It's Okay, It's Okay, Yes, Listen
You’ve asked me outside to have a Very Important Conversation, even though you’re an idiot and I already know what you’re going to say. I so badly want to run away and leave you—all of this—behind, even if leaving isn’t survivable, that’s how tired I am.
It’s against our guidelines, exiting the bunker, which is why you’ve asked me. To confer Importance. And for Privacy, in case I make a scene, which I probably will.
“Here,” you say, righting and patting a half-melted tire for a seat. But I don’t want to sit, so I turn and stare into the crackling sky.
Ever since they—I was going to say arrived but no, not arrived—showed themselves to have had arrived, long ago and in every place we thought we were alone, their curiosity giving way to a deeply-rooted disgust, it’s been like they turned on a catastrophe-spigot and removed the knobs, hid the instructions on how to turn it off. The wind has teeth. The water is punctuated by falling stone. We’ve watched friends disintegrated, evaporating into a smooth orange mist, while others were scooped whole and screaming into eldritch jaws. The fortunate dissociated in the beginning, and never came back.
You cough, and I hate you. I so deeply fucking hate you. It’s the most powerful thing I’ve felt since watching Cora get dusted in the Glow, or when her sister, already half-unhinged, stopped speaking and wandered into the cold and you just let her.
“There’s something I’ve been meaning to say,” you say. I roll my eyes, thinking of saying it for you, to humiliate you, but then—over your shoulder, out there in the middle of one of the black Continent Storms, the water lifts.
And lifts and lifts, shifting nearer.
You see the look on my face and think I’m frightened of your words, offer two fingers to my knee as if this might, somehow, be comforting. It’s so stupid and yet so unbelievably tender, the kind of thing that only mildly annoyed me before, back when we were a couple, parents.
There’s only a breath before it’s on us. But as you finally start speaking, I decide not to interrupt.
Tyler James Russell is the author of To Drown a Man (2020), and When Fire Splits the Sky (2022), both from Unsolicited Press. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife Cat and their children. You can find him at Tylerjamesrussell.com, or on Twitter at @TJamesRussell.