(29) Anastasia Jill: The Cone of Uncertainty
Misty and I scavenged the stores for water less than forty-eight hours out from a major hurricane. In a couple of days, Hurricane Andrew would crawl up the coast like a starved raccoon, ripping our trash bag city completely apart. Misty was passive about the storm, dismissed evacuation. “We need to hunker down,” she said, “but we’ll be fine. We’re not going to leave.”
Her parents were in Mississippi, but she would rather die than stay there.
“Congratulations,” I’d said. “That’s your only other option.”
She barely spoke to me since, but we both knew I wouldn’t leave without her. So here we were, a two-woman army, tearing through the aisles of Dollar General while being serenaded by “Achy Breaky Heart.”
By this point, not much was left, and we had to make do with the rations that were crushed like the potato bread in aisle five.
“Why don’t we try Winn-Dixie,” I said as a woman nearly shoved me into the wall.
Misty chomped her gum extra hard. “It’ll be just as crowded, I’m sure.”
The aisles were crammed with people pushing plastic buggies full of soups and water. I looked in our basket and all we’d amassed: a roll of duct tape, a bottle of soap, and a guitar-shaped container full of Elvis Presley popcorn. “There might not be a point,” I said. “But we’re not going to get by on this.”
She turned around to face me, reached over to squeeze my fingers. “We’ll be okay,” she said. “Maybe we’ll get really lucky, and it’ll turn at the last minute.”
“Last minute is not our specialty,” I said, hoarding the last of the Saran-wrapped cake snacks. “Last minute’s idea of help is that we’re gonna get by on oatmeal pies and popcorn.”
She stopped and leaned over the lip of the cart. “Carrie, I mean it.”
“Okay.”
“We’ll get through this.”
“If you say so.”
Her boot dug into the wheel, preventing me from moving. “I know you’re upset, but we can’t stay with my parents. They don’t know about us, and how would I explain a girlfriend and your father?” Her eyes softened from the color of iron to molasses. “The highways are backed up for days regardless, and now it’s too late to get out.”
That was true, now. I told her we had days to leave before the highways closed. “You’re a baby about storms. You curl up in my lap at the hint of lightning.”
This was different -- the news anchors rolled up their sleeves and lost their composure against millibars and wind strength while angry yellow lights on maps warned of danger at our back door. The uncertainty of it all consumed me, and I teared up in the middle of the Dollar General, managing to croak out, “I really don’t want us to die.”
She pulled the gum from her lips, wiping its rubbery residue off on her jeans. “Stop trying to make me feel guilty.”
We lumbered up to the front of the store and joined the other idiots at the registers. Neither Misty nor I spoke the half-hour we waited in line. My anxiety flared by the time we hit the parking lot. I watched her as we loaded our groceries into the trunk, brown mentions of sun appearing along her nose the longer we stood outside. It was my turn to lean in and kiss her, leaving a lingering suggestion of calling her parents one more time.
“No,” she said, terminally.
When we got in the car, the radio stayed off, the only sound coming from Misty grinding molars into her gum. A string of hair hung around her bare finger, black and glowing against the glaring hot day.
“You’re staring. What do you want to say?”
I shrugged and said nothing. There was nothing to say at this point.
The static over the radio warned of the storm again, already rummaging around the ocean like a woman searching for bus fare. Misty changed the subject, asking if Winn Dixie was next.
“No,” I said. “Let’s go check on dad, help him board up the last of his windows.”
My father was a breed of man journalists made their salaries on, with their American flag-clad trailers and unwillingness to leave their condemned property, pets, and new television sets. Mobile homes were under mandatory evacuation, but my father chose to stay with his cat with no tail and put a few pieces of plywood around the structure.
When we pulled into his trailer, our plywood from the day before stood in its same dusty spot on the grass. Misty went in before me, squeezing my father into a hug against his recliner that smelled of Pall Mall cigarettes and cheap beer. He embraced him like a daughter, asking, “Is my girl driving you nuts with this hurricane talk?
Before she could answer, I said, “It’s not just my talk. The weatherman won’t stop bringing it up for five minutes.”
Misty rolled her eyes. “Carrie’s convinced we’re going to die.”
His throat released a rusty noise. “We’ll be fine.”
Misty lingered on his lap, back pressed into the arm of the chair while I rearranged the pictures on the mantle, then turned the TV onto the local news station. I went between channels for a while, and the motions drove him nuts, to the point he told me to stop. “Sit your behind in a chair. Worrying ain’t gonna halt the storm.”
