Drown #7.7: drown

August 2085—Stephanie Nova and Justin Kim are 25, Lily is 2, Willow is 3. Lucy Harris is 19. Welcome, baby Cassiopeia!



"Don’t be alarmed at her coloring," Violet warned them. "I can assure you that she’s perfectly healthy."

Cassiopeia Hope Deppiesse was born at 9:34 pm on August 9th, 2085.

Her skin was a pearly shade of blueish gray, but she had her mother’s warm caramel brown eyes.

"Thank you for keeping us safe," Lucy said. "You have no idea how much this means to us all."

—

Ten percent oxygen.

Safe as they may be for now, Earth was losing its war with these little shits. The forces sent out to space couldn't come home, and whatever forces left here on the ground couldn’t fight them, either. Our primitive bombs did nothing to them except make them pause for a moment, in curiosity, and then they carried on.

The girls knew that they weren't allowed to play outside anymore, but nobody wanted to scare them about any more than that. They were still too little to understand all of the doom and gloom that they might have heard on the news. It was better that way, they all decided. They only missed the playground and wondered why none of their friends came over to play anymore.

Stephanie's daycare kids didn't come anymore because their parents had stopped going to work. People were afraid and wanted to be home with their families.


They all crowded around the newscasts, waiting for some good news.

The military had ceased fire at the moment because they needed to think up new strategies. The little shits couldn't be bombed. They wouldn't let anything get close enough to push them or collide with them. There was no good news.

Manufacturers couldn't make oxygen tanks fast enough. Supply stores were selling out. The lower the supply stocks got, the more people bought. The more people bought, the less air there was for everyone. Less air made people panic, and then people raided the factories, who then couldn't make any more oxygen tanks at all. That wasn't good news, either.

How much longer could they survive in these little bubbles?

But Justin patched up holes in their ventilation ducts, he laid sheets of plastic over the doors so that they would lose less air going out and coming in. He equipped the air conditioner with more efficient filters. Stephanie didn't know how it was possible that he didn't seem afraid.

"Please don't go to work anymore. Don't leave us," she begged him.

"I won’t leave you," he promised.


They couldn’t go outside for even a few minutes anymore without wearing an oxygen mask. And good luck finding one of those if you didn’t already have one. Luckily, that was one of the things on Keri’s preparation list, a medical grade breathing mask and tubes. Stephanie fitted one of the smaller tanks to an old backpack so she could still do her gardening, but the air was becoming too depleted for even the plants to breathe. Even plants needed some oxygen.

The plants were dying. The animals were dying. People were dying. The future they had hoped to see was dying. And they'd all tried to fight for it, but they didn't know how. Their primitive weapons weren't strong enough, their intellect wasn't advanced enough. And they couldn't breathe. So they would retreat into their little bubbles for however long the bubbles would last. They would stand on dry land and wait to drown.

—

Stephanie found Lucy one morning, leaning over the baby's bassinet, not moving, but just staring. The baby was unusually silent, too. "Is everything okay? What are you doing?"

"She's fine. I was just thinking at her," Lucy said.

"Thinking at her?"

"She doesn’t understand words, but Dallas says he can hear me sometimes. Not just the words, but the feelings. I wonder if she can, too. I don't know, it's just that when I think at her it seems like the only time she's ever quiet. She cries so much! I don’t think I expected her to cry so much. Did Willow cry this much when she was little?"


Willow's difficult infancy still felt too personal and tender to talk about with near strangers—Willow did cry a lot, but Stephanie figured that was probably her fault—so she struggled to answer that question. "It gets easier. I promise, it does."

Lucy smiled. "I guess it would have to, or else nobody would have babies."

"Hey, did you eat breakfast yet?" Stephanie asked. "I made pancakes. I put gummy bears in them."

"Ooh, gummy bears!?"

"Yeah. Go have breakfast," Stephanie said. "I’ll hold her if she cries."


Cassie started to whimper just as soon as Lucy left the room, so Stephanie picked her up. She had warm skin. Stephanie felt bad for seeing her bluish coloring and thinking she would be cold to the touch. But she wasn't cold. She was soft and squishy and warm.

But Lucy was right, Cassie did cry more than any other baby Stephanie had known, although she'd really only known two babies before. Cassie seemed more fearful of the world than either Willow or Lily had been. Maybe because Willow and Lily had gotten to know the world before it was ruined, and Cassie would only know the world as it was now.


"It was beautiful here once," Stephanie told her.

Cassie seemed to listen, she understood somehow, although that must have been impossible because she was only a couple of weeks old.

"Do you want to see?"

She brought Cassie to the window and faced her to the glass.

"My little girl hasn't gotten to see much of it yet, either. When I was a little girl, we used to run on the beach in the waves, and catch fireflies in the summer, and stand in the snowflakes in the winter, and run through the woods with our arms stretched out like a bird. I don't know how much running you can do in a house. Maybe when you're older, they might build giant arenas and fill them with fake trees so you can know what it's like to run through the woods. It was fun. It was a really good life, growing up here. I wish we could have saved it for you."

