A Cup Before You Go

by Rachel Ashcraft

We look for the children, standing on the shore, the sand holding the day’s heat, the water warm and lapping at our toes and our lanterns in our hands. We had let them go and they dove deep, our abominations with their webbed feet and gilled throats.

“The world up and caught fire.” Michael’s written a song that we beg him not to sing to us. The second line’s a little better: “The lake keeps us cool, but in turn gives itself up in inches.”

Everywhere else is blasted and treeless and gone up in chemical smoke. We do our best to forget it. We’ve always been good at it. For a while it was only us. Just me and my dog, and the little teashop we have, only half a click from the Lake Michigan shore. My great grandfather always described things in clicks. I thought it was the time it took for you to snap your tongue. But in truth it’s militant in the same way that it leaves your mouth - and he meant it - those two military-step syllables one in the front, one in the back. He’s left me language built for war.

“When it gets hot enough, the sand will turn to glass.” This is Michael our old man, the lyricist who would, he says, enjoy his tea with a finger of whiskey but will settle for the heady taste of rooibos. “Haven’t had a drop in twenty years. Even with the world ending, I can’t go back to it.”

He pays me in lake life. I don’t ask how anymore. Sometimes their scales are coated in sand, as if he no longer must coax them from the waves, but finds them fresh, deposited there by some ancient god, who gives up offerings to his most desperate of disciples.

Silas sits by the window and wags his tail slowly. His head is upturned, and he seems to be watching the lazy dust motes, settling now that the overworked air conditioner has clicked off. I’ve shaved his coat close to his body with an electric razor I found under the sink, left by the last tenant who lived here.

Alice steps between the shadows cast by the overhangs of the storefronts, darts from the shaded alleyways, slips like butter around the door, ‘to keep the air in’, she says. It’s her mother’s words, or father’s, or maybe a money conscious aunt, just like my ‘clicks’, she carries her dead with her too.

The thermometer reads 130 outside and it’s 96 in here today.

“That’s a degree lower than the day before,” Alice says in triumph. She’s an optimistic meteorologist, and she notes it down each day in her notebook. Our power comes from turbines in the lake, still cool enough to keep rotating, but fish and algae are starting to catch in their arms and turning belly up, smattering the shores.

Alice says she saw her little sister. Her hair seaweed, her eyes glowing spheres, her fingers blue and wrinkly in the moon’s wasted glow. 

“They can still come on shore,” she says. “They can breathe both.” 

The knowledge is easy for her to accept. She’s always been in a world of chimeras. I don’t tell her how we’ve always been able to save our species, but never ourselves.

She puts the shells on the counter, the ones that she says her sister brought up. “I found them by the front door.” It happens about once a week. On the cooler nights. We line them up, make towers, try to remember how to play mancala. They are heat-blasted and crumble easily. I know they’re from the shore. She must go there at night without us. I think it’s the nights that Silas likes to slip free. He paws at the door until I relent. He comes back with damp fur, his tongue lolling.

I leave the door cracked for him. The nights are as silent as they have ever been. The aurora flits and tumbles and streaks above us. It emerged after the bombs burned themselves out, and the city light with them.

When the day hasn’t been roasting and the nights are cool, we all go down to the lake. Michael brings his guitar and strums absently, mixing his songs together and his chords until he sounds like a drunk cover band with a has-been lead singer. Alice walks along the shore, and dips her toes in, and digs through the rocks, never quite sure of what she’s found until we go back to the shop. Sometimes the moon will give her a hint of the patterns.

And when Silas and I can go down together, just the two of us, he'll howl, his head thrown back, and sometimes way down the lake where the dunes still stand and the reedy grass and asparagus hide the last of the wild things, something will reply back. When I howl with him, animalistic, a scream that forms in my chest and leaves me raw and empty, it doesn’t even echo.

The street outside the teashop window shimmers and maws like an aura migraine gaping my vision - I often squint trying to pull those sides back down. Only at night does the heat relent and objects mold back into themselves. Sometimes things will slip through those holes. Sam, the stranger at first, had walked all the way from South Bend. His feet are bleeding and ragged, and he’s lost toes.I know he’s lost more than that. He's like the seagulls that fell from their sky, brittle and empty, with eyes cast somewhere back.

I make him jasmine/lavender tea and watch his tanned face steep, all the wrinkles melting as he closes his eyes. He rests his hand on top of the groaning AC and when he collapses finally, we take him to the coolest part of the old beach house, where I keep my tea leaves. Silas licks the sweat from his face.

The regulars will not leave. We have a silent pact to watch the lake simmer around us. I’ve only recently started thinking of it while boiling water for tea. Why until now had I never viewed it as the same?

Sam laces his fingers through mine behind the counter. We’re not lovers and we’re not together, not in the way that word has stood. Now I think it means something else, maybe what it used to mean, when humans had a culture of intimacy. Communities of ninety, I read once, maybe a Nat Geo or some internet article, and maybe it wasn’t even true, but they had nestled one against the other, while the world, fresh and new to them with blazing galaxies and stars still visible to the naked eye, roared and rampaged. And it must have staved off the fear. We aren’t ninety, but there are five who I think half-jokingly come to commune at the altar of tea leaves. I am after all the only storefront open for business. Though the cash register stands empty, they pay in other ways: food, trinkets, stories, news, company. We hold each other in different ways.

“Birds go first.” We’ve all at some point said that to each other. That was one of those facts that everyone knew. We bandied it like ecologists out of hell, looking at each other as if we could find blame. Eventually we let that go. Their bird bodies had been picked clean. Now even the insects don’t venture out during the day. When they do they drone and hover ponderously, unsure of the brightness and heat, and lower inch by inch onto the roasting concrete.

“They’ll sizzle soon,” Alice says by the window. 

Silas lifts his ears as if to hear it. 

“Like eggs on those hot July days.” She draws images of the beetles moving slowly on the windowsill under her forecast for the day.

“Fucking hot” is what Michael tells her to put down. I’ve seen her do it, just once, and he’d clapped his hands and leaned back in the booth. He had his three cups of tea, a book, and an old solitaire game beeping with each movement of his fingers.

I don’t tell them how, when the children left, I tried to follow. How I gulped the metallic water, how it filled my mouth and sinuses, and rushed into my lungs. How the lake threw me back out, how I landed on the burning sand. It wouldn’t let me follow and it wouldn’t kill me.

I over-steep a cup of green tea just to taste it again. But I do this in the silence of the night, when Silas is nestled between my feet, and Alice has flitted ‘home’, and Michael snores in the pantry, and Sam warms part of my bed. And when I go upstairs, I leave a cup out for my daughter and her friends and all the others that left, and sometimes, in the dull heat of the morning, it stands empty.

***

Rachel is a librarian in the Midwest. When not slinging books, she can be found exploring, wrangling cats, and hanging with friends. Her work can be found in Grendelpress's anthology More than a Monster, Hungry Shadow Press’ Deadly Drabble Tuesdays, Celestite Poetry, Shacklebound Anthologies: Wyrms and Planetside, The Daily Drunk, and Black Hare Press’ Run Rabbit Run anthology. Find her on twitter @rachcraftstales