What We Talk About When We Talk About the Apocalypse: Collected Short Stories Written and Illustrated by E. S. O. Martin

By E. S. O. Martin

The End is Never Truly the End. But a Doorway to New Beginnings…

 

In the title story, "What We Talk About When We Talk About the Apocalypse," two contrasting couples confront issues of love, loyalty, and economic hardship in an isolated snowbound cabin in the woods.

 

In "Angel Man," a woman's chance encounter with a real-life angel offers a surreal romance that challenges her perceptions of love and healing.

In "Inheritance," a woman confronts the ghost of her abusive father in a battle for her childhood home.

 

In "Prince of Birds," a father confronts toxic masculinity as he seeks to parent his sensitive son through a hostile world.

 

In "The Awakening," a boy's thoughtless cruelty towards a bird transforms into a poignant metaphor for humanity's realization and regret over environmental harm.

 

In "Library of Unfinished Projects," an elderly man's process of downsizing his home reveals a renewal of spirit that propels him toward a future filled with travel and rekindled relationships.

 

This captivating short story collection explores a myriad of apocalypses—be it personal, societal, or global. These tales of transformation traverse a spectrum of genres, from mainstream contemporary to romantic fantasy to gothic horror. These stories are about moments of seismic change, where the old reality has ended and the new reality has yet to begin.

 

CONTENT WARNING: This collection contains some heavy pieces that deal with issues of child abuse, animal abuse, elder abuse, domestic violence, sexuality, aging, death, the COVID-19 pandemic, wildfires, and environmental degradation.

These short stories are illustrated by the author.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Snow Goose Press
• Release date: Jan 10, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224588190

Book preview

PREFACE

I’ve dedicated this collection to the memory of my grandpa Herbo. Whenever he visited, he would take me to a used bookstore and buy me stacks of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror paperbacks. We read many of the same series together and we’d talk about the books for hours, sitting in the driveway in his well-kept Toyota Tacoma.

I once asked Grandpa Herbo why he didn’t like reading reality fiction.

My life is real enough, he said. Why would I want ‘reality’ in my entertainment?

Fast forward to 2023. I get it now, Grandpa.

I read somewhere that the word apocalypse means a revelation. First there is the catastrophe, then a reassessment, then a new beginning. Many of the stories in this collection are about those moments of revelation—the twist in understanding where what you thought was real turned out to be just a story in your head. For many of us, the past few years have been a time to take stock and think about whether the things we were doing before are still working for us.

Each of these stories is a time capsule of my subconscious at a particular time in my life. These stories were written over a span of about seventeen years, from my early twenties to my late-thirties. This period covers college, graduate school, moving across the country (multiple times), marriage, becoming a parent, illness, the deaths of parents and grandparents, financial struggles, career successes, and failures.

I wanted to collect these stories all in one place.

Some of these stories haunted my hard drive and my brain for many years. It is time to exorcise them and put them all together in one volume, so other people can enjoy these dark little beauties.

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT THE APOCALYPSE

Cabin in a snowy woods.

1. SAMOVAR

Anaka is only waiting about fifteen minutes when Lizzie arrives.

Sorry I’m late, Lizzie says, sliding into the booth of Samovar, an upscale teahouse in the Mission District, where she had suggested they meet for their bi-annual lunch. Parking’s hell. What are we getting? She peels off her trench coat. The satin fabric is so fine that it only gives the softest whisper as she folds it over her purse. Beneath the table, Anaka crosses her feet at the ankles and feels her rain-soaked jeans press into her calves. She feels suddenly self-conscious of what she’s wearing: a rain-spotted sweatshirt, old jeans that are baggy at the knees, sneakers with the sole separating at the toe—she must look like a bum. She and Lizzie may have started in the same place—as dorm mates sharing a mutual love of Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen King’s The Stand, George Romero movies, and anything dystopian or post-apocalyptic—but after graduation their paths had diverged in wildly different ways.

Just tea for me, Anaka says. You get whatever.

Just tea? You kidding?

Anaka shrugs and smiles. Unemployed, remember?

My treat. You know I’ve got it covered. Waiter?

Lizzie waves and snaps her fingers. Her manicured nails catch the light; they have been filed and painted into oval rubies. Anaka hides her own jagged, tooth-bitten nails in her lap. She hates the thought of Lizzie paying for her. She knows Lizzie is just being generous, but somehow it feels like a favor. Like when Anaka goes out to dinner with her parents and they still insist on paying, even though she’s thirty-one and should’ve been able to take them out by now.

Sitting across from Lizzie now, Anaka can’t help but think how ironic it is: all that time she wasted being a model student when they were dorm-mates in college when she should have been trying to be more like Lizzie—partying, making friends, networking. Maybe Lizzie had gotten a B-minus in Shakespearean Tragedies, but after graduation, she had walked right into a public relations internship at a start-up tech company, care of the friend-of-a-friend. Her internship led to a full-time position and now Lizzie was in charge of social media for a company that had billboards all over downtown San Francisco.

