The feeling stays with me, mingled certainty and fear, though I have no idea what to do about it.
Mom and Aunt Irene want me to keep working toward my A-level exams but nothing sticks in my brain. The news programs trumpet an endless flow of disasters. A hurricane has left most of Miami underwater and now it’s heading across the Atlantic toward us, a second surely on the way behind it, and a third. Commercial air travel has been completely suspended. My dreams are filled with violence. Images of half-human bodies sucked into the engines, churned up and spat out again. The army shooting them down.
Then a letter arrives from Jaina and I stare at it. The postmark is from days ago. I rip it open and devour the contents:
Dear Sophie,
This is strange huh? I haven’t written a letter since i was seven, even holding a pen seems all kinds of weird now, like—how retro, right? But my messages aren’t getting through and I wanted to tell you. well, you get it don’t you?
Mom says they look like angels.
There’s this way she says it—like she’s Carrie White’s mother. You remember us watching that, ewwwing at the pig’s blood and the way her eyes opened and i screamed? Carrie never really scared me—it was her mother, that crazy ole time Religion she caught so she locked her daughter in that freaky Jesus closet and the only happy part of the movie was when Carrie stopped her friggin hateful heart….
Mom got so happy when I finally tested positive, she threw me this trippy sort of birthday celebration with all her friends. They were chanting this Rumi poem about the body being a guest house and how I should welcome in the crowd of joys and sorrows and meet them at the door laughing which is great and all but it’s my frigging body right?
I dunno, feefs.
I used to love it how mom was different from all the other moms but now she’s talking about mother Gaia and how we should all be moving out east where there’s a commune forming or something. Somehow she’s even got dad on board with it. Maybe it’s because Melanie Britnell died. she drowned in her bath tub, i heard—but no one knows how she did it.
T-dot is clearing out, all the big cities are. Markeys is sick and Caroline and Aus and probably a whole bunch more but no one is saying. Here you can keep quiet if you want to and they have to treat you the same. Mom says it’s better this way because everyone can choose but they don’t tell us when someone dies and there’s this list we all started keeping—just for ourselves and it’s getting longer every day.
I guess mostly why i’m writing this is to say sorry because I get it now. What it must have been like with kira. i didn’t then. Sometimes i want to be like mom and just believe it’s all okay but I feel like there’s something rotten in me but maybe it’s sweet too. I don’t know how to trust it.
I just wish you were still here—that it could’ve been the two of us. I think you’d know what to do. You always watched to the end of the movie, didn’t you, when I had to pull the covers up you just kept watching. I’ll see you on the other side fee fi fo fum
For a while after I read it I can’t concentrate on anything. I sit on the bed, staring out the window at the Thames while I try to compose my own letter in response, but nothing seems adequate. I don’t even know where to send it. When Mom calls me down for dinner I tell her I’m not hungry. I try to reach Jaina on my tablet but all I get is an error message.
Suddenly the distance between here and Toronto feels monumental, uncrossable. I miss her so much. Her sharp laugh, talking in her bedroom, the smell of sagebrush all around us. I can’t remember the last time I heard from Dad. What if I’ve lost them both already?
I slide the letter into my notebook. It’s become its own archive, a way of remembering when the power goes out. It feels like we’re travelling back in time, circling back to those dark ages of terror.
And wonder, a small voice in the back of my mind insists. There were miracles too.
As I page through my notebook, the word appears again and again. Miraculum. An object of marvels, a sign from the heavens, a message.
And since the conjunction was in Aquarius it signified great cold, heavy frosts, and thick clouds corrupting the air; and since this is a sign which represents the pouring out of water, the configuration signifies that rivers will burst their banks and the sea flood. For his part, Mars in that sign denotes the sudden death which comes among many races, especially among children.
The first time I read the passage, I hadn’t understood. I’d thought they were the ghostly declarations of those who couldn’t grasp what was happening to them. They were terrified, searching for answers. But what if they weren’t wrong?
Now those words seem oddly resonant. Microcosm and macrocosm. They were dreaming about a poetic cosmos, with every earthly body shifting according to the order of the heavens. Everything connected, everything in sync, everything moving toward some ultimate purpose.
Maybe Kira is part of it, just as I am, just as Jaina is—all of us connected to something sweet and rotten at the same time.