SomeoneSondra Fink
4900 words The Coloradan landscape is bleakly exquisite, from the rutted road, to the wasted field, to the looming mountains, in shades of grayed-yellow and moldy-blue. But however I dab and mix, however I feather my brush, I’m no closer to capturing it than I ever was. My oils lump thickly together, suffocating the innocent canvas under a layer of knobby ineptitude. Ed’s embarrassed to have run out of gas in the middle of our “short cut.” I square off against my easel while he turns the dials on the radio. Without much route-adjusting prelude, authorities now seem to think the multiple calderas of Yellowstone will blow at any moment. Our supplies—for painting, music, surviving—are all stashed in the van where they’ve been for the past year. We’ve fled multiple calamities, but they ever nip at our heels. At least this one’s not human-made. This is just immaculate nature, taking her blind revenge. Two other cars are pulled over nearby, both running on fumes. We avoided the highway because mandatory evacuations put them at a standstill. Meantime, I’m not sure what Ed conceives as our next move. Singing heart-warming guitar ballads to road-weary faces won’t get him out of this situation. Nor, probably, his reflexive sorting of duct tape and atlases. “I dunno who I think I am,” I mumble, my eyes crossing the depthless gulf between the landscape and my canvas, “calling myself a painter.” “Who says you have to be ‘a painter’?” Ed snorts the question, making one-handed air quotes while navigating channels of static. “Well, what am I then?” “You’re someone who sees shit in the first place?” comes his curt reply. “What you smear on canvas is just dictation.” “What I smear.” Ed calls out my self-obsession while setting a laughably low bar. “And who’ll be around to get my take on the calamity anyway, right? But if Yellowstone erupts,”—I turn to him with a sigh, not yet fully persuaded it actually can— “can’t we just tape ourselves in the van?” We’re carrying tubs of water and about five-hundred snack bars, plus an emergency slop bucket if the resulting necessities must be performed in confinement. But if we sip and chew very slowly, could we stew in our own piss and shit until the ash clears? Can we somehow—share?—our hard-earned survival skills with the rest of this motley group just long enough to make another fresh start? Or is this it? Ed’s scanning a map for some nuclear bunker. He claims that sheltering in parking garages or the like—which at this point would be just as easy to locate, let’s be honest, as a nuclear bunker—will not suffice. Not in the face of “the big one.” Not after “the next Tambora times ten.” The sari-clad woman has nothing to say on the matter. Her hatchback is stuffed to the roof. Her son’s long legs stretch out the open passenger door like anchovies escaping from the can. The third car is an ill-supplied SUV with a bent old guy in the company of two very young girls. Their entire juvenile vocabulary seems to consist of nothing but the words “but Grandpa!” “We can hike it, Mom,” whines the long-legged kid, executing a series of dismissive gestures as he graces us with his full height upon emerging from the car. “We can find a cave at least, instead of dying out here in nowhereland.” “A cave is too exposed,” sniffs Ed over his bushy mustache. “Nowhereland,” echoes Loudmouth’s mom with a blank look around. “Which is weirdly beautiful,” I observe, “you have to admit.” “Wait, is that what you’re…?” inquires Loudmouth. “Oh my god. That painting sucks.” I hoist an edge of my soaked canvas and heave it away, flying-saucer-style, into the forbidding tundra off-road. “Meg!” scolds Ed. I rub a paint-stained hand on my shorts. I don’t know who I think I am, hawking bad artwork on the road. Some sad goof vainly grasping at landscapes that elude me, my tireless efforts no doubt inhabit ditches and dumpsters from Chicago to Cheyenne. People would rather nod along to Ed’s forlorn songs of love and courage. I guess we gotta roll with whatever puts snack bars in the cooler, but at this point, what am I challenging the apocalypse for anyway? A radio-voice is newly urgent when it abruptly cuts off. The vacuum of silence around us is like an eruption in reverse. “Was that it?” There is a faint rumbling that feels like the muffled thumps of a subterranean clock. It’s something I could well be imagining, but Yellowstone is six-hundred miles away. There’s nothing new on the horizon, but the sky feels suddenly