ONE DAY DARLING

by Lizaveta Donoso

The promised weeks had come; the months and years forevermore.

It was said that California's fault lines had deepened and revealed themselves like laugh lines, permitting the entry of sea water as it leveled the cities among and between—entered a new strange place in the earth—and these fault lines had given thousands of inland citizens time to chase the desert plains out toward the nation's big flat center, out east toward the Midwest, where there was word that bald-headed blue-eyed young men rode on horseback through southern Illinois setting fire to the landscape with torches and aerosol cans, leaving nothing in their wake but a glowing ribcage of little hills and valleys pouring out into the flat rippled belly of the northern prairie, where the Great Lakes had been overtaken by a blue-green algae that teenagers had taken to ritually eating, and it was said that many of these young people dropped dead right there on the spot with those that survived having fallen into epileptic fits during which, they professed, they'd all seen the very same vision of the sun cracking like an egg and, from it, a great colorless dragon emerging and setting fire to the atmosphere with the first beat of its wings which, despite the sweaty-browed and steely-eyed stillness of the doctors and nurses, was convincing given that these professionals had already heard word that hundreds of Ivy League academics—Joyceans and quantum theorists and analytic and continental philosophers alike—had taken to their office rooftops to perform indigenous rain dances in meticulous slow-motion reverse so as to send the rain back from whence it came; as they danced, the President and his ilk—senators and cabinet members and corporate titans as well as wives and husbands and children and secretaries with various nuclear codes—had apparently absconded into golden tunnels beneath the earth and when the federal electricity grid failed in spectacular fashion (some are said to have seen a night-ending spark ejaculate from the crown of the Empire State Building) the gilded walls of these Presidential tunnels were imbued with such profound energy that those in contact with it disappeared into a fine red mist while the luckier few were immediately blinded and left to wander the belly of Old Adam Earth in perpetual darkness—it's possible that this was mere wishful thinking—and the news that at a church in Flordia, as the sea waters rose around the congregation's ankles, a father had wrapped his infant child in a yellowing blanket and sprinted him up to the Christ statue, elbowing holy men out of his path, and placed the child in the marble arms of their Savior and called out that his boy had been chosen to usher them on to Paradise, screaming through tears that Christ had, in fact, come again—in rosy cheeks and button nose and little shout of black hair—and the father fell to his knees and sang a hymn—"All people that on earth do dwell, sing to the Lord ye know is God indeed"—and the congregation too fell to their many knees and sang: a high pure all-chorded voice that rose as the waters did, the child's throaty cry between them, then the coming of an immense wave that silenced them all, leaving only a lightning rod of steeple reaching up into an all-gray sky.

It was the Christ-child that Leon pondered as he unpacked his duffel. They were lucky to find an unlocked room at this motel in rural New Mexico: Tucumcari, now mostly abandoned, was just off the highway and they had anticipated all motels to be full. Perhaps the California mass had not yet arrived. Perhaps they'd already come and gone. Perhaps they never would.

Leon pulled a polyester polo from his bag. The pocket said Baron's in red cursive. Baron's Grocery was now beneath saltwater and earth, but Leon did not question why he'd brought the work shirt—he'd loaded it into his duffel just as, only a week before, he'd unthinkingly hefted boxes from wooden pallets. He folded it, put it to the side, and for a brief moment thought he heard a cry from the street outside; he dismissed the notion.

In the bathroom, sitting on the toilet with her pants around her ankles, Carla scrolled through her news feed. Her phone's battery was near sleep but she could not shake the feeling that somewhere within or even beneath all of this information would lie the truth: the key she needed to understand—if not the purpose of this catastrophe—perhaps, at least, a cause. If she could know the cause then she could sense its effect. She knew that the rising waters and the burning prairies were not the end of things. It will continue. Nothing ever ends.

A pregnancy test sat next to the sink.

Her phone died. She leaned her head back against the wall, the toilet's tank a not uncomfortable prop against her back.

Her mind fell into a chasm. As a baby, her parents played a CD of whale songs to which she could fall asleep. The all-everywhere hum of the whales painted her walls and filled her up inside with a calm that still had no name.

