Ring Around the Rosy

By W.B. Cushman

The sun has broken through the inevitable hole in the Earth's atmosphere, and the only survivors are those underground during the event. Seven young people, led by a girl in a wheelchair, her nerdy high school attendant, and a boy with Down Syndrome, meet in the ruins of a private school in their hometown of Marion, Massachusetts. One finds a portable radio in a ruined basement, and the group hears the plea of the one station still broadcasting. "Please come to Rockport." So begins a journey across the length of the state, in hopes of finding the one parent who may still be alive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: W.B. Cushman
• Release date: Jan 13, 2017
• ISBN: 9780998547510

W.B. Cushman

W.B. Cushman is a writer living in Portland, Oregon. Ring Around the Rosy is his first novel. 

Book preview

There are no real people in this story. The Massachusetts towns are real, and a few of the public buildings. There is a private school in Marion – but not this one. If a Tube is coming to the world of public transportation in the Bay State, it hasn’t arrived just yet. There is no WANN in Rockport, though there is a Bearskin Neck.

And if you find yourself in Marion, Massachusetts, and you need to go looking for an artist, well, Rockport’s as good a place as any in which to look – and better than most.

Copyright © 2017 W.B. Cushman

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-0-9985475-1-0

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Cover design – Vicovers

Formatting – Beenish Qureshi

To my wife Susan – for everything

With thanks to Pat and Jamie, Spenser and Marie

Table of Contents

Book One (The Marion Sun)  Page 5

Book Two (Essex Tears)  Page 84

Book Three (On the Road)  Page 111

Book Four (Tube Dreams)  Page 152

Book Five (Rockport)  Page 178

Book One

(The Marion Sun)

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All the people in this story were somewhere far below the ground when the sun finally burned through an inevitable opening in the Earth’s supposed-to-always-be-there protective atmosphere and cooked the planet. The whole damn planet. One cycle through, 360 degrees of the slow waltz the planet takes every day, that’s how long the sun burned as it moved along before some geological astrological meteorological whimsilogical shift took place and the chasm in the atmosphere buttoned itself back up, so’s if you’d been on a vacation to, say, another planet and came back the next day things would be pretty much the same as usual. Excepting, of course, everybody’d be dead – deader than a doornail – and that includes, in addition to homo sapiens, all the cats and dogs and exotic house pets and baboons in the rain forests (ooops, no more forests) and giraffes and all the mosquitos everywhere (which, some fatalists may snarkedly call the perennial silver lining), and even all the cows, which may be the saddest thing of all. What did a cow ever do bad to anybody?

But the people you’re about to meet, they’re the lucky ones – in terms of continuing to simply exist, continue breathing and swallowing and giggling, even in the ultimate shit house waiting for them up there, of which they haven’t a clue when we begin.

Ah, the irony of it all. Think of all those folks who growled and grimaced and uttered threatening sounds about the big lie of global warming and depleting ozones and all that scientific hoodoo the liberals and their white-smocked allies were making up, creating out of the thin blue just so’s to come up with more money for projects, and of course more taxes on the little guys like you and me, fuckin’ A, and now think about those anti-science dickheads today, little teeny piles of ashes who, in fact, do not have an answer now that they’re blowing in the wind. Again, the Big Ooops.

Of course if it wasn’t just them – the neo-fascist, right wing evangelical everyone’s going to hell and burn except us folks – well, you might decide there was some brand of twisted justice if they was all of it. If you were particularly insensitive and generally a hippie black panther green party union-loving Bolshevik that is. But, in this case, where that lucky old sun gets the last laugh, it all evened out, ideology notwithstanding, when everyone not somewhere deep beneath the planet’s surface became a smore sometime in the big circle twenty-four hour space fry that began at precisely 11:24 a.m. August 13, 2018 and lasted – planet wide, moving along across the fun-loving latitudes and longitudes – for a little more than twenty four hours until just about noon the 14th.

But, for the sake of telling this story, let’s begin again, at 11:15 a.m. Tuesday the 13th. Here, at the Eelaham Southeast Coastal Aquarium, east of downtown New Bedford, Massachusetts. Off Route 6, little old Route 6 that runs all the way from Long Beach, California and directly past the entrance of this aquarium right out to the tip of old Cape Cod, which of course, after the fact, now resembles a Frito covered in bean dip and left in the microwave, on high, for an hour and a half.

Here we go.

