The Floating Cradle

Twenty-Six

It was always impossible, she tells us—spinning silk from wool, transmuting lead to gold, turning water to wine. The alchemy was never there.

"Then what's all that?" Lyle waves at the pieces laid out so deliberately in the middle of the floor. Nobody wants to go near them, like they form some sinister pentagram.

"Madness," Allie whimpers into Jack's chest. She peers out from his body as though through the crenellations of a fortress. "I just thought—if I kept workin', if I kept tryin', somethin' would come, somethin' I hadn't thought of yet. But I should've known—I did know—there was no way. Stupid, stupid..."

The gravity of her words descends upon us. I start to stutter, struggling to reel my brain back to my body, borne ahead by some ebbing momentum.

"But—are you sure there ain't—"

"THERE AIN'T, OKAY?" Allie rages.

I feel no anger at her deception, just a creeping cold that starts in my stomach and radiates out. This is not my death sentence, not yet, but the thing itself feels so close, homing in on us under cover of the bombs, its breath now clammy on my skin. By his own estimate, Jack has little more than a day left. As Allie clings to his arm, he crumbles around her.

The real adults—Daddy, Mama, Lyle, Felicity, and Blake—start to talk, parsing through options with such clerical calmness they might as well be discussing a new rotation of crops for the back field. Several times they gesture to my list, my numbers and facts, like it's a PowerPoint slide. It is chilling how easily they file away the vitriol of just a few minutes ago, terrifying how they excuse themselves on the numbers, as though every prohibitive variable is an "Our Father," every unfavorable outlook a "Hail Mary," and the more they repeat them, pretend to mull them over, the deeper the release. It's terrifying because I now see the essence of what I meant before when I urged them to trust the numbers: Abdicate. Surrender. Then at least, if the decision is death, you were never forced to make it yourself.

After twenty or so minutes, they concur we must pray—that is, actively do nothing.

"Whelk be damned—plenty of folks oughtta be lookin' for us soon. I ain't lived my whole life 'round here for nothin'," Daddy says, looking at a spot just over the tantum's head. "Just a matter of time."

Pete leaves Felicity's side and sits by me. He leans into my shoulder and I lean back, shredding the edge of my sheet of paper, ripping off little pieces until my fingers can't resist the temptation to tear it in two, right down the middle of the 8. The halves flutter to the floor, two 0s, an atomic p-orbital throwing probability to the dogs.

"Cómo estás, nephew?"

"Fantastic. I've always loved the invasion shelter."

All ambient muttering—intoned prayers, Allie and the tantum's soft, private utterances—stops. My parents look at Pete as though he has said the most vulgar thing imaginable. The tantum trumpets with laughter.

"I should've known," he slurs, not even bothering to move his lips. "So how long did you guys hide down here? Lemme guess—a week?"

There is a pause. Pete and I don't actually know the answer, having been "buns in the oven," as they say, during first contact.

"Only three days," Dan admits with a grin. "Disappointin', really—thought it was gonna be more like War of the Worlds, not 12 Angry Men starrin' Al as Henry Fonda. She wore us down, insistin' we didn't got enough evidence to condemn all'a y'all. We gave in 'cause we knew she was right, but mostly we just wanted her to shut up."

We allow ourselves to laugh along with Jack. Allie wipes her eyes and gives the cellar a spiteful sweep.

"I can't let you die, not here."

"Hey, I'm still breathing, aren't it?" Jack says, grounding a trembling hand in her hair. "Believe me, I don't wanna die in Bumfuck, Arkansas either."

"Your husband's kind of a snob, ain't he, Al?" Pete snorts.

We drift in and out of sleep, in and out of conversation. I can only guess what Allie and Jack are talking about, collapsed upon each other, a heap of mismatched limbs in their segregated corner. When it's staring you in the face, do you talk about death, or anything but? The hours bleed together; every so often, Felicity will open a jar and pass it around, and I'll savor my palm-sized portion of jelly or two pickled okra like they're delicacies. At this point, the hunger has become a reassuring presence, overriding nausea, planting enjoyable distractions in my head: fries smothered in cheese, chicken fried steak, crispy corn nuggets—you see the pattern.

I haven't really prayed since I was a little kid, but I don't know what else to call the thoughts I'm having now, running like a smoke ribbon from my heart to my brain to whatever deity might happen to be receiving in the ether. I don't want the tantum to die, and not just because I'm afraid of seeing it happen, or because it will destroy Allie, or because the idea of sharing the cellar with a dead body gives me the creeps.

I don't want him to die because I want to have the chance to show him he's wrong about us, to prove to him we're better than the first impression we give. I want him to live to a day when he'll hug Mama goodbye at the airport without a second thought, and suspiciously interrogate my new boyfriends alongside Dan and Lyle, and—should he and Allie choose to adopt any—bring his kids back here, point up at the dark sky unalloyed by city lights and say, "There—that star, that's where your daddy came from," as their backs press up against the cool grass and the smell of sweet potato pie wafts over the fields, inviting them home.

Naw, I dunno if I really want those things. But I want to want them. I want a future where I want them.

But that future, if it was ever possible, has since passed like water through a net. There is no more cool grass, no more farm, and the land that once supported it is likely not to do so again for many, many years. How long will our patch of nowhere seethe, counting down half-lives until the scar closes up and the past doesn't hurt anymore? How long will we live in exile of this place—and where will we go in the meantime? What if there are no more vacant nowheres to claim, just pre-ordained somewheres to squat upon? I try to imagine the banality of going to school again, of things returning to normal, but all I can see is someone else's school, someone else's normal, and myself bobbing along like a black sheep, always a little out of place.

It is unfathomable that the Earth should have become something else, blasted itself into a new age, all while I've sat stationary and blind, incubating underground; the only thing more impossible would be throwing back the cellar doors to find the world I left intact, a snow globe settled over with white. We've been down here only four days, and yet I know I'm changed in my bones, as though something has untwisted my double helices, tweaked what I had once thought was set in stone (which very well could be the case, if the fallout has infiltrated my body, though that's a worry I refuse to indulge just yet).

I am not the same—but most of my post-nuclear energies have gone toward avoidance, just like before, trying to think of anything but the bombs, anything but the crushing consequences of my actions. Anything but the self-contradictory, wild, dying, living, twirling, unquantifiable world, and what might be left of it. Yet even as I stay, I have shifted.

If you say two things at once, no matter how at odds, they both still originated in you. If you think one thing and say another, both judgments extend from you like parallel beams—parallel until bent, until forced to overlap at your intention. On the farm, it felt like there was all the space in the world to run, but down here, packed in like sardines, we can only converge. Compress. Even as we bicker over nothing, ignore the burning world a few feet above our heads, dig up old dirt to sling at each other, try to reduce all being to numbers—the unsaid is pressing alongside, flexing and contracting, bearing us along, together—

Jack begins to wheeze.