Extinction Event

My sister doesn’t understand what’s happening right now. 

She’s laughing that laugh of hers that scrunches up her whole face as she drags the yellow ducky sled clunkingly behind her, snow barely crunching beneath her tiny booted feet. She’s only been sledding once before, years ago. It doesn’t snow in Arizona, but here in D.C. it comes up to her knees. 

Her beaming grin is a bit wonky—I’d needed braces to align my snaggleteeth, so it’s no surprise hers are following my example—but she doesn’t smile like she’s ashamed of them, not like I used to. Instead, she’s all breathless excitement and uncontrollable wiggles in her unwieldy fuchsia snowsuit.

She’s only six, Mom and Dad’s ‘whoopsie baby’ born ten years after their so-called only daughter. They had called her Daisy, mostly so they could giggle themselves pink whenever they called her Whoopsie Daisy (they’re funny like that) but she was never Whoopsie Daisy to me. To me, she was always just my Daisy-girl. Ever since I first held her tiny form in my thin, ten-year-old arms and nodded far-too-seriously when Mom joked that it was my job as the big sister to protect her. 

I had always thought I was supposed to protect her from bullies. Or from cars whenever we crossed the street, her hand fasted in mine like a promise. Or maybe from quicksand, until it occurred to me at fourteen that maybe quicksand wasn’t half as ubiquitous as the cartoons had made it out to be.

I never realized I was supposed to protect her smile, her laugh—that fragile golden thing wrapped in thin white petals. 

When archeologists dug up Pompeii, they found over a thousand perfectly preserved remains. Snapshots of people fleeing, of people dying. The scene fascinates us to this day, but there was always one in particular that drew my attention. Our textbook theorized about them as a mother sheltering her child from the blast, shielding its small form with her own body. I had asked my history teacher to tell me more about the pair, and she had evaded the question in a way that I would only later come to realize meant ‘I don’t know, this wasn’t my area of study, please don’t make me shatter the illusion that I know everything.’

I tried looking it up later, but Mom always said that no website with any journalistic integrity makes you close three ads to read an article, and apparently the agony of thousands makes for fantastic click-bait.

I wonder what the agony of billions will make after today.

Mom and Dad are hard at work right now, two CERN geniuses storming desperately through the halls of the pentagon, or perhaps locked in one of the war rooms shouting into the phone at some poor scientist on the other side of the world. Begging the fabric of the universe itself to stop the inevitable.

They’re trying to save the world.

Daisy trips into the snow and then giggles to herself about it.

I can’t save the world. 

She turns her gappy smile at me and tries to shake loose the snow sticking to the inside of her hood.

But the world isn’t my responsibility. 

“C’mon Daisy-girl,” I sing to her, scooping her up out of the snow with one hand and grabbing the rope of the sled with the other. “Time’s a-tickin.” I pop her over my shoulder and begin the trek up the frosted hill. The cold stings my eyes. That is, of course, the only reason they’re blurring the scene in front of me.

Daisy wiggles on my shoulder, pounding playfully at my back with mittened fists, but she doesn’t ask to be put down. She never does. 

When we reach the top, I dump her into the snow with an exaggerated groan. 

“Oof, you’re getting too big for that, aren’t you?” She’ll never be too big for me to carry her.

Daisy just rolls her eyes with a grin. “You always say that.”

She wiggles away from my finger prodding into her ribs, despite the protection of the snowsuit. “Well I wouldn’t have to if you didn’t keep getting bigger, now would I?”

Throwing herself at the sled seems to be the only acceptable answer. 

Fair enough.

She looks up as I begin to situate her into the sled properly, tucking her feet into the front and unwinding the long rope handle so that it doesn’t get bound up on the descent.

She’s quiet for a moment, and it’s only then that I realize what she’s looking at. I can feel the question percolating even before I hear it—can see it stitching together the gap between her eyebrows and weighing heavy at the corners of her mouth.

“What’s that?” she asks, pointing up into the sky.

I don’t have to look to know what she’s asking about. 

I do anyway.

“It’s called an asteroid.” My voice doesn’t break when I say it, it doesn't even waver. I can’t be scared or sad or angry here. I’ve entombed those emotions, sequestered them far away from Daisy. “It’s just coming to say hi.”

The shape is close enough to see now, the rising sun casting part of it in shadow and haloing the rest with fire.

She turns to me with wide eyes and smiles. “Can you take a picture for Mom and Dad?”

It’s not an uncommon question between us. She loves pictures and loves even more that I’m always willing to take some for her. I used to think she’d grow up to be a photographer—a world-class one with prints in National Geographic or hanging in an art museum somewhere. That was back when I still thought she’d grow up.

I smile back at her. “Yeah, Daisy-girl. I bet they’d like that.” I open the zipped pocket in my brand-new snow jacket and fish out my phone from the depths.

I take eleven pictures before she’s satisfied with the result. I tell her that I’ve sent it to our parents like she asked. I don’t. Instead, I send them a picture of her that I took right after: her cheeks and her nose glowing red from the cold, a perfect match to her new fuchsia snowsuit. She’s surrounded by snow and sitting in a yellow sled big enough for two with baby ducks printed on the sides. She’s smiling, happier than she’s ever been. 

I attach the picture with the message ‘we love you’ and put my phone back in my pocket. 

When I settle in behind her, I can’t help but squeeze her tightly. 

“Ready, Daisy-girl?”

She squeals with joy as we push off, racing down the hill.

“If you could do anything you wanted today,” I had asked her this morning after shaking her gently awake in our hotel room, “anything in the whole world, what would you want to do?”

She had looked out the window, past the frost clinging to the glass, then grinned her lopsided smile at me. “Can we go sledding?”

There’s no way to protect her in the end. Like the woman in my textbook trying to bodily shield her child from the wrath of Vesuvius, we’ll both be fossilized in a fraction of a second. 

Some day, thousands, millions, billions of years in the future, some strange form of life that visits the wreckage of our planet might one day dig us up, might catalog our remains based on the poses we ended up in, the artifacts around us. Maybe they’ll do tours like we do with Pompeii. Maybe they’ll even set up a gift shop. And they’ll look on with curiosity or fascination or distant horror.

All around the world there will be stillness; a global photograph of fear and agony.

And amongst it all, Daisy and I will be sledding forever.