***

Where’d David go, Teddy? Cracklin’ Rosy asked Teddy Holmes, the boy with Down Syndrome she’d come to know pretty well this summer, and liked enough, and actually (in private) thought he was kind of cute.

He went to get my water bottle.

All the way back up to the van?

Yes he did.

Rosy looked over to her right, at the water fountain up against the corridor wall.

Dude, there’s water everywhere down here.

It’s not the same.

Isn’t water water? she asked.

No it’s not, Teddy said, and folded his arms across his chest – case closed.

Whatever Dude, Rosy said, moving the joy stick with her right hand and swinging the chair down the corridor to the dolphin tank. Her school mate and sometimes attendant, Matt Lavalee, followed slowly behind, wondering for the seventh time in the last hour why he was down here when he could be up outside staring at the hurricane wall out in the harbor, daydreaming his favorite things, since the Cracklin’ One (which he called her both to himself and to her face) was more than capable of taking care of business here in the darkness of the underwater world, together enough, actually, to lead this group of individuals from the program, each with their own, what Matt called, stuff.

Rosy called back, Teddy, you seen these dolphins yet?

I’m waiting right here for my water, because I said I would.

Yo, Home Slice, which was a nickname Rosy had given Teddy because he was always calling other people Home Slice and so she started calling him that not knowing what his reaction would be but since he laughed when she called him that she kept doing it. I don’t think David’ll have a problem finding you if you’ve moved twenty feet away from where you said you’d be.

Not gonna happen. I’m waiting here.

Rosy had to laugh. Teddy, aka Home Slice, cracked her up. All the more reason to like him. It fit right in with her world philosophy of not liking anything coming under the category of normal. You know why? Because normal people stared at her. Because normal people talked funny to her, in baby talk, like her physical disability made her somehow less than up in the head, consigned her to permanent pre-k mental development or something. Because normal people were boring with a capital B. Ha she always thought, What they don’t know will hurt ‘em one of these days. (Which, it was about to turn out, was true way more than she knew).

So she tried to stay away from normal people doing normal things. Now, granted, coming to the Eelaham Aquarium on a hot and humid August day, school vacation and all, was a pretty normal thing. But being down in the dark rather than out in another sweet sticky summer day, school starting up again in two weeks, was a little away from normal. And then there was her crew. A field trip from the Cattabriga House, where she’d been enrolled and participating to one degree or another for the past eight years, which would have made her seven when she first started there. It was a small group today, just the one van, and a few had already left back up to the van, bored after just a short time – which was crazy considering all the wicked cool and wonderful things to see down here. Leaving only Teddy and his attendant David, who was, that’s right, out in search of the perfect water bottle now, and Matt and her. Which was cool, and she knew she was in the right place at the right time, because Teddy was just Teddy – a big kind of not normal – and then there was her, of course, the Cracklin’ One, in her chair and with her wild hair and weird old hippy dresses and blouses and scarves and scrunchies and multi-colored fingernails and toenails (which Mom had to help with.) And there was Matt, a self-proclaimed king nerd among all nerds, with, as far as Rosy had made out, no friends other than a couple nerdy science buddies he usually only saw in school, maybe sometimes on the rare occasion at one or another’s house, and dressed totally like a geek (which Rosy loved) and was barely interested in anything  people would call normal (yay) and, there was this – was the best attendant she’d ever had in terms of paying enough attention and being there right when she needed him.

And then the ground shook. Really, really shook, and the few lights down along the corridors puffed and popped out, making the fairly obviously this must be an earthquake event scarier, and Rosy looked and saw the water in the dolphin tank begin to roll from side to side, new waves and currents and water eddies, the dolphins – smart as they are – flashing through the water like people would look running out of a theater on fire in a panic. There was yelling and crying, it got really loud, and she heard a long, loud Help, and knew it was Teddy stuck in his wait right here for the water spot, and so she fingered the joy stick and very slowly moved through the almost pitch dark back towards where he was standing.

Matt? Rosy called out, not too loud, she didn’t want to add to the noise and stress-ness all around.

I’m right here, he said, close enough to blow some of the loose hairs hanging over her right ear and offer a respite of tickling in an otherwise scary (not knowing it was the end of the world) time. See – right there when she needed him.

We’ve got to find Teddy.

Another loud Help came from directly in front of them, and in a moment the trio was together, and led by Matt, up against one of the corridor walls.

I don’t like this, Teddy said. I want my water. I want David.

David might have a hard time getting back down here and finding us, Home Slice. Why don’t you have some of my water while we wait for him?

