[ Greta / Tom ] If You Are Reading This Then This Warning's For You .
if you are reading this then this warning's for you.
~2800 words.
shattered_ink . PG - swearing and sad themes.
greta / tom . the hush sound / empires .
summary:
Greta faltered. Frowned into the heat. “We can’t just leave the vineyard.”
“The vineyard’s dead. Everything’s dead. Let’s go.”
disclaimer: don't own them. this didn't happen. the title is from chuck palahniuk.
a/n: for and prompted by xmexandxyoux , who suggested a Tom (or Sean, but I knew more about Tom)/Greta fic based on Grapevine Fires by Death Cab For Cutie. I took the song pretty literally here, save for a lyric or two. my writing style seems to be indecisive and indulgent and ever-changing, so I don't even know. self-beta'd like, two seconds ago, so you know how that goes. I just hope you like this. (:
Greta stood on tiptoe, her hand shielding her eyes. From here, the trees ran neat lines into the horizon. Quivery orange light danced and rippled on the vineyard, and she couldn’t tell if this light was fire or just the sun and its attempt to hide its face.
Tom came lumbering up the gradual slope of the field, his shirt soaked through with heat and his shadow stretching off to the side. He hauled two buckets on a pole spread across his back, sweat pooling at his lips and falling to water to the barren fields. Even before he reached her and set the buckets down, she knew.
“Dead,” he announced, holding the withered remains of the grapes grown at the far end of the vineyard. “Dried out from the sun. Or maybe the fires are close enough now to kill these with just the heat. It’s crazy, how hot it is out there.” He sniffed and spat at the grass, which had baked and thinned to the color and texture of bread crusts. All his nervous pacing was splattering perspiration all over Greta’s sundress, but she didn’t seem to notice, or mind. The sun was disappearing fast now, but the air was still wiggling. The flames were coming in from the west, and this whole place would be ablaze in the morning.
“We’re going,” Tom said, dumping the raisined grapes and heaving the buckets onto his shoulders again. “Grab the clothes and the money from the shed. We’re going into the towns.”
Greta faltered. Frowned into the heat. “We can’t just leave the vineyard.”
“The vineyard’s dead. Everything’s dead. Let’s go.”
By the time Greta had pulled together their wrinkled shirts and dirt-crusted pants, the worn bills and coins stashed beneath their mattress and the last remnants of food that hadn’t yet shriveled, the sun was gone and she could just make out the faintest tangerine glow in the distance, where the flames had taken its place.
-
A half-mile later and there was a tractor trailer on the side of the highway. Its driver took them into the next town, eyeing Greta in the rearview mirror the whole ride in. When he pulled over at the border and demanded she get undressed as payment, Tom hooked his arms around the guy’s neck and yanked viciously. “Get out!” he shouted to Greta. “Take the buckets and get out!”
She did, and waited quietly beside the trailer. She risked a glance at the window and saw the driver’s eyes, wide and rolling white, saliva frothing and bubbling over his bottom lip. She shut her eyes and fought thick tears, counting to ten (then twenty, then one hundred) in her head.
Tom kicked open the door some moments later and took Greta’s face in his hands. He kissed her fiercely on the mouth, heaved their buckets onto his shoulders again.
They walked the rest of the way into town.
-
3 AM, and the world outside the window was the decaying color of cigarette ashes, broken up by red and yellow flashes, like embers.
Greta and Tom sat beside each other on the cot, unable to reclaim sleep. This apartment, this town, felt like an itchy, ugly sweater you couldn’t wait to shrug off when no one was looking. The men who’d rented them this room, they’d started knocking out windows an hour earlier, and now the telephones were wailing from room to room, coinciding with the sirens howling outside. Greta knew what was happening even before Tom picked up the phone and said, “Hello?”
“Hello. The following is a prerecorded message taped in the case of an emergency. The fact that you are hearing this message means you are in immediate danger. Please remain calm and listen to the following instructions -”
Tom threw the phone across the room, watched it split in half, its electronic guts all falling out. “Fuck that!”
