Sixty-six million years after the top of the world, I click on buy
on an emergency go bag from Amazon. When it arrives, I’ll use my tooth
to tear open the plastic, unzip the pack stitched by women who seem like me
however for his or her N95s, half a judgment day away, no evacuation plan in sight.
Another episode of the current tense, and I can’t cease pondering
in regards to the timeline the place the asteroid misses, Earth dominated eternally
by the car-hearted and walnut-brained. Meanwhile, I’m merely gorging
on the butterfly results of ashes, ashes; reaching for the oat milk
whereas, a whole lot of toes beneath, a chalk line marks the second we had been all
doomed. We had been performed for. We had been science fiction earlier than science,
or fiction. One billion judgment days later, I’m alive and ashamed
of my purchases; I’m afraid of being afraid; I’m the world’s worst mom.
My sister calls, and it’s already too late for issues to be higher. Every mistake,
an asteroid that’s already hit, historical past already mushroomed into a million species
of unfit, their fossilized corpses already forming coastlines, austere workplaces.
This 12 months was a layer cake of disaster lengthy earlier than any of us might,
biologically talking, have been imagined. Human History, a entrance parlor
infinitely painted over with bloodbath, and into the fray got here I, extremely allergic,
fast to cry, and armed with fats fists of want. I broke every thing I touched.
I obtained good grades. I used to be instructed nothing was extra noble than to make sure
my youngsters would eat. I discovered to take a rooster aside with my fingers,
to fill in a Scantron, cry on cue. Sixty-six million years after the final
nice extinction, six to eight enterprise days earlier than the following one, I whispered
Speak to a fucking agent into the maintain music to set off the system into connecting
me with a “real person.” I averted coughing in public, although it was too late.
I utilized for a BIPOC farming intensive, although it was too late for the earth
to yield something however extra corpses. New species of horror sequence
had been already evolving: election bot; cluster bio-bomb; driverless spouse.
I muttered curses to maintain the deepfakes away, studied the celebrities for indicators
of the worlds to come back, although they had been already right here—the extinctions
and feudal lords, the soiled blankets, the dissidents tied to stakes or hung
from branches, the value gouge, dying camp, flood, bombs of liberty, bomb
and bomb and bomb already dropped, already having made me
from its mud, already damaged and paid for and straddling my crown.
What crown? If I’m king of something, it’s being late. Omw, I sort,
although I’m nonetheless huddled in final 12 months’s errors. Asteroid, Alexa corrects,
and I say, Five minutes. Just give me 5 minutes. I’ll be proper there.