Old Truths for a Best Day

A literary apocalyptic; a short story; 1900 words,

I want to thank my beta readers: Chet Sandberg, Trevor Cohen, JamesLuo, Kenn Reff, and Derek Beyer. Also a nod to Ian Cattanach, whose article, Why Substack Fiction & Poetry is Dead, is why I’ve added an “about the author.”

About the author: Now politically progressive but once an evangelical pastor, I lost my tribe for speaking out against Donald Trump. Lately, my stories have turned apocalyptic. Surely, one thing has nothing to do with the other.

Old Truths for a Best Day

You’re not in trouble, but I need you to listen. Remember my words. Treat them like your potassium pills, and they’ll ward off the sickness to come. Can you do that?

Sarah said she’d remember everything. She promised.

Randall ruffled her hair and lost himself in innocence that radiated like a nuclear blast, but the half-life of a child’s trust could be measured in months. The teaching had to be done while her core still burned.

“You’re at an age,” he said, “where you understand the difference between who you are and who you pretend to be. You’ll lose that as you grow older.”

The Geiger counter waved a red finger. Chittering softly. Silencing him.

Sarah’s brow knitted, but her only worries would be whether she could go out to run and dance or if this was another indoor day. With the winds building in the east, indoor days could become basement days–could become bunker days–and he felt a blistering of guilt. Let her play while she still could.

But he didn’t want this to be a tomorrow talk, turning it into a lecture to be associated with cinder-block walls and second-rate beds. Best-day talks came with bright skies and bird song, and that’s where the truths of the old world belonged. Old truths for a best day.

“As you become a teenager–”

The counter hushed, and a new chittering rose in its place, the shuffling of shoes on snow-sheeted paving stones.

Sarah’s face double brightened. She knew the signature of that sound as well as he. Better. Her lips mouthed the word: Tommy.

Randall nodded, and Sarah sprung from the white sofa, sprinted past the grand piano they would never hear properly played, and skidded to a stop between the staircase and the windowed door where glass sparkled like jewels, cascading rainbows across her ill-fitted white dress. Beneath Tommy’s twisted shadow, those sparkles died like the memory of stars.

She opened the door and squealed as Tommy stepped into the foyer, slouched and hidden beneath a frayed hoodie. She spun in circles and talked about all the fun they would have in the snow. Dizzy and joy-drunk, she wrapped her arms around him. Her eyes closed and her smile widened, but Tommy shrugged her away.

Randall stood without thinking to stand; no one came into his house and disrespected his daughter. No one.

Tommy’s hands never left his pockets. He stood without purpose, a creature of resentment, indifference, and ego, and when he raised his head, when Randall could see his eyes beneath that raggedy hood, he spoke with all the eloquence of a paralyzed dog, two mumbled thoughts dropping from his mouth like rotten teeth: “Mom’s dead.”

Caitlyn. Tommy’s mother. Their neighbor. Dead.

Shit.

Tommy’s resentment became grief; Sarah’s pain became compassion; and bluster fizzled away, a great litany of damnable curses transformed into softly spoken words.

And Randall said, “I’m sorry.”

Caitlyn had embraced Sarah. She’d insisted on “play dates” with Tommy and, in this time of distrust and isolation, had become a true neighbor. Randall never wanted the intrusion, but he knew they’d been made richer by it.

Her death was the end of a future that no longer existed, a future that ended months before they met. Before Sarah found the manor. Before Randall found Sarah.

In truth, they’d all died with the world. There could be no tomorrow, and every today was the death spasm of a lost humanity. Caitlyn had dreamed of more, but like everything else, dreams die.

“I can’t bury her on my own,” Tommy said.

Sarah reached her hand for his. “I remember when my momma died.”

Tommy didn’t reach back, and Randall’s heart ached. Like so many others, Sarah had lost everything and pieced back together a life from what she could find. She’d adopted Randall as her stand-in father. Given the chance, she’d adopt Tommy as her best and only friend. Did she imagine more? At her age, Randall thought it possible, but his heart told him no.

Natural ringlets bobbed before Sarah’s eyes as her hand remained outstretched and unmet. Randall expected her to cry, to run back to him and bury her face in his side. Instead, she looked at Tommy with disapproving curiosity and said, “You’ve got no gun.”

Tommy shrugged.

“You don’t never leave the house without a gun,” she said.

“Didn’t much think about it,” Tommy said. “Didn’t much care.”

“You’d care if they found you.”

“Not really.”

Sarah’s mouth made a scandalized circle.

Randall put an end to the quarrel with a hand on Sarah’s shoulder. Tommy wouldn’t have welcomed his touch.

“We’ll help with the burial,” Randall said.

“Do you mind if we don’t go back right away?” Tommy said.

“We’ll take it in your time. There’s no rush and no needs to serve but our own. If you’re tired, it’s a good day. You can sleep in a good bed.”

“It’s a best day,” Sarah said, but nobody answered, no one at all, even when death was an old truth, and old truths were best shared on a best day.

“But even on a best day, you need a gun,” Sarah said.