“What is it, Tom?” Greta said, but he was already crisscrossing the room, pulling their clothes into the buckets again, shoving their money into the bottom of his boots before crushing his feet into them. Greta stood and helped him cram food into their pockets, had to trap a sob when she saw that the heat had spoiled another heap of fruits. “What’s going on, Tom?” she asked again, and he pulled her out into the hall, where flashlight beams were swinging from wall to wall in search of some sort of a rescue.
“Let’s go,” Tom muttered, just as the sound of smashing glass cried overhead. Heat was spilling into the halls now, and both Tom and Greta figured that the flames must be past the border at this point.
“Our vineyard,” Greta gasped.
“Not now, let’s move!”
Ten flights of stairs flew behind them, and they burst through the front entrance, ripping through the swarms of panicked people waiting on the sidewalk. Outside, the heat swelled to the point where his hand was welded with hers, and their buckets began to sweat steel. The outlying flames framed each building they passed, a radioactive glow. Some people were leaping from the higher floors, which would explain the punched-out windows and the glass peppering the concrete.
Tom and Greta flew down the streets, tripping over the crooked cobblestones and the bodies splayed unconscious on the pavement. Tom made a sharp cut to the right, onto a street of abandoned shops. Their windows had gaping mouths with jagged glass teeth and black throats, and the doors were nailed shut, the word CLOSED painted on them in red. The omnipresent glow of fire now painted the nights a liquor-bottle brown; the streetlamps lining the roads were broken and useless.
The street petered off into battered dirt and sporadic grass, railroad tracks strewn here and there. Tom pulled Greta aside, panting, sweating. They waited.
“You think trains still run here?” Greta asked.
“No. We’re cutting across the tracks. There’s another town up ahead.”
“Tom -”
“I swear to God, Greta, if you tell me there’s no point in getting out of here, I’ll -”
“The fire’s spreading fast. The world’s all air and no rain and this is stupid, this is so stupid -”
“I am not letting you die here. I will drag you kicking and screaming into that town if I have to, goddamn it!”
She had no doubt that he would, and so she sucked in a breath, waited until her heart’s spasming subsided and they could run again.
-
In the morning, she woke up between tombstones. The skies were the same lead color as the graves, and instead of clouds, there were plumes of smoke rolling through, gray on gray, raining ash into Greta’s tired eyes. She pushed herself onto her elbows and looked out ahead of her, sighing when she saw the flames licking at the distance, eating the grounds, burping up smoke and soot.
“We’re on a hill,” Tom said quietly. “In a cemetery, actually. We’ve got about an hour before we’d be in any real danger.”
Greta snapped around to face him. Fleeting concerns danced through her head, like what time was it exactly, and how long had he been lying there on his back, wide awake, staring openly at the sky. She shook her head clear and sat up straighter, grass clinging to her hair and arms and legs.
Tom passed her a cup. “Wine,” he explained. “Lots of vines around here. Must have been a vineyard before it was run over with tombs. I pressed some grapes earlier when I couldn’t sleep.”
Greta accepted the cup with a smile. “You work too much, Tom Conrad.”
He shrugged, tipped back his head and finished his own cup. He glanced at the looping mass of overgrown vines wrapping and curling around the graves and nearby trees, and he shuddered. His eyes returned to Greta.
When she finished, he was already standing, a rough and callused hand outstretched. He asked, “May I have this dance?”
She said, “Okay.”
She said, “Keep up.”
They twined hands and threw their loose arms over his shoulder/around her waist, laughing. Greta hummed the first notes of a song she only remembered vaguely from her childhood, a song from before the flames and the smoke and the tombstones marked with the names of their friends. Tom attempted to hum along, but his voice cracked in his throat, his feet stuttered over themselves, and so he just held on to her, tight, nose buried in her hair as they danced beneath the fumes.
Between the third verse and the chorus, Tom’s foot hooked a vine jutting from the grass, and he and Greta went toppling like a house of cards, a two-person domino effect. He threw his arms out under him so he wouldn’t crush her, would just end up in the position to do push-ups, trap-straddling her.
“Hello,” she said, beneath him.
“Hi.” His mouth twitched, but that could have been because the veins running along his muscles were tense with the effort of holding himself up. Through clenched teeth, he said, “It’s a nice day, isn’t it?”
