Free How I Spent the Apocalypse by Selina Rosen Page B

him a look. “Cherry Summers? Her name is Cherry Summers. You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” With a name like that it was more likely he’d met her hanging on some pole at a strip club than a Waffle Hut.
     “I swear, Mom, that’s her name.”
    I typed in the name and not too surprisingly got only one entry in Fort Smith. I gave the number to my son who hammered it greedily into his phone. Apparently he got the answering machine because he got that same look on his face Lucy got every time she made a call and got it—or worse yet nothing. I took the phone from my son.
    “If you get this message call us back at…” and I gave her the number. “Find someplace still standing with a wood stove or fireplace. Stay warm. Dress in layers. Grab whatever food you can, find bring it into that room with you, cover the doors and windows with blankets or stacked furniture. Burn whatever will burn for heat.”
    I hit the end of the message so I closed the phone and handed it back to Lucy. Between you and me, I figured the girl was dead or would be soon. Hypothermia is a bitch. Hypothermia with a big dose of shock and not enough food or water will kick your ass quick. But it put a look of relief and hope on Billy’s face, and that was reason enough to do it.
    Lucy handed me my phone back, and I realized that she hadn’t followed me out to the barn, no doubt fully consumed with trying to reach someone… anyone. However when I said I’d finish up in the barn Lucy followed. In fact, she followed so close that if I’d stopped she would have run into me, and it dawned on me that since she couldn’t reach anyone she was probably going to be stuck to me worse than before.
    She tried to help me clean up the mess Spot had made… Why do I have a goat named Spot? Because she has spots, of course, and when I finish milking her I get to say, “Out damn Spot,” which I always think is funny no matter how many times I say it.
    As I was saying, Lucy tried to help me clean up the milk and tried to help take care of the chickens and guineas and rabbits. Mostly she just got right in my way. I grabbed a handful of fish food on the way back to the kitchen and threw it into the river where the fish greedily snapped at it. The waterfall was running at the far end against the wall to the house which meant either Jimmy was washing dishes or more likely the cisterns were all full of run-off and groundwater was seeping into them. When the cisterns are full a pump kicks on and the overflow runs down the waterfall into the indoor river. The waterfall helps to aerate the water. The water runs into the three-foot deep, two-foot wide trough that runs the length of the greenhouse. When it hits the wall to the barn there is a spillway that runs into another trough which runs into the barn to water the animals. The overflow there runs under the floor in pipes and runs all the way out to one of the outside ponds.
    Now the water trough that goes through the greenhouse is filled with fish and plants and snails. Not cod, but perch and channel cats. All our bathwater, washing machine water, and sink water runs down the waterfall and into a box filled with lava rocks and water plants. The roots and rocks filter the debris and what comes out of the rocks the fish and snails eat. We have to watch what shampoos and soaps we use, but you know what? You ought to anyway. The trough has two-foot walls in it every three feet and this helps to hold the water while the fish and snails and plants clean it before it gets to the animals in the barn.
    I stopped and was just watching the fish snap up the food. I didn’t have to feed them much; there was enough food that got washed out in the dishes, off our bodies, and out of our clothes that they had their own little eco-system going on here. The snails ate the algae and food particles, the fish ate the snails and the algae and the food particles and picked at the plants. The plants filtered the water