and then another, and then five. Soon the state was cut off. People at work talked about disease; Cholera and swine flu, anthrax. The plague. It scared me, but I laugh and speculate wit everyone else and silently sipped my tea. At home is when I watched the news and started to make a back-up plan.
My father thinks I’m being silly, paranoid. “You’re going to worry yourself into anemia, sugar,” he says, with his thick southern drawl. I’ve been calling him every night since the news radio gave a report about a hospital in Nashville having to shut down. Reports of people pouring into hospitals like bees to a hive.
“But, Daddy,” I answer, pacing around the kitchen, unloading the groceries. I’m not the only person getting scared.
The grocery store is only a ten minute drive, but it took me forty, traffic backed up to my street. At the store was worse. People shoving and screaming, elbows in faces, people fighting over clothes and medicine. I headed for the canned goods and pasta, meals in boxes. Stuff that would last for years, things that could be boiled on the stove, even without electricity. I forwent the fresh stuff, not that there was much of that left anyway. I skipped the bread too. Anything that was going to spoil. I grabbed a bag of rice and candy bars.
Ziggy looks at me with an odd disdain as I poor him some dry dog food instead of canned. I’m saving that.
“People are just overreacting, Liv. Please don’t get caught up in all the hullabaloo.”
But how can I not?
“I know,” I answer. I lock the front and back door. Ziggy concedes to the kibble.
“Do you want to come home, sugar?”
The thought has crossed my mind, but after today I don’t know if I want to be outside on the roads and Daddy lives over a hundred miles away. “No, Daddy, you’re right.” He tells me he loves me and I do the same.
That night with Ziggy, I watch game shows and try to solve the puzzles. Afterwards, the news has reports of the flu in my state a few counties south.
No one thinks it’s the end until finally it is.
It all ends quietly and a little faster than I expected. We didn’t know each other yet; I don’t know how it went down for you, you don’t really talk about it much. But I watched the news with my dog Ziggy sitting by me on the couch, his head in my lap while I feed him cheese-nips. It started with some sick people in Nebraska. One town quarantined, and then another, and then five. Soon the state was cut off. People at work talked about disease; Cholera and swine flu, anthrax. The plague. It scared me, but I laugh and speculate wit everyone else and silently sipped my tea. At home is when I watched the news and started to make a back-up plan.
My father thinks I’m being silly, paranoid. “You’re going to worry yourself into anemia, sugar,” he says, with his thick southern drawl. I’ve been calling him every night since the news radio gave a report about a hospital in Nashville having to shut down. Reports of people pouring into hospitals like bees to a hive.
“But, Daddy,” I answer, pacing around the kitchen, unloading the groceries. I’m not the only person getting scared.
The grocery store is only a ten minute drive, but it took me forty, traffic backed up to my street. At the store was worse. People shoving and screaming, elbows in faces, people fighting over clothes and medicine. I headed for the canned goods and pasta, meals in boxes. Stuff that would last for years, things that could be boiled on the stove, even without electricity. I forwent the fresh stuff, not that there was much of that left anyway. I skipped the bread too. Anything that was going to spoil. I grabbed a bag of rice and candy bars.
Ziggy looks at me with an odd disdain as I poor him some dry dog food instead of canned. I’m saving that.
“People are just overreacting, Liv. Please don’t get caught up in all the hullabaloo.”
But how can I not?
“I know,” I answer. I lock the front and back door. Ziggy concedes to the kibble.
“Do you want to come home, sugar?”
The thought has crossed my mind, but after today I don’t know if I want to be outside on the roads and Daddy lives over a hundred miles away. “No, Daddy, you’re right.” He tells me he loves me and I do the same.
That night with Ziggy, I watch game shows and try to solve the puzzles. Afterwards, the news has reports of the flu in my state a few counties south.
No one thinks it’s the end until finally it is.