“Very nice,” she agreed, even as the air began to ripple with heat.
Sweat clung to them like a second skin. Tom collapsed on the matted grass beside her, rolled onto his back and spread his arms until his left hand brushed the fingers of her right. Once he found them, he trapped her hand with his own, turned to look at her and had to squint, her hair being the same liquid-gold as the sun.
“So before we start running,” Tom said, and felt Greta twitch beside him, “I had something to tell you. I mean, ask you. I mean - say to you. I had something to say.”
“I smell burning grass,” she murmured, eyes closed. “You’d better get talking.”
Tom inhaled and closed his eyes. “I’m an asshole.”
A smile pulled at the corners of Greta’s mouth, but she bit her lip to hide it. “You’re not an asshole, Tom. You can be a bit of a prick, but you’re not -”
“We’ve spent the past six months in this breakneck marathon for survival. And all I’ve done is yell and pull and fight you tooth and nail, but I haven’t hugged you or laughed with you until today. I’m an asshole.” He squeezed her hand, turned to her to find her eyes already wide on him.
His stomach did a ballet.
He pressed a kiss to her forehead, said, “But I do love you, you know?”
A tear slipped from her eye and ran a greasy trail down her dust-coated cheek. Pretty soon, this all would have to end.
-
They ran the way they always did, dragging each other through whatever dirt and grass and mud hadn’t already been swallowed up and set on fire. The towns were all built close together now, as though the architects and construction crews all those years ago had predicted this disaster that would burn down the world as they knew it. When one town caught fire, they’d always been able to run to the next, a cat-and-mouse sort of game that was getting old, and fast. By the time Tom and Greta crossed over into the next town, it was dinner time, and they rented a room in a boarding house with televisions and three hot meals a day.
“See,” Tom said, “this isn’t so bad,” as a roach shimmied itself between a crack in the wall.
“At least, not as bad as it could be,” he added, stationing the television in their room to one of the few remaining news broadcasts.
“Oh,” he breathed, upon seeing the screen in flames.
“… fires rage across the desert at an alarming pace. Trained firefighters are fighting this battle desperately, but when interviewed, each of them has stated their doubts. We take you to what used to be a local vineyard -”
The field that appeared onscreen then was a wasteland, all charred and browned and ruined, smoke still spiraling up from the singed remains of grapevines. The camera panned along the damage before coming to the end of the wreck - a pile of ashes and bruised tools that used to be a shed.
“Our vineyard,” Greta whispered. There was no way to tell for sure, but she could feel it, a collapse in her chest. “That’s our vineyard.”
“Most officials are praying on rain, or some other sort of miracle. One thing everyone can agree on, though, is that it’s only a matter of time.”
Tom cut off the television. Sank back onto the bed.
Greta rubbed his shoulders as he seethed into his hands.
-
By midnight, they were on the run again.
-
The crash and hiss and boom of waves was startlingly different from the roar of fire.
Greta woke up on the sand, a lone seagull pecking at her toes. Below, the tide licked at the shore, dragging shells out just to return them, teasing. Long before the fires started, Greta remembered thinking about the edge of the earth, about the point where this vast planet ended and the dark space and stars beyond it began. Now that she was here, she felt no different than she had as a child, riding her bike up narrow roads just to reach a chain-link fence and a dead-end sign.
Except now, she couldn’t even turn her bike around or backpedal. The flames were on her tail and she’d have nowhere to run but the sea.
“It’s the end of the world and I feel fine.”
She climbed to her feet and waddled through sand and broken shells. Walking farther up the beach, she found their buckets and lifted their shirts from them, tucking them under her arms as she ambled toward the waves.
Her t-shirts fluttered in the wind like flags before she freed them, let them settle on the cold surface of the sea. The faded jeans she’d worn around the vineyard during harvesting season soaked to an almost-black as the waves carried them out. Tom came along soon after and found her like this, tossing clothes and tissue-soft dollar bills out into the ocean, where they were steeped and swallowed whole. He snatched a half-finished bottle of wine from the pile of things Greta was feverishly tossing and drank, eyes on her the whole time.
