loading . . . 10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days 1.
There is a future in which a hellgate opens off the coast of California. It happens at midnight on the first day of the new year, which is sooner than anyone expected. The waters rise and we are forced to abandon our home, but one of the neighbors has a spare raft we can borrow until the rescue boats arrive, so there’s that.
There is a moment on the raft when I am crying—I’m dripping wet and I’m clutching a bag of essentials that feels comically insufficient and I’m spiraling out thinking of all the things we’ve already lost and everything we still stand to lose—and I look up at you and realize you’ve pulled a Yahtzee cup from your bag. At my incredulous look, you say, “We need _something_ to do.”
I laugh for the first time since we got the news.
2.
There is a future in which the Old Ones are called down upon our mortal plane, and they wreak horrors unimaginable upon the populace. An elephant-sized spider with mouths for eyes, a vampiric creature made of smoke and blood, a small army of gelatinous masses that cause deadly hallucinations at the barest touch, and more besides.
That night, we are huddled in our living room inside a protection circle we learned to draw from a YouTube video, when voices call to us through the front window. It’s the elderly couple from next door, Marilyn and Ted. They remember the country’s last stretch of eldritch horror, when the doomsday cultists first unmasked themselves and their century-long search for a hellgate, and they have a plan for neighborhood defense.
“We’ll take it in shifts,” Marilyn says, so firmly that I melt in relief. We cannot wield the deep magics necessary to close what the doomsday cultists opened, but we can do this. We can learn to make candles and draw lines of salt around our neighbors.
You and Ted go door-to-door to round up more volunteers. There is a single father with three children in a panic. There is a rental house stuffed to the gills with broke college kids who are far from home. There are two middle-aged sisters taking care of their mother.
I’m left with Marilyn. I ask, “How did you do it? How did you survive last time?”
“Well,” Marilyn says, as tactfully as can be expected, “we didn’t all make it last time. A mix of luck and circumstance, I suppose.”
Later, she teaches me how to crochet. It helps keep my hands off my phone.
These are the amigurumi critters I crochet for all of our friends that winter, in order of decreasing jankyness:
* A bumblebee
* A birthday cake
* A potted cactus with button eyes
* A baby axolotl
* Celeste from _Animal Crossing_
* Several Pokémon, including Snorlax
* About half a dozen dumpster fires
* And a Cthulhu beanie for Marilyn. (I’m a little afraid the joke won’t land, but she thinks it’s hilarious.)
There’s a yarn shortage, so the colors aren’t accurate, but everyone says that adds to their charm.
Seriously, Marilyn is the best.
3.
There is a future in which a new virus sweeps the land before the last one has even fizzled out. If you catch it, your eyes bleed and you develop a craving for brains. On the news, there are stories about people holding bite parties to get it over with. The college kids all get sick, and we have to tear apart both our dressers to board the windows up while we wait for the cure to reach our neighborhood. You sign up with a volunteer collective, making food deliveries to the homes of the less agile, and I love you for that, but I’m boiling with worry every time you go out. I’m staring at the walls and wondering how long I should wait to panic if you’re late, and what I’ll do if you don’t come back, and what I’ll do if you come back _wrong_ , and what we’ll do if this never ends, and—
We adopt a pair of cats. We name them Shaun and Liz.
Their antics are so infectious that for entire tens of minutes every day, I forget to worry.
4.
There is a future in which the demon warlord Escarioth lays claim to our neighborhood and demands tithes in the form of our happiest memories. We offer up an extra set (our honeymoon, RIP) to exempt the three little kids next door, who don’t have enough to spare.
We learn to bake bread!
5.
There is another future in which a freak blizzard sweeps its way south, and it seems like the entire world has been painted white. We’ve never experienced cold like this before. It is both terrifying and downright comical what we have to do to stay warm.
We learn to homebrew!
6.
There’s one in which we have a devil baby, and I’m not even sure how it got in there. You are there with me for every minute of its painful gestation, rubbing my back in between Zoom meetings with your boss, drawing cold baths when I feel like I’m burning up, making dinner every night, and cleaning the litter box every morning. We have to buy a book called _Steps to Raising a Devil Baby_ because every time it has a tantrum it sets more of the house on fire, and even if the hellgate is shut soon, there’s no undoing this one.
In between writing angry emails to our state-level practitioners and toting our devil baby to anti-hellgate protests, we take up gardening. There’s something about the give of the soil beneath my knees, the crisp scent of green when I pull a weed, that slows my heart rate back to manageable. My bougainvillea is blooming all year long, and as long as I don’t stop to ponder the persistently warm weather that makes this possible, I can glory in the pink vibrance of the yard and pretend this is one of the good outcomes.
