Assistant Managing Editor Bess Winter: Lisa Alletson’s “Apocalypse” is perfect both for the spooky season and for the anxious writer in all seasons. In a reality where news travels faster than we can form a thought, and where catastrophe seems to unfold all around us, how should the artist respond? In “Apocalypse,” as in life, the siren song of inaction is difficult to resist.
Listen to Lisa Alletson read “Apocalypse”:
Apocalypse
When Earth falls into a permanent summer and all the other writers have died, I wade into the Pacific Ocean. Find a mermaid cradling her newborn bluebird. The mermaid’s brain floats in a sac near her head. Stegosaurus plates rise along her spine as if she is history. She feeds on drifting words, catching them in her teeth. Swallows the words slippery and whole.
I offer the mermaid gold for her words. Put a net to her lips to try and catch them. Darkly, she turns from me. The clouds part like a mouth. A blue tongue of sky licks up the world’s remaining languages.
I swim away through blooms of dying fish. They retreat from my fingers like skin retreats from a wound. Silver as the afterlife—the way it shimmers. The way it says, “Soon.”
I should wade back to land, but the crows are plucking clams where the ocean meets the sand, and the water level holds my hips just so. I know I should return, but the path ahead is widening where the rocks are tilting skyward, and beside me an old fin whale rocks the ocean soft to sleep.
Lisa Alletson is a South African/Canadian writer with work in New Ohio Review, Gone Lawn, and Pithead Chapel. Her stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction. Her prize-winning debut chapbook, Good Mother Lizard (Headlight Review, 2022) is available here.