alien, some sleight-of-hand where what seems frozen in sameness just became something else entirely. The radio squawks unintelligibly. “It’s happening,” answers Ed, his voice shaking. “Right now. It’s catastrophic. This is it.” “How long…?” wonders dead-eyed Sari-Mom. “It’ll keep erupting… for a bit. The ash’ll take… maybe a few hours.” Ed makes his estimates between glances at his vintage wristwatch and steady looks at the horizon. “We should start to see the cloud soon.” “We’re gonna die out here?” The old guy waves his arms, seeming none too worried about alarming his granddaughters. “In the middle of nowhere?” “If we just tape the car doors—” I begin. “It’s the big one, Meg,” Ed barks over me. “We’ll be under ash like we’re at the bottom of a lake.” The word “shelter” keeps popping out of every channel that Ed dials to, but unaccompanied by any coherent instructions. “We should have stayed in the south.” I’m resurrecting an old argument. “Tornado alley?” “Well… you said there was a bunker near? Some nuclear thing?” “Near Colorado Springs.” “Which is how far?” “About twenty miles. According to the atlas scale.” “Twenty miles?” “Shut up, they’re talking about it now.” He presses his ear to the radio. Then his face shuts like a door. “They’re closing it in five hours. Ahead of the ash. Permanently. This is the big one, Meg. They said ‘permanently.’ That means volcanic winter.” “Volcanic winter?” wails the old guy. His manic gestures incite similarly uncomprehending wails from both girls. “Not if…” Ed begins, turning to our unlikely assemblage with his never-failing can-do spirit. “Can anyone run for it? Twenty miles in… four hours? And tell them we’re here?See if…” His sentence degrades to silence, until: “I can,” says the boy. “Ishan!” his mother objects. “Well, who else?” “Meg…” Ed starts with a look at me. “She ran the marathon—” “A decade ago!” I balk. “I’m death-challenging nature ten years later? “I can run faster than some old lady,” scoffs Ishan, and I know this is hardly the time and place, but: ouch. “Over my dead body, Ishan!" Ishan’s mom looks like she’s about to pull her bun out and stab him with a hair pin, but Ishan only rages in reply. “Well, what are we gonna do, Mom?” he demands, flapping his long arms. He turns to Ed. “Where is it?” “Th-the bunker?” asks Ed. “The road we’re on. If you stay on…” And he’s off. The kid is just off. No prep. No supplies. Just invincible daddy-long-legs already vanishing in the distance while his mother screams at his back. “Ishan!” If I had anything like the blind confidence of this kid, I’d have conned my way into galleries by now. And at the same time, I know he’s toast. “Kid!” bellows Ed, jogging a few paces before breaking out in coughs. “Ishan! Let us… there’s a…” Ishan’s mom throws herself back in their car, gunning the engine and spraying gravel for maybe a hundred feet before the car stops dead. And that is some impressive pace the kid is pulling, because he’s already at the bend in the road, and then he’s just gone. “Okay, well… here’s hoping,” breathes Ed, massaging his skinny chest as Ishan’s mom rises spirit-like from her car, “though he doesn’t have water and… doesn’t know about the turnoff.” “Ishan!” screams his mom. “Can somebody…? Ishan!” I can run faster than some old lady keeps echoing through my skull, right up there with that painting sucks. When I should be asking myself: Can I run twenty miles in four hours? No. Maybe. Ed was too kind to mention that I dropped out of the marathon at mile seventeen. Unable to bear foot pain from overtraining, I finally slunk like a shitball to the med-tent. That was one of the last road races. The heat since has been off the charts. And there’s not much in the way of civic organization since the economy tanked and infrastructure crumbled. All of it a dystopian prologue to the current question: Can I outrun the inevitable? I’ve run some. Out here on the road, if only to get away from Ed for a minute! And if I don’t… I mean, that kid has no chance. He doesn’t even have water or a map. He doesn’t even know about the turnoff. He started way too fast. It’s twenty miles. That’s not a sprint. For that distance in that time window, you’d have to find a perfect pace and hold it. It would be all about the sweet spot between too fast and too slow. What are our other options? Mom? Granddad? Ed and his heart condition? Suddenly I’m the jock. That kid is gonna crash. And I’d not mind seeing the look on his face when I… “I’ll do it,” I say. 
