Fiction by Radical Creasy
A little boy stands on a wobbly wooden chair at the too-short table in his mother’s kitchen, wearing overalls and a striped button-down shirt. His head is slightly too large for his body and is topped with a knit Carhartt hat, bought secondhand. He is waving his arms wildly and singing some off-putting six-year-old version of death metal. He stops abruptly. It is at this moment that he asks his mother, “Mommy, is the world ending?”
She just looks at him, teetering on the chair. His curly blonde hair falls in a surprisingly charming mop over his curious honey-brown eyes, making her wish she had a simple answer. He still has a fleck of mud drying in his hair and on the bib of his overalls from his afternoon romp in the woods. He’s like any other little boy; he plays with trucks and Legos and watches cartoons and resents when his mother asks him to sweep the floor. He is also nothing like anyone who has ever existed. He dances around when there’s no music playing, like his life depended on his body continuing to move. He asks too many questions, if there were such a thing. He is the contrast of light and dark, as if shadows had a body. There is nothing behind his mother’s eyes as she tries to figure out how to tell her little boy that Yes, darling, the world is ending, but not just yet.
His mother is a quiet type, young-looking for 33. She pulls her billows of brunette curls into a loose ponytail at the nape of her neck with a hair tie she has somehow kept track of for months. Lily likes her coffee too sweet and too milky. It’s her way of clinging to joy in a world that pours her bitter, black, freshly-brewed reality every morning. She worries – she worries for her son, she worries for herself, for their future and for the millions of people who are worried about the same things. When Aster was born, she really wanted to be the kind of mother who put her all into parenting. She wanted to cut his apples and his cheese into little cubes and store them in perfect little Tupperware containers to hand him as he leaves for school. She knew that if she cared too much, she would inevitably hurt him.
She answers his question. “Maybe.”
She answers this way because he asks 100 questions a day. She answers this way because she can’t bear to tell him the truth; rather, she can’t find the words to explain such a complicated truth to a six-year-old. But if the world is going to end, doesn’t Aster deserve the truth, difficult as it may be to hold? She’s angry with him for being too young to understand. He’s angry with her because she doesn’t let him have five juice boxes in one day (too much sugar and too much plastic waste, she thinks). Later, he will be angry with her because she failed to tell him the truth when he asked whether or not the world was ending.
The next morning, she watches the morning news from her low-rise apartment – the kind with the dull grey outside paint and a din in the kitchen that doesn’t budge no matter how many lamps you add. The forecast for the coming week projects higher temperatures than the state has ever seen (which is saying a lot for Oregon in mid-July). The pang of regret living in her stomach punches her in the gut. She didn’t tell him the truth. She dumps her milk-coloured coffee into the ugliest travel mug to ever exist and texts her therapist. Her hands shake and her lungs feel suddenly small as she thinks about Aster’s question. Can we move our session to 5pm today? I can’t wait until tomorrow.
Incident Two / Part Two
“Lily?”
She blinks herself back into the room and stands up to meet her therapist. She’s been seeing Rye for a few months now, and found their even-keeled temperament unnerving. The lilt of their voice had a way of drawing out of you every secret you’ve held in your throat since primary school. Rye was 36 – only a few years older than Lily, but somehow they possessed the patience of a tired grandpa who still listens intently to a story his granddaughter has heard several times. Lily thought she was paying Rye to listen to her dump her problems onto the overly poofy green couch every two weeks, but Rye’s job was actually being a level-headed guide for Lily as she navigated the paradigm shift that came with her climate-induced existential crisis.
Lily is a kindergarten teacher. She loves kids – always has – and went straight into teaching after getting her Master’s degree in early childhood education. The curriculum changed in 2010 and she was now required to teach about climate change, but she couldn’t even explain it to her son. She was detrimentally protective of him. That was the same year she got diagnosed with severe depression and an unclassified anxiety disorder. She didn’t start seeing Rye until two years later, after an incident where Aster had asked one of his many questions and she had given him no answer at all.
Today, Lily’s hands shake from the moment Rye called her name. She sits, slowly, feverishly, on the stupidly puffy couch Rye loves so much, perched like a tiny bird ready to flee at the first sign of danger.
“Lily, I sense a lot of tension today. Can you describe how it feels to be in your body right now?” Rye asks. Lily stares aimlessly across the baby blue office for a moment before crossing her arms and shrugging her shoulders with a defiance usually seen only in children.
“I feel incompetent as a parent, and my lungs feel tiny. I can’t breathe today,” she says. Rye uncrosses their legs, takes a slow, deep breath and asks another question in the same measured, observant tone as before.
“What would it look like if you felt the way you want to feel in your body?” Rye asks. Lily climbs off the puffy couch and onto the floor. She sits upright, her legs spread wide like she’s rolling a ball to a toddler, and gestures to her body spread across the hardened carpet.
“Like this,” she says. “I want to be open, but I can’t.” She sits like that for a short minute before she climbs back onto the couch, clutches the throw pillow and fidgets with the decorative knots of thread attached to it. Rye knows that she’s struggling to find words. They probe, asking what the next right step could be. Lily shrugs, her words meandering until she says something about pulling out every book on homeschooling from the old decrepit library that haunts the corner of her apartment block.
She takes a deep breath, then gets up and rummages through Rye’s desk for a sheet of blank paper. Lily scribbles homeschooling books and bus conversion and run away from society? and normal life for Aster. She puts air quotes around the word “normal” before crossing out that list item and adding all dead in 20 years in its place. She stands, holds the paper out in front of Rye’s face, waits for them to read it, then shoves it in her coat pocket and walks out of the office.
The door closes behind her with an apathetic click. Lily knows it’ll fly open again in a week, when her fears of failing as a parent of a boy in a world that’s ending will flood her throat and fill her eyes with saltwater again. Rye will listen. Rye will help her rationalize. Rye is good at that. Lily will slowly come to know, to trust, that Aster will be fine. She will learn that she, too, will be fine.
She doesn’t know it yet, but soon, she’ll be living in a bus in the woods with Aster, distanced from the ever upward-creeping temperature of the city. She’ll do sessions with Rye online. Aster will never wear shoes. He will adore this fact. He will be confused for a while as to why they left the city, but he’ll be happy. Lily will be proud.
Yes, the world is going to end. She vows to tell Aster when she can find the words. There is no ‘perfect’ at the end of the world, she thinks as she walks out into the July heat, her wild brown hair unburdened by the dry air. But I can tell him the truth.