Thief!

Sugarhouse, UT

 

Lee woke up in the middle of the night and had to pee. He sat up quietly to not wake Analise and then slid a T-shirt over his head and gym shorts over his boxers. He crept downstairs to use the bathroom. Someone, he didn’t know who, probably Nephi, was in the bathroom on the main floor so he went around the backside of the kitchen and opened the door leading down to the basement. A burst of cool, earthy air hit him as he turned the hallway light on and walked down the stairs to use the small bathroom down there. It was a half-bath with only a toilet and small sink. He rested his right arm on the side of the bathroom wall while his left hand controlled his member.

He yawned, shook, slid his shorts back up, and flushed the toilet. He looked through the bathroom cabinet absentmindedly after washing his hands and was surprised to see two orange prescription bottles on the middle shelf. He looked closer, squinting without his contacts in. One was Escitalopram, 20 mg, the other Fluoxetine, 40 mg.

Antidepressants.

He knew this because Becca was currently on a small dose of Lexapro, 40 mg. Were the meds his dad’s? No. Definitely not. His mom’s then? Was she hiding pills in the basement bathroom? He knew many Mormon women were on antidepressants, but his mom? She’d never talked about being on anything. No one in the Church really, talked about such things.

On the way out of the bathroom something caught his eye in the corner of the basement. He crept over in the half-dark.

The light from the hallway stairs providing a dull glow. In the corner he saw the basement shelves of well-over three months’ worth of emergency supplies stocked to the ceiling. He looked over the gear and began picking up a few items out, subconsciously.

In five minutes, he had assembled a small pile of supplies—a blanket and first aid kit. Some packets of food and canned goods. While in the past Lee had found this stock piling of emergency supplies a bit silly (a staple in most Mormon homes), Lee now found himself wholly given over to the idea. Perhaps it was the news of the Supervolcano and the apocalyptic visions he’d been having. But he now found the idea of them travelling or living without at least a minor supply of food, water, warm clothes, fire starters, and so on, incredibly foolish. They had a baby, after all.

And so, it was in this moment, that Lee decided to steal a small portion of his family’s emergency preparedness supplies. He was sure they wouldn’t mind. His parents probably would have even offered, but Lee felt embarrassed asking for some reason.

As he was pillaging supplies, Lee also found an old box of mementos marked “Lee” and opened it. Inside, the box was filled with some of his old soccer trading cards, pictures, toy figurines, and, at the very bottom, a tomahawk, or throwing axe, with a skinny wood handle and black forged blade. His uncle had given it to him in middle school and taught him how to throw it. For a year, Lee had been obsessed with the thing, throwing it at whatever trees he could find, even setting up a mock axe throwing range in his backyard with rings of old logs that sat upright on a table. But the next year he was in high school and felt childish playing with such an item and so abandoned it to his parent’s basement. Yet now, over ten years later, Lee was overjoyed to find the tomahawk and axe throwing had now become a national pastime.

As Lee took the items back up to his room, he passed a framed quote on the stairs that read: “We do live in turbulent times. Often the future is unknown; therefore, it behooves us to prepare for uncertainties.”- President Thomas S. Monson (“If Ye Are Prepared Ye Shall Not Fear,” Oct. 2004 general conference)

Lee nearly laughed out loud thinking it was the one and only piece of advice from the Church he could get behind. He walked back up the stairs, turned the hallway light off, shut the door, and returned as quietly as possible to their bedroom, depositing the armful of doomsday supplies on the computer desk beside the air mattress before checking on Analise and slipping into the covers next to Becca.

In his mind’s eye, his dreams, he felt himself drawn—like the eye of Sauron to the ring—to images of the bubbling caldera under Yellowstone, it’s yellow and red lava hissing, creeping, slowly making its way to the surface of the earth. The wolves and mountain lions and grizzly bears all fleeing from the impending disaster in the area in their mammalian omniscience.