They are listening only because they are tired and frightened and there is nothing else to do. She glances at the wall again, but the foxes are gone, and so is the portal. And so she begins.
“There once was a fox on the mountain,” she says. An old story, one that her father had told her when she was small. “She wanted babies of her own more than anything else in the world. But she didn’t know how to get them, and so she asked the mountain how.”
When they were born, her daughters tumbled from her like firecrackers—their hair bright red, their voices loud enough to fill the room. She was too tired to cry, too tired to think, too tired to be anything other than relieved. The nurses cleaned the babies up and handed her one girl and then the other, and she held them against her, skin to skin. They were perfect. Their mouths opened like tiny birds. They rooted against her collarbone, her breasts, and the nurses helped to turn them, one mouth against one nipple, one mouth against the other. It hurt when they latched on, and Heather hissed, fought the urge to fling them both across the room, see their tiny skulls crack against the wall. Did it show?
“It will get better.” Had the nurse seen the storm in her face? Maybe she said this to all the mothers. The nurse nodded to B, weeping with joy by the bed. “You have help. You’ll be just fine.”
“They’re so beautiful,” B said, and he reached over Heather’s shoulder, cupped one tiny head in his palm. “They’re so beautiful.”
Already, she was so tired of him. It felt hormonal but she knew it went much deeper—beyond the emergence of these tiny bodies, beyond the relief and the sudden flush of power: I did it, I did it, now I can do anything. She wanted to run screaming through the hospital, climb the walls, jump off a mountain. She was almost certain she could fly. And she hated the way he wept, the way he seemed so happy. Ten months ago she had had hardly any idea who he was, and now she was married to this man in a way that went even deeper than the ring she’d let him put on her finger.
Greta and Jilly. Jilly and Greta. They were perfect. She loved them, and it was an iron cage that settled over her heart and clanged shut in a way that reverberated right down to her toes. She had been free before, and now she was chained to them forever.
The next day, meteors rained down from the sky.
When they climb out of the basement long hours later, the hospital is gone. They clutch the girls—B has Jilly now, while Greta sniffles in the crook of Heather’s arm—and climb the stairwell until they step out into a tired orange light that reveals a city turned to rubble, littered with dust. It could be late afternoon, it could be evening. The air is hot and dry and smells of burning. The sky is thick with cloud and smoke. Their fellow basement dwellers emerge the way they do—squinting, shielding their eyes from the light or the wreckage, maybe both. There are no human sounds, not even sirens.
“Were we attacked?” someone quavers. No one knows what to say.
There is a toppled building to their left, half of an office tower shaved off in front of them across the street, the ground littered with downed trees and fallen branches, shards of broken glass, power lines dancing in the wind. On the far side of the office tower, smoke rises in a steady plume. She wants to go and see what’s burning, and the answering vision comes to her in a flash, like so many others have through the years. A crater, a hunk of molten rock, the area around it so hot it’s hard to breathe.
People are moaning in disbelief. “What happened?” someone says. “What’s going on?”
Heather glances around—so many people spilling out into the dim light, all of them looking around with the terrified eyes of children. She has no stories left to calm anyone.
“Your phone,” she says to B. “See if it works now.”
He’s one step ahead of her, thumbing at his phone with one hand and holding Jilly with the other. “No signal.”
A woman beside her—her scrubs splattered with blood, dirt smeared across her face—pulls her own phone out of her pocket and taps it. “I can’t get a signal either.”
One by one, people tap their screens and hold them up to the sky. Nothing happens.
“The cell towers,” someone says, finally. “They must be down.”
Heather bundles Greta tight in the folds of her hospital gown and moves farther out into the road. She’s in bare feet. It’s taken her this long to notice.
“Heather,” B says. “Be careful.”
“I’m always careful,” she says. “I just need to see what’s going on.”
He holds out an arm. “Give me Greta.”
Heather shakes her head. “She’s fine.”
“You’re not wearing any shoes,” he says, carefully. “I don’t want you to fall.”
“I’m not going to drop her.” She’s angry at the way his words have brought her own fears to the surface. “I’m fine.”
Behind B, the crowd is starting to disperse—shell-shocked and terrified, some people wailing again. Others still wave their phones in the air. She turns away from B and steps forward, picking a path through the rubble. She feels his eyes on her uneven gait.
I can keep her safe, she thinks. Fuck you.
When she gets to the end of the street, everything is exactly as she envisioned it. The crater has demolished an apartment building and spans almost a block. Small fires burn all around. The others from the hospital join her—B beside her once more, his hand shielding Jilly’s face.
He nods to Greta. “Cover her. She shouldn’t be breathing this in.” By this he means the tiny flecks of ash and dust that dance around them. They float almost lazily, as though they have all the time in the world.
“She is covered.” She draws Greta deeper into her gown nonetheless.
“Heather.” B’s voice is sharp now. “Heather, come away from here. Please.”
She turns and walks away from the crater, stopping at first by a small house that is seemingly untouched except for the roof, which is smoking. Greta snuffles in her arms, a tiny pig gone to sleep again. For a moment she imagines the story she’ll tell the girls years from now. You both could sleep through anything. Even the end of the world.
She opens its door and steps into the house and hears B calling her name in a voice that belongs to someone else—to the person that told everyone to calm down in the basement. He’s trying to take charge. He’s worried for her.
She moves down the entry hall and into the kitchen, where mugs of tea are abandoned on the counter, flecks of ash and soot floating on the surface. The patio doors have blown open—ash is everywhere in the house and, as she steps outside, onto the patio, spread thickly over backyard grass. She cradles Greta and watches the smoke rise out of a hole in the backyard, a much smaller crater than the one she’s just seen. Smoke drifts over the half-buried bodies by the wreckage of the pool. An arm attached to nothing, just lying curled on the blackened grass. The air here smells like a barbecue that’s gone on too long.
Beyond the fence at the end of the backyard and the squat brown house on the other side, beyond the street that lies in rubble on the far side of that—Deadwood Street, she thinks dizzily, how fitting—over still more roads and paths that lead out toward the forest (Miller Road, Longwood Avenue, Larkspur Crescent), beyond the smoke and the glittering fires that burn all around, the mountain rises, cool and green. Untouched. There are no fires burning there, as far as she can see.