Micah Cash

Inside

Excerpt

We stopped at a church. It stood in the back of a grassy, gravelly rectangle that had once been a parking lot. Two picket signs on the edge of the highway nearby: Jesus is King! and Souvenirs! 5 Miles! 

O

April pointed at the desecrated house of worship. It was quite old but still white, with a thin blue triangle roof and an unassuming door. Haunting, she said, as she snapped a photo on her film camera.

O

Admittedly I was a bit jealous of the apocalypse, its ability to hold attention. Only widespread fear and misery are potent enough to fill talk shows, betting markets, exurban cemeteries, galleries, and the ramblings of insomniacs. Let us return, then, as we do in times of grief, for the sake of pleasure but mostly for the need for relief, to art. Said the cult leader.

O

Every year, she said, I look at the calendar and think, these numbers are too high. Or maybe too low. They’re just off, somehow. They belong in the prologue of a bad science fiction. That cell on a spreadsheet where your cursor accidentally scrolled. What did we expect, giving a year such a ridiculous name?

O

We watched sports documentaries, histories of famous people’s forgotten relatives, adult cartoons. We dirtied things and then cleaned them. Movement was our plan for salvation. 

O

When I met April, it was blue hour and she was crouching on a beached tree stump, reading the waves like a foreign language. That was the third week of the disasters, or maybe the sixth. I wasn’t a local, that much was clear from my white sneakers. Although, my hotel had stopped turning the room. 

O

Whatever seemed utterly impossible was, as a rule, actually happening. Like playing a card game and being dealt one joker after another, cards meant to be removed beforehand, set aside from the rest of the deck as a matter of procedure.

O

We drove and drove. April smoked nervously in the passenger seat and told me about her parents. Her mother had been a contented housewife until, just after her fortieth birthday, a stalker began following her as she drove around to her various appointments. The man’s face, which appeared in the rearview mirror, at the hair salon, and in the pickup line at April’s middle school, was rough like a topographical map. One day, the face appeared next to the bushes outside their living room window, but this time the body attached to it was holding a knife. Her mother called the police, testified for hours in a dark room at the police station, and sent him to prison. 

O

“Daddy” suffered from a still undetermined neurological degeneration. Last she saw him, he was barely speaking but still able to understand, vaguely, what was happening around him. Near the onset of his disease, he had lost the bulk of their savings in a phishing scam. After that he put his computer in a drawer and locked it for good. In a certain way it was nice, she said, that his brain could no longer keep up with the pace of the world, because unlike most people who felt the same way, he had a concrete excuse. 

O

The collapse was evident, but not overwhelming. Biochemical abnormalities, crypto-nuclear attacks, loose pathogens, sociohistorical cycles, Christian-named storms. Reaping, sowing. Nevertheless, people took convincing. There was chaos out there, but it hadn’t shown up on their doorsteps and rapped its knuckles.

O

Certain personalities were more adaptable than others. Those with drastic, conspiratorial tendencies were among the first to go. All paddle, no creek. The survivors had dispositions suited to the situation. Above all, a taste for loneliness.

O

In school, I studied philosophy. Descartes, Hume, Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell. I admired their irrational confidence. I knew, already, how different I was from two, four, six years before. Still, I couldn’t imagine morphing into a different version of myself down the road. Now I find those dead solipsists awfully embarrassing. My new drug is speculative fiction. Sentences poignantly nagging, as if their authors had peeled back my scalp and scribbled notes on the underside. 

O

Since the world is ending / why not let the children touch the paintings?

O

In bed, her skin was icy and refreshing. That feels good, we kept saying, and we yearned to feel good, to keep feeling it. I dreamt of a large pond in the middle of an enormous field. The grass caught fire in a ring around the edges, advancing inward. I saw the circle close, long-legged animals run and jump in the water, blades of wheat char and vaporize. When the flames reached the pond, I was eager to know which would consume the other, but in the end the water turned black and the fire disappeared, and I woke up.

O

The apocalyptic genre is obsessed with images of emptiness: vacant shopping malls, abandoned roadways, decaying airport terminals. Without people to fill them, spaces acquire a liminal tendency. In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street. The critic in me still thinks that apocalypse is a fairly cheap conceit, a trapdoor to uncertainty.

O

Some people find comfort in it, I said, staring at the church. Familiarity. It’s only eerie because of what we think it stands for. I think even an alien would find everything about this place creepy, she said. And a little sad.

O

I suppose there was a deeper disagreement, about the sorry state of the world as merely something of interest rather than some visceral misfortune. The church was depressing, but depressing in an interesting way, like a novelistic detail, and for me, this made it at least neutral. Later, April developed the picture herself using some old chemicals and placed it on the breakfast nook where she knew I would see it. She was right.

O

My favorite authors seemed to believe that the downfall of civilization would be dominated, thematically, by melancholy. But now that it was really happening, the feeling was different. Malaise was too basic, too obviously negative. I felt good, then bad for feeling good, then good for feeling bad for feeling good, then plain bad, then bad for feeling bad when I really felt good, then all of it at once.

O

The End begins before you are ever aware of it. It passes as ordinary.

O

Sleep came in enormous, indulgent quantities, or else not at all. I’d been relegated to a passive observer, able only to comment on the days’ formal features. Nonlinear narrative, temporal drift, an overarching dreamlike tonality.

O

April and I were so near to each other and so far from everyone else. She would shift irritably on the couch, sneaking furtive glances, before announcing she was leaving.

O

I’m so sorry, I would say if I spilled coffee on the rug. Don’t say sorry, she’d say, I want you here. But given my position, I felt like I owed an apology to the whole world, every morning when I woke up, like a psalm. 

About the Author

Micah Cash is a Fiction student. He has published nonfiction in the Village Voice and the Drift, fiction in the Drunken Canal, and was a finalist for the Prose Online International Flash Prize. Micah is from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and currently lives in South Harlem.