“I think there’s more of the world out there,” Greta was panting, as her scuffed work boots sank and drowned. “There are people the fires haven’t reached yet,” and she threw some quarters and nickels and dimes into the waves, “and there’s a chance we’re not the only ones left,” while she struggled to pry the flats off her own feet. “We can maybe save people, send them money and clothes. We can maybe stop this.” Then she tripped on some shells and fell onto the sand, still clutching one foot. Still frantic.
“We can’t stop this,” she whispered. And the calm that came with acceptance washed over her, wearing her out.
Tom had finished off the wine and cast the bottle into the sea. In some hundred years (not that he or anyone else would be around to witness it) that bottle would be in pieces, these chips of frosted glass that might have been someone’s necklace, someone’s ring, someone’s something, if only they’d been alive and there to lift them from the sand.
“We’re going to die in about two or three hours,” Tom said.
He sighed and settled cross-legged beside her on the sand, glass and shells cutting into his feet and legs and thighs.
When you’re caught between the ocean and a fast-spreading wall of flames, a few cuts and a little blood suddenly don’t matter as much anymore.
“I think it will be beautiful,” Greta said, still cradling her foot and the stubborn shoe attached to it. “I mean - I hope it will. I know it will probably hurt.”
“Nah. That’s the thing about death. It’s the opposite of life. It won’t hurt at all.”
“How can you be sure, Tom Conrad?” She finally got the shoe off her foot, and was working on the other. “How can you know for certain?”
He tipped his head back. “Because I’ve been alive, haven’t I? I’ve been running for months now. I’ve seen my house in flames. I’ve seen our vineyard in ashes. And I haven’t seen death yet, but it’s got to be better than this.” He sat up straight again and looked her in the eyes. “Life is cruel, so death should be gentle. That’s only fair, right?”
“Haven’t you heard?” Greta freed her foot from the other shoe, tossed them both into the waves. “Life is notorious for being unfair.”
Smiling in that smug and teasing way he had, Tom kissed her fervently and laced his hand with hers. “This isn’t life anymore, bumblebee. This is different. This is it.”
*
~2800 words.
shattered_ink . PG - swearing and sad themes.
greta / tom . the hush sound / empires .
summary:
Greta faltered. Frowned into the heat. “We can’t just leave the vineyard.”
“The vineyard’s dead. Everything’s dead. Let’s go.”
disclaimer: don't own them. this didn't happen. the title is from chuck palahniuk.
a/n: for and prompted by xmexandxyoux , who suggested a Tom (or Sean, but I knew more about Tom)/Greta fic based on Grapevine Fires by Death Cab For Cutie. I took the song pretty literally here, save for a lyric or two. my writing style seems to be indecisive and indulgent and ever-changing, so I don't even know. self-beta'd like, two seconds ago, so you know how that goes. I just hope you like this. (:
Greta stood on tiptoe, her hand shielding her eyes. From here, the trees ran neat lines into the horizon. Quivery orange light danced and rippled on the vineyard, and she couldn’t tell if this light was fire or just the sun and its attempt to hide its face.
Tom came lumbering up the gradual slope of the field, his shirt soaked through with heat and his shadow stretching off to the side. He hauled two buckets on a pole spread across his back, sweat pooling at his lips and falling to water to the barren fields. Even before he reached her and set the buckets down, she knew.
“Dead,” he announced, holding the withered remains of the grapes grown at the far end of the vineyard. “Dried out from the sun. Or maybe the fires are close enough now to kill these with just the heat. It’s crazy, how hot it is out there.” He sniffed and spat at the grass, which had baked and thinned to the color and texture of bread crusts. All his nervous pacing was splattering perspiration all over Greta’s sundress, but she didn’t seem to notice, or mind. The sun was disappearing fast now, but the air was still wiggling. The flames were coming in from the west, and this whole place would be ablaze in the morning.
“We’re going,” Tom said, dumping the raisined grapes and heaving the buckets onto his shoulders again. “Grab the clothes and the money from the shed. We’re going into the towns.”
Greta faltered. Frowned into the heat. “We can’t just leave the vineyard.”
