Fiction | Short Story

The Evacuation

Look at the ocean, they say. Every road will flood. You will be trapped. Your house will be destroyed. Look at it swell.
I’m staying, I say.

They tell me I have to evacuate for the hurricane.

They like to evacuate. They are frequently evacuating. They evacuated for the fires and the tornadoes and the mudslides. And I went. Every time.

I packed my things. I mourned the things I forgot. I chided myself for mourning material things. I said to myself, “I’m just thankful for my life,” loud enough for the children to hear.

But no, they tell me. Those were dreams I had.

When I saw the white giraffes and said, Do they have albinism? They said, No, look at their dark eyes. They have leucism. And that made sense so I believed them.

That all those evacuations were dreams—that does not make sense.

You have to get ready, they say.

I’m staying, I say.

Look at the ocean, they say. Every road will flood. You will be trapped. Your house will be destroyed. Look at it swell.

But I look out and see mountains and trees.

Look, they say.

I look out and see the desert.

Look, they say.

And I look out and see the salt flats sparkling white.

One of them starts to gather my things for me. My toothbrush and toothpaste. My socks and underwear.

I’m staying, I say.

You will change your mind, they say.

*

They move about so quickly, they fill my house with nervous energy. I think of them as ants, and I did not know I was the queen ant, but here I am, amongst them, very still.

*

I say, When the sky turned green and the tornado came, I did not hide under an overpass. That’s old advice. I lay in a ditch by the road.

And thank God you survived, they say.

Another time, I tied myself to a pipe in a barn.

That’s an old movie, they say. That’s Twister.

For the fires, I left. I stayed with my parents in Nevada and when I came back my neighbors’ houses were gone but my house was fine.

And thank God it was, they say.

I don’t remember the mudslides, I say.

It was a dream, they say.

Over and over I watch time-lapse videos of caterpillars building chrysalises and turning into butterflies but I still don’t understand it.

It’s the imaginal discs, they say.

Do I have imaginal discs?

No, they say. But they haven’t looked.

*

I lie down on my couch. Still the queen ant. I feel pregnant with everything I need to start anew.

*

I did not like staying with my parents, I say. They bicker.

You do not have to stay with your parents, they say.

Where will we go?

Someone has an empty basement they’ve offered.

And we will all fit there? I ask.

No, we have to split up.

And where will another group go?

A hotel. Many hotels, they say.

I don’t have money for a hotel.

No one likes the word money. They shift about. Uneasy.

You can sleep in your car.

I don’t have a car.

This is about surviving! they shout.

And more quietly, We will figure it out.

*

I regret now that my wings have fallen off my queen ant body.

*

What about the children? I ask.

The children are ready. The children are waiting, they say.

The children should stay with me. I have good doorways.

That’s for earthquakes.

I have good bathtubs.

That’s—

I have a good basement.

Basements are for tornadoes.

But you said—

That basement is off the island. We have to get off the island.

I look out and see the plains.

I look out and see the tundra.

And you don’t have a basement, they say.

That’s true.

Still, I say, you shouldn’t keep making children evacuate.

*

They leave to help others. To gather them up. They say they will be back for me.

*

I turn on the television and it is full of emergency warnings. On the news, a man in rain gear is standing in the gusts of wind, trying to speak. An A-frame sign that advertises an ice cream shop’s waffle sundae is lifted off the ground and blown into the man’s body. They cut back to the studio but the anchor is laughing so hard they cut to commercial.

The commercial is for small plastic toys that physically enact the outcome of rock, paper, scissors by having one box-like toy wrap around the other. They cut back to the studio and the anchor’s eyes are wet on the outside corners from laughing. He says people should continue the evacuation.

*

My husband comes home even though queen ants don’t have husbands.

Everyone is evacuating, I say. It’s exhausting.

Aren’t you evacuating? he asks.

I’m staying, I say.

The wind is beating hard against the house now.

I listen. It’s shaking the windows.

I’ll close the shutters, I say.

We don’t have shutters.

Who are you to tell me about the shutters! I say.

Mason, he says.

I married someone named Mason?

That’s right, he says.

You would be an absurd thing to make up, I consent.

You’ve already packed a bag, he says.

They packed it for me, I say. I’m staying.

*

They return. My husband becomes one of them.

*

The mudslides were terrible! I say.

They say, That was a dream you had.

Can’t they still be terrible? I say. They were terrible!

They were. They were, they say.

It buried the scenic highway! It took houses right off their foundations!

Those were two different mudslides, in California, months apart.

For the fires, I fled to Nevada, I say.

We aren’t in California, they say. We’re in New Jersey.

We’re in Florida.

The hurricane is coming up from Florida. We need to go.

I’m staying.

You will be like one of those people on the news who did not evacuate and then they are dead or stranded the next day.

Those people are nothing like me! I shout. They were riding it out. I am staying. I am not here.

I look out and see a meadow of wildflowers.

I look out and see a canyon and all its strata poised around me in reds and browns, and the canyon would hold me tight except that time has stopped so we’re stuck here, waiting.

*

They leave again. The television is nothing but emergency warnings. The wifi is down. I am not an ant anymore who’s lost her wings. I’m a caterpillar whose rudimentary wings are still beneath my skin. The imaginal discs, already beginning.

*

A child appears, trying to the open the door, and I get up to help.

Inside, I sit the child on a wooden chair and drape a towel over her. She makes no effort to dry herself further than this.

I got separated from them, the child says.

How?

I don’t know.

You are not my child? I say.

No.

A transformer blows and the child jumps and the house loses power.

What do you want to do now? I ask.

The child shrugs.