I have things that that boy lacks, like maturity and appropriate caution. I have water, and a page from Ed’s road atlas with informative scrawls. I have snack bars from our now priceless supply. I have a flare gun. Except for something funky barely visible on the northwestern horizon, it’s a gorgeous day. I can’t picture a better setting for running the first twenty miles I’ve attempted in ten years. I get a long kiss—a last kiss?—from Ed. His sky-blue eyes meet mine for a moment. There are eons in that look. I pat my bulging pockets. Ed gives my ass a parting smack. And I’m off. There’s no sign of the kid, but he’s got a long stride and he set out at a sprint, so he’s got a big lead on me. Out here on the road, I’ve sometimes run, honestly, just to get a break from Ed. Or from the rest of the mobile homeless, the faces we encounter on repeat, in scrubby campsites and derelict malls. I hear there are still gated communities, even a bustling metropolis or a few, but there is also a spreading patchwork of places abandoned to the newly unreliable elements and social unrest. There’s a lot of road-trippers, like us, evading disaster and chasing supply lines. Ed and I have been together for decades, long before the wildfires and the cyclones, long before the riots, the mosquitos, and the food lines. We’ve each been so many people. Ed’s been everything from a pothead to a grade school science teacher. I’ve been a baker, a dog-walker, and an EMT. Recently, our roles have grown wishful. He’s a traveling folk singer inspiring the masses in the face of coming doom. I produce commentaries on our shared travails: a chap book, a painting. And who are we today? He’s a prepper who knows all about nuclear bunkers and the big one. I’m someone who can run twenty miles in four hours. Maybe. Ed and the others and our bedraggled cluster of cars have all vanished around the bend behind me. I’ve established myself at what I deem the exact medium-speed trot that will enable my newest iteration. Plop plop plop go my sneakers on the broken asphalt. This was a backroad already, and there haven’t been any more cars. Plop plop plop I’ve also got Ed’s watch, to keep track of the time. He kept my phone, which was drained. The sunshine’s cast shifts from merry yellow to a discolored jaundice, and I’m actually picturing the exact mix of grays, browns and purples that might capture it. Plop plop plop My success depends upon that steady beat, on maintaining that muted energy that is nothing special, while possibly limitless. I know from experience that if I push it, I’ll crash. If any part of that plop plop plop changes, in either direction, it spells doom, for myself and for the others. Ed’s probably broken out his guitar by now, to calm screaming mom and granddad like a musician on the Titanic. Maybe “Puff the Magic Dragon” for the kids. If I can’t hold this pace, I’m executing those kids. Plop plop plop We never had kids. I was always too busy chasing something, ever eager to matter. I lived for the unseen dream of my numerous liabilities revealing themselves as secret strengths, my mind ever locked on the shortest route from “no one” to “chosen.” But how do you make news when there are no headlines left to chase? My life has been an exercise in magical thinking, only for my closing feat to be just maintaining a moderate speed ahead of an extinction-level event. Not to save the world, mind you, just six other people that, let’s face it, no one cares about on an abandoned backroad twenty miles from shelter. To sip water, nibble snack bars, and squat to pee while hoping against side stitches and blisters. Plop plop plop has been my life so far, and plop plop plop it will remain for I hope the next three-and-a-half hours. Have I at least cleared three miles? No sign of that kid. 
