Anneka

15

Death Like Lemonade At The End Of The World

i.

The last summer at the end of the world is the year of locust suntans and God, she hates it, picks their filmy wingspans sticky-twitching off coconut caramel calves. They’re everywhere, that summer, a plague from out East
where they already knew the world was ending. She swallows them every time she opens her mouth so she drowns them in vats of sticky sweet summer lemonade. In baby pink, lots of strawberry syrup, and here's how they taste: like epidemics and planetfall, like cookie cutter ice cubes sucked through a curly straw. Icky tang of the end of the world.

Outside, her neighbours are making bomb shelters out of cardboard castles.
They’re clipping garden hedges with end-of-the-world machetes.
Her neighbours are carving deep furrows in the earth. And she, watching, sips her lemonade. Even with the bugs it’s still pink. It tastes like a thousand things she doesn't understand.

ii.

That was the summer the sky turned red, and then black. And for all of August lightning crackled promiscuously on the horizon. Was it only last month she read gossip magazines, snuck boys into girl guide tents? Summer camp, a novelty getting old. The thing to have now is a good rifle, a gas mask, or a can of pork ’n’ beans. Beware the nosy neighbour. Beware the ailing heart. It is time to start thinking about what you want to leave behind.

iii.

If you listen closely, on some nights, you can hear the sound of armageddon. It comes like a church choir or the cracking of a whip. It sounds like the beat of a thousand drums. Also, angels. It sounds like the roar of a millennium of breath.

Heres what it’s like at the end of the world: Cup your fist, curl up in dirt, and linger. Stand under a doorway and maybe then you’ll be safe.
I could explain in terms of curly straws and pink lemonade. I could appeal to your sweet tooth candy cane heart. But everyone knows the best way to talk about the end of the world is what you talk about when you talk about dust. About how to step out of your body with a howl like a roar. How to cut your skin loose
and gleaming like the coils of a snake. And how it is only then that you know
you’re no longer what you had been. That you’ve been swallowed whole.

iv.

One Sunday, the last week before September, all of the trees in the world catch fire.