"Before We Knew It Was the End of the World" by Lindsay Ferguson
This is a selection from our Summer 2023 issue, “Stay,” currently available in print and digital versions.
Back when we used to watch those movies – when it was only just the movies – I never told you just how often I imagined surviving a dying earth with you. I savored the thought of it being just the two of us at the end, whatever was left of it. Free to run wild, to render ourselves reckless because everything had gone to shit anyway. I wanted to taste the absurdity of it.
We’d leave breakfast simmering on the stove and spend the morning swimming in the stream behind our house, the sun and water playing at our backs. Come home to a frying pan charred sticky and sweet.
I’d finally send that letter to my sister, the one I’d written and rewritten a dozen times. Tell her that she was wrong, that I would’ve been a good mother if that’s what I had wanted. I’d dot my i’s with the tiny hearts I knew she hated. Seal the envelope with a kiss, my lipstick the kind of bleeding red that would let her know I had no interest in being saved.
I pictured you plowing the lawn mower straight through our neighbor’s hydrangea bushes. Their petals were so blue, so absurdly vibrant, that the first time I saw them, I put my mouth to your ear and whispered that I wanted to devour them, to crush indigo between my teeth. I’d never forgotten the day we moved in, the way her eyes soaked up the deep brown of your arms as they strained under the weight of our life in boxes. The way they blinked back fear, or maybe disgust. I never forgave her either. Together we’d gather the petals and spread the remains ceremoniously around our home. Use them to garnish every room, where we would make love as much as we wanted, as loud as we wanted.
I never told you any of this.
Instead, in the mornings, you’d pace the kitchen, fix the same fried eggs and coffee as the day before, and wait for me to meet you at the table. I’d cocoon further under the sheets waiting for tremors, signs that the ground beneath us was beginning to crack.
You’d kiss me goodbye in the doorway and I noticed the shape of your mouth changing against mine. That’s when I stopped being able to feel the sun hot on my skin, knew that it was spiraling further and further away from us.
I didn’t breathe a word about the garden. How late at night I would slip softly from our bedroom into the backyard and dig my hands into the frost-laced soil, certain that I felt a quivering beneath my fingers, proof that something was snaking its way to the surface. That there on my knees – the earth caked around my wrists, pearls of sweat gathering at the back of my neck – I would pray for something wild to happen.
In reality, in the end, there is no plotting our misdeeds because there is no time. The sky peels back like a tinfoil lid and something putrid creeps in, settling into the earth with a trembling thirst. The bark of the orange trees in our backyard weep blood, their sticky sap trickling down the blades of grass. The sun turns red, and then dims out almost completely. Constellations fall out of the night sky, sending entire neighborhoods up in flames.
There are rumors of people turning into beasts. Before we lose contact with the rest of the world, we hear more than a dozen tales of men and women sprouting claws overnight, growing thick coats of fur, pearlescent fangs rupturing from their gums. These are the ones who can’t be saved, a man on the radio says before the connection sputters to static.
On the tenth night, we board up the windows of our home, make a dinner of the last of the oranges as we listen to flood waters lapping outside our door. We strip our clothes to try to peel off the heavy wetness of July. In the shadows, we can only see the contours of each other’s faces, and when you reach out to touch my cheek—to check if I am still myself, still human—I smell the citrus mixed with smoke that has settled into your skin. When my lips meet yours, you run your tongue over the ridge of my teeth and I wonder if you’re checking for anything sharp, searching for the taste of something metallic and unfamiliar. As I lean back and press my hands into the floor, I think I feel a rumbling beneath me, or within me, I’m unsure. With something clawing its way closer to the surface, I wonder if you’ll see this new world the way I do. If in the moment it bares its teeth, attempts to swallow us whole, you’ll lean forward with me to peer down its throat.
Lindsay Ferguson is a writer and visual artist from Columbus, Ohio. Her writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and appeared in Barrelhouse and Best Debut Short Stories. In 2021, she was named a winner of the PEN America/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. In 2022, she was named a Tin House Scholar. When she's not writing or creating art, Lindsay can be found helping nonprofits wrangle their communications.
