--- Osbie Z, cont'd ---

I hadn’t been much fond of watching the news. I only remember the television making the same fuss they always did. Every night, something new and frightening and in flashing colors. I remember they always had this music that went ‘bahm pa bahhhm’ because they wanted you to think they were very important, even though so many things they showed were far away and meant so little matter to the way we lived our lives.

We- what was China? Oh. Well. You know it used to be that all the people north and south of us, east and west too, were all part of one country together. It went all the way from one ocean to the other, and the only bits that weren’t ours were called Canada and Mexico and to be honest they didn’t even count much anyway. China was basically the same thing except they were far away on the other side of the ocean and we didn’t like them so much.

So I wasn’t paying much attention at first. I was much too busy living, and doing the things a young girl was supposed to do. There was school to worry about, and boys, and my parents, and money, and everything was so complicated all the time, where all of our living was happening so fast that you couldn’t have believed it.

It’s hard to imagine, but a place like Ghost Perch would have easily fit a hundred families. Houses stacked so tight together, you could shout out the window and make a new friend. There were so many people everywhere and all the time that you could spend a whole day doing nothing but meeting strangers and they would all be new and interesting and different no matter how often you did it.

I… well anyway, like I said I wasn’t paying much attention to the rest of the world to see what was coming.

I do remember how much fuss the grown-ups were making. My own father in particular loved the news, always eager to share or dispute it, as if his opinions could be passtimes. He was already arguing and guessing at why another country might hate the moon so much, and if it was meant to be an act of war, or whether we should take offense proactively so as to make it an act of war just to be safe.

But you can see the difference with your eyes, of course. The eye of the moon didn’t used to be there at all, and neither did its ring. For all of my growing up, and for all of history before, it was all just silver and pimply all over; for a million billion years they say.

How did they do it? Well, they had these things called rockets, which we had too, but they were like big metal pillars. They spat fire out their backside until they shot so fast they were screaming, and BOOM! When they hit something they exploded like a thunderclap, but bigger. Really! I swear. Todd, I’m sure you could find a book for us which has them in pictures.

Of course, it wasn’t an accident or an attack like we were worried. We’d find out later there was something on the moon already, and China had simply seen it before we did. Or maybe our government knew it too and didn’t tell us, or maybe who knows what. I’m sure the whole world was pointing their telescopes and cameras up at the sky, they must have, I’m sure. But the TV wouldn’t show us what the scientists saw, so all I learned was what I was told: that there up in that big old crater, right in the middle, there’s a single lonely timber, blasted and ruined, impossible and bigger than any tree which ever grew on Earth before.

Of course, by the time anyone could convince themselves if that was true or not, it already didn’t matter.

I went to school back then, every day of the mid-week and if you can imagine it, together with two hundred other teens roughly about my age. It was early September, and we were all still reeling from the consequences of the Autumn dance; scandalized by who had kissed who, or who had been asked by the wrong partner, or however we could recover from being seen in a bad dress…

When a voice came over the intercom (which was like electric voice pipes in the ceiling for making announcements). There was a problem with the buses which were supposed to drive us all home (bus being our word for a very big type of car). They were long and yellow and you could fit a hundred people in them, and every morning they would come gather up all the children from their homes and deliver them to school, and back again before evening – except today they wouldn’t ever come.

Folks have spent a lot of time talking about the First Calamity, especially... back when there were more folks to talk with about it. People seem to want to remember that it happened in a sudden crash, but that wasn’t true. It came in fits and starts, and we just hadn’t realized how few pieces needed to break before the whole machine of nation could wreck.

The first signs us kids heard something was wrong was from the traffic reports. Just like the old streets used to be like brooks, flowing with slow and small cars, and the old roads were like creeks, there used to be roads so wide that they were like the raging river. And we called them highways and freeways and interstates and parkways, and they were full of a hundred thousand cars in rainbow colors, shooting in two ways at once and faster than the wind.

But the trick about a river, is you don’t have to stop the whole thing. You just have to block it in one spot.

Yes, Todd a dam. No baby, nobody’s planning on building a dam anytime soon. Ask Mister Sadiqi. A waterwheel? Sweetheart, how do you even know what that is? Baby, I don’t know how anything works that’s mechanical. Well – you can ask him in the morning.

