Always look on the bright side of strife
- 3 days ago
- 9 min read
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Mom said. “Right now all I care about is that there are more of our people than there are of them. And that our people voted. Let’s go home and see how the counting’s going.”
Just like everything else that year, The Election season ended in a cliffhanger and a warning: To be continued… And just like everything else that year, no one wanted it to continue as much as they just wanted to know how the story would end. Mom stayed captivated by each of the Witch’s retellings, imagining all the ways the story could play out and getting more prickly when each retelling didn’t answer her questions. After a while I wasn’t even sure what we were waiting for anymore, let alone whether it would happen.
“Why are you still watching that show?” I asked. “All the suspense is over. You already know how it’s going to end.”
“But I don’t know how it’s going to end!” Mom said through stuck teeth. “I can’t stop until they admit that I was right all along. Who knows what they’ll try next if they think no one’s watching.”
Mom had been Referee of the Universe for so long that she’d forgotten it was a responsibility that no one assigned to her in the first place. For weeks, she’d been living in two competing stories: one where her patience was rewarded and she was crowned right, and the other, where everything ended with the plot twist to end all plot twists. If Mom’s side lost, all the rules that civilization had created to protect itself since the beginning of time would turn out to be imaginary. It was a lot for a support dog to keep up with.
Maybe that’s why she was so obsessed with rules and routine, because they were the only things left that were all hers. They could close the world down, lock up nature, burn down the wilder-ness, and make poison out of the very air around us, but as long as we didn’t leave the Stuck House, there was nothing else to lose.
But too much routine can be its own kind of prison. Before I was a business dog, I too used to sit around the Stuck House all day waiting for things to happen. Since my life wasn’t very exciting back then, smaller things felt bigger. Getting a treat was more of a treat, but all the moments that I didn’t get a treat were more disappointing, too. And there were a lot more moments without treats to be disappointed about. It didn’t matter that the stolen treats were only in my imagination, the rage that someone wanted to take them was still real enough to bark about.
“We didn’t know how good we had it,” Mom would say every now and then when she saw something on TV that would be impossible in real life.
“No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!” the Witch announced.
While the Witch laughed at her joke, Mom said, “Imagine a world where it was funny for a group of strangers to burst into someone else’s home! Someone could be killed if you tried that today.”
“Wait, what happened during the Spanish Imposition?” I asked.
“They murdered a lot of people. But that’s not the point. It’s like watching an episode of Friends to relax, and they cut away to the New York skyline with the Twin Towers. Reminders of loss are more jarring when you don’t expect them.”
“But what about shorter buildings that are still there?” I reminded her. “Even with everything that the boogeyvirus took away, there’s still more than enough left over. You could be grateful for what you still have.”
“Oh yeah, like what? The office is closed, probably forever. Stores and restaurants are closed, half of them for good. Even the damned mountains are closed.”
But if Mom was wearing long sleeves again, that meant that the mountains would have been closed by now anyway. “What about the desert?” I reminded her. “Is the desert still out there? Maybe we should check.”
“The desert’s too far away. We need at least 4 days… Hang on a second!” she looked at the calendar on the wall and remembered what it was there for. “Thanksgiving is next week! I completely forgot!”
Mom and I had a tradition of spending every Thanksgiving in the desert near Las Vegas. We hadn’t been to the desert since the first invasion of the boogeyvirus, but what’s a tradition if not a connection to The Before? And what’s Thanksgiving if not a time when you’re supposed to eat treats to celebrate that you still have treats to eat?
“Hooray! I can taste freedom already,” I drooled.
With the decision made, Mom pulled our winter gear out of the closet and loaded it into the Wagon. She bought a brick of bottled water and many more cans of soup and wet food than we could eat in a long weekend. One afternoon, she closed her laptop earlier than usual and we set off for the desert. Hours passed as buildings gradually disappeared from the windows and the land turned dry and sandy.
“Are we almost there yet?” I asked when the Wagon’s control panel lights turned on. I’d forgotten how stiff a whole day of driving made me.
“Just a few more hours.” By Mom’s voice, I guessed that was a short way. “I thought we’d stop at those dunes in the Mojave that we never got to explore last year.”
“The ones where we met Lily?” The way I remembered it, Mom never wanted to see those dooms again.
“Not those ones…”
“Oh! You mean the pink ones that were actually white?” The way I remembered it, I’d convinced her to accept the dooms as they were, without waiting for them to put on their formal colors.
“No. You remember, that time the road was too rough? We left the van behind and walked the rest of the way on foot.”
“Oh! You mean the un-certain dooms. Where we walked all those boring miles and turned around as soon as it got sandy because it was getting late and you had to work the next day?”
“That’s right. I was thinking that if we went at the beginning of our trip, we’d have the whole day to deal with the unexpected.”
“Why do we need so much extra time?” Before she could answer, another question bumped the first out of the way. “Wait. What about the road?”
“What about it? I bet it’ll be in way better shape than it was last time with everyone taking road trips this year.”
I checked her thought bubble, where millions of beefy truck tires rolled over a Wagon-eating ditch, packing down the loose rocks and softening the steep edges until it was barely a dip. “But what if the road is the same as before?” I asked. “Or worse? What then?”
“I know I promised we’d play it safe on the side of that mountain, but I miss the thrill of trying new things. We’re too precious with this old van anyway. It can probably handle more than I think. I’ve gotten a lot more practice off-road driving this year, and we’ve survived dicier stuff than that. It’s like you’re always telling me, I’ve got to get out of my own way and trust my ability to work things out.”
“I told you that?” The way I remembered it, Mom finished that long-ago adventure proud of her accomplishment. When she was too chicken to push the Wagon across the ditch, we got out and walked the rest of the way. If we’d stayed on the roads the Witch told us to follow, it would have been five miles in each direction. Instead, Mom used a magic spell she called trigomometry to cut the distance in half. We walked wild through the desert and found our way all the way to the dooms by sight. It was the first time Mom ever found anything without someone else’s trail to mark the way.
“We’ve been relying too much on other people’s advice about what’s safe,” Mom said with a confident nod. “When have we ever met a problem that I can’t solve by keeping my wits about me? What’s the worst that could happen?”
That word safe reminded me of something. “What would someone less witty than you do if they got in trouble out there? What advice would you give them?”
“There was cell service, remember? I used it to find the way back to the van. I suppose they could call for help…” …like losers! her thought bubble added.
Something about that didn’t add up for me. How would we get out without calling for help if we needed it? But since dogs can’t add, I did the reaction Mom’s face told me to do. “Ding dong, the Witch is dead!” I wagged.
By now, everything outside the Wagon was total blackness. With the Witch giving directions, Mom let the flashing cursor in the middle of the road lull her into a trance. Now that Mom’s thought bubble was finally quiet, I gave in to the Wagon’s rocking and dozed off.
“Exit here,” the Witch announced, breaking rudely into my nap.
The Wagon exited into nowhere.