I don’t know where they are, I say.

Oh, the child says. How long will the storm be?

Hours.

What are hours?

You’ve been here five minutes. Eleven more times is one hour.

That seems like a long time.

Yes, I say.

*

And who knows what my imaginal discs will be by then.

*

Another of my husbands comes home even though caterpillars don’t have husbands.

He clatters through the door, dripping wet. There’s a puddle beneath him in an instant.

We have to go, he says.

I’m staying, I say.

I’ll go with you, the child says.

I can’t carry you both, he says.

I don’t want you to carry me, I say.

I can walk, the child says.

It’s too deep in places, he says. He looks at both of us, back and forth, back and forth.

Why are you hesitating? I say.

I love you, he says.

If you don’t take the child, I say, it will be as if I never loved you.

Still, he hesitates.

You will come through the door one day and I will pretend we never met.

That might happen with you anyway! he says.

I will have thrown my wedding ring into the fires of Mordor!

That’s not quite how—

You know what I mean!

He picks up the child.

As they leave the house, all I can hope is he has a nice strong name, like Ethan.

*

I light a candle and do a crossword in the dark. Olaf is someone’s name. Épée is one of the weapons in fencing. It grows quiet. If I am in a storm, I think, am I in the eye of it now? I can feel the imaginal discs of the eyeballs of the next phase of my life growing inside me.

*

Another child appears. This is my child.

Where have you been? I ask, and I pull him in and hold him against me such that he thinks he does not need to answer.

It’s a long time before I feel I can let him go.

I was hiding in the closet, he says.

This whole time?

He nods.

When I told them about all the times they had us evacuate before, and they told me I was dreaming, you did not come to my side then?

He shook his head.

You would not defend your own mother?

*

I remember myself at his age, my mother taking me to a fair once. I had to take off my shoes to go on inflatable slides and she carried them for me. I remember feeling the grass through my socks. She got me a blue snow-cone—a flavor I’d chosen but didn’t like. I said, You can finish it, like it was a gift. She took it from me and said, Look at me. She said it again. Look at me.

She was in shorts and a T-shirt, sneakers, her purse across her chest between her boobs, making them look even larger, and in one hand were my shoes and in the other hand my melting snow-cone, turning bright blue at the bottom of the white paper.

This is not the picture of success, she said.

*

Do you know what the forbidden experiment is? I ask.

No, the child says, for my sake.

It’s to observe a child as they grow up with nothing. No one and nothing. Could they survive and how? What traits would they end up with as they grew? What was innate and what learned? It’s cruel. It’s cruel so it’s forbidden.

And yet—the child begins, because he’s heard me say this before.

And yet, throughout history, there have been children who wander into society after being lost to the world, raised in the wild, that have answered some of these questions.

But still—

But still, the child was not observed throughout that time, only later studied.

So we are not cruel.

We are not cruel in that way, I say. In that one very particular way.

*

Another husband comes in. This one, the father of the child.

We must hurry, he says.

He lifts up both of us, one over each shoulder.

Outside, I feel the rain slap against my face. I see the ground flooded and see the water splash off the back of my husband’s heels. I turn and see the child, soaked, his short hair turning piece-y and droplets of water gathering on the pieces, rolling down them and then flying off. Behind him, the world is gray with rain.

Is this sight so much more reliable than what I saw before? I think, missing the tundras and deserts and salt flats and plains and flowers and mountains and trees. All swapped out for rain.

He puts us down next to a very high pick-up truck. He opens the door and lifts each of us into it. Then he gets in. The three of us sit across the front bench seat, like we’re in an old movie.

He drives us north on the long island, on the flooded road, guided by the street markers and not by the paint we cannot see.

We reach a bridge and take it. We reach another bridge and take it.

We’re on the mainland now, he says, and keeps driving. The child falls asleep.

*

I am no longer an ant or a caterpillar. I’m only a woman again. I only have one husband now. I only have one terrain.

*

Where were you? my husband says.

I keep escaping before my body can, I say. Where were you?

I had to get to the island, to get to you.

And now we’re evacuating again.

Yes.

We’re evacuated.

Yes.

Before, the cars were piled up.

Yes.

If everyone died in their cars, the cars would’ve been stuck like that forever.

Yes.

How do you think they would fix that? Do you think they would take out the dead people and drive the cars away or just bulldoze them off the road, with the dead in them forever?

You know they would take the dead out, he says.

And drive the cars onto those trucks that carry eight cars at a time.

A car hauler, he says.

A car carrier trailer, I say, even though I don’t care what it’s called. I fall asleep, too.

*

We stop for breakfast and in the restaurant everyone is there who tried to get me to leave with them before. On the news, they are showing the footage of the destroyed homes.

That’s where I live, I say. That’s my block.

No, my husband says.

My house is gone.

No.

The child, my child, starts to cry.

Don’t cry yet, he tells my son. We don’t know yet.

That block like all the blocks, I yell.

That’s why we had to leave, they say. We tried to tell you.

Like all the times before!

*

I leave the restaurant holding my son’s hand and we walk among the parked cars.

What do you need? I ask him.

He shrugs.

To eat? To sleep?

No, he says.

Me neither, I say.

Inside one of the cars is a Nintendo DS.

Do you need that? I ask.

Yes, he says.

In the back of a pick-up, I find a wrench and break the window of the car where the DS is. We take the DS. We pilfer things from all of the cars, smashing more and more windows as we go. Soon everyone is out of the restaurant, watching us.

What are you doing? they ask.

We are making a run for it! I say.

Yes! the boy yells.

We stuff things into bags and run into the street together, screaming and laughing.