a good apocalypse short story to ponder
Earlier this week, my friend Brandon linked me out to this short story by Alexandra Kleeman called You, Disappearing, from Guernica magazine, and my first reaction was to marvel at how someone had already managed to write a smart, not-too-on-the-nose parable about our current apocalyptic situation — then I finished reading and scrolled back up and realized it was published back in the fall of 2014, meaning it wasn’t just Before Corona, but like….Before Everything.
Anyway, it’s not too long and the energy is very Severance x Damon Lindelof, and I think you, too, will find it eerie how Kleeman’s story foresaw the kind of banal inconveniences, pointless bureaucracy, and weird feelings dredged up amongst exes once a seemingly indomitable way of life starts to disappear slowly and then suddenly.
This is my favorite part:
After the announcement, people did one of two things. Either they tried to care more, or they tried caring less. They decided to survive, to collect and hide and ration, or they decided to let the amount of time left in their lives work away at them. They tried to grow vegetables in their small backyards or they let the yard get overgrown, falling asleep drunk in the afternoon on a lawn chair encircled by weeds. For a while we did whatever we had chosen with dedication. But it was difficult to stay dedicated for more than a few weeks and eventually we middled, caring about things sloppily and in spurts. We poked at the dirt and then fell asleep feeling that we should have done more or maybe less. In the end, there was only one kind of person.
Let me know what you think.
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