The northwest landscape is changing. The sky overhead is still blue, but clouds blanket the mountainous horizon, a surreal mix of dull tones that seem to pull together by some magnetism, a section in the middle stretching up from the expanding layer below, as if to flip the heavens a bird. The haze finally dissolves to turquoise overhead, and I imagine what it would be like to paint just the sky, leaving out the mountains, to frame that referenceless, ombré void. It actually hurts, the vision versus the ability to execute. Ed calls me a crank, and who can blame him? I’m probably just jealous of the hopeful victory lap he allows himself every time he inspires a crowd of lost souls around a campfire. He has the sense to take the win, while I aspire for more, only to get prickly when my efforts fail. Plop plop plop Have I cleared four? Five? The horizon’s darker. The turquoise overhead is turning filmy, smeared, darkening to almost navy where it meets the piled brown clouds. They’ve come to resemble a distant mountain range, like a towering duplicate of the actual mountains. My wisely moderate pace may be a final joke, one last idea defeated at its inception. Even if I make this bunker, is anyone there willing to drive their trucks or fly their copters through the falling ash to save six souls who could have planned better? Plop plop plop Probably ninety minutes have passed when I realize Ed’s watch has stopped. I don’t know when that happened. I don’t know exactly how much of my perishable time has curdled. The turquoise sky is now steel blue. The piled brown clouds obscure the western range. The road climbs into a series of foothills that extend from dismal mountains ahead. There is a drop off on one side, descending into a loamy ravine with rocks and mulch and elongated grasses. My legs are going numb and something invisibly airborne wants to crawl up my nose and back down my throat. I’ve not yet seen that boy, and I haven’t seen any turnoffs. My knees hurt and my water bottle is lighter, and I hope I’ve run at least… seven miles? I’m gonna die out here. And my story along with me. Part of the carpet of bones this whole region is about to become. “Hey!” comes a faint call from off to my left. And down. “Heeeeeeeey!” I know that whiny wail despite the short duration of our acquaintance. It sounds both desperate and entitled. “Hey! Help! Heeeeeeelp me!” He thinks no one hears him. He’s crying to God alone. What the fuck was that kid’s name?” “Eee… Ishan?” I try, sneaking as close as I dare to the road’s leftward edge. “Heeeey!” comes a newly eager call from too far below. “Help! I fell!” The ravine is all sagebrush and alder branches snaking out of the depths. It’s not exactly easy to fall into. It’s not a cliff. He must have wandered off-road, to take a piss or smoke a joint. And now I’m supposed to-- “I was looking for water!” he calls. “I slipped.” Jesus, is this kid’s one life more important than the five behind me? And how important are the five? Do I really think anyone at this supposed bunker is gonna brave the calamity to rescue our handful? When there are probably people dropping like flies across three states? And countless more to perish in the “volcanic winter”? No one is anyone. That realization strikes like a bolt of lightning from my third eye to my root chakra. Who the fuck are we fooling? “I’m slipping! Shit!” “Hold on!” I answer, my replies becoming automatic, unavoidable. “Just let me get closer!” I put aside my supplies—map, water, snack bar, flare—and lower down the gravel on my butt. The ravine descends into loose earth and snaking weeds, with fallen trunks and bramble and unreliable boulders blocking any clear path. I’m gonna kill myself trying to save this idiot, and everyone else back at that parking site, and, oh my god, why did I leave all my gear up top? There’s nothing to get hold of to keep from falling, except… twigs. Some twiggy sprays feel anchored in the soil, and I grab a handful like a rope. That allows me to slither further, until I finally see a long-fingered hand grasping at branches. He’s on a fragile-looking platform that is in no way beholden to humans. But my savior-roleplay has got me going like a robot, overriding my brain like basic programming. I twist dangling vines around my arm and slide carefully lower, where he stretches across his accidental perch, his hands buried in tangled growth. “Can you scramble?” “My ankle,” he rasps. “I can’t stand on it.” Fuck. He’s dead weight. “Okay, hold on,” I say, scooting low enough to probably just combine our weight and take us both down. “I can’t believe