An Etiquette Guide to the End Times: The End Times

By Maia Sepp

There aren't any zombies (yet), but the world is still at the brink of destruction: It's 2028 and global warming has led to rising oceans, crazy weather, and resource scarcity. On top of that, someone just turned the Internet off. Seeing as how it's humanity's last chance to turn things around manners are, understandably, a bit frayed.

Bookish etiquette buff Olive O'Malley is busy microfarming her urban property and minding her own business (and her chickens) when the government comes calling. Their goal is to push the populace towards carbon-neutrality while keeping kvetching to a minimum, and they come with a proposal: transition Olive's popular etiquette column to a radio show for the masses, and they'll help Olive find her grandfather, who's gone missing.

 

Olive doesn't trust the hipster government officials who try to bribe her with delicious-but-probably-a-little-evil chocolate pastries, and declines their offer. (Politely, of course.) But they won't take no for an answer, and soon Olive is knee-deep in turmoil, eco-terrorism, and missing chickens. Now she has to untangle herself from their demands and figure out how to make sure her family (and her poultry) are safe before it's too late.

 

An Etiquette Guide to the End Times is a 30,000 word novella.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Maia Sepp
• Release date: Jun 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9781498994507

Maia Sepp

Maia Sepp is an author of quirky contemporary and dystopian fiction. She left the tech sector to write books about sock thievery, migraines, the future, and...the tech sector. Her latest, "Wake," is the prequel to the "End Times Series" and is a story about climate change, unruly appliances, and finding somewhere to belong. It will be available June 2015."The Sock Wars, an Amazon top-100 digital bestseller, is her first book. Maia's second novel is "The Migraine Mafia," a story about a nerdy thirtysomething's quest to come to terms with a chronic illness. Her third book, "An Etiquette Guide to the End Times," is a humorous near-future dystopian novella. Sign up for Maia's mailing list at: www.maiasepp.com/mailinglist.html

Book preview

Chapter One—In the Land of Victory

My superhero power is definitely not sleeping. When I was looking for a house, my realtor rhapsodized about this bedroom’s perfect southern exposure, about the tastefully herbaceous wall treatment and charming old-world feel. Right now my room could be more accurately described as a floral-wallpapered sauna, full of an impossible heat, like three Julys stuffed into one. It isn’t helping.

I watch the overhead fan stop again, gyrate, and then restart before I roll over, the sheets coming with me. After a minute I shift to the other side, flinging the covers away with a sigh. The fan finally grinds to a halt, probably the victim of a wiring problem I haven’t been able to pin down, although lately I’ve been thinking it might just hate me.

I relocate to the living room and angle the pedestal fan my way. God, it’s hot. I close my eyes and lean back on the couch for a minute, hoping sleep will take me. The sofa is a faux leather hand-me-down that’s supple after years of wear, smelling faintly earthy, soft against my skin.

Eventually I switch the TV on. Our cable hasn’t worked properly in months, the service so erratic it’s like the people running the company are legless, as my grandfather Fred would say—a charming Irish way of saying spectacularly drunk, even though my grandfather hasn’t seen Ireland since he was a child. My eyes land on Fred’s easy chair, a pale green monstrosity he could barely squeeze through the front door when I finally convinced him to move in with me. His pipe, his books, and his old-man slippers are still where he left them.

After flipping through a bunch of static, I shut the TV off and switch to the radio, which promptly announces it’s five-thirty in the morning. I ponder what to do next, discarding juggling, mind-reading, and origami, although I spend more time thinking about mind-reading than I probably should, considering I’m the only one here. Finally I pull my computer tablet onto my lap and turn it on. I write an etiquette column for a high-spirited arts and culture website, and my latest instalment is due on Friday; other people’s problems are always a delightful way to get my mind off my own. I start to page through the letters, which all start with Dear Olive. Dear Olive, I’m convinced my neighbour is milking my goat. Dear Olive, my neighbour’s windmill is keeping me up at night. Dear Olive, my wife is hoarding solar panels. What do I do?

Three crashing noises erupt above my head, each more ominous than the last. I wait for it to stop, but twenty minutes later I’m clinging to the side of my house, staring down a pair of raccoons who seem intent on defiling my solar array. For a long while it’s just the three of us, locked in visual combat, but it’s my roof and unless they start paying rent, they’ve got to go. Eventually they get spooked by the noise of the six a.m. domestic surveillance drone overhead, which would make this the first time I’ve ever been happy to see a drone. I watch as it starts its first pass of the morning. They’re smaller than the military version—sleek, modern, ever-watchful. Rumour is they’re even biodegradable, although that hasn’t exactly endeared them to anybody.

