2.

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     Nate climbed to the grocery store latterly, the old-fashioned way; hand over hand on the ropes he and Larry had slung along the pavement together almost four years earlier. The ropes had been set at thirty feet lengths with a carabineer tied to each end, clipped to an anchor, and embedded into the pavement by a bolt. In order to set the path, the anchors had initially been spaced three feet apart and the rope had been threaded through the carabineers. This was the only way they could have set the path. They soon found by accident that if they unhooked an end carabineer and re-hooked it to their safety vest each man could take a sixty-foot swing, catching the anchor at the other end of the arc. This cut the one-mile trip to Super Foods grocery store from six hours to one.

     He told his kids he was going grocery shopping when they woke up the next morning. Beatrix burst into tears again, and Michael asked if he could go along, a thing he had been more and more interested in lately. Nate patted his son on the back and told him he needed to stay and look after his sister. He promised he’d bring home a treat. The truth was Nate needed to be alone more than they need groceries.

     First he passed by Barb and Martha Huntsman’s green house. Barb had been a Lutheran minister and together they cared for an adult autistic son who had fallen at The Flip. The two women had seemed fine, but then a few months earlier had taken the plunge. 

     Next was the hole in the ground where Jim and Sarah McDonnell’s house had once stood. The McDonnell’s had a ten-year-old boy, Damon, who had gone missing about a year after The Flip. Everyone assumed the boy had fallen, and then the father had lost his head and chopped down the tree in their backyard. Not long after, Jim and Sarah’s house had ripped free of the ground while everyone in the neighborhood watched it fall silently into the sky. After that, everyone agreed it best to leave the trees alone.

     Last was Sheryl Gustafson’s house. She was twenty-three and the first to go. Nate had initially thought her the best candidate to help him out with the kids as he and Larry tracked out the neighborhood. It seemed she was too hung up on the loss of everything she’d ever known and loved, especially her boyfriend. She slipped away one night a month after The Flip. 

     There were others, but they were either not worth mentioning or had been forgotten altogether.

     After the flip, Nate thought that the little community they had formed would hold everyone together, like the roots of the trees. But they were all just people. Nothing was holding them here.

     Three blocks into the trip and Nate’s arms and wrists were starting to ache. He wasn’t getting any younger or stronger. He reverted to the long swing method and gave his limbs a break.
 

Nate paced up and down the aisles of Super Foods.  It was an older neighborhood style grocery store with lower ceilings making it much easier to shop under the new set of circumstances. The shelving racks had been bolted to the floor, and that was where they hung as he strolled the aisles, occasionally having to step over the florescent light fixtures that jutted up from the ceiling. Most of the food items here had a short drop at The Flip, just falling to the bottom of the shelf that had once been above it. Top shelf glass jarred items such as olives, jalapenos, and capers were now extinct. If Nate needed jumbo size Jiff he only needed to grab a stocking ladder to climb up to the shelf nearest the floor to grab one. And no need to worry about expiration dates, turns out that was a bunch of bullshit.

     Nate scanned the aisles up and down for the item he desired. He was not looking for olives, jalapenos, or capers. Nate was looking for something with booze in it. 

     Upon Nate and Larry’s first arrival at the store, they had celebrated by getting drunk off of 3.2 beer. This was Minnesota, at least that’s how Nate still thought of it, and any stores that sold groceries were only allowed to sell beverages with a maximum of 3.2% alcohol by volume.  This was mostly ok with the light beer and wine cooler aficionados.  Also, it was good enough if you just needed a little something to iron out the nerves.

     “I think I have a drinking problem,” Nate said right after his seventh beer and right before he vomited.

     “Me too,” Larry agreed.  

     Still in a drunken stupor, the two men filled seven shopping carts with light beer, wine coolers, and margarita mixes, wheeled them to the docking bay, and shoved them off into the sky. They got rid of the cooking wines, mouthwash, and isopropyl alcohol, agreeing hydrogen peroxide would be sufficient to keep wounds clean.

     Nate started his search in the beer section and worked his way out, hoping he and Larry had missed something years earlier. When he and Larry had tossed out the cooking wines, Nate couldn’t say for certain if he purposely withheld Mirin, an Asian cooking wine, which usually hung out in the global foods section. This knowledge came in handy two years earlier when three people decided to drop out of the neighborhood over the course of a couple of days. The two men had downed the first bottle in less than a minute. After the fifth bottle, Nate challenged Larry to a fight from which was produced one black eye and one torn shirt. Later, tearfully, Nate said, “We can’t do this anymore.” 

They piled the Mirin along with Shaoxing into a shopping cart, pushed it to the loading dock door, and shoved it out to forever.  Hours later, after they’d sobered up, they shared a silent trip home, Nate wallowing in his shame.  He couldn’t say for sure if he’d purposely withheld the identity of vanilla extract.

     Three days after Jim and Sarah McDonnell’s house had broken free; Nate downed five bottles of pure vanilla while Larry was on the other end of the store collecting pain relief medication to aid in his aching wrists and hands.  When Nate knocked over the stack of breakfast cereal they had once neatly organized, Larry ordered Nate to bring him to the culprit.  Together they put all of the extracts into a basket and rolled it out the door.  “Sorry,” Nate said every few seconds until he finally fell asleep for a few hours.  The fog of that experience was so deep that Nate couldn’t say for sure if he’d withheld his knowledge of Pam cooking spray.

