Chapter 4 #4
“I spent that night being mad. I found a boy who liked me, and he wasn’t talking to me.
I yelled at Daddy for no reason. Mom too.
They said that wasn’t fair. It wasn’t. I apologized but I was still angry.
Why did he make a promise to me and then disappear?
Was that how boys from cities were? Did they just take what they wanted and didn’t think about how it made others feel?
I didn’t like that. It wasn’t right. People shouldn’t do that to other people.
“A week went by. And then another. And then another. I still thought about Chris all the time, but after the first few days, I didn’t try to contact him anymore.
I’d been ghosted. He disappeared like a ghost. It happens all the time.
I read about it online. Boys do it, girls do it.
I thought Chris was different. I thought he was better than that. I never heard from him again.
“Then Dad came to me about a month after Chris had left. Said he knew why Chris hadn’t called me back, hadn’t texted.
He’d found an article online. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought to look him up by his name.
I just didn’t think about it. But Dad did.
Chris and his parents were on their way back home.
They were in the Blue Ridge Mountains, driving on a winding road.
Another driver fell asleep at the wheel.
He was in a tractor trailer. Hit them head-on.
Chris and his parents died instantly. They’d already been put in the ground by the time I found out.
“I thought to myself, isn’t that strange?
One minute, you’re riding horses and kissing under a willow tree, and the next, you’re on a slab, waiting for someone to dig around your insides to confirm you died the way people thought you died, even though Chris apparently didn’t have arms anymore, which, you know.
My grandpa used to butcher pigs. Do you know how it’s done?
Hang them up by their bottom legs and slit their throats.
A bucket underneath catches all the blood.
Chris wasn’t a pig. But they still stretched him out and caught all the blood that came from him.
What a terrible thought that is. We’re almost there.
Keep going straight. See the cows? Those are ours.
“My parents said it was the way of things. That sometimes, when you least expect it, bad things can happen. It’s not anyone’s fault.
It just was. And I remember thinking, how is that fair?
How is that right? Was he scared? Did he see the truck coming?
Or was he looking at the phone? Was he looking at his phone, scrolling through our messages, looking at the pictures we’d taken together?
Maybe if he hadn’t been so distracted, he’d have seen the truck.
Maybe he could have warned them. Daddy said it wasn’t my fault.
They probably went around a corner, and the truck was already in their lane.
The truck driver wasn’t hurt. Can he sleep at night? I wouldn’t be able to.
“But I couldn’t get one thought out of my head.
Something my mom told me. She said at least he didn’t suffer.
That it was over probably before he felt any pain.
I hoped that was true. If I had to go, I wouldn’t want to suffer.
I wouldn’t want to know something was coming and that I couldn’t do anything to stop it.
Here one moment, happy, safe, and then gone the next without a thought of what had happened. Isn’t that nice? Isn’t that pretty?
“I wasn’t okay for a long time. Which was weird.
I knew him for a few weeks. In person, only a few days.
I didn’t know anything about him, really.
But I was young, and more than halfway in love.
How tragic, I told myself. I was like a girl in a book.
A princess who loses her prince and her heart turns to stone.
At least he didn’t suffer. But I did. My heart didn’t turn to stone.
It was painful. It felt like I was being stabbed over and over again.
“We don’t slaughter animals on the ranch.
It’s not that kind. But Daddy grew up on one that did.
Cattle farm. They line them up in these pens that open up to narrow corridors they’re funneled down.
All in a row, all in a line. Then the cows are stunned with a gun.
Not a normal gun, but with a metal bolt that hits the cows in the head, knocking them senseless.
After they’re stunned, they’re hoisted up by their legs and their throats are cut.
If you do it right, the cows won’t know what’s coming. That’s what Daddy said.
“But I didn’t believe him. I’ve known cows all my life.
They’re smart. A lot of them act like big puppies.
They have awareness. You can see it in their eyes.
There’s the expression ‘cow-eyed,’ that means dull.
Most cows aren’t like that. They have personalities, wants, desires.
Most of it is baser instinct, but it’s still there.
So yes, I think they suffered. I think they knew something was wrong when they got put in that pen.
I think they knew something was wrong when they were shoved down the corridors.
I think they heard what happened to the cows in front of them.
Making noise and then … nothing. See the sign on the archway? Diamond K Ranch. That’s us. Turn there.
“I never told my dad what I thought about the cows. How they knew what was coming. It didn’t matter.
Because six months after Chris died, the black hole came.
And anytime you turned on the television, all those people losing their minds, police and military trying to push them back.
Like cattle, all of them. And that’s when I realized.
We’re the cattle. We’re the cattle and we’re being herded toward the narrow corridors.
We know what’s coming but there’s nothing we can do to stop it.
Soon, it’s going to be our turn to be stunned and have our lives stolen from us.
You can park right next to that SUV. It’s not ours.
People came to visit. There you go. Right there.
Perfect. The people who came in the SUV were nice.
They wanted to ride horses before the end of the world.
A man and a woman. A couple. Their son. He was … eleven? Or maybe twelve years old.
“We have some people who work for us on the ranch. They live here too. We had ten of them. When the news came that we were all going to die, a few of them left. They wanted to see their families. But most stayed. They continued working. What else was there to do? Wail and scream? Try and run? No one’s listening, and there’s nowhere to go.
So, they kept on working. Dad and Mom too.
‘Someone’s gotta do it,’ Dad told me. ‘Might as well be us.’
“I helped, but not as much as I used to. I was too caught up in what was going on. I’d never really thought about black holes before.
Why would I? I didn’t care about space. I could see stars anytime I wanted to.
There are people who dream of flying, seeing the curve of the Earth.
I like my feet on the ground, thank you very much.
I sat at the computer for hours and hours and hours, reading everything I could.
Some people thought it was going to be over in an instant, that we wouldn’t even have time to react.
Others thought that we were going to feel every single part of it.
That our skin will melt. The blood in our veins would boil.
Radiation poisoning, if we weren’t dead from a blast of invisible energy.
I hated that thought. I didn’t want anyone I loved to suffer.
What if we survived, but my father’s tongue fell out of his mouth?
What if my mother lost her lips, her eyes, her ears?
What if her skin only partially melted, and she looked like a monster?
She would be in so much pain, begging for someone to help her, and what could we do?
Nothing, I think. Nothing aside from helping her sleep.
“I wanted to help them. I wanted to save them. I didn’t want them to suffer.
Chris didn’t suffer. Did I tell you that?
Mom said he didn’t, and I wanted that for them.
I didn’t want them sitting in front of the television at night, seeing how hopeless things were getting.
I wanted them to be happy. To remember the life we’d built.
See the barn? Daddy built that before I was born.
It took four months. Everyone chipped in because people care about each other. Most of us want to see others succeed.
“But I couldn’t shake the thought that they were going to melt, that they were going to suffer.
I couldn’t stand the thought of my mother screaming in pain because her skin was boiling.
I couldn’t stand the thought of my father with burnt-out eyes and nothing on his mind but dying.
When you’re in pain, when you’re suffering, all you want to do is make it stop.
You wish for death. They were suffering.
I could see it in their eyes. The lines on their foreheads.
The secret conversations they had. They were my parents.
I needed to protect them. They were wishing, but they couldn’t say it out loud.