centralia

“Will you ever forgive me?” she whispered. But Robin couldn’t answer, because she couldn’t tell which one of them had asked.

---

Life’s pedantry died on the cross. On a balmy July afternoon: dinner dates, soccer games, paper routes, ticket stubs, receipt drawers, 5-year-plans, veterinarian records, family recipes, term papers, lottery scratch offs, dentist appointments, Pap smears, corporate reimbursement requests, letters of recommendation, grandparents in urns, video game achievements, ice cream cakes, and many other comforting notions of time and legacy were suddenly and brutally put to death.

She imagines when the news broadcast that final collapse of order, everyone collectively gazed out their windows for that last longing glimpse of reality known, calm and frozen as prey animals – even the tigers, even the foxes. She imagines in retrospect, floating dreamily by the rattling vent as her physical body below eventually defrosts and screams at the kids to get to the fucking garage. Lucas has his Gameboy, Annie has the cat. She’s calling Michael over and over until she hits the sixth voicemail as their hot breath collects nervous as dewdrops in the air, shimmering with heat. Hands poised on the hot metal of the car doors, and they all know at once there is nowhere to go. This ruined world is everything, and everywhere around them.

Floating Robin watches the rest from the red pleather movie seat of her mind: the highway asphalt cracks beneath an angry sun, a sinkhole swallows the middle-age minivan, and she alone crawls from the pit like the grotesque antihero of a Bosch painting, smoking with hellfire.

---

Her memory is a dark cave she can’t stare at for too long or she’ll hallucinate little baby-footed demons laughing and packing lunches in the corners.

She wanted even the skin that scared her, Miami baby body in Prada glasses, beach towel from Macy’s, sand dirty and gleaming, hurtful to the touch. Fantasizing about the lines at the mall, credit card debt, that time she fractured her ankle attempting Youtube cardio – not the Disneyland vacation, because she could not bear to look directly at it. Rather the items that structured it, the space around the form gentle in its mundanity. Vicodin for flight anxiety, dropping her phone in the bath after anniversary wine, asking the internet if she needed to tip her catsitter. Floating Robin dreams and dreams these boring visions while physical Robin walks blankly through the smoking wastescape of North Carolina as if there was a traversable end to this terrible movie, as if she could get there without having to watch it.

The woman on the beach leans against Robin’s side out of nowhere. Floating Robin is shocked back into physical Robin’s form at the touch of another human after days of bloody-footed, blank-eyed migration.

“Hi,” the woman says, kicking waves of grit against Robin’s exposed ankles. “Fancy a fancy Italian bullshit seltzer?” Presses a half-dented, fully lukewarm golden can against Robin’s brow, as if it was imaginatively refreshing. Robin does not know where this strangely upbeat creature magicked such an item from. Buildings are still smoking. Nevertheless, she takes the can and flips the tab, jumping at the pop like a gunshot in the big silence of an empty tourist beach.

Buoyant lemonade fizzing under their smiles, yellow peel acid ruin mouth. The soda is piss warm but so are the tears that bristle as a scent memory of an art museum cafeteria hits her tongue, chaperoning a ninth grade New York field trip, and a sandwich is eleven dollars. She starts walking again without thanking the woman until sand from another set of feet starts breaking in rude waves against her ankles again.

“What are you doing?”

“Oh, you know,” the woman grins, teeth showing. “Walking with you, as the saying goes.”

---

She says her name is Mo. She is penny shiny and keeps her wild curls at bay with a sweaty bandana. She doesn’t have anything more than Robin, except survival skills and the unfathomable desire to practice them. Also a tube of lipstick: perfect for her own dark skin but tragically gothic against Robin’s pale sunburn – Mo applies it liberally on Robin’s mouth, anyway, until their smiles finally match.

With sticky lipstick, Robin unsticks a little from the chalk outline she’d drawn around her own body.

“I wish I had taken something, something to remember their faces.” She pinches at her wedding ring, abruptly enraged such a useless rock was her only memento of a lifetime of moments, plans, memories, loves. The rock showed her nothing, held nothing. Music drifts quietly through her mind as she recalls the photographs set triumphantly atop the living room piano, blurrier than sound.