“The vineyard’s dead. Everything’s dead. Let’s go.”
By the time Greta had pulled together their wrinkled shirts and dirt-crusted pants, the worn bills and coins stashed beneath their mattress and the last remnants of food that hadn’t yet shriveled, the sun was gone and she could just make out the faintest tangerine glow in the distance, where the flames had taken its place.
-
A half-mile later and there was a tractor trailer on the side of the highway. Its driver took them into the next town, eyeing Greta in the rearview mirror the whole ride in. When he pulled over at the border and demanded she get undressed as payment, Tom hooked his arms around the guy’s neck and yanked viciously. “Get out!” he shouted to Greta. “Take the buckets and get out!”
She did, and waited quietly beside the trailer. She risked a glance at the window and saw the driver’s eyes, wide and rolling white, saliva frothing and bubbling over his bottom lip. She shut her eyes and fought thick tears, counting to ten (then twenty, then one hundred) in her head.
Tom kicked open the door some moments later and took Greta’s face in his hands. He kissed her fiercely on the mouth, heaved their buckets onto his shoulders again.
They walked the rest of the way into town.
-
3 AM, and the world outside the window was the decaying color of cigarette ashes, broken up by red and yellow flashes, like embers.
Greta and Tom sat beside each other on the cot, unable to reclaim sleep. This apartment, this town, felt like an itchy, ugly sweater you couldn’t wait to shrug off when no one was looking. The men who’d rented them this room, they’d started knocking out windows an hour earlier, and now the telephones were wailing from room to room, coinciding with the sirens howling outside. Greta knew what was happening even before Tom picked up the phone and said, “Hello?”
“Hello. The following is a prerecorded message taped in the case of an emergency. The fact that you are hearing this message means you are in immediate danger. Please remain calm and listen to the following instructions -”
Tom threw the phone across the room, watched it split in half, its electronic guts all falling out. “Fuck that!”
“What is it, Tom?” Greta said, but he was already crisscrossing the room, pulling their clothes into the buckets again, shoving their money into the bottom of his boots before crushing his feet into them. Greta stood and helped him cram food into their pockets, had to trap a sob when she saw that the heat had spoiled another heap of fruits. “What’s going on, Tom?” she asked again, and he pulled her out into the hall, where flashlight beams were swinging from wall to wall in search of some sort of a rescue.
“Let’s go,” Tom muttered, just as the sound of smashing glass cried overhead. Heat was spilling into the halls now, and both Tom and Greta figured that the flames must be past the border at this point.
“Our vineyard,” Greta gasped.
“Not now, let’s move!”
Ten flights of stairs flew behind them, and they burst through the front entrance, ripping through the swarms of panicked people waiting on the sidewalk. Outside, the heat swelled to the point where his hand was welded with hers, and their buckets began to sweat steel. The outlying flames framed each building they passed, a radioactive glow. Some people were leaping from the higher floors, which would explain the punched-out windows and the glass peppering the concrete.
Tom and Greta flew down the streets, tripping over the crooked cobblestones and the bodies splayed unconscious on the pavement. Tom made a sharp cut to the right, onto a street of abandoned shops. Their windows had gaping mouths with jagged glass teeth and black throats, and the doors were nailed shut, the word CLOSED painted on them in red. The omnipresent glow of fire now painted the nights a liquor-bottle brown; the streetlamps lining the roads were broken and useless.
The street petered off into battered dirt and sporadic grass, railroad tracks strewn here and there. Tom pulled Greta aside, panting, sweating. They waited.
“You think trains still run here?” Greta asked.
“No. We’re cutting across the tracks. There’s another town up ahead.”
“Tom -”
“I swear to God, Greta, if you tell me there’s no point in getting out of here, I’ll -”
“The fire’s spreading fast. The world’s all air and no rain and this is stupid, this is so stupid -”
“I am not letting you die here. I will drag you kicking and screaming into that town if I have to, goddamn it!”
She had no doubt that he would, and so she sucked in a breath, waited until her heart’s spasming subsided and they could run again.
