A Family Emergency

Ellis solemnly took in the news, because that's all there was anyway. Talking heads and scrolling words were everywhere on his phone. Other people on the bus were also sitting up, staring tensely at their screens, transformed from their usual bored commuting selves.

The talking heads on his phone were not only everywhere,  they were different. They looked scared.  The man his mother hated, the one with the fake hair, was openly crying.  Another notoriously upright pundit seemed to be taking a thoughtful drag now and then on a blunt as he answered questions. 

Ellis put an ear bud back in.

"John, I  thought you were opposed to legalization?" remarked a tinny voice.

"Not today," said Upright John.

People on the bus began to get, and make, frantic calls. One girl with long red hair had her eyes closed and her lips were moving constantly and silently. 

"It's going to be alright, Alice," said a tiny old woman sitting next to her.

Maybe not, thought Ellis. But at least the old woman was trying.  Ellis saw her draw the praying girl into one of those ridiculous embraces, where the shorter person fumbles and pats.  A hopeless envy rolled over him.  

About his own situation.  The problem,  as he saw it, was not that the world might be ending, but that it might be ending with him alone. 

Normally, Ellis didn't mind being alone. Liked it, really.  Because it was so awkward with his parents. Awkwardness was literally the story of his life. Not that Ellis had been a mistake--his birth had been as carefully planned as a satellite launch--it was more that he was a failed experiment.  His wildly educated parents had read deeply on the subject of parenting without ever taking note of one important piece  of anecdotal evidence. Children bored them terribly. It might have been better if Ellis had come into the world with at least a master's in physics, but he'd only been an ordinary, agreeable, and quite dull baby.

It was nothing personal. The good part was that Ellis was less than five years away from moving into a dorm somewhere and becoming the fond acquaintance and occasional visitor his parents had come to hope for.

Only  it seemed likely that Ellis and his parents would never live to see this more tolerable future.

At this moment, as an asteroid dubbed Hostium 1 approached on a collision course with Earth, his parents were in Bali.  They were on one of their frequent honeymoons, which is what they called a vacation where Ellis's presence was not required.  They would probably be clutching each other's hands and talking about trajectories. Holding on tight. Staying calm. Neither of them rushing to get back to the side of their only child.

Not that there was any point, of course. Even if the flights weren't cancelled,  there wasn't enough time. The truth was, his parents probably wouldn't even be able to make a call.

The bus driver continued to stop at the usual places. The corner opposite the main library.  The shelter in front of the rambling old steak joint.  Either this was from force of habit or the driver didn't yet understand that nothing she did mattered. Not today.

"I mean," thought Ellis, "the driver could stop on Central and sing karaoke into her mic  and then throw herself naked into the Canal for a swim. Who's gonna do anything about it?"

But then Ellis realized. The bus driver was actually doing one of the few jobs that still mattered. She was taking people home.

The bus wheezed to a halt at his stop, one of the major ones. Some passengers fled through the doors, running.  Probably, their families weren't in Bali. Others seemed frozen to their seats, afraid to move.  Ellis speculated these were the people who might have to go home and tell their families that an object six miles across was about to play cue ball with Earth. Not everyone would know yet.

Ellis almost didn't get off the bus.  He couldn't think of any reason to go home, but there didn't seem to be any reason to stay on the bus either. In the end, however, home was home, and there were tons of pizza-related items in the freezer--bites, bits, personal pans, snacks. Every combination of marinara sauce and carbohydrates a person could dream of--it was there and ready to be defrosted. 

Maybe he would go on one of his walks first, though. See what a dying world looked like. Maybe he would find someone doing the same thing and they'd want pizza.

Ellis was stepping down onto the curb and heard a high voice howling out a question:

"Why?" 

A small and rebellious boy was sitting on the sidewalk and refusing to walk another step. Over him stood another old woman, this one tall and faintly amused.

"Why go home?" asked the boy again, more quietly. 

"Because I said so,"  said the old woman, as if that were all the explanation anyone could ever need.

The scene reminded him of his grandmother. His parents had gone No Contact with her for precisely this kind of poorly supported certainty.  And possibly because she drank buckets of absinthe and kept marrying men named Bob. Or something like that. It had been five years.

Mostly, he remembered his grandmother had wild red hair and been fun. That she'd always carried bags of plastic toy soldiers and boxes of cookies, no matter what his parents said.  Here and there in his drawers, a few  soldiers remained, reminders of another age. Ellis would pull them out every so often, staging battles between the survivors.

The little boy on the sidewalk did not go No Contact. In fact, he seemed to find his possible grandmother's argument compelling. He nodded and got up and took the old woman's proffered hand. Then the two hurried off home. Together. 

Again, Ellis felt a pervasive envy. 

The bus roared off and Ellis found himself sorry that he hadn't stayed on it. Except that, sooner or later, the bus would be empty and he would have been both alone and without marinara and carbohydrates. 

The condo was two blocks up, in a rectangular building  covered with turquoise and orange panels. There was a gym, a pool, underground parking, and a few shops. As a home it featured every convenience without sacrificing the impersonal quality his parents so cherished. 

The lobby door was closed. When his card key didn't work, he noticed the adjacent window was broken out and reached through to work the door handle  from the inside. 

He expected to catch hell from the snooty front desk receptionist, but she was gone and there was no guard milling around. They'd gone home, Ellis realized, vaguely surprised. A tented white card with neat handwriting proclaimed that "Staff is unavailable at this time, due to a family emergency. "

At first it seemed weird to Ellis to describe Hostium 1 as a family emergency, but as he stood in the empty lobby it began to make a vast kind of sense.  Unsurprisingly, the elevators weren't working, so he  turned to the fire stairs, now quite illegally propped open with a trash bin. 

Five flights. The fire stairs were lacquered concrete, with railings painted a thick, muddy, brown.  The lights flickered, almost making it seem as if the building were trembling. As he walked slowly upward, his steps echoing,  each hallway door opened to hopeful faces. People were waiting for husbands or wives, sons or daughters.  At the sight of Ellis, their expressions would collapse into disappointment and they would disappear He began calling out:

"It's just me!"

But, as he reached the stair leading to the fifth floor,a voice replied. 

"Ellis? El?"

Ellis stood for a moment, looking up at the outline of a woman in the doorway to his floor. He thought to himself that he might die from hope.

"El?"

Ellis nodded jerkily and choked out:

"S'me."

An old woman with improbably red hair emerged into the light of the stairwell. In looks, she was an older and broader version of his mother, resplendent in bright colors. She held onto the door and peered down at him, chattering, and already he could smell her floral perfume, the one he loved and his mother made fun of.

"Nobody answered your mother's phone, so I just came. I broke in! Those stairs are like climbing the Matterhorn, but I made it. You're so tall and handsome!"

She stood waiting for him, looking proud of him and proud of herself. Then her face became stern and her tone took on that because-I-said-so quality. 

"Don't you worry. They don't know for sure, they said they didn't .  I say we eat pizza and watch that rock buzz on by, so we can wave. The oven is already heated.

His grandmother opened her arms,

"It will be alright," thought Ellis going up the last few steps into his grandmother's embrace.