Editing the End of the World

The end of the world, Emilie learned, is no excuse to throw out her nine-to-five schedule. Especially not on editing day.

She grumbled as she pawed at her nightstand for her glasses and instead knocked over a mess of papers littered with red scribbles. Her vision was two years beyond her lenses’ help, but they were the best she had until the world rediscovered ophthalmology. Outside, the eternal clouds hung over the bucolic Montana town that escaped most of the new-world dangers. The crunchy, moss-colored garden her bedroom window backed up to could not say the same.

New crops, albeit not ones that would feed her town, grew when the fiery blasts that ravaged neighboring states shut off power and communication networks. The writers who had searched for years for inspiration found it through the mystery of the rest of the world’s fate, the suddenly imaginable nuclear holocaust, and the hurried digging of latrines once plumbing slipped into the before.

The standing council, formed by people who did not attend the National League of Cities’ conference in D.C., mandated everyone alive and ambulatory find a job. They begrudgingly accepted Emilie’s and her coterie’s pitch to solicit and edit a periodical. The council would not have approved their proposal had people not started clogging the town’s bulletin with their short stories, poems, and zines. 

Emilie threw on a new pair of clothes and tied her hair in an old scrunchie to face the day, predetermined to be filled with crushing townspeople’s dreams of publications from a secluded part of the local library. She and her 11-person team of teenagers, elderly, and uninspired adults rarely got flak from the rejected, though some slipped past the skeletal staff who suddenly found themselves at the center of town entertainment.

The brunt of her heart-breaking would come in the afternoon, when she handed back manuscripts eked onto spare notebook paper, torn out book pages, and posters ripped to scale. She always looked for people to help her deliver the news that their work did not make The Gamma Montana, but her editors would suddenly find conflicting work. They would reappear when the time came to harvest paper and manually write copies of the journal.

For now, she stirred in instant coffee she would not be able to replace in a month, strike a day from the last calendar to be printed for a while, and straighten up the house. She put on gloves to test counters for dust, then threw them away. She wondered if their town would one day have to answer for subsidizing the latex industry. She decided it didn’t matter.

She raised her mug at Pauly, the head librarian, as she pushed the formerly automatic doors to get into the lobby. Pauly lowered her head at Emilie to say, “I’m so sorry.” 

“You’re going to have your work cut out for you today,” Pauly said to Emilie. 

A tower of papers all but blocked her shortest coworker from Emilie’s sight. The near dozen of her colleagues circled the column as if it were a shrine, their jaws set and their eyes reluctant to reach Emilie’s.

“Joe really thinks we’re The Atlantic, no?” Emilie said. Joe was one of the town’s oldest residents who took advantage of their submission windows to submit voluminous piles of work, seldom on topic. Their fall issue was about survival. Joe wrote about dying. ‘Oh god,’ Emilie thought. “I’m guessing none of you wants to join me to let Joe down gently?”

Silence.

Two hours later, Emilie rang Joe’s doorbell out of force of habit before realizing the door itself was open. She let herself enter into the dark living room, lit by a lamp partially obscured by mountains of books. The spindly man entered from the kitchen and readjusted his partially cracked bifocals to get a look at the towering woman standing in his doorway. “You’re just in time. What did you think?”

“I think you entered a story with a prompt exactly opposite of what I asked.”

Joe coaxed out a laugh that sounded like creaking floorboards. “Surviving is not the same thing as living. Dying can preserve the soul, too.”

Emilie grimaced. “This is the second time you’ve submitted something about your death, Joe. What’s going on?”

Joe motioned to her to sit before he entered his kitchen and returned holding two glasses of bourbon, an increasingly rare indulgence that would not come with ice until the winter. They sat and sipped for a minute.

Emilie took in his house in a new way, though she had ended up in his living room once every few months to tell him his stories were outlandishly unfit for her publication. Stickers obscured all of his family members in photos. A pencil mark dotted a wall, where a window could ostensibly offer light. Around the already existing windows, five pothos plants and scores of cuttings clung to the postwar ration of natural light.

“Assuming you didn’t read my story about the next firestorm, I’ll tell you what’s going on,” Joe said as he swished the liquor in his Highball. “The proverbial end of the world came because two superpowers felt a bit too superpowered, despite centuries of colonization, manufactured class war, corporate takeovers of all private persons’ wealth, and global posturing. They threw themselves into default, and by that same coin, the regular man into the stone age, yet the youths in this town are still working eight hour days, now seven days a week. It’s not fair.”

