Cosmic Winter

Johnny’s twelve-year-old legs bicycled, rustled, shot him out through the open screen door onto the porch.

“They’re going to shoot a nuclear bomb at it!” he called, bare feet creaking the wooden floorboards, dislodging their cool dust.

Johnny’s parents, reclined gently in lawn chairs, kept their backs turned to him, as though they had not heard. They were stony-faced, watching the sky cave in.

“We’re lucky, you know,” said Father, talking to no one in particular, words dispersing, particles lost in air. “There’s half a chance they’ll vaporise it outright, half a chance they’ll send it somewhere else. They wouldn’t be trying something like this if it was going to hit, say, some poor country in Africa. This must be their last resort.”

“Why wouldn’t they?” asked Johnny, leaping from the porch to get a better look at his father’s face, bathed in flaming sky. He felt the morning grass damp underneath him. The air was fresh, the world red-fire. It was exciting, the three of them being up that late, so far from home. Exciting that the world was ending.

“Don’t start,” warned Johnny’s mother. 

Father sighed, still staring at the sky, darkness spreading from a single black point in the center of it. The meteor was coming. 

“Yes, you’re right. Hardly the time to have him worrying about those sorts of things. Hardly the time to have him worrying about anything, really. Or perhaps that means he ought to be worrying about everything. He’s got an awful lot of worrying to do, and not much time to do it.”

After a moment, Mother tilted her ochre eyes down to Johnny. “Why don’t you go back inside and check the news for us?”

Johnny nodded solemnly, reporting for duty, cheeks shining, sparkling in the early morning redness, the blood-burning sky. In two quick bounds he leapt the porch stairs, rushed inside. Valiant Pheidippides.

“What was that for? Saying he’s not got much time left?”

“Not much time left for worrying. About normal kid things, I mean,” said Father. “Assuming we make it.”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk like that.” 

At that moment, Johnny burst back through the screen door, shouting, breathless. “They’re launching it now! Only half an hour until it hits!”

Father’s head, bent permanently back, watching the dark new, rapidly approaching sun, creaked slowly, deliberately down to Earth, expending a Herculean effort. He looked dazedly down, face scalded red from watching the burning sky, blood shining through skin. “Come on, Johnny,” he said, patting his lap. “Come on.” He beckoned Johnny closer, then hoisted him up, set him down on his knee. “Let’s watch it together. You don’t have to check the news anymore.”

“All right, Dad.” 

Mother smiled wanly across at them. Father clutched Johnny in silence. They could almost make out the meteor whistling overhead, serene as birdsong, shifting ever closer through vast space, setting the atmosphere ablaze with its kamikaze descent. 

Father shifted underneath Johnny, clutching him, impatient. Thirty seconds passed, a minute, slow as trickling, viscous lava. “You know,” he said, finally, “there’s going to be a winter that’ll last for years and years, they say. When the meteor hits, all the dust, ash, little bits of rocks are going to spew forth, like a great blanket over the sky. First there’ll be firestorms. Every forest on Earth will burn. Then everything’ll go dark. First the plants’ll die, then the animals, then—”

“You don’t know that,” said Mother. 

“There’s an awful lot of science backing me up.” 

“You don’t know that the meteor will hit us at all, I mean. They could still stop it.”

Father went silently back to shifting, watching the black and red doom in the sky, arms wrapped around Johnny’s small waist, rocking him up and down, up and down, fitful. 

Johnny whipped his head frantically back and forth between the two adults, each locked away in their own vasty deep, lost in the shared burning of the sky. “Mom, Dad,” he said, eyes wet with red-glowing liquid. “It’s all right. They’re going to stop it. They’re going to blow it up.”

Laboriously, Father tilted his scalded face once more down to Johnny’s, seeing his wet eyes, the smile on his lips. Feigned bravery. “That’s right, Johnny.”

The whistling silence, the birdsong, birdless reverie of the early morning stretched into vast infinities. Time was shifting away, moving slowly, quickly, not moving at all. Each felt in turn an urgency, an anxiety, followed by a languishing indolence, a great, all-consuming lassitude, followed once more by sheer panic, that otherworldly beast of Fear. And each one, in the expansive, eternal silence of the morning, felt very, very small.

“I don’t want to watch it anymore, Dad.”

A brief pause. Mother wiped her sky-burnt face with the back of one of her thin hands. She stood. “Come on, let’s go inside.”

There were no protests.

* * *

Three plates of mashed potatoes, boiled peas, slabs of grey chicken breast lay abandoned on the table. The three infinitesimal humans sat in infinitesimal chairs around it, none of them eating. As though the food between them was a sacred, mysterious object, as though it were the subject of an elaborate ritual. Mother and Father had prepared it solemnly some hours before. They knew the meteor was coming that day, but the exact hour, even the vaguest notion of time of day, was far beyond their knowledge. And so they had prepared dinner, so many hours before, going about their days with the greatest of existential horrors lurking in their shadows, the Sword of Damocles lingering above them, clinging to some nebulous symbol of domesticity. It was the early morning now, the food had gone cold. Not one of them suggested reheating it, but still they all sat, huddled around the dinner table like birds in a nest, not wanting to be too far from one another at any given moment. They had pulled the blinds shut, blotting out the sky. Lights had been switched on all through the house. They had been half surprised to find the lights in working order; it seemed too normal. 