She thought that this must have all started with the killing of the whales: that writhing deathworld of seafoam and civilization's spear. Maybe the whales had sung this world into order, into existence, at keys too low and true for the ears of apes. Maybe the blubber of God himself was that same fat that fueled the lamp that let men hunker in dark rooms deciding how to twain-carve the world the whales had sung into creation. Maybe the great catastrophe of our species had been a catastrophe of language: a need, so desperate so as to be unquestioned, to imagine the world as made up of our own words.

The test was positive: two little lines: two bare figures holding open that white unseeing eye.

Her breath left her. She had expected as much. Not knowing why, she placed the test inside the medicine cabinet and left the bathroom.

The two decided to walk into town before sundown. From the hotel parking lot they could see the highway's off-ramp with its scattering of abandoned cars. Two teenage boys sat atop an SUV holding rifles aloft with one hand and passing a cigarette back and forth with the other. Leon called out to them, asking if there was anywhere to find food. The boys listened without looking and one of them, brushing the hair from his eyes with a nail-polished hand, proceeded to take aim and shoot out a car window. The sound of the shot was flat and quickly eaten by the desert wind. By the time the butt of the rifle was back at his shoulder, Leon and Carla had turned and ran.

Dinner was undersalted biryani recovered from the breakroom refrigerator of a convenience store. They ate it with plastic silverware and gazed out the window of their motel room as the star-laden night unfurled like an old carpet. They watched Orion the Hunter fade into his black life, walk flat-footed across God’s lowland country, then disappear behind an unlit sign for a donut shop. They watched the cup of the Big Dipper skirt puppet-like along the top frame of the window. They mused that Ursa Major didn’t look all that much like a bear: a horse, a giraffe, a doe mid-leap. They fell in and out of sleep.

In her dreams, she sat foot-on-knee. The water around her was the same temperature as she and the reef before her spanned further out than up. She watched the fish: green and white and blue and white; gasps of red like fruit. They danced in and out of coral windows. An angler's unlit bulb like peeled lychee. Orange roe like young persimmons. Shrimp picking flesh from an old corpse. A single leviathan rib emerging from the substrate earth, bending up and in, stretching like an aeon toward an unseen sun.

In his dreams, he stood with his bare feet in the dirt. Warmth from the soil beneath and heat from the sun above. The furry simian hands atop the corn had gone brown with drought, curling inward into brittle little fists. He looked up at the big roof of the sky. It held no clouds and gave no sound. Then a stir from the corn and a black rising of wings. Two child hands, burnished by the sun, erupting from the corn: one gripping the stalk of a slingshot and the other pulling its rubber back and down. A single blink and a stone is flown up into the crows: a blurred black line cutting through the living storm, seeming not to stop at all though it must.

Leon groaned in his sleep, waking Carla. Her mouth tasted like cumin and stale air. She went to the bathroom, switched on the light, and turned the spigot on the sink. Nothing emerged but the clank and rumble of empty pipes. Panic ran yellow down her back. She put her shoes on in the quiet and stepped out into the night, careful not to wake Leon.

The stars. Christ, the stars. More than she could ever name.

Not knowing where to go, she made her way to the off-ramp. She cautiously expected to see the little skyscraper of a rifle or the glowing bud of a cigarette. But there was only the cold square darkness of cars. She remembered the barren town behind her—what little had once been there, all claimed by those before them—and thought that, perhaps, these cars might have supplies.

She trod carefully, stepping over what she could but still sometimes feeling the crunch of glass beneath her shoes. Many of the car windows were broken outward. In the moonlight she could see the ruby resin of dried blood on their shattered apertures. Overfilled suitcases. Still-strapped car seats. Fast food waste. Cell phones. Crumpled packs of cigarettes. St. Christopher medallions. Beaded seat covers. Dashboard screens flashing NO CHARGE. Windshield wipers at half-mast. Rusted chassis. The dribble-drop of leaking coolant. Flat tires. A child's shoes cast to the blacktop. The skitter of coyotes in the dark. The desert. What remains.

Carla spotted the winged canopy of an SUV's open trunk. Its God-facing window glowed at its rim, taking on light from the moon and the jewels that it fathered. She sidled between cars and came under the canopy.

She fell back at the sight of the boy. Blood had run from the bullet hole in his throat, painting a noose of old fire around his neck. It pooled where he sat and had begun to dry on the low pile of the trunk's upholstery. His eyes laid high in their climb; cast forever skyward. His rifle laid barrel-up on the rear of the seats like a smokestack against an all-smog sky. He was alone.

