“The End of the World” by Candice May
My sister sends the praying hands emoji. I type the hugging face, delete it, and send the rowboat. There’s a girl in the rowboat, and now she's me. I screw in the oars and push the boat across the sand, leaving my phone and shoes at the shoreline.
My boat is named The Shepherd. She’s where I go when it feels like the world is chasing me. I pack up and row. Sometimes I bring a case of canned beans and a slingshot. Other times it’s just my guitar. Today I’ve packed the rowboat with three things: a small journal with an attached pen, an unopened bottle of Don Julio, and a VR headset.
A few days ago, my sister said: “The future is coming. I'm going to believe it's not the end of the world.” We were at her nine-year-old's birthday party. Everyone drank spritzers while I took shots in the bathroom. We watched my niece open a pile of presents. She squealed when she unwrapped the VR Junior Zookeeper game. Her friends grabbed for it, oohing over the 3D-shaped animals printed on the box. I'm not sure if she ever opened my present: a donation to the World Wildlife Fund—‘Adopt an Orca’—and a stuffed whale toy. I’d wanted to give her something real.
Now I row out to my favourite island. There's a private rock around back where I swim naked in the summer. But it's February and spitting rain. The waves are winter chop. A blue heron slouches in the shade. I pass the rock and keep going, moving forwards by rowing backwards. My phone is likely vibrating emojis on the beach: curious face, magnifying glass, shrug.
“This is why I get depressed sometimes,” I told my sister's husband, between a mouthful of cake, but he didn't answer. “Have you heard about the VR for cows?” I said. “Simulated summertime, lush green fields. Apparently, the cows are happier and produce more milk. But if I were stuck in a cage, I’d rather know it, wouldn't you?”
“Nah,” he said, going for more cake. “Why feel bad if you could feel good?”
My niece ran in, her head engulfed in the game’s headset. She’d downloaded the Junior Zookeeper app to her parents’ phone, and now she growled and clawed at the air. “Bad bear!” she cried. “No dinner for you!”
After the party, everyone distracted, I stole the headset and downloaded the app to my own phone. I was up all night cradling baby koalas in my hands. I bottle-fed a chimpanzee. Studied the excrement of a lion. A waddle of penguins followed me around the Antarctica zone, where I tossed them bucketfuls of fish. In the morning, I washed the grey leather skin of a grandmother elephant, and spent the rest of the day feeding, cleaning, grooming. When I took off the headset, I felt dizzy and my muscles were sore. Then my sister banged on the door and demanded I give it back. “The zoo?” I said. “No, the headset.”
Miles out, I lift the oars and drift. There are more islands out here, a foghorn bleating in the mist. I drink mouthfuls of tequila and toast the grey sky, the swirling seagulls. I write postcard-sized poems to my family, my younger self, and some notion of God. Then I lie down in the damp wooden bottom of my boat.
“It's just the future,” my sister told me, scraping icing from a plate. “It's inevitable, anyway.” But she sounded unconvinced. Nostalgia thrummed between us, an unspoken sadness. When we were children, we played hide-and-seek in the forest. We hunted roadside ditches for newts; they crawled in our hands. Our own father had ridden a horse to school and never owned a television. I wanted to tell my sister that I run from the inevitable, or rather, I row, and that someday soon I might just keep rowing, further and further out. I’d be long gone when the high tide came to drown my abandoned emojis at the shoreline.
The sea smells saltier at night. Waves lap the sides of my boat. From the dark water, migrating sea lions snort and bark. A buoy bell clangs. When the stars come out, I put on the headset, bobbing towards some horizon I can't see. There are no apps out here, no VR. Inside the headset it's all black, all nothing—a perfect void, vacant of any future or past.
I fall asleep and dream of whales, surfacing. Blowholes spitting and sighing; the cavernous exhalation of a deeply held breath. I dream of my 3D zoo animals—those koalas and monkeys and lions and penguins. I dream of a ghost shepherd, hovering above my boat with a lantern. His scraggly beard is threaded with seaweed. “Wake up,” he whispers. “It’s the end of the world.”
But I can't wake up. Or maybe this isn't a dream. Now the ghost shepherd sits in the stern of my boat, head in his hands. I reach out to hug him, reach and reach and reach.
Candice May is a writer from coastal British Columbia, Canada. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pleiades, December, PRISM International, SmokeLong Quarterly, Atticus Review, The Masters Review, and has twice been nominated for 'Best of the Net.’ She is currently working on a collection of short stories.