Meanwhile, Anaka hadn’t even known how to look for a job when she had graduated from college. After a couple of years of thrashing about in the real world, she had gone running back to academia. She stretched grad school out as long as she could, taking the maximum seven years to complete her degree. Now she was out again, and she felt like nothing had changed... except that she was nine years older and a hundred-thousand dollars in debt... Nice going.

When the waiter arrives, Anaka runs her finger down the menu’s price listing, stopping at the smallest number. Even this is more than she earned in an hour, as a barista at a local bookstore before the bookstore had gone belly-up.

I’ll have the... butternut squash dumpling? Anaka says.

You sure? That’s just an appetizer.

Big breakfast, Anaka pats her stomach, only to hear it grumble.

Lizzie shrugs. You’re welcome to share my plate. Then, to the waiter: I’ll have the English Tea Service with the vegetarian quiche and cherry-oat scone. And,—she winks at Anaka— on the side, I’d also like the Warm Greens and Tempeh.

Thanks, Anaka says, quietly.

The waiter clicks his pen and scurries away.

Eager to change the subject, Anaka says, So tell me about this new guy.

Lizzie squeals and clasps her hands. Well, we’ve been together about seven months now, and he’s just asked me to move in with him.

Big step.

I know. I really think he might be The One.

Anaka breathes in deeply. Wow. She feels the weight of the teacup in her hands, smooth and heavy as a river stone. She listens to Lizzie describe her relationship with Max. They met at Burning Man. The chemistry was immediate. He was a commercial real estate broker living in the city. He wanted her to move into his high-rise condo so they could take things to the next level.

So the game is that he’s going to propose to me in six months and we’ll be married by next year, Lizzie says. I’m having some of his friends drop hints about how I want him to propose to me.

Why don’t you propose to him?

I guess I could do that... Lizzie says, obviously bored with the idea. But enough about me. How about you and Preston? How’s married life treating you?

Although Anaka and Preston have been together for almost a decade, they had only recently gotten married at City Hall. Their wedding—if you could call it that—had been quiet and unassuming. Still, marriage was one of those items on the Checklist of Success: college, job, marriage, house, children, equity, etc. Even though Anaka was happy for Lizzie, she still felt a sting knowing that the Checklist was the subtext of their conversation... the subtext of so many conversations she’d had since people started asking what she planned to do with a Ph.D. in Regency-era English Literature—write the next Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? Har har... Even though Anaka was proud of her marriage (and her degree), she generally spent her days feeling like a total failure.

Anaka breathes deep and feels the pressure build in her ribs. We’re good. We’ve decided to retrench up in the mountains.

Retrench?

You know what the characters in Jane Austen novels do when they move to the country because they’re too broke to live in the city?

Right.

Preston’s grandpa owns a cabin up near Arnold. We’re moving up there so that he can work at the ski resort while I write and look for a job.

Lizzie reaches across the table to squeeze Anaka’s hand. You are going to be such a rugged mountain woman. I can totally picture you wearing a coonskin cap and skinning a deer or something.

Yeah, well... Maybe if you guys are in the area, you could come up and visit us? Anaka says. "Skiing. Snow. It’ll be pretty awesome. We could play Settlers of Catan... Drink hot chocolate..."

Oh, Max is so outdoorsy. He’d just love it! And I can’t wait to have you meet him.

2. SOCKS

That night, in their apartment filled with boxes packed for storage, Anaka and Preston play Apocalypse. It was a game they made up while binge-watching Doomsday Prepper after Preston had lost his job as a high school history teacher in the most recent round of budget cuts. (It didn’t matter that his students scored higher on standardized tests than those in the rest of the school. It was simple seniority: last hired, first fired.) Somehow, it made them both feel better to imagine how they’d fare in a global apocalypse. The shackles of civilization would fall away. No more credit card bills. No more student loans. No more rent. Just you and your wits, fighting for survival in a cold, hostile world. Anaka begins:

Pandemic.

The cabin is pretty isolated, Preston says, so we might survive long enough for a vaccine. He is sorting clothes on the bed. Sweaters, rain shells, wool socks: things they’ll need at the cabin.

Nuclear war.

The nearest city is Stockton. Nobody cares about Stockton enough to bomb it. Preston tosses Anaka a pile of socks.

Global warming.

Sub-category?

Rising sea level.

Mountain range. Check.

Zombies?

Preston swivels his hand: comme si, comme ça.