—

Justin and Stephanie settled in for their six hour guard duty shift by the road. She came with him now more often than not. There were plenty of adults at home to watch the kids, and he needed a wingman, he told her. But more accurately, he just needed a companion. They rarely saw trouble here, and six hours was a long and boring time to spend all on his own.

But just as they settled in for their shift, Stephanie's phone rang. Justin immediately cringed at the idea of being trapped in this car and forced to listen to a whole conversation between her and Jeremiah. Then she covered her phone for a moment and whispered, "It’s Tyler Jackson. He's back on the ground in South Carolina now."

Then Justin felt slightly better about being trapped in the car with this conversation.

She talked to Tyler for a while about the war, about the aliens, about the end of the world, about his apparently enthralling brush with death in a fiery rocket ship malfunction, about a girl named Maya, about life and marriage and love, about Jeremiah, about Justin while Justin was sitting right there and had to listen to it all. Justin felt good, at least, that she said nicer things about him to Tyler than she did about Jeremiah.

After she hung up, Stephanie said, "He said he always thought you were okay. He said, out of all my high school boyfriends, the noogies you gave him were the most considerate."


"For the record," Justin said, "I think he officially got more kisses out of you in high school than I ever did, and he was an eighth-grader and we were seniors, and I only gave him one singular noogie. He was annoying back then. It was deserved."

"Maybe," she said. "I'm sorry I didn't kiss you more in high school."

"I was probably a lousy kisser back then."

"I doubt that very much," she said.


"Hey, remember that thing you wanted to ask me a while back?"

"Yeah," he said.

"What if you never get to ask it?"

"Why wouldn’t I get to ask it?"

"All kinds of reasons," she said. "If the war doesn't end, and we all die. If the war does end, Jeremiah comes home and you die. Or I die. Or we both die."

She didn't have a shred of optimism sometimes, like she just expected the worst to happen. She was the opposite of how most people prepared for the worst and hoped for the best. Stephanie prepared for the worst and expected it. She looked at him with an expression of infinite sadness.

"You don't want to ask it anymore?"


"I do," he said. "More than anything. But I want to ask it for real."

"It can be as real as you want it to be. What if this is as real as we’ll ever get? What would make this more real?"

"I don't know, not being trapped in a car with alien spaceships over our heads. You not being married."

"That’s not fair. You keep forgetting that you’re still just as legally married as I am."

He did keep forgetting that. Now he felt like an asshole. "You're right. I’m sorry."

"No, I’m sorry," she said. "I shouldn’t have brought it up. I guess it shouldn't happen because I asked for it."

"Steffie, I’m going to ask it some day."

"Maybe. But what if Jeremiah comes home and kills you and you still don’t get the chance."


"So you’re okay with him killing me, as long as I ask the question first?"

He thought this was funny. She didn't.

"I want to go back to the house now," she said.

"You can’t," he said. "You’ll break the airlock, were in space, we can't breathe, were dying."

He stopped laughing as she reached for the door handle. He grabbed her hand.


"Steph, don’t. You can't make it up the road, you'll get sick. I’ll drive you back home if you really want to go home that bad."

"You can’t leave your post," she said. "There were some break-ins again down the street."

"Okay, that's good because I don't want you to go anyway. I don't want you to think I don't want to ask it anymore. What if everything is fine and I do get more chances? What if you and Jeremiah have a tearful but civilized little chat and call things off and the world is restored and everything is fine?"

She shook her head like that was too much to hope for. "I don’t want to talk about this anymore."


"Wouldn’t it make you sad to hear how nice it could have been, but to know that it can't happen that way right now?"

"It’s making me sad that you won’t stop talking about it."

"Fine, what do you want to talk about then?"

"I don't want to talk."


They each played their separate video games for a while. Then as the evening became night, she leaned her head against the window and closed her eyes.


Justin's guard shift lasted another two hours. Nobody came in or went out. Everyone mostly stayed at home with their families these days. Stephanie was asleep, and Justin was bored of all the games he had on his phone. The sky was dark, clear, and starry. At night, you couldn't see the little shits because they didn't emit any light. You could almost pretend it was all normal again, except for the constant song in the sky, except that if you stepped outside for more than a minute or two, you’d get dizzy and pass out.

It wasn't that he wasn't scared sometimes, he just didn't see how being afraid helped them. He'd rather focus his energy on what they could actually do, like making the house more secure, or making sure everyone was safe. In business you could weigh up the numbers, risks and opportunity costs, but nobody could put a number on the chances that this might actually be the end of the world.

How tragic would it be if he never got to ask it?

"Steph, your neck’s gonna hurt if you sleep like that. Come lay on my shoulder."


She scooted over to his shoulder, but she couldn't fall asleep again.


"I have thought about it," he said. "What I would have said and how. It would have been really nice."

"But what if now I don’t want you to ask it?"

"Not ever?"

"No, just not tonight," she said. "It would be sad now."

"No, it wouldn't. What if I asked it anyway?"

"I’d be mad."


"I bet you wouldn’t," he said. "Especially after I tell you how nice it would have been."

