absolute power annihilates planets absolutely

a different kind of doomsday prepping

Previously… Katherine sent a blog post into the ether. It’s bitter. It’s angry. But it’s not hopeless, or else why keep writing? Our Goldilocks planet is on the verge of taking after Venus, completely inhospitable to humans. So Katherine writes, because what else is there to do when the world lights up?

Chapter 4 - absolute power annihilates planets absolutely

I feel better after hitting Post on my latest blog entry. That’s the entire reason I started the thing, almost a decade ago, unbelievably. Trying to get hard feelings out instead of watching them swirl down into the black hole I thought I was. Now, getting those feelings out of me and onto the screen is second nature. I feel a thing, I write a thing. By the time the responses come in, it’s like the subject is already behind me.

I’m having a harder time with that today, though. My neighbour of half my life has left, maybe forever, leaving me in care of her houseplants and free access to her backyard berries. My sister is travelling in a throng of people abandoning the cities, if that’s an option, heading north to places like here, where fresh water flows abundantly and urban fantasies of living off the land haven’t yet been sorely tested.

After shutting down my computer and making sure the charge cord is snugly attached, I head downstairs. My mom is sitting at the kitchen table, like she’s done thousands of times. Sometimes in my memory the table was full of children, then one or two, sometimes my dad and her, and often, just her. Sitting at the table over the years, her hair greying, her proud posture angling forward a bit, the cigarette in her hand changing to a vape, then a cookie, but nowadays, just a coffee cup. Black and caffeinated in the mornings, creamy and decaf in the afternoon. Decaf and a shot of whisky in the evenings, if it’s been one of those days.

Hard to imagine a day more worthy of a shot of whisky than this one.

“Hey, Mom,” I say, stepping beside her and hugging her with one arm, the certainty of her solidity a balm. “You got the supplies okay?”

“Enough honey and beeswax for a lifetime. A long one, if that’s still possible. Groceries, too. Things are very odd. Surreal. I don’t think everyone believes it.”

“Thank you for doing that. I know it couldn’t have been easy.”

She stares at me, a wild animal behind her eyes.

I take a deep breath, hoping she follows. She does, but then picks up her phone and immediately starts shaking her head.

“What says the internet about all this?” I ask.

“Well, my daughter wrote a downer of a blog post,” she says. “But I haven’t finished it yet so maybe it lightens up.”

My chuckle is so dry it feels stuck in my throat. “Better out than in,” I say, reminding her of my therapist’s refrain.

“I know. But still, you know... You know, I did try. In my time, with what we knew. It’s not like we had all this information always coming at us. If you wanted to know something, you either read it in a book or saw it on the news. And we all watched the name news. It’s not like today.”

“I hear you,” I say. “I know you tried, and power accumulated anyway. It’s what power does, what people with power do.”

“Do you think your sister’s okay?” My mom’s fingers curl around the coffee mug. Her generation does struggle with getting rid of things, and my mother’s mug collection is evidence of that. This one has a cute little graphic of a cheerful chickadee and the words Mama bird.

“Of course. Dad gave her a least one gun.”

“Oh my god,” my mom whispers. “This is really happening.”

I sit at the table and look at her. With her eyes closed and her forehead gathered into a deep central crease, she looks older than she is, but at the same time, there’s a denial, almost a refusal in her expression, like she can close her eyes against whatever’s coming. If it’s too dark, she closes her eyes. Too bright and she looks away.

“I want you to know I’m going to do everything I can to keep us safe. To keep us all safe.” My voice is a low promise but without her meeting my eyes, it feels like I’m making it to myself.

“You told people to come here –”

“I told women to come here,” I interrupt.

Now she looks at me, narrowing her eyes. “I know you think women can do no wrong...”

I jump in again. “That’s not true. I fully believe women are capable of great harm. I just don’t believe if we’d had the same power men do, we would have destroyed the planet. I just don’t fucking believe we would do that. So what’s the harm in getting us together, now, when it could be the end? Why can’t I wish we could get a second chance and let women have a turn leading the way?”

“Do you think there’s a chance, then, a chance to be okay despite what they’re saying?”

I sigh, touch my fingertips to my lips to slow my thoughts, to make sure I don’t speak faster than I can think. “I can’t see why we shouldn’t live as though there is a chance. I can’t see how that could possibly make anything worse.”

She nods and opens her eyes, meeting mine. She nods again and this one seems like a permission, like trust. “What about your brother, though?”

“I truly don’t know.”

“Maybe your father...”

“Maybe,” I say. I want to say, after Jenna went missing my brother has only ever looked out for himself. Why should now be different? But my mom knows. She pushes her coffee away and gets up to leave.

---

Tricia knocks on the front door at 2:37am. I know because I jerked awake at 2:34am, around the time she would be pulling onto our street.

I open the door to her, and she dumps an armload of stuff at our feet. I see sleeping bags, a tent, two gun cases, a cooler, and several reusable grocery bags full of stuff.

“There’s more,” she says before turning around and going back to her car. I pull the gear into the house and line it up in the hallway so no paths are blocked. I’m extremely careful with the guns, as my dad would expect.

Tricia comes back in with another armload of bags, wearing what I know is her bug-out backpack, and a cat carrier in her other hand.

“You brought the cats,” I say, half dismayed at what it might entail to feed a cat if cat food stops getting made, and half excited to see my fur-nieces.

“Just Pen,” she says, keeping her voice low. Penelope is the oldest of Tricia’s cats, and the meanest. She’s a matted, be-goobered fifteen pounds of barely contained rage with one extra pound of unexpressed anal glands. And she’s the absolute best.

Tricia shuts and locks the front door and bends down to open the carrier. Pen shoots out and is gone down the hallway before the fur she leaves behind settles on the hardwood.

There’s a dark silence and Tricia looks at me. It’s like her grown self shrinks around her big brown eyes until I’m left looking at her as a child. Always tanned and covered in scratches and bruises, my sister’s entire life has been lived chaotically rocketing between the past and the future, never settling into any given moment.

I step in and hug her, and her arms around me are rib-creakingly tight. We both hope we are comforting the other, easing existential fears. There is so much I can’t believe I haven’t said, and with every moment that passes, that obvious commentary seems less and less relevant. What really matters is keeping my promise to my mom: I am going to do everything I can to keep us safe. Everything.