Carla, seated wonder-wounded on the asphalt, brought her hand to her mouth to trap her breath and did not immediately sense the blood oozing from her palm, the warm taste of old iron seeming nothing but infernal air: utterly appropriate. It wasn't until her jaw shuddered and she felt an arrowhead of glass burst between her teeth that she was thrust back into her body, sputtering blood and dust into her bleeding palm, the pain and its cause hitting her all at once. Above and behind her, the shattered remains of a windshield hung like a sandworn relief of Jupiter.

She wiped her palm on the front of her shirt and felt little daggers of glass press further into the gash. She looked back up at the boy, searching for a witness, but he now knew nothing pain. But there, on his hip, he still wore a fabric-wrapped canteen: electric blue gone dull with age and, over it, in old faded marker print put down in the shaky hand of a child: 3LIJAH. Beneath the name, a little cartoon wolf, and Carla could not tell if it looked at or past her.

Leon, rolling in his sleep in the cave-dark between dreams, reached for Carla's familiar body and found nothing but empty air and the scratch of his fingernails against the carpet. He slipped into another dream. He laid in a strange bed and watched the warm woven beam of a streetlight through a window. He heard the midnight bustle of drunks from the street and smelled the musty air of a radiator. He felt the hummingbird stillness of insomnia and the low-grade panic of not waking Carla, whose low-pitch snoring and warmth against his cradling arm kept him sedate enough to not leave the bed and wander the apartment in search of something that had not yet arrived. He held her closer: in fear, in love, in a wish to protect and be protected. He stared out the window waiting for their promised visitor but saw only his own eyes reflected back at him. He pulled his wife closer and felt her disappear. He awoke in the motel room. She was gone.

A flat sheet of light escaped from under the bathroom's door, slightly ajar, which was enough to keep Leon from flying into an immediate panic. He rose and shuffled into the bathroom and found nothing of Carla but her phone. He tried to unlock it and was greeted only by its dead black screen and Leon again saw his own sleep-torn eyes looking back at him. The feeling was like that of the shipwrecked: waking up hot and parched and finding that the whole world has resolved into a receding horizon line.

But there was no time for such a word. Carla burst into the room on a wave of odorless air gripping her bleeding hand and holding it at face-level. Leon ran out to meet her and had to resist the urge to hold her, wounds and all, until the next unpromised sun rose from dust in the east.

He sat her on the bed and returned to the bathroom in search of a first aid kit. The room had clearly been cleaned and as he threw open the cabinet and drawers beneath the sink he was confronted by two truths: that first aid supplies were not standard issue in motels and anything that a previous tenant may have left behind would already have been swept away with the rest of the now useless, distant, infuriating garbage. He grabbed a towel and tried to run it under the sink but no water emerged. Amid the clanking of the pipes and Carla's muted groans, he opened the medicine cabinet and found the pregnancy test.

He looked at the result: a future resolved into a single always-open eye. The silent reverie that followed was not entirely pleasant: like the momentary state between drunkenness and a hangover. Thoughts passed so quickly beneath the surface of sensation that no language could bring them into the open air. All he could grasp was a single memory: nearly drowning as a toddler and being pulled up and out of the water by his mother. Animal fear. Full lungs. Safety tinged sickly yellow with new knowledge.

He pocketed the pregnancy test and rushed to Carla with the dry towel.

As the sun rose outside their window, pink and red and orange, Leon picked shards of glass out of Carla's palm: oddly beautiful: little stars dipped in ruby aether. She winced and hissed with the removal of each shard and even her pain wasn't without beauty. Despite her protestations, he uncorked the canteen she'd found and emptied its meager water onto her cuts. He wrapped the plush towel around her hand. He held it to his forehead. Here was something promised. Here, right here, with us.

A long lurching creak sounded from the bathroom followed by the sound of water rushing from the still-open tap. Carla looked at Leon and understood why death is not so awful among the whalebone homes on the ocean floor. Leon looked at Carla and understood how murmurations of birds can't be split by a single stone.

Leon kissed his wife. Then he rose and opened the window and got the shower running and laid out his old uniform on the bed. The world was ending and there was still work to be done.