There was so much soup. Hundreds of cans lined the basement floor to the right of the stairs, beside the deep freezer and portable gas stove. Behind the makeshift room divider, and running all the way to the back, was a tetris-like bulk of bins stacked to the ceiling, and beside that, the creepy part of the basement. The entirety of which could be considered creepy, as it was unfinished and littered with debris, it’s just that to the left of the stairs is where things got weird.
There was the couch made up of cushions and things found on the side of the road. More bins, bags labelled ‘play clothes’ an armoire filled with electric coloured fake furs and empty hangers, ropes dangling from the ceiling on which used to be a swing before the seat was cut off as punishment for some misbehaviour. In our house swings were a luxury, bedroom doors were not a right, but a privilege. Next to the unburdened rope, bare bulbs hung down, dim, leaving pockets of darkness. More bins, more boxes, more clothes, rags, toys, scraps, and Star Trek action figures still in their original boxes. All a strange hoarder hodgepodge, but nothing disturbed me more than the soup. This portent of doom.
Do you think they sell shotguns at Zellers? My mother asked me one day.
I didn’t think they sold shotguns at Zellers. Or maybe I hoped they didn’t sell shotguns at Zellers because I wasn’t so sure my mother was above eating her young.
We have to be ready when the neighbours find out. They will come a knockin’. She said in her affected hill-people voice.
A woman who tries to speak in a proper British inflection when she is in fact from London, Ontario, my mother said this as if she were auditioning for a role in Deliverance. We lived in the suburbs of Toronto, our neighbours on either side of our house—the alcoholic old Scottish woman and the devoutly Christian Korean family. These were the people she believed would come a knockin’ when civilization collapsed. Presumably hearing rumours of the soup. They could have it, for all I cared. Life is nothing without a little variety. And cable.
But it never came down to martial law, cannibalism or any disruption in my prime-time lineup. The millennium came and went without incident.
As long as I can remember dreaming, and have remembered my dreams instead of just waking myself screaming from them, I have dreamt of catastrophe. They’re all bad dreams, my dreams, but some are just worse. Distinctly apocalyptic in flavour. There was one in particular I remember so clearly; an overcast sky, water level creeping to three storeys. The city was drowning and I was frantically searching the streets, the higher ground parks and playgrounds for Jesus. I couldn’t find him.
I was raised Atheist. Or rather, I cobbled my religion together from the belief systems of my favourite television characters. It’s possible Jesus got in there somehow. Just as it’s conceivable that in addition to my mother’s Y2K survivalist paranoia, my brain scrambled in some Judgment Day mythos. It was for the best that I sold the house. That I donated the soup. And put my mother in a home. But the hold her belief in the end of days had on my psyche was stronger than I thought as I scoffed my way through the aisles of Zellers in search of firearms. Because disasters remind me that I never thought any of this would last anyway. Never planned on having children, or getting married, I haven’t saved money, or learned to drive. Alternately I also haven’t stockpiled dry-goods, given thought to cat as alternative food source, and I never learned proper hand-to-hand combat techniques. I’m an asbestos riddled office building without structural support. I’m not fit for life, and I’m not prepared for life after life as we know it goes pear shaped.
My reformed-survivalist plan is this: Don’t. Don’t live past the shelf life. Go with the edifice-collapsing flow. If nature wants to wipe us out like so many dinosaurs before us, so be it. Life is fleeting, our grips on our stations tenuous at best. To believe otherwise is not to be optimistic, but delusional. This is why I find large bodies of water both frightening and reassuring; their promise of destruction. It could be over at any time. I’m just afraid of a broken promise.
