The day after the apocalypse turned out to be somewhat of a letdown. Target wasn't even running a sale and we had to wait in a fairly decent-sized line to stock up on the limited edition anchovy-flavored Cheese Its. Steven Wright was running around in vanilla pudding filled galoshes smacking pedestrians with a stuffed emperor penguin. It was all pretty business as usual.
There weren't even any less people on the road to the eighty-seventh Republican presidential debate and used plastic humidor flea market. It probably made a difference that nothing had really happened, no zombie epidemic, no everyone plugging in their Dyson home rototilling vacuum cleaner and combination fish dehydrators at the same time. We'd simply decided to finally make November 26th the apocalypse so we could stop trying to predict the day it would come. Thus, the 27th was the day after. It was largely a paper thing, but it sufficed. Finally, something on the national agenda that transcended partisan rancor. It was weird though that no one was gone. One expects the day after to have empty streets, crumpled paper and used aluminum pantyhose blowing everywhere. Martin Sheen introduced a bill that would require two-fifths of the population to stay home on any given day to keep up the traditional conception, but that didn't go very far when people remembered he didn't really hold political office. The same went for Isaac Hayes. It's so hard to remember that sometimes. Theft became a problem for a bit. After all, what's to stop people from taking whatever they want once the apocalypse occurs? Well, the police. EAS Anti Shoplifting Security System Products. Boss Hogg. Pajama-bearing Muscovites dedicated to social justice after misreading the secret seventh chapter of Charlotte's Web. In short, everything that normally stopped people on every day before the 26th. People kept overlooking that the apocalypse was only strictly an observance. One kooky group of athletically-inclined income tax adjusters in East Lansing got really hammered on poster paint fumes and low-fat bacon and tried to prognosticate that the world was going to end in a week due to invasion by sentient dancing silkworms from outer space, but everyone just laughed and they got real embarrassed. It was so hard on that sort to have to be constantly reminded that they were too late for doomsday predictions. Thanks, Obama.
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David Atkinson
David S. Atkinson is the author of "Apocalypse All the Time" (forthcoming 2017), "Not Quite so Stories," "The Garden of Good and Evil Pancakes" (2015 National Indie Excellence Awards finalist in humor), and "Bones Buried in the Dirt" (2014 Next Generation Indie Book Awards finalist, First Novel <80K). His writing appears in "Bartleby Snopes," "Literary Orphans," "Atticus Review," and others. His writing website is http://davidsatkinsonwriting.com/. |