There was a long, extended, mournful sigh. Okay.

What’s happening Matt? Rosy asked, not so much expecting an accurate answer as making conversation for the sake of doing something.

You’d have to think that with the shaking and rumbling, the way the water was moving around in the tanks (he saw that too, she thought), and the electricity going off, though it seemed like it was an electrical surge the way the lights popped, anyway, you’d have to think there’s been an earthquake.

Isn’t that strange for around here?

Massachusetts is actually a pretty active earthquake area, you just never hear about them because we don’t get big ones.

I think we just did, said Rosy. She turned to where she thought Teddy was standing. How you doing Home Slice?

I don’t like it.

Tell me about it.

***

And there they waited, for a long time, longer than anyone could imagine, surely past lunch, quite possibly past afternoon snack for all they knew. At some point Teddy announced he’d peed his pants. Rosy liked him even a little better then, for being brave, and having peed her own an hour or so earlier.

Me too.

Did you pee your pants? Teddy asked Matt.

Metaphorically, was his answer.

Teddy laughed out loud. That’s so funny Matt. What you said.

Good thing you didn’t ask me about shit.

Bang, Teddy shouted (and if it wasn’t dark he would have seen fifteen or so people turn in his direction, or maybe not, since he didn’t pay too much attention to what anyone else was doing, except, of course, when they were off fetching his water.) That’s so funny.

And Cracklin’ Rosy smiled – a big smile – in the dark. So cool.

Outside, by now, the haters were all sunny-side up, and the liberals never got to blah their I told you so’s, being the crispy critters they were themselves. The great forests that ran from the Cape Cod Bay and Buzzards Bay coasts and grew in size and dominance and – oh my God – wonder as they rolled west to the Berkshires – were on fire and burning or already burned, sooty stumps all that was left to pock the equally sizzled dirt. Seeds, spores, fungi, bacteria, life-givers and life- fuckers with, all autoclaved out of existence in a mosquitoes’ heartbeat. Most of the waters had boiled – the ice-age created lush freshwater ponds that dotted this part of the country reduced to shallows, steam drifting up off the pungent reality of dead fish floating on the surface. The charred, dusty bones of birds, thrown like pieces by Gods in a great game of Candyland, were strewn everywhere on the ground. Houses burned or were already gone, banks burned, factories burned, the metro-rails and walkway-movers up in Boston began to melt in mid-transit, not an airplane flew, not a ship sailed, not a vestige of the day-to-day realities of life as it had been only last weekend remained.

This was the way of the world people deep in the ground everywhere came out to after the earth had spun just a little more, and the life-taking terror of direct solar comeuppance had moved on. In its circle game.

Kind of like a bitchin’ game of ring around the rosy.

***

Wow, Rosy said upon entry back out into the above-ground world. Holy F’n wow.

Not an earthquake after all, said Matt.

Where’s David? Teddy asked, turning in a full 360.

What do you think happened? asked Rosy.

I’d guess something like a nuclear bomb, the way things are burned, almost everything gone. Except the sky would be different, I think, ugly and boiling or something. And we’d be rotting away every second. It must have been something else.

Star Trek, said Teddy.

What? Matt asked.

The attack of the space invaders. Like on TV. It’s that, I bet.

Matt pulled his phone from a pocket, the camera seemed to still work, and began taking pictures, in all four directions. The hurricane wall out in the harbor was different, it didn’t look like a jetty anymore, now it was a solid hunk of melted rock. And the ocean water was down too. A lot. Tsunami he ruled out, duh. But some kind of natural disaster. So, maybe not a nuclear war and probably not (sorry Teddy) an alien attack. Something with massive heat.

I don’t like it, Teddy said. Not finding David, he was looking for the program van, and he was not finding that either. I want to do back down.

Rosy looked at him. As you would say, Home Slice, not gonna happen. Remember how long it took us to get out?

After the shaking and the rolling and the yelling and screaming and crying, and after the long, long waiting and the pants peeing, when they began to hear and even sense people beginning to leave, Rosy had said it was time to go. People had flashlights with their phones, so Matt was able to get to and return from the elevators. They weren’t working, of course, and the stairs weren’t an option. Not for someone like Cracklin’ Rosy, his primary responsibility now, in her power chair, which weighed over two hundred pounds with the batteries – not counting her Rose-ness – so the stairs were out. Instead, Matt had taken some elastics he’d had in his back pocket –