It’d be convenient to imagine that was the night we conceived the kid, because wouldn’t that suggest there was some higher purpose to the whole thing, not just the sad motel sex, but fifty-six years of eating, sleeping, shitting, enduring one minute after the next? This kid, my kid, and all the Children he saved, our little ark up in the hills where, no matter what happens to the rest of it, some righteous sliver of the human race will survive. That’s what the kid believes, and if he’s right, it’s a nasty joke for God to play on me, but I can’t say I’d blame Him.
It’d be convenient, and it’d be easier—especially now. If I could believe in something aside from my own rotten luck. That after all these years of playing the odds, my number finally came in, the one jackpot that does me no good whatsoever. If I could believe that there really is a puppet master, some holy ghost guiding the chess pieces across the board, that this one time he broke with tradition and sacrificed the father instead of the son. But that isn’t His way, and believing in it isn’t mine.
A happy accident, that’s all, for the Children and for me, because there may be no atheists in foxholes but there’s at least one immune-to-bullshit bullshitter in these woods, and he may not be ready to die, but he’s definitely not looking to survive.
Something will come next; something always comes next. But I’m guessing whatever it is won’t be too friendly to bullshit—the world’s not going to have much use for that anymore. Unless, maybe, you’re the kind that can buy into a lie so fully, so thoroughly, that it comes all the way back around to truth. There’s a new world coming, that’s what the signs tell me, and it’s going to be dark, and it’s going to be cold. It’s the world I made, but my Children are the ones who’ll have to live in it.
My Children, and my son. There’ll be no living on through them: God may have made His children in His image, but I made mine in the opposite—and whatever they remember of me will be a lie. I made them to believe; I made them to survive.
I, on the other hand, am in the business of knowing when to quit. I’m in no hurry to die, but it’s a comfort to think I’ll be gone before they know enough to hate me for leading them into the promised land.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robin Wasserman is the author of several books for children and young adults, including The Waking Dark, The Book of Blood and Shadow, the Cold Awakening Trilogy, Hacking Harvard, and the Seven Deadly Sins series, which was adapted into a popular television miniseries. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in several anthologies as well as The Atlantic and The New York Times. A former children’s book editor, she is on the faculty of the low-residency MFA program at Southern New Hampshire University. She lives and writes (and frequently procrastinates) in Brooklyn, New York. Find out more about her at robinwasserman.com or follow her on Twitter @robinwasserman.
Desirina Boskovich — HEAVEN IS A PLACE ON PLANET X
It was 8:34 p.m. on a Tuesday, and it was almost the end of the world.
Actually, the world was expected to end on Friday, at precisely 5 p.m., eastern daylight time. This was not a forecast, or a projection: it was more like an appointment.
On Friday at 5 p.m. eastern, a thousand high-powered laser cannons would fire simultaneously from their hidden positions in outer space, instantly reducing Planet Earth to vapor and ash. At the exact same moment, the consciousness of every living human being would manifest itself on Planet Xyrxiconia. This planet was located a trillion light years away in a far-flung region of the universe Earth’s scientists had not yet glimpsed. There, on Planet X, humanity would find themselves in fresh bodies—remade vessels. These reincarnations would live eternally in a world of infinite luxury.
At least… that’s what the aliens claimed.
They’d arrived two weeks ago. They’d been rather vague on the subject of their origins; apparently, they came from all over. And they’d been traveling a while. They’d spent more time in the dark empty places between stars than we could possibly imagine; they’d been staring into the endless void since before we were finger-painting on the solid walls of caves.
Through human mouthpieces, the aliens communicated their expectations. There would be no end-of-the-world parties, no apocalyptic adventures, no doomsday loss of decorum. There would be no orgies, no mass suicides.
Directive: Continue about your business, human citizen. Wait patiently for the appointed day. Shop, work, eat, sleep. Stick to routine. And stay calm. This mandate came with teeth. The aliens suggested that one out of every thousand humans on Earth be appointed to the noble task of enforcing. They left the details to our local governments. When Italy, France, Switzerland, and Mexico formed a coalition protesting this tyrannical treatment, their heads of state were promptly vaporized on the spot.
After that, no one resisted. As directed, local governments staged lotteries. One in a thousand.
Of course, my number came up; it always does.
It was 8:34 p.m. on Tuesday. I sat at the bar, running my fingertips across the polished wood, sipping whiskey that burned like fire all the way down.
This was typical behavior for a Tuesday evening; I was in the clear.
Across the bar sat a frumpy middle-aged white guy in a neon sweater vest, tossing me dirty looks. Finally he stood up, strode over, and slammed his glass on the bar beside me.
“Lady… You must feel like a real hero,” he hissed. “You must be really proud.”
“I don’t know what you mean, sir,” I said, taking another measured sip.
“You know exactly what I mean.” He gestured to the standard-issue ray gun—we called them “misters”—hanging at my waist.
“Well, why don’t you try using your words?”
“You’re a traitor, that’s what I mean. A murderer. Killing your own kind. You people make me sick.”
“Hmm,” I said, nodding. I’d gotten used to this kind of thing.
“And I’ll tell you what else. If there is a paradise on Planet X, I sure wouldn’t want to share it with the likes of you.”
A tense silence had fallen over the bar. The other patrons were listening, observing with a kind of desperate curiosity. They wanted to know if I was going to enforce him, of course.
I didn’t see any reason to; a pissed-off guy from Brooklyn insulting some random woman at the bar was the very definition of “business as usual.”
“Go fuck yourself, you self-righteous piece of shit,” I said, and turned back to my drink.
A group of kids trooped into the bar. It was a regular’s bar, filled with old timers quietly mourning the world’s slow decline and their own gradual loss of hope; it had been that way for a long time, long before the aliens arrived. These kids were out of their element, but too drunk to notice. There were six or seven of them: white kids, the girls so young they looked like children, dressed in their spangled thrift-store finds, their gladiator sandals and embroidered leather cowboy boots. They gulped PBR and downed double shots. They were celebrating a wedding. The bride pulled the groom up onto a table and they began to dance. The wedding party cheered them on while the rest of the patrons looked on in disapproval; it was not that kind of bar.