you came,” he says breathlessly. “I kept calling. But I didn’t think anyone would hear.” “Can you grab my hand?” He reaches out in answer, only to have to quickly grab at shrubs again when his whole body slips lower. Water chortles obliviously somewhere below. I stretch my hand further, my whole body at the mercy of plant life in no way engineered for human support. “If you can just get hold, I can—” He goes for it, lunging a hand in my direction. His fingertips barely graze mine when his temporary ledge collapses in a cloud of dirt and screams. “Ishan!” I shriek, straining against my anchoring weeds as he vanishes under the falling earth. “Ishan!” A hellfire of rising dust muffles my voice, which sounds exactly like his mom. “Ishan?” The side of the ravine is now a fresh cliff, strewn with loosening boulders and the waving ends of shredded shrubbery. Everything feels a little darker than it did only minutes ago. “Ishan?” He’s gone. He’s just gone, the same as when he took off running down the road like some fool. If he’s not dead, he’s… I hate the idea of him waking up all alone down there, but… Holy fuck, I’m so off-pace by now. Ed’s back there. He trusts me. He thinks I can do this. Am I gonna fail my last earthly assignment because some stupid kid doesn’t know his ass from his elbow? “I know where you are!” I call, smearing my hair off my forehead as I struggle back up the ravine to my gear. Back on the shoulder, my limbs on fire, I peer at the atlas page and grind some dirt into the spot where I guess we must be. I take off my bright bandana and tie it to a bush. “I’m going for help!” comes my unlikely promise. “Just hold on! Just sit tight! I’m… getting help! Within the next… two hours probably.” The sky is now the exact sepia you’d expect of a volcanic plume, the discoloration extending all the way over my head, only blending to blue somewhere near the eastern horizon. It’s June. The days are long. But it’s gonna get dark. It’s gonna be the dead of night when that ash descends. “Just sit tight!” I get all my gear secure on my body. I swig a mouthful of vanishing water. I resume the plop plop plop. But it’s different now, partly because of the sun lowering behind the mounting gray in the west, partly because of the tears streaming down my cheeks. I struggle to find the perfect not-too-fast-not-too-slow, though maybe just a little faster due to the time I’ve lost. We’re intruders. We don’t belong. The realization levels me like an earthquake. This landscape has bided its time, waiting for our inevitable slip-up, to give us the hook. The replacement species already evolving is probably some mammoth, scaled thing, without enough brain cells to even study our bones, happy to lumber about consuming leaves and water—I drain my bottle—then reliably shitting them back out to grow more. Maybe our replacements won’t need to matter. Judgement Day is a blue-black twilight that would be almost ethereal if the air didn’t feel so thick, if particles of invisible earth weren’t sticking my tongue to my cheeks. The landscape has mounted on my right. There’s a dark opening in the rising rocks. I surrender to panic and run for it. A cave is too exposed. But if I found some raised pocket, if… if there was some fucking goat’s blood to mark the entrance, some fresh teenage entrails… I push into the furthest, darkest corner. I flatten myself against the rising stone, cold as a graveyard. The cold snakes through my shoulder blades to encircle my heart, and what am I? Some future fossil meeting her final rest in a nameless cave off a forgotten highway. It’s poetic in its way, but there'll be no one around to raise a folk tune. At least I’m not still running. I finger tiny pebbles and suck in a breath. Was Ishan's ending a quick one? Or is he counting life’s steps as they plop away? How’s Ed? Oh, Honey. Tears now. Twenty miles in four hours. That was a good one. Ed’s voice was like honey when he sang, to the myriad of other castoffs who joined their voices with his, who lined up to drop tips in his jar. I always rolled my eyes. Now I wonder if anyone’s got a guitar at that bunker. To calm a massively reduced population while the snack bars dwindle. They’re all gonna be hella pale when they finally crawl back out. And to what? But, oh... How I’d paint it if I were there. New tears wet my sooty cheeks as I picture every vanishing sunbeam. Every dimming star. Every color of mud I'd splash over a hundred cave walls, unscrutinized by judge or jury, accomplishing nothing but the simple act of witnessing. What am I? I’m someone who sees shit in the first place. 
