“I’m afraid it’s chronic,” the doctor had told me.
“So how long will I be sick?” I asked. “How long will I feel like
this?”
“I don’t think you’re listening,” he said. “It’s
chronic. There is no cure. It’s not even strictly a disease—just the
symptoms.”
Two months later, I was at the zoo. In the interval, I had been moping around the
house, watching PBS specials on apocalypse. There were so many ways humans could
die: plague, lack of clean water, war. It was a miracle we’d survived
this long. They showed footage of A-bomb testing in Nevada. In one photograph, soldiers
watched a bomb test from a couch in the middle of the desert. They wore protective
goggles and their hair blew back over their heads. They looked like they were watching
a very realistic 3-D movie.
At the zoo, I stood at the seal cage. The seals had always been my favorite—so
slippery and playful, like dogs in Spandex. One seal pup in particular seemed happy
to see me. He swam over to the rail where I stood and wrinkled his whiskery nose
in greeting. Were seals dangerous? I reached down to touch him anyway. The sky went
a bright, chemical pink and the dozens of little children gathered around the seal
cage were pointing at me, saying something important that I couldn’t quite
understand. Then the world got lower and darker.
“You will not die,” the doctor was saying. “But you will be alone
with your knowledge for the rest of your life. You will try to tell people about
the coming horror but they will not listen. That is your curse.”
“Somebody call an ambulance,” a voice above me said, distant and cold
as the sky.
lives in Greensboro, North Carolina. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared
in Blue Mesa Review, Coe Review, and The Surreal South ’09
anthology, among others. He is an editor at Mayday Magazine and New
American Press. He is at work on a novel, Joshua City—a
post-apocalyptic, Brechtian, sci-fi monstrosity replete with lepers, revolutionaries,
and Siamese triplets who can see the future—with coauthor Okla Elliott.