I sank into a rocking chair and put the television on a non-hurricane-centric channel. A soap opera played while ticker tape scrolled across the bottom. I tried not to read the message, didn’t realize I was until Misty sat before me and took my hands. Her chest curled over my lap, ribs locking their sharp fingers in prayer under her skin. “Carrie,” she said, and when I didn’t focus, said my name in full, “Carrie Marcy Mau, listen to me. We are going to be fine.”
I tried the same approach but with a shakier voice, telling her, “No, Misty, we are going to be fine. We’ll be lucky if we’re in one piece, which is the furthest from fine any of us could be.” Both my father and girlfriend tried and failed to reassure me, at which point I barked out, “We should have left when we had the chance!”
Misty grew exasperated. “Can you please drop it already?”
“I’ll drop it,” I said, “when you can give me a better explanation than the pair of them being homophobes. I’ve put up with worse and stayed for dumber reasons than dying.”
My father rose out of his chair, bones cracking as his arms rose over his head. “You’re driving me nuts, Carrie.”
“Yeah,” Misty said, “That makes two of us.”
I shoved her away and stomped towards the door, slamming the screen hard as I could when it shut behind me. Rolling up the sleeves of my shirt, I grabbed the hammer and nails and set to putting the last of the plywood against the hole-filled windows of my dad’s trailer. Metal scratched metal, and the panels themselves laid lopsided against the frame but they were sturdy as any band-aid could be on a disaster. A can of spray paint sat in the garage. I took it and wrote, ‘Don’t loot me, I’m poor’ on the wood.
Misty chuckled behind me. “An unnecessary warning.”
I turned to her and said, “Assuming we live long enough to get stolen from.”
She sank into the dirt and motioned me to join her. Dropping the can, I curled into the patch at her side. Taking my fingers in hers, she tried to wipe away the slick remnants of paint. “I’m sorry,” she said. She stroked my arm in a calming manner and said, “You want to hear the story of how I got my name?”
Her parents came to this country when she was six, and since most of her peers couldn’t pronounce her given name, she elected to go by Misty. This time, she cut me off and said she was different. “You know what I didn’t tell you? We were refugees. We escaped on a boat, rowed for miles until we found refuge in another place, and eventually came here.
“You know why I picked Misty? Because we learned about it as a synonym for water, and to me, at that point, for me water was strong.” She brushed the trail of moles on my knuckle. “And water is strong, but so are the people who live by its command.”
She held my arm in her hand, skin sparking across the shallows of my wrist. “I have to believe we’re stronger. Because we can’t run away this time. Not from this, but we’ll be better for it at some point, I’m sure.”
“What if we get hurt? What if we die?”
I watched her sit solid, taking the hurricane into her veins until her core of being hardened to an eyewall. “This is going to be fine. It’s not that big of a deal.”
Getting on my feet, I dusted my hands off on my thighs and strode back inside to find my dad feeding his cat in the kitchen. He didn’t turn around when I said, “I’m putting back on the news.”
“Do what you want,” he said. “It won’t change anything.”
I nodded and went to the couch, watching the storm’s path squeeze its pupils tight against the lower half of the state. Dad joined me, sat down with a freshly cracked beer while I studied the newscast furiously.
The man on the news loosened his tie and said, “This thing is coming right for us.” Any uncertainty had since passed -- if you ignored the evacuation commands, start making plans: Contact next of kin, write your name on your arm in sharpie, so you’re easier to identify.
Standing up, I hollered for Misty to get in the house. Once she joined me, I threw a hand over at the television. “You wanna tell me this isn’t nothing anymore?”
Her eyes flickered to the broadcast, and her skin went pale as tissue paper. She started to cry, eyes producing enough water that her cheeks turned red. She sobbed relentlessly, and on instinct, I pulled her into my arms. She was a head shorter than me, and her gum stuck against my lower neck. Even once she pulled away, bits of it wouldn’t come off my skin.
With a kitten voice, I told her, “The highways may be closing but we could take side roads if you want to leave.”
She shook her head against my chest. “No, we can’t.”
“Why not?”
Pushing me away, she said, “We still have to go to Winn Dixie, remember? We just need to go.”
I gave one nod and told my dad, who gave us twenty bucks to top off our wallets. I asked if he needed anything, to which he replied with, “I’ll be alright.”
The car kicked back a few times, low on gas and steam, but I gathered myself and my girlfriend inside and got us to the grocery store in one piece. This store was fuller than our earlier stop, and the pickings were even slimmer.
Misty stopped crying, adopting a bitter attitude, cursing at each person who dared to look in her direction. Carts wormed their way into our hips, toes crushed under kid-sized shoes.
After being trapped in an aisle, Misty spat, “This is a suicide mission.”