Anyways. The traffic reports were coming in. All over the news, starting slow at first and not stopping until we’d reached a fit of crisis. By afternoon, a few of the buses broke down on the road. Pop! Their engines split and spat fire and stopped forever. But that wasn’t an emergency yet. Then next the roads began to clog, cars blocked up, front bumper to back bumper and practically kissing. Serious delays in the Memphis area! Avoid highways headed East, South and West, to and from the city, and North as well!

But we’d seen that happen before sometimes, cars could ‘trip’ and ‘fall’ like people can, and then crash! The road will have to stop for an hour or two, so that the car can get taken to the car hospital. So we still weren’t thinking in emergency yet.

Ashli dear, please. Yes you’re right, but this isn’t a story about how cars work.

We went on for an hour believing the roads would clear, that an ounce of patience would right all wrongs like always. Then the director of the school, who was called the Principal, announced and gave us permission to use the telephone to speak to our parents. She said we should consider asking family to come pick us up, and also she asked our teachers to stay with us past the clock until we’d all found our way home.

We were becoming wild and restless. It was almost like a party at first. A girl from the basket-ball team fetched up a ball from somewhere and we were throwing it in the classroom, laughing. The teacher was flipping the television channel to find a sports match.

When the first aeroplane fell out of the sky, none of us were making the connection. The TV blared its horns and the newsman made his sad face, and we could only be worried about the problem of getting home. I myself was only thinking of catching one of my seniors, the upperclassmen, who drove cars of their own, and begging a ride. I’d be very popular if my classmates knew I was a passenger in a Senior’s car, and besides I didn’t own a mobile to reach my own mom or dad at their work.

Despite the odds, one or two parents arrived to fetch their children home. Where they didn’t, older students loaded up with passengers until kids were practically hanging out of the windows. We heard them hooting and hollering and carousing as they would go.

But for every fifth truck or sedan, or hatchback which managed to start, there was a sixth one which failed. Smoke and flame and wrenching metal started making a pattern that even the slowest of us were catching. So I found myself stood out in the parking lot, fuddled and upset as the passage I’d negotiated was spitting an ugly plume while our driver apologized. All the while, the voice of the radio, the faces on the television, the flashing banners of the internet, were all turning at last to the conclusion that were were standing at the turn of something terrible.

A second plane had fallen down into the ocean. The third had landed on a bed-mattress factory. Now the telephone lines which we used to speak to each other over distance were beginning to buckle under the strain of overuse. The first folks were starting to abandon their cars on the freeway and a mechanical failure was causing the news camera crew to land their helicopter. The Governor was considering declaring a state of emergency.

And some of the students who’d left by automotive were starting to return on foot.

By suppertime, the Governor’s scheduled announcement was cancelled to make way for the President. Two of my friends and I were in the cafeteria watching a television on a rolling cart. We were holding hands. I think a quarter of the student body were still in the school building; everyone else had either lived close enough to walk home, or had a friend who did. A fitness teacher had started up the grease fryer, and I remember eating soggy potato fries from paper cups. The salt and peanut oil stuck a right mess to my fingers.

Ten thousand aeroplanes used to fly through the sky, every day. Before the First Calamity I could see them sometimes among the clouds, like a tiny iron bird roaring with a lion’s voice overhead. Now all flying had been cancelled except for emergencies. Grounded. A thousand-thousand travelers were trapped far away from home and even across the world. A bazillion vehicles had used to drive the branching motorways all across the everywhere. Now, sixty percent (the TV said) of our highways were stopped still. More were obstructed. The once great New York City would in fact never completely clear their streets after the first day, locked forever in a paralysis which would only grow worse with time. Los Angeles was on fire so fast you’d think they were trying to break a record.

The President’s speech would go down in history as a hot, stinking disaster. He couldn’t decide whether to blame cosmic rays or sunspots, or a foreign gasket-maker abroad. He might as well have blamed little green men from space.

At least he would have been half right.

That’s not where he failed us though, not in not knowing the cause. It was in making a promise to us he couldn’t keep, a promise which being broken was worse than never being given. There’s value in optimism, in hoping that the worst is over. I like to think he was trying to comfort us in his way. But it’s also true that there’s strength in acceptance; in gritting your teeth and preparing honestly for the harder, meaner times to come. That’s what we needed, that was his mistake. He gave us gentle when we needed steel most of all.