Maya Woke up Late for the End of the World
When the asteroid hits that island of plastic we tossed in the Atlantic ocean will no longer matter. The recycling we do to save the planet. Green bin. Blue bin. Brown bin. It’d all be wasted.
A SHORT STORY
You know the feeling. You wake up with sunlight peeking from the blind and you wonder if you’re late for work. Keep snoozing and you end up missing your dentist appointment. Your manicure session. The world spinning half an hour too long and you there, with a drooling mess edging on your pillow.
Sometimes you count up. Sometimes you only need to count down.
Twelve minutes.
I woke up with a banging coming from upstairs and someone knocking at my door.
At the door, a motorbike helmet. A blue suit hanging loose choked up in a yellow tie. Eyes hidden behind a matt black shield reflecting my face. He could be a burglar. A mannequin. The helmet says, “Did I wake you up?”
Water’s running in the hall from the flats upstairs. People rushed away leaving their front doors open and running taps overflowing sinks. Unfleshed toilets and TVs left on with nothing to watch anymore.
The last broadcast said whatever God people believe in, he probably won’t do his magic this time. An asteroid as big as the moon would hit soon. They said do your prayers and forget about your unpaid bills. Then millions of black and white dots were flickering on the screen and a countdown appeared.
Eleven minutes.
A man’s screaming outside. He says the end is near and he’s available for sex. At my door, the helmet ducks his neck and the shield reflects my blue pedicure with my toes sunk in the carpet. My legs look distorted and ginormous. Back to my face, the helmet says, “This is for protection.” He taps his knuckles on the shell and says, “From the blast.”
Inside the helmet’s Ivor. He usually wanders around with yellow crocs and white socks tingling inside. Like a patient without a hospital. The suit and the tie he’s wearing now, he’s trying to make an effort for the big ending. Blowing up in fashion.
Ten minutes.
Ivor shuffles his feet in my kitchen and his head slams on the cupboard. He lands both hands on his helmet and says, “How could you still be asleep?”
When the asteroid hits that island of plastic we tossed in the Atlantic ocean will no longer matter. The recycling we do to save the planet. Green bin. Blue bin. Brown bin. It’d all be wasted.
To Ivor, I say, how could you not sleep?
All those vegan diets you’ve been on for years, they will all have been for nothing. All those cows farting carbon dioxide. They will win.
Then Ivor’s sitting at the table, the helmet still on. He lifts the shield and wipes his face with four fingers. His cheeks are covered in stripes of cream. Rugby-player style. Motivational make-up. He says, “The sunscreen is for protection from the radiations.”
Tell everyone the end is near and all those folks will show you their real selves.
Gina pictured herself dying with pleasure. Just before everything’s reduced to a mushroom of smoke. The bang, bang, banging from upstairs, that’s her sex party still going on. She asked if I was interested.
The last thing you want to do is to be hit by an asteroid with an STD. A thousand years from now aliens with seven toes and three eyes, they’ll find what’s left of your body and question your contraception approach. They’ll point at your gonorrhoea. Those crabs you caught. Syphilis. Chlamydia. Or worst, you could die pregnant.
No thanks.
Nine minutes.
Outside a circle of people’s holding hands. They’re praying. They say, “This is our last day on earth.” They shout, “You must be born again. Salvation is for everyone.”
Ivor drums his fingers on the table and says, “In case I survive and you don’t” — he leans forward and my face on the shield turns watermelon big — “I won’t hold your hand while you’re all dead and covered in blood. So you know.”
The point of the impact shouldn’t be far from here. Teenagers and families drove all the way there. Pitching a tent and getting stoned. Waiting to get killed with the impact.
This is like a war movie. Only this is for real and there’s just one single bullet the size of a planet. Granddad always said that the secret to surviving in the trenches was to think of yourself already dead. He said, “The fear of dying kills you way before you get shot.”
Outside, cars are left on the street with engines still on, stacked up in an endless queue. There are no ambulances anymore. Get a heart attack, a stroke, and you’re ahead of the game.
Think of yourself as already dead, my granddad said, and you become fearless.
He was at the front long enough for Grandma to give birth and stop breastfeeding. Then one day at the front they were playing cards, just to kill time before someone killed them. And one of his friends shot him on one hand. It was an accident. Paul Carnie was a good laugh but terrible at holding a rifle. Grandad had to eat soup with a spoon between his thumb and pinky until he died. Paul Carnie felt so guilty that he paid off his remorse letting me stay in one of his apartments for free. This flat I live in, I pay my rent with morning teas with his wife. Widowed Mrs Carnie pops in every day with a new reincarnation of her husband. Poor Paul’s been a teapot. A chandelier. A pillow.
Mrs Carnie living with the dead and waiting for her turn to pass away.
Seven minutes.
All the shop’s windows outside turned into broken spiderwebs leaving a carpet of glass for everyone to parade on. All those grocery stores, hairdressers and vaping shops. No one will need any of them anymore.
Ivor asks if there’s anything I regret. And he says it rocking on the chair so much he’s giving me seasickness.
Then there’s the jiggling of a thousand cat’s necklaces in front of my door. The ding-dinging is Mrs Carnie shuffling her feet in slow motion with a giant bunch of keys dangling on her hip. When the jiggling stops and a voice yells, “Maya. Open up, I’ve no hands.”
What Mrs Carnie is holding is a plant. This is what her husband turned into, today. Her face peering between the leaves, Mrs Carnie takes a big sniff and says, “It’s an acacia.” She says it’s like her Paul, only it snores less and smells better.
One of the several upsides of reincarnation.
Outside a security alarm is squealing deafening everyone. Winking flashes of red inside my kitchen. A herd of zebras is galloping between cars. A family of elephants is stepping on trash and plastic bags. Someone opened the cages at the zoo.
