In the Apocalypse by Liz Shulman

When the electrical pole fell in the alley, knocking out the power on our block, Tony and I knew there was nothing to do but sit on the porch and wait.  I poured us each a little whiskey over ice and we sat in teal plastic chairs and watched the men from ComEd install a new pole deep in the cement.  The lights from their truck guided them as they delicately transferred wires like surgery.  I lit a citronella candle.  “This is what it will be like in the apocalypse,” Tony said.  “Everywhere will be so dark.”  Breaking my rule of only smoking when I travel abroad, I lit a cigarette.  “In the apocalypse, that cigarette will be worth a hundred dollars,” Tony said.  When I was 21, home from college, living with my parents, I tried to hide I smoked.  If I could just make it to morning, I thought in bed in the dark, I’ll brush my teeth and they’ll never know.  I always worried, though, that something would happen in the middle of the night to expose me, like maybe if my father had a heart attack, I’d help my mother get him to the hospital, and, although I’d try to breathe through my nostrils, she’d still smell my stale cigarette breath.  Or I’d develop a blood clot and die and they’d find out I had been smoking.  Every night nothing happens to any of us, I’m relieved.  Downstairs, the neighbors were on their porch, too.  Five or six of them, a loud couple with their loud friends and loud kids like it was a party.  We preferred the quiet.  Without the noise of the neighbors, all we would have heard were the distant sounds of the men working on the pole.  Occasionally some crickets.  A couple sirens in the distance.  In a couple weeks the cicadas would arrive, screeching.  The neighbor who lives in the unit next to ours came out on the porch.  “Everyone is downstairs,” he said, carrying a bottle of rosè and a plastic container of cheese cubes.  A variety pack, I was sure.  Tony whispered, “This is how it will be in the beginning of the apocalypse.  At first, everyone will be nice to each other.”  We finished our whiskey.  I put the cigarette in the ashtray, blew out the candle.  It was midnight.  My parents hadn’t called with an emergency.  Everyone was alive another day.

Liz Shulman is a writer and teacher in Chicago.  Her writing has appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Tablet Magazine, Columbia Poetry Review, Punctuate, Understanding and Dismantling Privilege, among others.