“This is a good one,” I whisper, as a small root pulls, sucking, from the dirt.
“This is a good one,” I whisper, as you shout in fear and surprise at some fresh hell inside the house.
This is a good one.
7.
There is a future in which we stopped it all from happening.
The doomsday cultists reached the hellgate, but they were beaten back before they could crack the seal. Our state-level practitioners heeded the warnings of the great seers and spent a year meticulously building their counteroffensive. We watched the whole thing on livestream with our friends, and we cheered and cheered and you kissed me like nobody else was in the room.
I can’t see past it, that moment of fracture. I can’t see that normal life. This witch’s ball you bought on Amazon is pretty good for $27.99 and free shipping, but the imminent horrors are drowning out all other possibilities. Is this thing broken, or is it really going to be that bad?
In every other future, I spend far too much time imagining this one, the one where it all turned out okay. I wonder what our lives would look like, if we could just focus on our jobs and our friends and save up for a vacation now and then, and, while we’re at it, what if we didn’t have to worry about getting terminally sick at the grocery store and what if the news wasn’t a constant stream of worldwide atrocity and what if every summer wasn’t the hottest summer on record and what if my sister could send her kids to school every day without worrying about whether they’ll come home?
At which point I’m forced to admit that things weren’t too great before, but we’re never going to deal with any of that if we can’t get the hellgate shut!
8.
There is a future in which all we do is fight. Our house is a revolving door of people fleeing one overrun district on their way to another. Our days are filled with phone calls and fundraisers and marches and getting locked up overnight and bailing each other out again and studying the forbidden texts for spells to make the evenings just a little bit safer, and it’s never enough, all we do is yell at one another because it’s not enough.
9.
There is a future in which we don’t fight at all, and on our deathbeds, this is our greatest regret.
10.
There is a future in which nearly all of these things are happening at once and we are overwhelmed. We are fighting and struggling and self-caring our way through the apocalypse, and every day there is something terrible but also something lovely, and we are caught in constant whiplash between the two.
In this one, it is hellfire, not water, that takes our house out, and hellfire is not covered by our insurance policy. We race for our go-bags—a California constant even before this mess—and we grab the baby, the cats, our phones and chargers, our vital documents, the first aid kit, and everything else I assembled last wildfire season.
Ash is falling outside, reeking of sulfur and leaving bloody smears wherever it lands. Everyone is loading their cars, except for the college students, who are still recovering in a government facility near the hospital. We pass some spare N95s to the sisters who live across the street with their mother. We make sure Marilyn and Ted know where they are going. The single dad peels off with his kids.
It’s a long, choking terror of a drive out of the canyon, but we make it.
Your brother lives in an apartment in the city. It’s cramped and expensive but it’s safely surrounded by concrete, and he’s only a little resentful about shoving all of his exercise equipment into one corner to accommodate the baby pen.
We’re sharing a mat on the floor that first night. We’re lying on our sides, face to face, and my hip hurts already but I’m not willing to roll over yet. I keep tracing your cheekbones and dwelling on what might have happened if we had slept in and missed the evacuation alert.
All of my craft supplies are gone. Your leatherworking kit, gone. All of our board games, the fancy dice, the garden, the sourdough starter, the spice cabinet, the nice wine we were saving, our soft robes and slippers, the Funko Pop collection, all of the books and movies and video games, every little treat and comfort we’d worked into our days to counteract the onslaught of bad news and petty humiliations of life under a doomsday cult—it’s all _gone_.
The witch’s ball is gone, too, exploded in the heat, but I can’t stop thinking of all the other futures I saw that I didn’t list here. These are the good ones. These are the _good_ ones. These are the ones in which we’re together through the end, and the worst thing we are stricken with is survivor’s guilt.
But there are other possibilities. There are futures in which you die (of disease, in a riot, gobbled down the maw of a creature long thought lost from the world of man), there are ones in which _I_ die, there are ones in which I go to prison for spreading anti-hellgate propaganda, and ones in which we lose so many friends and family that we are frozen in a state of perpetual grief.
I keep touching your face, and I keep touching your face, and you whisper, “I couldn’t imagine doing this with anyone else,” and that finally sets me blubbering.
There is so much that could happen in the next few years, and no bargain bin witch’s ball can tell me which of these futures will come true. I don’t know who will make it and who won’t. I don’t know how badly the effects of the hellgate will ripple around the earth, or how long it will take to close it.
I only know that here and now, in this moment of calm between the storms:
I’m so glad you’re here with me.
_(**Editors’ Note** : “10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days” is read by Erika Ensign on the _Uncanny Magazine Podcast _, Episode 63A.)_
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