The giant acacia spurts yellow buds all over the floor and Mrs Carnie glances at the helmet with Ivor inside and says, “Are you dating a rapist or just a delivery guy?”
Outside the window the world is getting ready to die and Ivor sneezes. His head snaps forward and he says, “What plant is that again?”
The clouds and the sky gets darker. A shadow casting on everyone’s cirrhoses and bone cancer. A queue of penguins is waddling away, direction nowhere. Monkeys are ripping off car side mirrors and climbing on lampposts.
Five minutes.
Mrs Carnie says that this will be everyone’s fresh start. And she keeps caressing the reincarnation of her husband, brushing it against her lips and says, “No more pain to suffer. Isn’t it, Paul?”
Ivor lifts his shield and he must be having an allergic reaction because his face is all sweaty and swollen. With his lips turning purple, to me, he says, “Is she talking to the plant?”
I tell Ivor that the acacia is Mrs Carnie’s dead husband. Ivor sneezes again, drops his chair back and his helmet slams on the table.
And Mrs Carnie says, “I found him dead. Surrounded by porn magazines. God bless his soul.” Ivor clears his throat inside the helmet and Mrs Carnie says, “Now you can find all that sort of things on the internet.”
Four minutes.
Then it’s night in broad daylight. The sun eclipse you don’t expect. Once the asteroid enters the atmosphere it will catch fire like a giant burnt marshmallow.
Mrs Carnie, “Some people are dead longtime before they die.” And Ivor says, “Has anyone talked to any explosion survivors?” He says, “Is it painful? Like waxing or something?”
I tell Mrs Carnie that she’ll finally meet Paul again. And a monkey jumps in from the window. Ivor springs up from his chair and yells, “Get out of here.”
With her face inside the acacia, Mrs Carnie says, “Paul was hiding.” She says that after he came back from the front he couldn’t sleep. She says, “He had one of those thing doctors call with long words ending with ‘phobia’ no one can ever pronounce.”
The monkey jumps on Ivor’s lap, arms around his helmet. And Ivor holds her baby-style and says, “Look, she thinks I’m her mama.”
On the street, a man’s shouting to save all women and children. And a woman tells him to go to hell. Mrs Carnie says, “Paul liked this building for the hidden room downstairs.” Her eyes on me while Ivor’s playing with the monkey forgetting about our death. Mrs Carnie says, “Not even rats could sneak in there. He felt safe.”
Three minutes.
I say, he was hiding porn magazines in a basement?
Mrs Carnie shrugs. She pinches a leaf with two fingers and says, “He called it ‘his cave’.”
And Ivor opens his shield. All eyes rooted with blood and steaming sweat, he says, “Do you mean a bunker?”
Mr Carnie the batman. Sinking with his iceberg of feeling back from the war. Hiding away from everyone.
Then Ivor stands up. The monkey still hugging his neck and from inside the helmet, he says, “What are we waiting for?”
I say, what?
And Ivor says, “A bunker. I really don’t want to die.”
Mrs Carnie says, “Oh sweetheart. The end comes when it comes. It’s alright.”
The monkey on his neck, Ivor grabs the plant and presses it on my chest and says, “You take this.”
Two minutes.
And we’re all walking down the stairs. All the way to the basement. Mrs Carnie in front of us. I’m holding the plant and Ivor keeps sneezing holding the monkey.
The corridors stairs flooded. All those doors left ajar. The open museum our next lives. Our Chernobyl for the next generations of tourists to visit.
Mrs Carnie’s limping all her way down the stairs, holding the handrail with one hand. Ivor says, “I don’t want to be rude, but could you walk a bit faster?”
I’m only wondering if there’s a toilet in the bunker.
Mrs Carnie stops. She turns her head back at us and says, “What, love?”
One minute.
The monkey jumps on Ivor’s shoulders, clutching his helmet. Screaming in fear. There are voices of people coming from everywhere. They say, sixty. Fifty-nine.
This is the New Year’s Eve of the end of our lives. The beginning of our death. No more bad movies or TV presenters to complain about.
We reach a giant metal door at the bottom of the stairs and Mrs Carnie grabs her bunch of keys and says, “Now.” Checking the keys one at a time, she says, “Which one is the right one?”
And Ivor says, “Oh God.”
Outside people are counting. Forty-eight. Forty-seven.
The bunker in front of us. Our Noah’s ark. Our ship of salvation.
The monkey sneaks inside Ivor’s suit, jerking his yellow tie.
Mrs Carnie looking through her million keys.
The atrocity of war, my grandpa said, the problem is always for those who survive.
Outside the crowd is singing. Shouting.
Twenty-one. Twenty.
There’s a roaring. Like a plane taking off. The asteroid entering the atmosphere.
You can hear people sobbing. Crying for the moments they never lived, washing all their regrets away.
Mrs Carnie says, “Maybe it’s the blue one.”
Ivor says, “Seriously?” And he’s jumping on his toes, the way you wait for your turn at the bathroom.
Sixteen. Fifteen.
Someone’s whining. Shrilling. A scream echoing in the flight of stairs.
Eleven. Ten.
I smell the acacia on my hand. The smell of Paul Carnie.
You can dodge death only a handful of times.
Nine. Eight. Seven
Grandad said that the problem with memories is that you never remember them the way they are.
The crowd outside shouts, seven. six.
Five.
Your sad memories become nightmares you can’t get out of your head.
A kid is crying somewhere. On the street. Behind a wall.
Four.
Grandad said that what’s worst than dying is dying alone.
Ivor says, “C’mon.”
Mrs Carnie grabs a key and sticks in the door-lock.
Four.
Grandad said that when death sits next to you, only wish you have a window seat to look outside.
Mrs Carnie says, “Maybe this is the one.”
Three. Tw —