-
In the morning, she woke up between tombstones. The skies were the same lead color as the graves, and instead of clouds, there were plumes of smoke rolling through, gray on gray, raining ash into Greta’s tired eyes. She pushed herself onto her elbows and looked out ahead of her, sighing when she saw the flames licking at the distance, eating the grounds, burping up smoke and soot.
“We’re on a hill,” Tom said quietly. “In a cemetery, actually. We’ve got about an hour before we’d be in any real danger.”
Greta snapped around to face him. Fleeting concerns danced through her head, like what time was it exactly, and how long had he been lying there on his back, wide awake, staring openly at the sky. She shook her head clear and sat up straighter, grass clinging to her hair and arms and legs.
Tom passed her a cup. “Wine,” he explained. “Lots of vines around here. Must have been a vineyard before it was run over with tombs. I pressed some grapes earlier when I couldn’t sleep.”
Greta accepted the cup with a smile. “You work too much, Tom Conrad.”
He shrugged, tipped back his head and finished his own cup. He glanced at the looping mass of overgrown vines wrapping and curling around the graves and nearby trees, and he shuddered. His eyes returned to Greta.
When she finished, he was already standing, a rough and callused hand outstretched. He asked, “May I have this dance?”
She said, “Okay.”
She said, “Keep up.”
They twined hands and threw their loose arms over his shoulder/around her waist, laughing. Greta hummed the first notes of a song she only remembered vaguely from her childhood, a song from before the flames and the smoke and the tombstones marked with the names of their friends. Tom attempted to hum along, but his voice cracked in his throat, his feet stuttered over themselves, and so he just held on to her, tight, nose buried in her hair as they danced beneath the fumes.
Between the third verse and the chorus, Tom’s foot hooked a vine jutting from the grass, and he and Greta went toppling like a house of cards, a two-person domino effect. He threw his arms out under him so he wouldn’t crush her, would just end up in the position to do push-ups, trap-straddling her.
“Hello,” she said, beneath him.
“Hi.” His mouth twitched, but that could have been because the veins running along his muscles were tense with the effort of holding himself up. Through clenched teeth, he said, “It’s a nice day, isn’t it?”
“Very nice,” she agreed, even as the air began to ripple with heat.
Sweat clung to them like a second skin. Tom collapsed on the matted grass beside her, rolled onto his back and spread his arms until his left hand brushed the fingers of her right. Once he found them, he trapped her hand with his own, turned to look at her and had to squint, her hair being the same liquid-gold as the sun.
“So before we start running,” Tom said, and felt Greta twitch beside him, “I had something to tell you. I mean, ask you. I mean - say to you. I had something to say.”
“I smell burning grass,” she murmured, eyes closed. “You’d better get talking.”
Tom inhaled and closed his eyes. “I’m an asshole.”
A smile pulled at the corners of Greta’s mouth, but she bit her lip to hide it. “You’re not an asshole, Tom. You can be a bit of a prick, but you’re not -”
“We’ve spent the past six months in this breakneck marathon for survival. And all I’ve done is yell and pull and fight you tooth and nail, but I haven’t hugged you or laughed with you until today. I’m an asshole.” He squeezed her hand, turned to her to find her eyes already wide on him.
His stomach did a ballet.
He pressed a kiss to her forehead, said, “But I do love you, you know?”
A tear slipped from her eye and ran a greasy trail down her dust-coated cheek. Pretty soon, this all would have to end.
-
They ran the way they always did, dragging each other through whatever dirt and grass and mud hadn’t already been swallowed up and set on fire. The towns were all built close together now, as though the architects and construction crews all those years ago had predicted this disaster that would burn down the world as they knew it. When one town caught fire, they’d always been able to run to the next, a cat-and-mouse sort of game that was getting old, and fast. By the time Tom and Greta crossed over into the next town, it was dinner time, and they rented a room in a boarding house with televisions and three hot meals a day.
“See,” Tom said, “this isn’t so bad,” as a roach shimmied itself between a crack in the wall.
“At least, not as bad as it could be,” he added, stationing the television in their room to one of the few remaining news broadcasts.
“Oh,” he breathed, upon seeing the screen in flames.
