Fragments from the Vault #042: The Last Order of the Apocalypse

The empty canals where the toll man comes knocking, 

the universe forgetting, and being forgotten...

____________________

Game: Night in the Woods

Location: Possum Springs, Deep Hollow County

More information: Possum Springs | Night in the Woods Wiki | Fandom

Screenshots of Night in the Woods in a reel. Photo credit: FetchQuester

The day we forgot about childhood I squeezed

through the chain-link fence at the back of the food-mart.

I watched a hoard of stragglers hop the westbound train,

cradling their hooch as the freight croaked past the steel-belt county line

and wondered if they'd find the stash of comic books

we'd left in the carriage

after our treehouse toppled from spring's last bad thaw.

We built it from scraps at the edge of the sawmill.

My fingernails turned green as I soaked in the choir of the forest,

our constellations a paper trail of old notebooks we pilfered from the diner

as we filled our lunch pails with rye bread packed with bacon and gherkin

and a stack of pancakes loaded with forage fresh from the crop.

We counted the checkered tiles while the sermon on the jukebox hummed;

truckers milled in and out and we'd gape at their rigs in the layby 

while we wolfed down our milkshakes

and, bicycles chiming, fled our turf for the arcades behind the arena

where harvest was held before the Arctic front dipped downward, encircling the pines.

***

The summer I broke my ankle also broke the record for longest drought. 

The park service rolled out fire bans

and we left our ghost stories to haunt the treehouse I could no longer climb, 

bartering our roller-skates for records and holding rehearsals 

in the tumbling stacks down market

where we raided unclaimed trunks and the shards of cola bottles 

while plying prisms of light through the Leica I found in my grandmother's attic.

Creative conflict happened; our disputes, laid across the road like spike traps, 

eventually gave way to miraculous things, but nothing so miraculous or tragic 

as when the skies finally breached and gave us the deluge our soil had thirsted for 

until, unceasing, it flooded the fields and dismembered the town. 

The salt smarted the gashes that split the library and plunged its foundations into the sweep, but we couldn't tell the cynics what our hearts had just lost.

Yet still the treehouse stood. It would take one caustic winter and the snowmelt of an unusually balmy spring to wash bare the relic of youth, 

leaving a solvent-stained receipt under the vending machines to mark the last order of the apocalypse.

Mae cruises with friends Gregg and Angus (left); Mae muses on the bridge at sunset (right).

Photo credit: FetchQuester

- Lucy A.

***

Sources: 

Night in the Woods (Infinite Fall/Secret Lab/Finji); fandom.com

*A sincere thank you to Rashika for guiding me on this journey.