No Exit

by Kathy Kachelries | Feb 2, 2006 | Story | 0 comments

This way, she says, and I follow.

There was no real direction, of course. The surface had been frozen beneath a mile of ice long before humans evolved, but still, I follow. Two hours after we lost our way in the snowstorm, all directions have become meaningless.

When I was a child I read a story about an oceanaut who followed a rope to the bottom of the sea. That was how they did it, then: you held on to the rope, buried beneath suits of rubber and glass to hold off the thickest weight of the ocean, and when you were ready to surface, you followed it. Anyhow, he somehow lost his grip at the blackened base of the sea, where the heaviness of water prevented anyone from floating to the top. Down was up, up was down. So he chose a direction and swam.

Obviously, the guy survived to tell the tale. If you listen to it like that, it’s not even a very good story, but here’s what I remember: as he was moving, having committed to the direction with the last of his oxygen, the light of his helmet revealed small bubbles. They were moving quickly over the glass, and when he saw them, he knew. He was moving up. He was moving in the same direction as the air.

Here, though, that’s irrelevant. There are no air bubbles, and there’s no way to tell left from right. The needle of the compass has frozen in place and the horizon is a blinding blur of white and silver, so pale that I can’t tell the ground from the air. The sun pours over the atmosphere without revealing its position. Her body, coated in thick rubber and plastic and thrown blackly against the endless white, continues on. It leaves unshadowed footsteps in her wake. She says nothing further, though it’s possible that our communicators have frozen. They weren’t designed to stand cold for this long.

She keeps walking, as if she knows where she’s going. I follow, because that’s all I can do.

We All Fall Down

by J. Loseth | Feb 1, 2006 | Story | 0 comments

The first day the sun didn’t rise, it was business as usual. The trains ran, the offices were open, and we just used a little more electricity than normal. We went to work, fed our fish, and gossiped about the news coverage while waiting for the bus. Over dinner the television told us what a strange event this was and how many records it had broken.

The second day the sun didn’t rise, we thought it odd. Our gossip spread to the cubicles and the break room and we listened to the radio, curious and nonplussed. It was weird, we told our coworkers and our friends and the people we met on the bus. It was definitely very weird.

The fifth day the sun didn’t rise, we complained. Extra lights were brought in and the power companies grew worried. The television said that California had adopted a mandatory rolling business schedule in which workdays were completed in shifts to reduce power usage. There was talk of rationing and of national disasters.

The tenth day the sun didn’t rise, we were panicked. We went to our doctors, our psychiatrists, our personal trainers, begging for help. The pharmaceutical companies had to keep their factories open twenty-four hours a day to produce enough Prozac.

The thirteenth day the sun didn’t rise, a national emergency was declared. We heard that it was the same everywhere, that no country had been spared. Our crops failed and our businesses closed. Thousands of us were dead from exposure or suicide. Our leaders gave speech after speech and our scientists despaired.

On the eighteenth day the sun didn’t rise, we locked ourselves in our homes and apartments. We looted closed stores and fought over food. Our water stopped running and we pissed in the streets.

On the thirty-seventh day the sun didn’t rise, neither did we.