The house was their summer home, up in Michigan. Their real home would be destroyed by the meteor. They had been forced to flee, taking with them only what was necessary. No time to think, say goodbye. Mother wiped a single, silent tear from the bridge of her nose. Neither Father nor Johnny noticed a thing, they were looking at the food in front of them as though it had come from another planet.

Johnny broke the ritual silence. “We’re never going home again, are we?”

“We will, Johnny.” Mother grabbed Johnny’s small hand in hers. “We will. Once this is all over.”

“When will that be?”

“We don’t know yet, Johnny.”

“Are we going to die?”

“No, we’re not going to die. We’ll be all right.”

Father didn’t speak.

They sat for five minutes more in frozen, still silence. The only noise was that of Johnny’s nervous fidgeting, back and forth, back and forth, rocking in his chair, scratching his thighs with his hands, then balling them up into fists, clutching until his knuckles turned white. Mother and Father each sat much stiller than Johnny. They were like statues.

The cataclysm broke the silence.

It was as if a gigantic, supernal monster had wrought with planet-sized claws some great chasm in the very fabric of the universe. It was the sound of ten thousand hydrogen bombs detonating all at once. A great flash of light came through the blinds.

And then the ground began to shake. The plates clinked together, wobbling on the small dinner table. The table legs shuddered up and down, up and down, teeth chattering. Johnny let out a shriek, a half gasp, half scream of blind terror. Mother did not let go of his hand as she pulled Johnny up from the table. She clutched him to her chest in the corner of the room. Soon Father joined them. He wrapped his arms around Mother, the two of them forming a protective membrane with Johnny in its center. The ground shook with greater intensity. Dust dislodged itself from the floorboards above. The heavens roared.

And, just as suddenly as it was broken, silence descended once more upon the family in their still-standing summer home in South Haven, Michigan, rushing through space on the third planet from the sun. Gradually, slowly, the house stilled, settled, and the family disentangled themselves.

“We’re alive,” said Johnny. His voice was small, launched straight from the beating heart in his throat.

Mother began to laugh. Nervous, insane laughter turning quickly to sheer joy intermingled with desperate relief. Father joined in, followed, after a few moments, by Johnny himself, not wanting to be left out.

“We’re alive,” Mother said. 

“We lived,” said Father. 

The laughter died down and Johnny began to cry, he had laughed so hard. Soon Mother was crying, then Father, too. They wept, clutching one another in the corner of the room, the cold dinner leering at them, neglected.

“That must have been the nuke, then,” said Father, finally.

“It must have,” said Mother.

“I told you they’d stop it,” said Johnny.

“That you did, Johnny. That you did,” Father said, smiling wanly in Johnny’s direction. “Should we go outside and see?”

Before Johnny could speak, excitement and relief swimming in his eyes, mother interrupted. “No,” she said, “not yet. Let’s check the news first, it could still be dangerous out there.”

Before Johnny and Father could so much as move, the television was switched on in a flurry of nervous hands. Nothingness. Static. Mother gave the television three meaningful wallops with the heel of her hand.

“Let’s look out the window,” Father said, moving to the nearest set of shut blinds.

“No!” cried Mother. “Let’s look in the morning, I mean. Come on, Johnny. It’s much past your bedtime.” She grabbed Johnny’s hand, half hidden traces of fear still in her eyes.

“But I want to look!”

“You can look in the morning, come on. A little sleep won’t hurt.”

“But Mom!”

“No buts, come on. And no looking through the window, either.”

Father stood in the dining room, saying nothing as Mother struggled up the stairs with Johnny in her arms. Almost five minutes later she came back down, exhausted. 

“Why did you put him to bed?”

Mother looked at Father, exasperated. “You said it yourself: anything could have happened out there. What if it didn’t work? Best to let him get some sleep thinking everything’s all right. It could be the last time.”

“Oh,” said Father.

“Yes,” she said, taking his hand, her ochre eyes meeting his for the first time that day. “Shall we?”

* * *

Together they waltzed onto the porch.

“Dear God,” said Father. 

“It’s happened,” said Mother, clutching his hand tightly in hers.

Heavy grey fog caked the planet. It fell, slowly, pale as snow. Dust and grey ash falling, cascading, gradually blotting out the sun, darker and darker, colder and colder. They couldn’t see any further than the end of the lawn.

“They must have diverted it,” said Father. “We heard the nuke go off. Who knows where it landed. Bits and pieces of it could be anywhere by now.”

Up above them, face pressed against cool bedroom window, Johnny watched the not-snow descend, weeping noiselessly as it blanketed his vision.

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