Free This is the Way the World Ends by James Morrow Page A

charred, blasted tree, a boy of about two snuggled against his dead father and pressed a candy cane to the corpse’s lips. ‘Daddy, food?’ he asked.
    Several children gathered around a man whose tattered scopas suit was in the Santa Claus style. The man sang snatches of ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.’ One little girl was telling Santa Claus to find her parents. Another was saying she wanted a sled. A boy with a mangled hand was asking Santa Claus for a thumb.
    Why wasn’t anybody helping these people? Somebody should be doing something!
    A horse blocked George’s path. Once it had sat outside Sandy’s Sandwich Shop. GIANT RIDE. 25 CENTS. QUARTERS ONLY. INSERT COIN HERE . The chances of Holly not getting an extra ride were equal to those of the sun not . . . Previously the horse had lacked an ear. Now it lacked both ears, its left front leg, and its hindquarters. The horse’s name, according to Holly, was Buttercup.
    The third-degree burn victims lay on their sides, backs, and stomachs, quivering piles of excruciation, daring not to move, naked beyond flesh. A cyclone made of screams moved across the land. As the mobile survivors passed by, the third-degree burn victims begged to be shot to death with scopas suit pistols, their own hands (weeping, pulpy rubble) being useless to the task. ‘Somebody please kill me,’ the third-degree burn victims gasped with curious politeness.
    God, make this stop. Help them, God .
    George began to run, desperate to reach a place, any place, where indecent death was not. He dodged fires, circumvented walls of smoke, leaped over corpses. Large sections of Wildgrove had become beaches of broken glass; it would take a thousand years to put the town together again. He went past burning houses, pulverized automobiles, stray toilets, lost sinks, fallen traffic lights, smashed STOP signs, wayward CHILDREN – DRIVE CAREFULLY signs, severed water mains, uprooted fire hydrants, and telephone wires lying on the ground like dead pythons.
    The stones of Rosehaven Cemetery had survived the disaster splendidly. Most had been torn from the earth, but George could find no gouges or fissures. A familiar place. A place to get one’s bearings. Granite is truly forever, he thought.
    Dead Wildgrovians were sprawled on the grave sites as if seeking admittance. To George’s left lay old Mrs Mulligan’s stone, Design No. 2115 in Oklahoma pink. He remembered inscribing ASLEEP IN THE ARMS OF JESUS on it. To his right was a memorial to the Prescotts, Louis and Barbara. ERECTED IN LOVING MEMORY BY THEIR CHILDREN , the stone said. (In truth, only their daughter Kathy had erected the stone; their deplorable son Kevin, who had wanted little to do with his parents while they were alive, wanted even less to do with them dead.) The blast had opened a ravine from one end of Rosehaven Cemetery to the other. Several previously interred Wildgrovians had fallen into it; they were mainly bones. Such was the extent of observable resurrection.
    George faced north, the direction of the post office, but the intervening smoke and dust were opaque. He saw the post office anyway, saw it in his thoughts, and beyond the post office he saw the lake, and on the shore he saw his cottage, and inside his cottage he saw Justine and Holly packing their suitcases, feeding the pets, waiting for Daddy. He merely had to go there. Giving the golden suit a quick little hug, he started off.
    The most convenient route home took George across acres of black dirt and directly into a crater. Cautiously he clambered down the pulpy walls, from which cut cables and broken pipes protruded like diced earthworms in a newly dug grave. Poisoned by radioisotopes, drained by their wounds, hundreds of dis-oriented refugees had died crossing the pit. He picked his way through a mottle of white corpses.
    The center. Ashes, stench, dead refugees, another survivor. The man was naked but for his utility belt, a few hunks of scopas suit, and a cracked,