How to Get over the End of the World by Hal Schrieve

Author:Hal Schrieve
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: environmental sustainability;environmental collapse;acts of resistance;apocalyptic visions;youth support group;lgbtq books for teens;diversity;fantasy book;zombie books;lgbt books;zombie apocalypse books;LGBT;young adult;books for teens;ya books;young adult books;teen books;fantasy novels;young adult fantasy books;fantasy books for teens;teen fiction books;fantasy;LGBT fantasy;YA fantasy;LGBT YA books;young adult fantasy;LGBT young adult;LGBT fiction;national book award;diverse books
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2023-08-30T01:50:48+00:00

I wondered if the bullet was somewhere in the dirt, but I didn’t look. I thought about her eyes and her tongue and got a flash of fire in my head.

I felt her last thought: where is the Boy? The Boy isn’t here. He doesn’t love me.

I started to panic. The electricity under my knees start seeping harder into me. There was nothing I could say to her.

I couldn’t leave her here.

I backed away and sat down in the mud, looking away from Agatha and breathing deep. I tried to sense the rain and the cold sky above me, but I could hear the fire crackle.

Then I sat, for too long, listening to the birds, feeling my paws burning.

Flash.

“Orsino!” Jukebox yelled, brightly.

I looked over. Jukebox’s car was parked in the drive, the edge of it almost touching the house. The lights were on, shining into the goat pen, and the goats were yelling. Ranger was barking from behind the fence. Jukebox was waving, leaning out of the driver’s seat.

I couldn’t answer. I waved. Jukebox squinted at me, and I heard the car door slam. They walked over, their swagger out of place against the backdrop of the place I grew up. They had on their big black sweatshirt, the hood pulled over their hair.

“Hey, little bro,” they said. “Sorry I’m late. What’s—oh, shit.”

I was covered in mud, and Agatha’s body lay, rotten and long and black-red-yellow-brown-deeper-brown, across the ground in front of me. Jukebox’s nose didn’t wrinkle. They looked steadily down at the year-old dead dog, then at me.

“Agatha, right?” they asked.

I nodded.

“Robin told me. About your dad. That guy’s a monster.” They knelt down next to me, and I could feel in the rain that they were crackling with light and fire inside, just like me. The hair on my arms and my head started to stand on end, and my bones started to shake.

“I have to . . . to move her,” I said. “She’s still with my dad, and she’s afraid.” I didn’t know if that made any sense. Obviously—super obviously—the dog was dead. But she was inside me, the same way she’d always been. We understood each other. My dad had killed her, the way he would have eventually killed me if I’d stayed. And she was stuck here, unless I stole her back.

Jukebox, to my relief, nodded.

“I think what you’re doing is smart. You think about her a lot.”

“I dream,” I said. “In the bad visions of the future, I’m a dog. It’s like I am her. Like it’s her ghost in me.”

Jukebox put a hand on my arm, which felt awful. I didn’t want to be touched. But their touch still sent a wave of feeling into me anyway. Cold, hard wind from distant mountains. The water that fell on my face was the river a million years ago and a million years in the future. I was grateful. I looked at them, trying to smile and not sure if I was smiling, and their eyes looked back into me, weird and deep and gray-silver.

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