An urgent animal need—I can’t die blind—propels me away from the frozen wall and back through the thick dark. I crawl out into the light, what’s left of it, to meet a stiff wind coming from the south. It’s just some random swirl, a brief respite, but enough to show the western horizon—Holy Moses—completely blanketed in a carpet of gray. The setting sun is invisible behind it, but imparts a scarlet illumination like a blood-red vow. I pat my pockets to find almost everything in place. Half a snack bar. Atlas page. Flare. I run. Plop plop plop plop plop I’m remembering road races in the lost world, where as much as I didn’t want to “hit the wall,” I knew that once I’d crossed the halfway point, I could tempt fate, take a chance. I take it right up the rising road. My chest burning, I crest the hilltop, only for a pothole to send me sprawling. Fuck! I’m on my back. A knee to my chest, any attempt to push back to my feet sending a searing pain all the way to my hip. What am I? A body in the dirt. A corpse-elect. A cell. A minute organism who somehow sprouted eyeballs for an upended look at an ombré, referenceless void. And what… naked ape… would imagine that colors like those could ever make the shoddy transit from my eyeballs to my fingertips? What cretin would even attempt that hue? The brown, the slate-gray, the translucent amber… the horrific, mindless beauty. Rising. Changing. Swallowing itself down to start over. Like the blue-green waves of the ocean’s surf crashing into foam. Exquisite. Even while it’s killing us. I roll to the edge of the road and off, surrendering my mortal coil to a teasing burble as melodic as Ed’s honey voice. The ravine’s not too steep here. It’s grassy. The promise of water draws me, even as I realize I’ve got zero shot at ever climbing back up. I worm my way to a pebbly shore that vanishes into a chuckling brook. I crawl to its edge to drop my whole face in, and, oh, how cold! How indescribably sweet! I suck down mouthfuls. Let the hiding bacterium rot my corpse if it wants to. “I forgot your name,” says a husky voice. My head flies up. Through dripping eyelashes, I see a long, brown teenager scooting toward me in the dirt. “I know you said sit tight,” grunts Ishan, coated in mud and rags and what looks like a concussed skull crowning a papier-mâché of blood and bruises, “but the landslide forced me to the bottom. And it’s not too bad down here. The bank is flat and the water’s decent. What’s your…?” “Meg,” I answer. “I’m Meg.” “Are you hurt?” “I… I twisted or sprained something. I can’t stand up.” “Me neither!” he laughs. And for some reason, this makes me laugh. For some reason this is hilarious. The synchronicity of it. The aspiration. Our combined laughter enlivens the ravine, as if to say we came! We saw! We eventually vanished with the dinosaurs, but what’re you gonna do? “What did you want?” I ask him as our laughter calms, and really knowing for maybe the first time that I’m never gonna see Ed again. “For yourself? What did you picture?” “You mean for…? Oh, my mom…” He chokes on the word. “She wanted me to be a doctor. But I really lack the brains. I’d like to be a bartender.” “A bartender? Your driving passion—” “I thought it would be fun to look cool and talk to people.” He pokes at his ankle. “What about you? What did you want?” “I… I just wanted to be someone.” “Well, mission accomplished,” he crack-tooth grins. “I kept hoping someone would come.” “And someone did,” I admit. “And how do you picture that’s gonna help? Company for your demise?” “Or we join our legs,” he answers. “You hurt your left foot, right?” I nod. “I hurt my right,” he explains. “We could three-legged-race it.” “How’s that? Up the ravine?” “No, the bank of this brook has been flat for miles. I’ve been crawling.” He winks one of his two black eyes and raises a hand to show me a blistered palm, a mangled elbow. “If we leaned against each other just right, maybe we could use the two good feet we’ve got?” I look ahead. The brook goes straight, while the road curves around climbing peaks. In the twilight at the bottom of this ravine, in the dark of this bank, I see the stream move away from the road, stretching at a diagonal northwest. It stretches in the same direction as the supposed “turnoff.” “My man,” I breathe. “Did you just find us a shortcut to the bunker?” “I’m sorry I said your painting sucks.” I lean into him, and he into me, and although our rise is painful, we manage. When we’re fully upright, we bind our legs with our combined shirts and sink our weight against each other. We take turns using our functional legs to step. Plop Plop Plop The brook before us is blue gray, with vortices of green and random pops of white. It shimmers against the glossy pebbles of its shore. Plop Plop Plop Its beach opens wider, a spread of soft silt, like a fresh snowbank, just waiting for human feet to fuck it up. Which we do, ruining that tranquil perfection as is our way. Moist, herbaceous smells rise like angels’ voices, and what am I? I’m someone who saved this kid's life. Or someone who got saved by a smart-ass kid. Or we’re both goners. But we hold our plodding pace in the gloom of a deep ravine, alongside a whispering stream, until, turning one last knob of ineptitude, I relieve a bulky pocket of some of its burden, raise an arm, and fire my flare. |
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Sondra Fink
Sondra Fink is a writer and holistic skincare small business professional from Brooklyn, NY. An active member of the Brooklyn Speculative Fiction Writers, her published work has appeared in Posture Magazine and the Kaleidocast podcast. She can be found online at sondrafink.com.
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