Emilie chuckled as if she had witnessed a pallbearer fall during a funeral procession. “Usually it’s folks my age discerning fair from unjust.”

“Usually it’s folks your age who’ve felt robbed of a life they were not entitled to live. Not yet,” Joe said. “I’ve lived through two pandemics, four recessions and countless battles for the chance of retiring comfortably and having my children fly in every so often.” He took a long pause. “Instead of worrying about my family’s status on the coasts, I think about the next bomb that will drop, and pray that it’s on the very bastards who called the first warhead. If not, I wish it would fall on my house. I have a desired shadow picked out that I would like the initial impact to burn into the sidewalk.” He pantomimed reading a book, his legs crossed, before continuing.

“My words are too plentiful for your stories. I get that,” he said. “To some degree, I just wanted someone to listen. My house is a ways away, by my choice I might add, and you’re the only one who makes the journey.”

Emilie clinked glasses with him. “I’m trying to dismantle the stereotype that editors and librarians are house cats. You give me an excuse to get up.” This meeting was different from previous confrontations. For one, Joe had never offered her booze. Another: their conversation about the next bomb was the longest they have had. She did not feel compelled to escape the smiley-face eyes of his crossed-out family just yet. “And I think I could find room in Gamma for your work. In installments, mind you. It may give people some righteous comfort.”

Joe’s eyes beamed light. “I would be honored. That warrants another pour,” he said before swinging his legs onto the floor to return to the kitchen. 

Emilie unfurled the first of over two-hundred pages. Divided into fifteen chapters, the story featured a lost child from one town away, smart teenagers looking to reinvent electricity, military interference and town revolts. The story spotlighted lovers cradling themselves during the first blizzard of nuclear fallout, as atoms ripped the skin from their backs. It recounted efforts of a boy scout troop to take over an active nuclear facility and attempt to repurpose a warhead for local control. Emilie had skimmed through every page before she noticed Joe did not return.

Her heart dropped when she saw Joe lying down in the kitchen. When she could not find a pulse, Emilie wrapped a blanket around him, took the rest of the bottle and began her trek to the library. Though her first glass and corresponding sips fogged her mind, she had never felt more sober.

The first installment of “The Next Bomb” splayed front and center across Gamma’s cover. The piece, though tough to pinpoint where to end the first installation, was a hit among most of her coworkers, then among several of her readers. They received dozens of messages applauding the brave tone and adversarial cadence. It was not until they put out the call for the winter edition that the library editing team received a visitor.

Francisco was a slight man with a voice that did not match. He grew more hirsute in the months after the bomb, losing the time and willpower to mow his face when not at council. Not even the jungle on his face, however, could mask the frown as he pushed open the no-longer-automatic doors.

He pulled Emilie into a side room, where he said, “We allowed the last issue to run and stay in circulation, and I’m afraid it was The Gamma’s last.”

Emilie took a second to process before asking the inevitable “why” question.

“People are growing restless as crops wither this season. Our first freeze will be a tough one, and pieces like Joe’s will stoke disobedience or unrest or both.” He looked at Emilie beyond his glasses. “Your pamphlets got us through the beginning of this new normal, and we appreciate that. It’s just not going to be sustainable going forward.”

“But what about the First Amendment? This isn’t fair.”

“Both democracy and fairness died during the first explosion,” he said. “There’s a bonfire tomorrow night. I expect you to be there and to offer all of the submissions you’ve received to date for the winter issue.” He stood up and left after offering an insincere apology and half-sympathetic smile to the rest of the staff. Emilie’s staff exchanged furtive glances, as if they knew the solution but were too ashamed to verbalize their collective thought. Emilie glanced over her crowd of information-sharers, all of whom had read every word of Joe’s series and spliced it into several installments. They knew that the protagonist vacated the home and world he had settled into during the dead of night. The main character, an outcast who felt as if he were looking past his own life, knew a path could take him to a town over, or at least a halfway point, to where his daughter lived. 

And while the woman’s status was unclear, his ambivalence towards the post-modern world was so clear that it let all the light rush in and blind whoever dared peer into its center. He had to walk away and rebuild his understanding of life, free from the death grips of the old normal clawing its way through censorship, draconian measures and monotonous workloads, into a shared vision for life beyond the edge.

Which is why a drove of elderly, teenagers, bookish adults and their cynical-yet-appeasing partners squeezed pages of grief, trauma, hopelessness and healings between their arms and did the same once the night fell, in hopes Joe’s parting gift to a dying town was worth risking another chapter of their own lives.