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I call my friend to warn her that the Doomsday Clock is predicting imminent annihilation.
“But it’s been at ninety seconds for decades,” she responds. “No, seriously. It wasn’t even this close during the Cuban Missile Crisis,” I reply. “And in 1991, it was set at a full seventeen minutes before midnight.”
She complains that she always gets her hopes up for the apocalypse, recalling the hysteria surrounding Y2K and the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012. I confide in her that struggling for survival in a violent, chaotic world is my deepest fear.
“You’re already doing that now, honey.” she asserts. “Plus, if everything did go to hell, we’d probably end up being apocalyptic warlords with a pack of henchmen to do our bidding. It wouldn’t be all bad.”
I chew the inside of my cheek and think this Mad Max scenario might be a better alternative to lying alone in a nursing home with bedsores, wondering if my relatives will ever come visit again.
“We’ll be okay,” she says. “Maybe when we’re old, we’ll finally get on a plane and run off to Italy together. I mean, we’ve talked about it for years.”
She says we could learn how to cook pasta from widows with kind, weathered faces and sell bouquets of wildflowers by the side of the road. I envision myself in a linen dress, leaving footprints in a modest vegetable garden of a crumbling villa with vines snaking along sunlit, stucco walls.
“I bet one of us will have a torrid affair with a wealthy expat and get whisked away to weekend trips to Paris,” she continues. “Now tell me that doesn’t sound dreamy.”
I promise to call her back tomorrow and drop the phone on the bed, making my way over to my antique dresser that smells like cedar and parchment paper. I pull out my grandmother’s floral silk scarf from a musty drawer and tie it around my hair like a vintage film starlet, noticing several brown age spots marbling the thin skin of my hands. Somewhere in the distance, a newscaster reports another high-profile bank failure and looming food shortages due to a reason I can’t quite hear. A static has filled my ears, and my thoughts struggle to stay afloat within my skull, as if submerged in a vat of syrup, unable to resurface for air.
I stumble through the hallway to the kitchen for a glass of water. The room is suddenly bathed in cold, unexpected darkness as the overhead fluorescence fails. I shudder, exhaling a single word— “Italy,” feeling the soft sounds dance around my tongue. A seductive delusion. A transient thought, a possibility—floating among the garish echoes of panicked motorists and police sirens through the open window.
Ashley McCurry (she/her) currently resides in the Southeastern United States with her husband and four rescue dogs. She also reads for Flash Fiction Magazine. Her work has appeared in over twenty online journals, including FlashFlood Journal, The Dillydoun Review, Switch, Pigeon Review, The Metaworker, Five on the Fifth, and elsewhere.
Image credit: Thomas Bormans
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