Mixed Priorities

We’ve all had shower thoughts. You know, those bright balls of epiphanic thought that burst into clarity for you while you’re otherwise preoccupied? I have a few favorites from some online gurus like ‘Aliens invaded the Moon on July 20th, 1969,’ Or ‘Somewhere in the world, there is somebody with your dream job that hates going to work every day.’ There is some real thinkers out there and in my free time I scooped up those bad boys like candy.

But you know what an entire lifetime of shower thoughts and life in general never prepared me for?

The clothes you wear on the day the world ends is your apocalypse outfit.

For pretty much ever.

Woo boy. Had I known this morning the world was going to come to a screeching halt I would have put more thought into the outfit. Instead, I did my usual desperate dive into a hodgepodge of clothing so I could avoid being arrested for indecent exposure while I ran to get my morning fuel. I mean honestly, how many mornings have I done this? Dressed in a stupefied daze throwing on whatever was in hands reach just to get to the nectar of the gods.

Once I went in a tank top and the bottom half of a chicken costume.

Don’t ask.

And now here I am, trapped in an old barn hundreds of miles away from where I started this morning trying to figure out what in the world just happened. And apparently obsessing over what I’m wearing is the main point of focus for my confused brain.

My apocalypse partner is pacing on the other side of the dimly lit barn. He’s in the remaining bits of a suit, having ditched the jacket in the city, and his tie is currently wrapped around my left leg. Because my dumb self decided that my floppy bunny boot slippers were appropriate footwear for this morning. During a desperate attempt to escape I stepped on my own bunny ears, tackling myself in a tumble down a flight of concrete steps. The result being losing big chunks of skin on my leg and a pair of scissors taking care of the ears. So now my slippers look like odd little snowball heads with bunny noses. Tragic? Yes.

But it had to be done.

The ears were a liability.

My end of days buddy pauses in his pacing and stares at me. Though there is limited light and we’re on opposite sides of this big old barn I can still feel the intensity of the gaze. It flickers down to my chest and back up. And I don’t for a second believe he’s looking at my chest chest. More my Philadelphia Flyer’s jersey.

“Fan of Bernie Parent?”

I meant to quip the question out. But my voice cracked, and I barely whispered. Maybe a day of running for our lives was catching up to me. I was feeling a bit peaky.

This jersey was my dad’s and probably fell somewhere on the collectors’ item-worth tons of cash scale, but I was unable to resist wearing it. I had lost my dad a few years back and one of the few things we mutually agreed on was Bernie Parent was the greatest goalie of all time. I wanted to be Bernie when I grew up. Hell, I still want to be Bernie when I grow up.

Being 30 and a woman isn’t too late to start, is it?

Maybe this whole “Armageddon” thing will be over soon, and my hockey career can begin. My partner gives a half shrug while staring at me.

“I’m a Penguins fan.”

I sucked in a wounded breath. “No.”

He nods at me, and I shake my head, folding my arms across my chest.

The outrage!

The indecency!

“I can’t believe I saved you from that falling boulder.”

He rolls his eyes at me, nodding down to my leg. Giving me a look that clearly says we’re even, he goes back to pacing.

Okay, fine, it was mildly heroic of him to scoop me up off the ground while I was in a crumpled pile and carry me a few blocks away to temporary safety. He could have saved his own skin and left me.

I had been standing in line at ‘…And All That Java,’ the Chicago musical themed coffee shop in Old City. Girl let me tell you what, they make the best double roasted mocha mint latte, ever. It's what dreams are made of. And it was what I was daydreaming about while standing there waiting for my turn when the alarm sounded.

At first, I had done nothing. I was one human away from that nutty deliciousness, the fumes alone were starting to do its magic via osmosis. Alarms had been going off daily, since we entered yet another war and Covid-25 smushed together with A17 and created a super virus, and the general population had become numb to them. But something was different about this alarm. You could feel it reverberate through you as much as you could hear it.

And that’s when everyone froze.

