Free Apocalypse by Nancy Springer Page A

thing is, nobody knows who she is. I know all the horse people for miles, and I can’t imagine who she is.”
    â€œLast I heard, there were still people in the world you didn’t know.”
    â€œAnd what would any of them want in Hoadley?”
    That silenced him. Alone in its pocket of the Pennsylvania Appalachians, Hoadley could hardly have been more isolated or forgotten. The coal barons had raped it and passed on, leaving behind them only black-lung death and the heaps of slag the miners called bony piles. The steel mills were turning to rusting skeletons. The land lay poisoned. The streams ran orange. But the community lived on, feeding on government largesse and, cannibalistically, on itself. For most of those who lived there—they had lived there all their lives, often in the same house all their lives, with the same friends, the same enemies, the same annoying bonds of kinship and religion—for Hoadley people, the town stood still at the hub of time and space, while just beyond the mountains the world spun on its way all around, faster and faster toward the close of the millennium.
    Gigi pressed her advantage. “You know as well as I do, nobody comes here.”
    Homer snorted. “It’s probably some sort of promo. Some new product they’re pushing.”
    â€œWho would start something like that here? There’s no money here. Homer Wildasin, you know better.”
    He rolled his eyes.
    â€œSomething very strange is going on,” said Gigi softly.
    Homer pushed himself back from the table; though he did not consider he had had enough to eat, he could see there was not going to be any more. He went off to look at a gun catalog until bedtime. Homer Wildasin had the skewed pride of a martyr. He would not speak his mind when he could suffer in noble silence—especially when a woman was neglecting him, and especially when a woman was showing her stupidity.
    Ma Wilmore’s house, though not as extreme an example as Oona’s, typified Hoadley taste: there was a cactus in the window wearing a crocheted hat Ma had made especially for it. The cactus’s name was Fred. Flanking Fred stood a silver-wattled Avon bottle in the shape of an amber-glass turkey, and a ceramic horse head with plastic roses sprouting between its ears. Ma Wilmore herself, meeting Cally and the kids at the door—unsurprised, for she phoned her son the funeral director several times a day—Ma Wilmore herself wore a crocheted hat much like the cactus’s, for her neuralgia. She wore it winter and summer, indoors and out. But her name was not Fred. It was Ma. Cally knew her by no other name. Perhaps she had no other.
    â€œDid you see that girl on a horse, Cally? Wasn’t she pretty?”
    Only Ma Wilmore or some other Hoadley woman of the older generation, Cally reflected sourly, would have called the apparition a “girl” or “pretty.” Ma would have called a bougainvillea in full, heady, incredible bloom a “posy bush,” just as she did the hydrangeas by her basement door, papery flowers which changed color, like litmus, depending on how the dog pee struck their roots.
    â€œCan you ride as good as her?” Ma Wilmore never waited for an answer, giving the impression that her questions were mostly rhetorical, intended to inspire thought in the listener. They generally succeeded in Cally. Ma Wilmore would not have believed how she inspired her daughter-in-law’s thoughts.
    Inside, the TV was on with no one watching it, as usual. Cally glanced at the Smurf rerun on the screen, then away again, remembering wistfully how exciting television had seemed to her as a child, before censorship. Ever since the fundamentalists took over there had been nothing good on TV or in the newspapers, either. Oddly, considering her liberal beliefs, she found the censorship of her TV watching more annoying than censorship of news and ideas, though less frightening than the