After the raccoons finally lumber off I pull myself onto the roof and take a look at the solar panel they’ve sullied, the wires connecting the array to my house almost stripped. It’s not easy to carry out rooftop repairs quietly at six in the morning, and it definitely wouldn’t be polite to wake anyone up, but I don’t want to be back up here tomorrow, either. If I leave the panel like this, they’ll come back and finish the job, I know it. They’re organized.

I look up when a new-fangled Town Car, still boxy and authoritarian but now electric-powered, turns onto my street. I watch it as it goes; there are almost no cars on the roads these days, and the sight makes a faint sense of unease pulse through me. I hope whoever’s in that car isn’t carrying bad news for one of my neighbours.

After it eases past my house I try to concentrate on how to get myself off this roof. I’ve brought my very last roll of duct tape with me, and after a moment of conflict I wrestle a piece off and start to fix the damage, but my foot slips and my right hip ends up bouncing off the shingles. I pull myself into a sitting position to gather my wits, my stomach clenched into the size of a peanut, my breath suddenly ragged and shaky. I don’t want to go splat on the driveway beside my house. It’s a bungalow, true, and not that far to fall, but it’s still a worry.

Over my left shoulder the sunrise glows on the horizon, beautiful in a terrifying sort of way. It’s hard not to be nervous about what the sun will do to us today; so far the summer of 2028 has broken four Toronto temperature records, slow-cooking our city under our feet, making everything smell like asphalt and failure.

Hi there, I say, barely above a whisper.

The tabby cat that’s been skulking around the neighbourhood is sitting near me. She’s tiny and brown, dainty but ravenous. I’ve been leaving her small bits of protein loaf for weeks, moving the bowl closer and closer to my door. She pretends not to be eating my food, and I’ve been pretending not to notice.

Hi, I repeat, and she takes a skittish few steps back. To make her more comfortable, I turn and look away from her, my eyes sweeping over my East York neighbourhood, a street of cosy hundred-year-old bungalows that’s tucked into an eastern corner of the city, separated from Toronto’s downtown core by a bridge and a few kilometres. When I was a kid, it was a place of block parties, ornamental flowers, well-behaved pets, and the occasional scolding by someone else’s mother. Now it’s a street I sometimes don’t recognize anymore, even though I practically grew up here. Today all of my neighbours’ roofs are like mine, retrofitted with solar arrays or covered in solar paint. Tiny windmills add spinny accent pieces. Our future will be powered by a goulash of renewable energy, the government says: solar-wind-hydrogen-geothermal with a little hydro-electric thrown in as a chaser, which is why our neighbourhood was designated a renewable resource pilot project. What they didn’t tell us was that we’d have to be up on our roofs at six in the morning, fighting off wildlife. There are a few other details they left out, too.

The cat and I sit there for a while. Eventually, I look at her again and put my hand out, just enough for her to sniff me. She moves closer, and I feel a tiny frisson of victory.

Having fun, Olive? My next-door neighbour Camilla is standing in her front yard, decked out in a flowing blue summer dress, her strawberry blonde hair in a neat chignon. She’s thirty-three, just like me, but much more stylish and energetic. Not to mention louder.

Sssssh, I whisper, as the cat zings over the roof and disappears. You’ll wake everyone up.

So come down, then, Camilla says, and when I meet her gaze, she grins at me. "I have iced tea. With ice cubes."

Just a minute. I make my way off the roof and down the ladder before slipping in the back door. The house is hot, a raw surge of summer stickiness taking up all the space in the hallway. I shuffle to the bathroom and run some water into the basin, splash it over my face before peeling off what I’m wearing, an old tank top and a ratty pair of cut-offs. Then I step into a hemp summer housedress, but when I glance down it’s already stuck to me like sweaty tissue, splayed up against me in a way which leaves little to the imagination, not that there’s anything exciting to see. A quick glance at the mirror confirms limp dishwater blonde hair, bland brown eyes framed by the faint beginnings of crow’s feet, all in a too-full face, the rest of me skinnier than it used to be. I run my hands though my hair. It used to fall to the middle of my back, and now it’s barely at my shoulders. I miss it.

Olive! Camilla’s disembodied-but-still-perky voice comes from the front of the house.

I unlock my front door. Camilla is standing on the porch holding a Mason jar, so cold it’s sweating. I try not to lick my lips. You know I’d never say anything about it, but this really is too early to call on someone, I say.

Not that you’d ever say anything about it, she says with a grin.

I smile back at her. Do you want to sit outside, or in?

Out is fine, she says. There’s a breeze now.