“… fires rage across the desert at an alarming pace. Trained firefighters are fighting this battle desperately, but when interviewed, each of them has stated their doubts. We take you to what used to be a local vineyard -”
The field that appeared onscreen then was a wasteland, all charred and browned and ruined, smoke still spiraling up from the singed remains of grapevines. The camera panned along the damage before coming to the end of the wreck - a pile of ashes and bruised tools that used to be a shed.
“Our vineyard,” Greta whispered. There was no way to tell for sure, but she could feel it, a collapse in her chest. “That’s our vineyard.”
“Most officials are praying on rain, or some other sort of miracle. One thing everyone can agree on, though, is that it’s only a matter of time.”
Tom cut off the television. Sank back onto the bed.
Greta rubbed his shoulders as he seethed into his hands.
-
By midnight, they were on the run again.
-
The crash and hiss and boom of waves was startlingly different from the roar of fire.
Greta woke up on the sand, a lone seagull pecking at her toes. Below, the tide licked at the shore, dragging shells out just to return them, teasing. Long before the fires started, Greta remembered thinking about the edge of the earth, about the point where this vast planet ended and the dark space and stars beyond it began. Now that she was here, she felt no different than she had as a child, riding her bike up narrow roads just to reach a chain-link fence and a dead-end sign.
Except now, she couldn’t even turn her bike around or backpedal. The flames were on her tail and she’d have nowhere to run but the sea.
“It’s the end of the world and I feel fine.”
She climbed to her feet and waddled through sand and broken shells. Walking farther up the beach, she found their buckets and lifted their shirts from them, tucking them under her arms as she ambled toward the waves.
Her t-shirts fluttered in the wind like flags before she freed them, let them settle on the cold surface of the sea. The faded jeans she’d worn around the vineyard during harvesting season soaked to an almost-black as the waves carried them out. Tom came along soon after and found her like this, tossing clothes and tissue-soft dollar bills out into the ocean, where they were steeped and swallowed whole. He snatched a half-finished bottle of wine from the pile of things Greta was feverishly tossing and drank, eyes on her the whole time.
“I think there’s more of the world out there,” Greta was panting, as her scuffed work boots sank and drowned. “There are people the fires haven’t reached yet,” and she threw some quarters and nickels and dimes into the waves, “and there’s a chance we’re not the only ones left,” while she struggled to pry the flats off her own feet. “We can maybe save people, send them money and clothes. We can maybe stop this.” Then she tripped on some shells and fell onto the sand, still clutching one foot. Still frantic.
“We can’t stop this,” she whispered. And the calm that came with acceptance washed over her, wearing her out.
Tom had finished off the wine and cast the bottle into the sea. In some hundred years (not that he or anyone else would be around to witness it) that bottle would be in pieces, these chips of frosted glass that might have been someone’s necklace, someone’s ring, someone’s something, if only they’d been alive and there to lift them from the sand.
“We’re going to die in about two or three hours,” Tom said.
He sighed and settled cross-legged beside her on the sand, glass and shells cutting into his feet and legs and thighs.
When you’re caught between the ocean and a fast-spreading wall of flames, a few cuts and a little blood suddenly don’t matter as much anymore.
“I think it will be beautiful,” Greta said, still cradling her foot and the stubborn shoe attached to it. “I mean - I hope it will. I know it will probably hurt.”
“Nah. That’s the thing about death. It’s the opposite of life. It won’t hurt at all.”
“How can you be sure, Tom Conrad?” She finally got the shoe off her foot, and was working on the other. “How can you know for certain?”
He tipped his head back. “Because I’ve been alive, haven’t I? I’ve been running for months now. I’ve seen my house in flames. I’ve seen our vineyard in ashes. And I haven’t seen death yet, but it’s got to be better than this.” He sat up straight again and looked her in the eyes. “Life is cruel, so death should be gentle. That’s only fair, right?”
“Haven’t you heard?” Greta freed her foot from the other shoe, tossed them both into the waves. “Life is notorious for being unfair.”
Smiling in that smug and teasing way he had, Tom kissed her fervently and laced his hand with hers. “This isn’t life anymore, bumblebee. This is different. This is it.”
*