You Feel It Just Below the Ribs

by Jeffrey Cranor

I’ve seen a lot of people who lived through that time not admitting this—it didn’t feel like an apocalypse. It just felt like life.

The generations who did not experience the Great Reckoning think of it as a cataclysm with a clear beginning and end, like a curtain opening and closing on a forty-year-long epic tragedy. But the end of the world comes with neither whimper nor bang. It unfurls its blossoms slowly, majestically, one moist black petal at a time.

I remember remembering them over and over again. How many times can you filter a memory before it’s really just a fiction? How can you tell how many times your memories have been filtered?

DISASTER COMES ON ORDINARY DAYS. IT’S ONE OF THOSE THINGS that’s obvious when you say it, but somehow you never really believe it to be true. But it is. Disaster comes on ordinary, nondescript, boring days. The law of numbers. Most days are ordinary, so when else would disaster come?

It is one thing to engage with critical material, but it is quite another to take everything such material suggests as objective truth or wisdom. We invite readers to level the same skepticism advocated by the author at the work she herself has done.

Question the Society, yes, but also question the questions themselves.

I wanted to free people entirely from the trauma they had suffered, but it seemed to me that all I had done was open a door to a garden. They could not stop themselves from venturing back into misery from time to time.

The way we live now has been the way we live for long enough that it feels permanent. Unimaginable that it should change. That it should ever have felt different. Astonishing how quickly that happens. Tradition, custom, the ways of the world—they really are little more than everything we have taken for granted since our own childhood. Everything can change within one or two generations.

They had built a small shack and lived off the land, hoping the place was remote enough that the tendrils of the war couldn’t grab them.

I’m not sure what made me feel like that, what made me push my past away. It’s like a sudden injury. I don’t want to touch it; I don’t want to look at it because that would make it real.

This isn’t—none of this is relevant, not really, but it is to me. It’s the only relevant thing. To me.

I’m glad, Miri. I’m glad I did it. I’m glad she exists. I’m going to miss her, but I think I would have missed her anyway. But that would be worse. It would be worse to miss her because she never existed at all.”

There is a woman out there who exists because Teresa decided that she should, and how lucky everyone who knows her must be.

She got up and left the room and took her golden glow with her. She left the shadows with me.

“It feels a shame to go back,” I said. “Everything’s so perfect here.” “Ah, but Miri, it’s only perfect because it’s temporary. An idyllic break from reality. If it became reality itself, the charm would be broken.”

“But remember, reality is magical too. We have our lovely little life in our lovely little house.

The food was good, the wine was plentiful, and we were full of hope.

If distrust is a flower, secrets are its soil, and distance is its sunshine.

Memory is malleable. History is mutable. All I can do is try to make sure my story isn’t lost. I have saved what I can, so you will understand what we have become.

SERMO LIBER VITA IPSA Free speech is life itself