River Teeth

Fuck Armageddon... This is Hell

A/N: Hey, I just wanted to say thank you so much for everyone's kind words in regard to my last note. It keeps me going and reminds that even if I feel alone, I'm not really alone. Thank you <3

In the living room of the McCormick house, Karen is swaddled up in a blanket on the torn-up couch. The VHS tape she put in has seen better years, and every time Snow White bites into the poisoned apple, the picture becomes snowy and cuts out. She knows that Snow White is later resurrected by a handsome kiss with true love's kiss but she's never seen it. As far as she can tell, Snow White bites into a stranger's apple and learns a valuable, posthumous lesson.

Karen wraps the blanket tighter around her as the old witch appears in the window, chuckles, and says "All alone, my pet?"

Kenny has always told her, "Never tell anyone if you're home alone. This is why Snow White is my least favorite princess."

One time Karen countered with, "But she was being nice. That's just who Snow White is."

"Yeah, so was Cinderella. But she stopped taking the bullshit, eventually."

The phone rings. Karen wipes her nose and stumbles to the kitchen landline.

"Hello?"

"Hi, is Kenny there?" the voice sounds surly. Demanding.

"This isn't... This isn't Kyle is it?"

"It's not fucking Kyle. Is there anyone else there?"

On the screen, Snow White's frail arm falls and the apple rolls out. The tape goes ashy and stops.

"My dad is in the shower," she says, though it's a lie. No one, including Kenny, has been home for over a day. She hangs up on the stranger and returns to the couch to sleep. She hopes that by the time she wakes up, Kenny will be home.

He has always reminded her of the Axe body spray commercial where the man turns into actual chocolate and every woman - on the streets, in the park, the theatre - takes a bite of him. She watched Kenny over the years, who had the most amount of girlfriends and the most amount of loneliness.

Her father seemed to do the same thing with alcohol. Just keep filling up and up to get rid of the emptiness. Distraction, she learned very quickly in life, was the key to pretend happiness. Their pastor did always teach them that an idle mind was the Devil's workshop. Sometimes she wondered if the Devil created distractions, too, to prevent people from finding real things about themselves.

Karen spent most of her free time reading and drawing. If she was going to be addicted to something like her father and brother, she at least wanted it to be useful.

Her room was taped from floor to ceiling with drawings, maps, poems, greeting cards, photos... Anything to make it look like she was any other incoming high school freshmen with a normal life and a quirky sense of interior design.

On her dresser sits a shoebox diorama of her last book report, Anne of Green Gables. She drew the Cuthbert home and used crumpled construction paper as foliage. Her teacher chided her for using a children's novel until Kenny came to the school, pick-up truck squealing, oil spatters all over his work uniform, to "have a talk" with him.

She kept on with the project. She loved how Anne could be so sensitive, yet so imaginative and blunt about what she wanted in life.

She worked on the diorama all night at the front desk of McCormick Auto. At some point, he left a Coke and a Snickers bar next to her but she was so engrossed in the project that she didn't notice until later.

...

When Kenny wakes up, there is a white sheet over his body. He can hear the footsteps of investigators and journalists walking around him and the other corpses. He's still sitting up against the wall where Cartman left him. Carefully, he pulls the sheet down. The sky is violet blue and all around him is ash. Debris is littered around him and the walls he once thought sturdy have mostly come down. In the distance, he can make out firefighters, police cars, and detectives. They're searching in Stan's car, scanning everything for clues.