Anaka flattens a gray sock against the bed. It is stretched-out and misshapen from too many washings. She sifts through the pile, looking for its mate, but there doesn’t seem to be one. She lays it alongside the other gray socks, but none of them match. Anaka never imagined that at thirty-one, she’d still be jobless and living off the charity of others. No money to fix her broken glasses, held together with tape. No money for Preston to go to the dentist to fill the gaping cavity in one of his front teeth.

And wasn’t it part of the American Dream to own your own house? Ha! Even renting was so expensive, it was absurd. All around them, people were being evicted so that their houses could be converted into condos or commercial high rises for rich people to keep as vacant investment properties in San Francisco. Foreclosures were everywhere. Part of it was aftershocks from the Great Recession. Part of it was the tech-boom and the resulting influx of programmers and app developers wanting to spend their freshly minted millions. Occasionally, Anaka and Preston would drive around and pick up pamphlets for one-bedroom fixer-uppers. Asking price: $1.2 million... and not even a view. If doctors and lawyers couldn’t afford to buy in the Bay Area, what chance did they have? A history major and an English doctorate—two people who had fallen into the liberal-arts crater, never to be seen again.

And even if they could afford a down payment, they would be buying into... what? A lifetime of concrete mazes and dirty air? Spending three hours a day commuting in heavy traffic? Paying bills month-to-month? Living as office drones in one long rat race for bigger houses, bigger cars, more stuff, and more debt?

Quietly, she says, What if the zombie apocalypse already happened? What if this is what it looks like? How are we going to survive?

Preston nods. He knows what she’s thinking, as this is well-trodden territory. Often they have clutched each other in the darkness, whispering their fears about their future in an impossibly expensive world. He folds the arms of a sweater in on itself, like a straight-jacket. Maybe we should ask Lizzie and Max, he says. Maybe they know something we don’t.

Anaka sighs. Yeah. She tosses her mismatched sock aside and starts searching for another matching pair.

How much do we have in the bank, by the way?

About seven dollars.

They are silent for a moment. Then Preston laughs and smacks her playfully on the butt. Guess you’d better get to work on that novel.

3. TREE CHOPPING

Anaka falls in love with the cabin the moment Preston pulls off the highway onto the dirt road. Tree branches scrape against the truck. The sounds of civilization disappear into the distance. Anaka sits wide-eyed, her face pressed up against the window. A foggy circle forms by her mouth on the glass. The air is cleaner at this altitude. It smells cool and sweet. And the light filtering through the forest canopy has a crystalline quality, sharp and crisp, like fresh prescription-lenses in an old pair of glasses. Outside is silent except for the tick of the engine and the chirping of the birds.

Her whole life she has felt like she was on borrowed time—six dollars a cup to sit here, ten dollars an hour to park there, two-thousand dollars a month to live indoors. Put a quarter in a parking meter and hear its mechanism counting down the seconds. Time’s up. Anaka never felt like she had a right to a place; at any moment, someone with more money and more power could swoop down and evict you. But here, away from the noise and the smog and the pressures of the city, she feels as if she and Preston are the only man and woman on Earth. They are homesteaders staking their claim. She breathes deep and feels herself stand straighter. Her shoulders are light, as if she has set down a heavy backpack she didn’t even know she’d been wearing.

This is Eden, she thinks.

The property is a mile away from the highway, and it is protected by three acres of forest. Sugar pine, incense cedar, white fir. A small creek marks the property line. Though there are a handful of hunter’s cabins in the vicinity, they are mostly vacant outside of deer season. The cabin has electricity, a refrigerator, and indoor plumbing. It has a cast-iron, wood-burning stove. There is a telephone. A radio. That’s it.

No cell phone service. No TV. No Internet. No mailbox.

Maybe they aren’t completely off-grid, Preston says, but the place is remote enough they might as well be. If either of them gets seriously hurt, it would be at least three hours before help could arrive. If at all. And there are plenty of ways to get hurt: coyotes, black bears, ticks, rattlesnakes, wildfires, exposure, infection, thirst, starvation—and that’s all before snowfall. In the winter, the temperatures will hover just around freezing so that the land will accumulate an immense amount of snow: five feet on a dry year, ten-to-thirty feet on average. They might have to dig a tunnel down to the front door.

Preston introduces Anaka to the idea of Expedition Behavior. When you’re on an expedition, you should be especially careful because you aren’t just putting yourself at risk but the entire team, Preston says. It is important to be able to read your environment. The more you know, the less likely you are to make stupid mistakes.

Anaka soaks up everything Preston has to say. He teaches her how to plug a flat tire, how to siphon gas, how to put chains on the truck, how to take her bearings in the woods, and all the basic knots she’ll need to tie their groceries onto a sled so they can pull it up to the cabin. They nail reflective markers to the trees so that they will be able to find their way home in the dark. Preston teaches her how to chop wood, how to use the chainsaw, how to rock the truck out of a snow bank, how to use the shotgun. He