After the End by Kathleen Lane

The bakery was the last building standing and so everyone gathered around its two and a half walls, its one miraculous window. They took turns walking up to what was left of the counter, ordering biscuits and scones from the unblinking baker now floured in ash. One line of red you could trace up his apron to a flap of skin hanging from his chin.

The biscuits and scones had been reduced to black pebbles and nobody seemed sure what to do with them, why they wanted them. Some licked.  Others, with nothing left to carry, cupped them like eggs, like answers. The children were the most inventive, building palaces around the pebbles, summoning six-horned beasts to guard them. The pebbles were magic, they said. Yes! If you plant them, new buildings will grow! You’ll see, papa, we’ll have a city again!

Their older siblings told them to shut the fuck up, but their parents, bent with the weight of their grief, could not make words, could barely make nods. Only the elderly helped in the sowing, twisting their bent fingers into the earth to make the holes, covering with soot the seeds planted by the children, watering each new planting with what spit they could coax from their tongues.

They made their way along the road, sowing a pebble where yesterday they bought milk, a pebble where Sundays they would sit the long dull hours of mass. A reluctant pebble for the doctor’s office, an extra pebble for the toy shop, and on they went into the red light of evening, until the mothers and fathers could bear no longer the sight of their foolish hope, and rose like cinder block to their work.

Kathleen Lane’s stories have appeared in Berkeley Fiction Review, Swink Magazine, Poor Claudia, Forest Avenue Press and elsewhere, and her middle-grade novel, The Best Worst Thing (2016, Little, Brown) is a current Oregon Book Award finalist. Kathleen lives in Portland, where she teaches writing and co-hosts the art & literary event series SHARE.