Self-Portrait with Nothing

by Aimee Pokwatka

When Pepper couldn’t sleep—at least since she was fifteen—she imagined the alternate universes that might be out there if alternate universes really existed. A universe where antibiotics had already stopped working. A universe where cancer had a cure. A universe where that man had never become president and started that war, and all the people who’d died and the cities that’d been destroyed still lived and stood perfectly intact. A universe where she hadn’t met Ike in the hotel lobby of a conference about the evolution of human sexuality. A universe where they’d met but hadn’t skipped out on the conference in favor of drinking hurricanes at the hotel bar and ended up in Ike’s room shortly thereafter. A universe where they’d broken up that time she told him she couldn’t see herself married instead of staying together. A universe where the pregnancy scare had been an actual pregnancy, and now they had a couple of kids, and two dogs and a cat, who was the boss of them all, and it was chaos and she mostly loved it. A universe where a terrorist attack had or hadn’t been successful, a universe where a virus had or hadn’t mutated and spread. A universe where there wasn’t a mass shooting every single day, or a universe where there were even more. A universe where children didn’t drink poisoned water, where hundreds of millions of people didn’t go to bed hungry, where the earth’s temperature wasn’t steadily rising, where solvable problems had been solved. A universe where Annie had...