~1000 words, ~10 minutes reading time
One week after Jonah kisses me on the mouth and walks into a tornado, I take my sunglasses, my trauma-bonded Happy Meal toy, and someone else’s car, and drive out of the bunker and into the unending world. I drive past wilted cornfields and barns collapsing like popped blisters, past billboards that feature my own eyes scratched out forty feet high, past graffiti that reads CON THE BAPTIST and ARMA-GET-ON-WITH-IT. I drive to the last Happy Pancake House on earth, and I order a super strawberry stack with extra whipped cream.
Jonah’s last words twist in my mind like smoke: The world feels too small for me now.
The world doesn’t feel small to me. I feel small within the world.
The ceiling fan slugs wearily around its track. Thunder tumbles through the air, threatening to submerge the turnpike. My fork screeches through pink splatters, leaving nosebleed trails across the plate. The only other diner is a septuagenarian laboring over her crossword, a row of plastic fruit cups arrayed before her like shot glasses. She gives me a look—my peach fuzz, my scarred cheek—but not the kind that screams hate crimes or says she recognizes me from the news.
I chew slowly, but I’m not expecting to wait long. The creature hunting us likes bad weather. It is, especially, a fan of floods.
Here’s the thing: humanity was gagging for the end of days when we came along. One hundred percent “Apocalypse me, Daddy.” Before any of us had the words to explain what happened to us in the parking lot (or the abandoned cistern, the laundromat, the diner where the burnt toast resembled the Pope), there was a “Which Prophet Are YOU?” Buzzfeed quiz and a doomsday cell in Indiana hawking bumper stickers of our faces. They took us to D.C. Talk shows, stadiums, prophetmania crowds heaving like the surface of a primordial sea. Millions of people who abandoned their ordinariness—cars, spouses, kids—to drift toward salvation like a pilgrimage of locusts, leaving a nation of picked bones behind them.
I close the eyes (burnished, slit-pupiled) that once netted me the front page of the Post and, some time afterwards, a smarmy headline about crocodile tears. We became vessels for something vast and terrible, sure. Just not what we’d expected.
#
After the apocalypse-that-wasn’t, Daniel was the first one to be stalked by the beast that calls itself Leviathan, devourer of false prophets. Danny never ate right, breathing steam from tea mugs and dabbing his pinky into flecks of foam. His god had once been hailed as a god of plenty, lord of a neo-Dionysiac cult with a taste for the raw.
Maybe it wasn’t divine ecstasy after all, his last diary entry reads. Just salmonella.
I think of Joanna predicting moonfall from her trailer park; Echo muttering in tongues; Kari’s hairdryer against their forehead, above the greening bruise from an ex. Was it all fake? My remaining compatriots sit limp and listless in the bunker now, scorched-out shells of their yearning. Sometimes I wonder if the Leviathan really eats us, or just asks us what we want to be when we grow up.
Did I really hear a whisper that night in the cul-de-sac, or just a generator’s whine? I’d been sixteen and barricaded in adolescence, in the longing not to be girl-shaped anymore. Did I really wake to the outline of my body splashed fuzzily against concrete, like a nuclear aftermath, and feel like I might fit my shadow for the very first time? Or did I just see an escape route in the shape of a camera flash, a microphone stand, a mushroom cloud?
Powdered sugar douses my plate like ash.
#
“Twelve down, eight letters, inwardly they are blank wolves.” The septuagenarian hovers next to my elbow. It’s raining cataclysmically now, lashing sideways. “Matthew 7:15.”
“Ravenous,” I say. “You’re late.”
“You’re all late,” counters the Leviathan, in its voice of a thousand winds and waters. It touches my scar. In answer I dig the Nostradamus the Narwhal Happy Meal toy out of my pocket, the cheap plastic one I once pried out of my own face. I still feel bad for that kid with his greasy fast food baggie, wailing amid a shower of limp fries as his dad howled Where’s your god now? and stabbed with more vigor than aim. Neither of us was, at the time, lovin’ it. Those toys clog landfills now, probably murdering sea turtles a thousand miles away.
The Leviathan’s shadow stretches into the parking lot. Its eyes are all wrong, two bulbs sloshing queasily with light, like anglerfish lures. If my maybe-god ever plans to speak to me again, now would be the time—in the hour of a sad, shitty sacrifice that probably won’t even work. Right? I imagine burning bushes and columns of lightning, but I find I don’t want any of them as much as I want to hear Jonah’s voice again, to watch my face grow its own shadows, to order a second helping of pancakes.
The Leviathan’s avatar looks old and liver-spotted and tired. I wonder if its god permits it to finish crosswords. I hail the waitress.
“Two chocolate chip specials, please,” I say. “Be right back.”
When the bathroom mirror fogs over, and the lone bulb hisses to life in a familiar way, I don’t fall to my knees on the unspeakably sticky floor. I toss my sunglasses into the garbage and stop by the diner counter on my way back. I order the Leviathan a pink lemonade, extra large, to go with the pancakes. I slide into the booth with one hand worrying at the edge of my contact lens case, blinking hard. Those things dry out my corneas like a motherfucker.
“Hazel,” intones the Leviathan, head cocked. “Nicer than the others. You were called.”
“Yeah, well, I hung up.”
“That is not an option.” It sounds disquieted. “You are—”
“Finishing my pancakes,” I reply. “Then I can be whatever you’d like.” The Leviathan’s knife lowers by degrees. It makes a soft noise at its first wary bite, like a jostled tuning fork.
Outside, the rain falls downward again and keeps falling.
L. M. Guay is a writer of poetry and speculative fiction, with short stories published in khōréō, Small Wonders, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, and elsewhere. Born in Asunción, Paraguay, and raised in Brooklyn, they currently spend their time between Chicago and Ann Arbor. They can be found online at lmguay.com or on Bluesky @nightgleaming