It was like someone had hit pause on the entire room movement completely stopped. Everyone in the coffee shop came to a screeching halt. The woman at the counter was frozen handing over a coffee, a man reaching out to grab it. His hand paused halfway outstretched. One of the baristas at the counter was pouring boiled water into a cup that was steadily overflowing onto the counter. Confused, I took a step back, crashing into a man behind me who was a rock-solid statue looking down at his phone.

Panic bubbled up in my throat as crashing rumbling sounded from outside. The thing is, the city is such a noisy place that things crash and rumble all the time. But settling over me like a warm blanket was the realization that the world was silent. I could hear the boiling water now dribbling onto the floor from the counter. The sound of a slamming door was in the distance but made me jump. Through the deafening silence was outrageous noise. A scream. A demanding voice over a megaphone.

That’s when my apocalypse partner appeared at my side grabbing my arm, a headphone dangling from his ear.

“Is this a flash mob?” I had asked him stupidly.

The events that followed was a mass of confusion and anxiety. We had run through the bodies of the frozen into a back alley. What felt like years later, we escaped the city, driving for hours. Until finally ditching the car and walking a few miles deep into woods. Night had fallen and we still walked until finally coming across this hulking mass of security. The big old red barn was cozy and offered shelter from the outside world. A giant hole in the roof allowed the glow from the moon outside to filter down, giving us limited visibility.

I had no idea where we were, how far we had traveled. It just had become apparent we needed to get as far away from other people as fast as possible.

Hopping down from the hay stacks I had perched on, I tried to conspicuously pick hay bits out of my behind. My neon pink bike shorts didn’t do much to protect me from the stabbing bits of pointy fodder. The pink also clashed horribly with the bright orange jersey, but again, why am I obsessing over this?

The big old barn was adorable. On any given day I would spend hours sketching it from different angles and getting lost in the story unfolding around us. The rusty tools and equipment that could have been handed down for generations or simply forgotten about in one corner. A beat-up ladder leading to a loft. Piles of hay and the subtle scratching and scurrying that betrayed the critters living beneath it. Every time there is a particularly loud scurry my survival mate jumps.

I make my way over to the ladder and give it a few wiggles. Seems sturdy enough to me. I slowly climb to the top, cautiously placing my feet on the wood. The wood doesn’t immediately crumble beneath me, so I take a few steps around. The loft is mostly empty, a pile of discarded table clothes and some Christmas decorations pile in one corner. The rest is barren. I hang my head over the side, glancing into the relative darkness.

“Hey, there’s a lot more moon light up here if you want to come on up.”

I don’t get any immediate answer and assume that he might want some time to himself. I can respect that. When I woke up this morning, I didn’t expect to the universe to thrust me together with a complete stranger and see how good we were at playing survival of the fittest, either.

A strange squealing and splashing sound crackles through the night and I fly out of my skin. Did someone just find us? Did they stab my pal and that was his guts hitting the dirt floor? Oh snap, oh snap. I went and trapped myself up on this loft with only the head of Rudolph to use as a weapon.

I grab the reindeer head by the underside, holding the antler nubs out. They won’t do much to save me from the big bad, but maybe I’ll have enough time to distract and run.

One thing is for sure, the end days will teach you if you are a fight or flight type of person. And this home girl is a thousand percent a flight-er.

And I am not ashamed one bit.

That dang echoing silence is back. Even our hay mates have gone quiet. I peer back into the darkness over the loft.

“Apocalypse Buddy?” I whisper squeak holding Rudolph’s head out.

A crunch on the ladder beside me starts me so much I shriek, throwing Rudolph’s head in that direction.

It bounces off the chest of my partner and he raises an eyebrow at me. In his hand is a metal tin filled with water which he offers to me. I gulp it down hurriedly, not realizing how thirsty I was.

I never did get that coffee this morning.

“Adam.” He says, plopping down a few feet away from me.

Leaning over I reach out a hand, “Nice to meet you, Adam. I’m Evelynn.”

He shakes my hand once and we sit in the light of the moon.

Trying to figure out what in the world tomorrow will bring.