Apocalypse

There were clouds scudding across the moon, and the cows, huddled in their individual stables, had been shifting their feet for hours. The stray cat, who normally slept sprawled across the front porch so she might be closer to the kitchen, was hiding beneath the stairs, her eyes glowing, her breathing heavy. No one collected any eggs from the chickens that morning—not even Lucille, newest hen and pride of the farmer’s wife, was motivated to drop one into the straw. The rooster paced back and forth across the yard, kicking up forgotten seeds with his talons and ignoring them.

Occasionally, wind tossed the daisies in the flowerbox outside, but all was calm and still. The American flag over the porch swing, dusty with age, hung motionless—the hot air that normally blew through the hole in the thirty-first star (made when the farmer’s boy received his first gun, two Christmases ago) was nowhere to be found. If the wind did pick up the cat twitched, and the draft horse, long-retired and close to death, rubbed his head against the fence a little faster.

The farmer’s name was Smith. He was a common man. His boy, Thomas, had sandy hair that fell about his face and drifted over his eyes. Thomas was eight, preferred Tommy, and liked to color pictures of dragons, gryphons, and loincloth-clad warriors on the living-room couch. He helped his father with chores when necessary, but he wasn’t very good at it, so he was sprawled on the kitchen floor, by his mother’s feet, playing with a copper pot. Every few minutes he hefted the pot in a chubby hand and let it fall onto the tile, over and over, giggling at the tinny noise that faded slowly away. He hadn’t learned to color inside the lines.

Tommy’s mother had been cooking for hours. She stood by the stove after her water boiled to nothing, staring out the window. When she scraped the spatula across the empty pan or carefully adjusted one of the dials, turning the heat down on a burner, setting the oven timer, Tommy smiled and squealed with laughter at the grand joke. Mostly she wondered if her husband was going to return. He left that morning on the tractor, driving up the road, and she’d watched his back until it disappeared, remembering that his hair hadn’t been so gray a year before and that he needed new boots because the soles were wearing thin. Things that wore thin scared her. The sun would break through the clouds soon, and in the yard the rooster was still pacing, beady black eyes darting from weed to weed, searching for grasshoppers that weren’t there.

She used the last of the sugar in a bowl of cereal for Tommy. He couldn’t thank her, but he patted her dress and grinned. He’d always loved sugar. As a boy, he’d called it “yum-yums” and asked for it persistently until he got what he wanted, so she didn’t really regret giving it to him or watching it disappear down his hungry little throat, though she did try to imagine how it tasted and think that it looked like snow. She was still pretending that she didn’t resent him, this innocent small boy who wouldn’t remember anything in a few years and was too fragile to understand the significance of the cat that hadn’t yet emerged from the steps.

The ducks noticed the fire first, setting up a furious, almost indignant quacking while it ate its way toward them across the dry fields. Some of the more intelligent ones ran to the pond and swam far out, nearly to the center, where they floated quietly and watched or searched for food underwater, oblivious as sparks landed in the reeds. It reached the chicken coop before it really threatened the house and the barn, and she stood at the window, ignoring the hens that tore squawking across the yard, ignoring the rooster, who stood panicked by a patch of weeds as they went up in flames, too stupid to move.

When she heard horses screaming, she lifted Tommy, resting him on her hip. He was a little big for carrying, a pudgy eight—he had a high-pitched giggle, and he blissfully dug his feet into her side. She didn’t bother telling him to stop. She carried him into the nursery, where they kept his big-boy bed, and said that it was nap-time so he scrambled for his stuffed bear, kissed it, smiled. She touched her lips to his cheek, told him Mommy loved him, and locked the door.

Twenty-seven was too young for something like this—her own bed was the wrong place to be. She stepped outside, sat down on the porch swing, and swung her legs up beside her—she needed new shoes, too, because they were dusty, stained with things she couldn’t identify. The flames were crawling across the yard now, and when they reached her the stray cat would have to leave. That made her smile a little, but where would it go? Toward the blaze, orange at the center? The rooster had already disappeared, and she could smell burned feathers on the breeze. One horse was left after the barn collapsed—the draft. He was screaming still, dancing in circles around his paddock. Even from where she sat she saw the whites of his eyes.

She vowed not to move until it reached her. Already it had licked its way over the lawn, reaching the daisies one by one; she watched them explode and wished she’d tried to eat one while they were alive, because she’d missed out on the taste of their petals, and she remembered that her husband brought them to her by the fistful in the early days of marriage, so she could stuff them in thin clear vases and tickle Tommy’s cheeks with them until he squealed for laughing.

When it reached the porch the cat did run out, straight across the lawn, tail between her legs. She saw the blaze that headed her off in every direction and froze; she turned and looked back at the woman, golden eyes bright and accusing, and the woman watched as she found another place to hide, thinking that she would go soon.

Thank God she never heard Tommy scream.

old MacDonald had a farm, e-i-e-i-o

and on that farm he had a cow, e-i-e-i-o

with a moo-moo here and a moo-moo there

here a moo there a moo everywhere a moo-moo

old MacDonald had a farm, e-i-e-i-o