Randall hushed her, but her comment caught in the recesses of his imagination. Taking up arms had become instinctual. Tommy would no sooner forget his weapon than walk out in the snow without shoes.

“I had to wait until it was safe to go outside,” Tommy said.

Randall said he understood, but danger grew in layers. Some came and went with the winds. Others hardened into the foundation of the world.

“She’s been in there a week,” Tommy said.

Randall said he understood, but what he understood was dark and dangerous. He’d seen women and children, exposed and unarmed, and had feared them more than any militia. Vulnerability only risked itself under a protective eye and only exposed itself to draw in the unwary.

Tommy wanted to appear harmless and knew he was protected. Caitlyn wasn’t dead. She was coming for Randall’s girl.

Clearly, they didn’t know Sarah as well as they thought. She didn’t need a father’s protection. She’d pointed a Glock 9mm at Randall’s head on the day they met. It’s why he’d believed her when she said she was alone but that he could eat something as long as he behaved. She’d kill him if he didn’t. It’s why he’d felt safe and slept like a child.

He’d eaten very little that first day. He’d been so emaciated, giving in to hunger would have killed him, but day by day, Sarah had strengthened him. He grew muscles again. Even a little fat.

Together, they felt like a family, but he’d always known this day would come. Kill the man. Take the girl. That’s how the new world worked.

But not Tommy. Not Caitlyn. They’d been different, at least Caitlyn had, full of hope and clinging to dreams.

Maybe that was who she pretended to be. Maybe, underneath, she was like everyone else. Maybe. His heart said no, but no one listened to their heart at the end of days. Hunger and lust spoke too loudly.

But Tommy didn’t want to go back, not right away.

If this were a ruse, right away was exactly what he’d need. Move quickly under the confusion of emotion. Rush Randall outside and into the sights of Caitlyn’s gun. Spring the trap before the quarry gets wise.

Kill the man. Take the girl.

Randall put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and felt him flinch. “I was just telling Sarah that she’s at an age where she understands the difference between who she is and who she pretends to be. When you’re a teenager, that goes away. We get this idea that the life we imagine can be the life we make real. The people who love us most can look like obstacles, good for nothing but holding us back. We resent what we have because of what we imagine.”

Tommy looked up at him.

“What matters is life as it is,” Randall said, “not life as we wish it to be.”

“I wish it were anything but this,” Tommy said.

Randall had rebuffed Caitlyn’s intrusion into their lives. Sarah, he could keep safe, but Caitlyn came and went as she pleased. He’d told her she was risking all their lives, that when they came for her they’d kill her son.

To sweep up Sarah in her fantasies would be selfish and cruel.

“Tell me about your mother.”

Tommy stared at his own feet.

“Tell me what she wished for,” Randall said.

But it was Sarah who answered.

“My momma used to tell me that some dreams never go away, no matter what happens.”

Randall hadn’t believed in dreams and certainly not in family, not before Sarah. What she’d given, he wouldn’t easily surrender to another, especially not this whisper of a boy.

Sarah would understand. She’d have to.

“What did your mother tell you, Tommy?” Randall said, and he heard anger in the cutting edge of his voice. “Did she have dreams for you and Sarah?”

Beneath his touch, Tommy’s shoulders hunched forward, as if he would curl into a ball.

“Tell me.”

“It was stupid.”

Randall softened his tone. “Tell me.”

Again, Sarah answered. “My momma said that some dreams are built into us. Countries fight, but we all still need to be human. It can’t be helped.”

Tommy’s voice barely raised beyond his lips. “Mine was kind of the same way.”

Sarah looked up into Randall’s face, her eyes wide with fresh understanding. “Tommy will live with us now, right?”

Randall wanted that Glock pressed to the side of head. He wanted to feel safe again. He wanted to sleep and know nothing would hurt him in the night. It’s what he should have given Sarah but what she had given him. Peace. Security. Belonging.

Now this scarecrow of a child had come to take it all away.

Randall’s grip tightened. “How’d your mother die?”

Tommy didn’t answer.

“My momma got stabbed over a bucket of drinking water,” Sarah said.

Tommy didn’t answer.

Randall lifted Tommy’s chin until they could see each other. Tommy cried, but men cried over killing other men. Tears never meant safety.

“She told me the future belongs to the young,” Tommy said, “and then she put a pistol in her mouth.”

Randall let go, and Tommy’s face disappeared beneath his hood.

“Shot herself,” Sarah said.

Randall looked through the jewel-like glass to a splintered view of the front lawn. No one waited, but he felt the presence of the gun. He felt the pressure of it in his mouth, the taste of metal on his tongue.

Sarah wrapped her arms around Tommy’s waist. He didn’t push her away.

“Damn fool,” Randall muttered, but as he watched the kids hold each other, he knew Caitlyn had been half right. The kind of future she wanted couldn’t be stolen. All she could do was offer it as a gift, and with all their walls and all their division, perhaps this seemed the only way through.

Tommy looked up, and in his eyes, Randall saw the boy’s pain and need for answers.

“The future belongs to the young,” Randall said, “but today belongs to us all.”

Outside, the wind howled, and the counter chittered its warning.

— Thaddeus Thomas