I wanted to tell her that staying in south Florida was a suicide mission but knew better unless I wanted another fight. My thumb crawled between my teeth, nervously hid behind my back molar, and took the hits as I tried to bite down my frustration.
Roaming the store only turned up a bottle of cheap wine and a package of saltine crackers, a can of condensed milk, and a few bruised bananas. The crowd buzzed around us in a state of hysteria, which only worked to heighten both of our nerves. I was about to give up entirely until we made it to the last aisle, and one lone jug of water stood defiantly against an otherwise empty shelf. I grabbed it before anyone else could, slam-dunking it into the cart.
“Great,” Misty said, grabbed the cart’s rubber ear and leading it. “Now we can go home and get this over with.”
We made it to the apartment and stashed our findings, neither of us speaking to each other in the process. After a few minutes, Misty announced she was going to fill our tub with water and not to bother her for a while.
An hour passed and she hadn’t returned. I went inside and found her standing in the overflow pooling around her ankles. The tub was already full, but she turned the knob harder, filling the porcelain like an endless idea.
I forced her aside. “Are you out of your mind? The tub’s overflowing.”
“So what?”
“So what? Now we have to clean this.”
Her tone bit through me like ice. “We could be dead in a few days, and you’re worried about how clean our bathroom is?” Just as I stood to scold her, she sank to the floor and curled around the toilet. “You were right. We should have gone. Hope you’re happy about that. At least you can die knowing you were right.”
Her body chugged like a dying engine, cyclone-sized gasps trapping her breath on the wrong side of her throat. I pressed her into a hug, attempting to pick words out of the drain of her mouth to help them find sense.
She apologized. I asked what for.
“My parents won’t let me come back up.”
I shifted so she could face me and told her to elaborate when she was ready.
“They’re traditional in many ways,” she said. “Found God when they came to America. They were always so unsure about my being gay.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
She caressed my cheek. “They won’t let me step foot in their house.”
I shook my head. This had to be some mistake. She assured me it wasn’t. She’d called them many times over the last few days.
“But we could die.”
“Maybe that’s God’s way of punishing me for living in sin.”
“No,” I told her. “No. Baby, don’t even think like that.”
“They didn’t say so much, but that’s what they meant. I know they did.” She went on to tell me how she’d exhausted every excuse; how we had nowhere to go, especially on the salary of a bartender and freelance construction woman. “I told them how scared I was, and they still told me no.” She kissed the bottom side of my mandible. “I’m sorry. This is so shitty.”
“Yeah.” I rubbed her back. “It really is.”
The yellow haze of a cheap light bulb made our skin appear lean and old, older than we would reach naturally at this point. We weren’t stupid—our apartment was junky and would rest along with our bones in a pile of rubble that would be glossed over by news cameras in a sequence of collateral damage.
Misty cried on my shirt, teary arms extending from the neck to gut as she lamented the fact, she couldn’t run away from this. I helped her up from the floor and took her to the bedroom, opening the curtains so we could watch the sunset tonight.
A melon gradient coated the sky, pink and green moisture bleeding into the clouds. I faced my girlfriend to the window, running my hands up and down her side. Once she was calm, I picked the gum from behind her ear. She took it and put it back in her mouth and proceeded to chew.
After a while, she turned on the television. The reports grew more cataclysmic, and the same warning about labeling yourself with your name came and went for those of us who chose not to run from the storm.
Misty sat up, pulled a Sharpie from her batch of art surprise, unceremoniously marked her arm, then mine, with our names and social security numbers. The ink ran down my arm, not fully dried before I touched it.
I choose to ignore the numbers and our aching hearts. I turn off the television, collect my girlfriend into our bed and crack open the popcorn. My teeth work in cyclones to make the food small enough to swallow, and with a dried mouth, I reassure Misty with my smile.
Anastasia Jill (she/they) is a queer writer living in the Southeast United States. She has been nominated for Best American Short Stories, Best of the Net, and several other honors. Her work has been featured with Poets.org, Pithead Chapel, apt, Minola Review, Broken Pencil, and more.
This episode was sponsored by:
The Spiral Bookcase, Philadelphia, PA
Dive into the magic of stories with a delightfully strange indie bookstore. From small press to folklore, The Spiral Bookcase carefully curates stories that peer through the worn spot in the tapestry and make you feel like you can step out of your skin for a moment or two. Explore magical books alongside a bewitching collection of candles, tarot decks, crystals and ritual objects, all hand-selected for their wonder and enchantment. Visit The Spiral Bookcase virtually at spiralbookcase.com or follow along on Instagram for recommendations, sneak peeks and more from bookseller & owner Victoria. That's @spiralbookcase.