“A picture. It would’ve taken two seconds just to grab a frame from the piano … it would’ve, just taken a second. And I could’ve had so much more time, to remember properly. But I guess—”

“Don’t worry. It won’t be much longer now.” Mo reaches for her hand and runs her soft thumb along Robin’s crinkled hand, lined by age and burns. She touches the cold edge of Robin’s wedding ring, the only cold thing that remains on this smoldering earth, besides Mo’s expression when she thinks Robin isn’t looking. However, Robin finds she is always looking.

Mo is really, really beautiful glowing against the ravenous red eye of their killer sun. She effuses light while the rest of them wilt beneath it. She is perhaps the last beautiful thing that remains in Robin’s shrinking, melting world. It feels like Mo has snapped a lighter in her throat. There’s a deep ache in a windowless room inside her, unmapped and uncharted. Floating Robin watches her hand reach out for one of Mo’s errant curls and shrieks what about that Lucas-Annie-Michael Robin? But Mo catches her hand before she can touch, and kisses her knuckles. And she knows every Robin is the same.

---

The church is smoldering and stunning stained glass windows beaten in. The pieces shine like sea glass in the grass. “Honey, we’re home!” Mo teases and pulls an old key from her pocket. For some reason, Robin thinks it’s the same color as the lipstick – but upon closer inspection, the key is silver as any other.

There’s no reliable way to clock distance but Robin estimates they’ve walked at least five miles from the beach they lived on for a few weeks, extraordinarily aimlessly, so she is startled a half-skeletal church turned out to be their endgame. Mo never mentioned it, yet she has a key.

“This is my house,” she smiles, like it was an unfunny joke when really it was a morbidly funny truth, “one of my many vacation homes.”

They spread their few belongings out along the pews. A thready knapsack of non-perishables idly scavenged, a knife made from scrap metal. Collecting anything to live by seems a shameless ruse, yet Robin continues because Mo continues. For Mo, she has sunflower eyes.

“I have something for you,” Mo says excitedly, “I just need your ring.”

Robin clutches nervously at the jewelry she’d been ferociously, viciously hating since July. For a brief, honest moment, it’s precious again – proof there was a before-July.

“Trust me,” Mo insists, guilelessly, and Robin does.

When she hands Mo the ring, she’s a girl again watching her grandad show off a magic trick. Sleight of hand, coins toppling out of her ears, the queen of hearts secreted beneath his sleeve. Except Mo doesn’t do any of that. She folds the gold in half like paper, twists the perfect shape of it and in just a blink, hands Robin a heart-shaped locket rooted to a chain pulled from nothing, pulled from corpse steam and hope.

The locket breaks open as Mo drops it in her palm. Her favorite photo from the piano in miniature rests perfectly inside, and that cavern deep inside her opens again.

“Oh, please. Don’t look at me like that. Let me do one truly nice thing before the world ends.” Mo’s eyebrow arches, her lips curve; Robin watches in floored fascination as the chapped skin shifts and a dot of red blood peeks through. This reassures her.

“What are you?” Robin asked, but she already knew in the burning pit of her. She’d always known Mo somehow, this girl who said her name like a rhyme. Robin sweet, Robin name like a wing beat. Robin burning up, Robin red-throated. Robin feather-coated. Mo shook the stallion mane of dark curls across her shoulder, and Robin tasted lemonade.

---

“Will you ever forgive me?” Mo’s whisper in her ear echoing and deep, like a salty seashell tucked lovingly against her head as their bodies curl together on the pew.

“Will you ever forgive us?” Robin answered. The moon over ruins. Strawberry moon light falls in cool sheets through holes in the church roof, like missing teeth. It was a pretty work of art, and they ruined it, believing art once made would bloom forever. The permanence of idea: the illusion of infinity. When people saw themselves as gods, god herself could do nothing but watch them unmake a universe. There is nothing more powerful than perception.

“Just don’t tell the Pope I fucked you,” Mo smirks against her cheek. Robin laugh-sobs, she’s not sure which exactly. She wonders if god is lying with everyone left at the end of the world, as easily as this, in whatever form they find most beautiful. “I love you so.” Mo says sweetly, and Robin’s heart takes wing. The last living beast in the sky.