She looked at him doubtfully, but she didn’t tell him to stop.

"Okay, here, turn around in your seat and lay your head on the dashboard. Look up through the glass. Can you see the sky?"


"Yeah," she said.

He held her hand but she looked up at the stars. He knew she wouldn't see the little shits at night, only the stars. She could imagine that the stars twinkled more when it was really just the darkened ships as they passed in front of the light.

"It would have been at night, like this, but no spaceships in the sky. I would have taken you to the beach, I think. That place where we had our date, and we’d be barefoot because we’d have our feet in the waves. I guess now it couldn’t be outdoors anyway because we couldn’t breathe out there. And I guess I wouldn’t do the down on one knee thing, because we’d be out in the water up to our ankles. I’d hold your hands, both of them, like this. I would have kissed each one, like this."

He kissed her right hand, then her left.

"And there, all of those stars, just like that. I would have said…"

She looked down from the sky to his face.

"I would have asked the question you said I couldn’t ask tonight."


He cracked up and she slapped his shoulder.

"You brat," she said. "Okay, ask it. I won't be mad. Please ask it."

"Only if you promise it’s for real. If I do this, I’ll mean it."

"I’ll mean it, too," she said.

"But someday I’m going to do it again, better."

"You can do it as many times as you want."


"Okay," Justin said. He laughed once. He took a deep breath and cleared his throat. Then he reached across the center console and held her hands. He looked into her eyes and she looked back, and that was all he could see—her bright eyes and big smile. They could have been anywhere in the world and it wouldn't matter where.

"Stephanie, you’re my sweetheart, my best friend, my wingman. You’re the most beautiful person I’ve ever known. You’re already much more of a companion than one person can expect in a lifetime, but if it’s not asking for too much, someday, as soon as you’re legally allowed, would you also be my wife?"


"Yes, yes, yes," she said. "It will always be yes."

—

Seven percent oxygen. Earth's atmosphere was now unsuitable for human survival.

"Don't shoot them," the authorities said, but people shot at them anyway because what else could they do? Should they just do nothing? People couldn’t stand by and do nothing. People fought back, even if their fight seemed futile. Fireworks, flares. It was silly, if you thought about it, if the bombs didn't even work, but it felt like doing something.

The little shits didn’t shoot back though, they only stopped when the bright flash came near, as if curious. How funny. How quaint. For a few short moments while they studied the flash, their droning song would cease. Then they began to fly again.


Stephanie dreamed about last summer, how she used to love to sleep with her windows wide open, even though that meant waking to the chirp of birds much earlier than she wanted to be awake. Now there was only the sound in the sky, the little shits stealing the air. Beyond that sound was the constant whir of the air-conditioning, a steady white noise.

Boom! 

Stephanie startled and opened her eyes.

"It's just a firework," Justin said.

It was a close one this time. Someone in their own neighborhood had let it off. And then came the jarring silence as the little shits stopped above them. So much quiet. And Stephanie thought she heard something else, too. She got out of bed. She sprinted outside.


She could still see the fiery trail of smoke in the sky where the flare had been. She stood beneath the trees, looking up, searching. She heard them, the birds, she knew she did.

"Steph, come back inside," Justin said.

Government alerts stated that people couldn't be outside for more than thirty seconds—no longer than the time it took to go from a house to a car—but thirty seconds was only the safe estimate, probably. She wanted to stay out here just a little longer.

"Just another minute," she said.

"One minute, but breathe slower," he said. "You're breathing wrong."

She waited, she listened. Everything was just as it should be again, and it was all so quiet by comparison. She could hear her own breathing. Too fast and too shallow. She could hear everything, the wind, the rustle of leaves on the trees, her own heartbeat in her ears. It wouldn't last for long. After a minute or two, the little shits would start flying again.

"Come here," she said to him. "Come listen before it’s over. Do you hear that?"


"What are we trying to hear?"

It was a sad, impossible bliss. The sound of birds chirping. The birds weren't dead yet. There was still hope for them all. She felt it overflow within her, the mix of hope and despair, warring with each other, each trying to cancel the other out. The chirp of birds who weren't dead yet, but might be soon. A newborn baby with a whole life ahead of her, but who might never get to grow up. A beautiful proposal from her favorite man in the world for a marriage that might never get to happen.

Maybe Stephanie would get her wish after all, that they would all die in this perfect bubble of love. But now she didn’t want to die. She wanted the world not to end.

"The chirping," she said. "The birds aren’t dead yet. They're not dead. We just couldn't hear them over the sound. The birds aren't dead and maybe we're still going to see all of our kids grow up. They're going to grow up some day, and we're going to get married and grow old together, too."

"Steph, I hope so, too. But you can't breathe like that out here. You're gonna—"

Her eyes went starry and her knees trembled. But he caught her.


"It's okay," he said. "You're going to be a beautiful old lady some day and the birds will be fine for a while longer. I promise."

"But how can you promise that?"

"I just can. I'm promising it. Now let's go back inside."

—

footnotes: the question // the perfect bubble of love

outtakes: alien baby skintone drama // gameplay engagement