Doomsday locket

A heart. He could never say, “I love you” but this locket he gave her was in the shape of a heart. She had come that close to being zipped into the forced unity of Russia and Japan. The zipper pulling up to her neck caught on the locket and gave it its heart shape.

He wrote guide books for the end of the world. We all lived in the end and tourists of it were few. None the less there’s always someone, especially at the end. We visited the worst places. He wrote while I was taken hostage hither and thither. What force could zip Russia and Japan together? Islands to islands, dust to dust, it was of sea gulls and a sand bar this zipper. There was no love, but I had the combination inside my locket.

Often I brought back tidbits from my prison sentences that he lifted for his guide book. People want to know what to look for. The only thing we can control is our perceptions, how we see and interpret the world and what happens. I like to help.

One place, I was blindfolded so I don’t know where it was, had ferns growing out back where they let me sit in the sun until I begged for water. The water was rusty as if they had sprinkled turmeric in it. It was nice to be reminded of turmeric. They had stolen a steeple from the village church, and tried to add me to the team of workers plopping it onto of the tiny brutalist hovel. But I was afraid of heights and dissolved into tremors so bad they dismissed me. No longer prisoner, at a place that didn’t accept guests, I left.

The forced togetherness of Russia and Japan is like the smell of flowers in a small closed room where it changes from fresh floral to downright shitty. The thing is no matter how bad it smells you know it’s roses, it’s none other than beautiful roses turning to putrid on sweaty skin.

Everyone needs space. I just describe it, I don’t dole it out. Here bare earth, gray and cracked, shows through bald spots on the lawn. Years of too little rain add up even in areas still classified as wetlands. In the guide book Mack Everly, who is to me my would-be boyfriend, will l tell you both how it’s classified and how it is. There’s some satisfaction in knowing what’s what.

Everyone needs to explore. Only a few do though, when times are bad, as in the end of the world. But normality persists, and you would never guess, but retirees make up our largest customer segment. The last adventurers.

I enjoy picking up their habits, like wearing socks and Birkenstocks together. Emily, old enough to be my grandmother, pulled at my locket.

“You have a boyfriend.” she said.

“No.” I said. “He doesn’t love me.”

“Then why the heart shape? He gave it to you, no?” She said.

“He gave it to me but the heart shape is an accident.” I said.

“Everything is an accident until you take ownership of it.” She said.

This disturbed me quite a bit. I thought I was so good at perceiving the interesting things in a diminished world, but I had missed this. Holy Mackerel. Maybe he does love me. Does that change the stinking roses, the zipper injury, the dry lawn, the unwelcome guests, the wars, the poverty, the extinctions?

Hell yeah! Totally. An accident that becomes real, and comes to belong, cheers up a brutalist hovel quite a bit.