 

     Nate sprayed the Pam down his throat until he started to feel fuzzy in the head.  He slipped a little and caught himself on the shopping cart he was pushing.  “Nice,” he thought.  He sprayed more into his throat feeling all the bad surprises fading away.  

     Filling the cart with the usual items, soup, SpaghettiOs, corned beef hash, and propane; he finished off the Pam, tossed it on the floor, and pulled another can from his front pocket. 

     He browsed the book section to see if there was something he hadn’t read yet.  He grabbed something written by Phillip Krietzer and read the back flap. He wasn’t sure if he’d read this one or had seen the movie, or both. He shrugged and tossed it into the cart. At home he had a bookshelf full of the classics. Books written by Dickens, Twain, Hemingway, the Russians, the Swedes, the Spaniards, and the Ugandan.  He hadn’t found time to read any of those before The Flip, and he hadn’t found time to read them now.  He’d find time to read them sometime, but for now he’d read this piece of shit written by Phillip Krietzer for the fourth time and toss it out the window when he was done.  

     Nate flipped through the pile of magazines he and Larry hadn’t bothered organizing.  He finished off his second can of Pam and pulled the third from his back pocket.  Sports Illustrated? No. People? No. Time? No. If magazines were relevant then, they certainly weren’t anymore. Where were the porno mags? Those had the most chance of relevance. He took a hit of Pam, and his head started to swim. 

     At the bottom of the stack of magazines was the cheap tabloid Weekly World News. On the front page of the paper was just the two-word headline, “WHAT’S NEXT?” Nate paged through the rag to see what its four-year-old predictions were. 

     Most of the issue detailed the natural and unnatural disasters that plagued the earth in recent years and the subtle hints it had been giving off that it didn’t want us here anymore. After years of ozone depletion, global warming, deforestation, depletion of natural resources, we were doing our best to wear out our welcome. The earth had started to fight back with bigger tsunami’s, increased volcanic activity, stronger earthquakes, and more powerful tornadoes. We just weren’t getting the hint though. 

     But the planet got more direct about matters when the sea levels started to drop and the lakes and rivers began to dry up. Luckily for us, most of the oil had been depleted years earlier, and somebody figured out that if he redirected the oil derricks, he’d be able to pump water back out of the earth. “Hurray!” humanity let out at once. And just like that, we had water bottles with names like “Chevron,” “Shell,” and “Phillips.”

     It was only the last few pages of the magazine that dealt with “What’s Next?” One prediction was that the water had gone deep underground to super heat at the Earth’s core and was going to return to the surface as a giant geyser, scalding all of us to death. Another had the world just exploding. Nate liked the theory where the Angels came back to Earth to strike down all the souls unfit to enter God’s kingdom. The writers of the paper seemed to agree that the most likely scenario was that things would get worse, then plateau, then get worse, then plateau, until we as a species just couldn’t take it anymore.

     Nate knew what really was “What’s Next?”

​

     You’re in another fight with your wife, and she drives off to get away from you. In the moment, she’s right. You’ve lost all of the money you had, and all the money your going to have for the next twenty years. You let her down, all because of the stupid idea that Minnesota needed a mountain climbing supply shop. People tried to tell you that there weren’t mountains in Minnesota, but you just didn’t listen. She had your back, though. She always had your back. Her support started to go away when your business began to fail and you secretly went out to get more bank loans, and then asked her dad for a personal loan. The last straw was when you refused to unload the merchandise, to at least pay her father back. Instead you just filled your garage with the equipment, and let it gather dust.

     “Clean the garage,” she’d say, which meant, “Please Nate. Please sell the climbing gear. I love you. Please show me you want to try and save this marriage.”

     “Clean the fucking garage,” was what she said the day she spun off in the car, which meant just that. Michael was in his room on her orders to clean, and Baby Bea was swinging in the tire swing.

     You stood in the garage and looked around at the mess of your failure. Your pitiful attempt to regain your youth. “Regain yourself,” you told you. All it did was push you away from what was important. You. All you wanted now was to be alone, and to climb.

     But then the ceiling came crashing up in your face, and you heard screaming and tearing coming from outside. When you made it to the door you saw houses and buildings falling down into the sky. You saw your son with his bloody face calling for mommy from the back door of your house. You saw your baby girl swinging in the tire swing the wrong way, laughing. “Hi Daddy,” she said. “Why does your face look like that?”

     “Karen!” you screamed out at the world. “Karen!” and you did that until you couldn’t do it anymore.

 

     Nate was sitting on the floor now. It had been the worst for Michael. His son remembered life before The Flip, and what it was like to have a mom and a dad.

     Beatrix didn’t know the difference. She took away nothing from the old world and was content to live in this one.

     Nate tossed the can of Pam to the other end of the store. “What’s Next?” he asked. 

     Later, he’d fill a cart up with all brands of cooking spray, roll it to the dock, and push it into the sky never being quite sure he’d ignored the presence of the Grey Poupon.

 

     The effects of the Pam were beginning to wear off, but the sun had begun to go up, and an early rule was no climbing after dark. Instead he sat in the entryway of Super Foods and watched the sunset. This was “the magic hour,” the moment in the day when you could see the ring of debris that had formed around the earth. It was proof that beautiful things still happened. The ring was in alignment with the orbit of the moon, which had not floated off into space. This was the proof that there was still some gravity somewhere on earth. It was also proof that The Flip had been entirely personal. He drew a circle on the dusty floor, and then drew a ring around the circle’s equator, which turned it into an orb. He wondered what it all looked like from outer space.

     As he stared up into space Nate could feel Karen sitting next to him. It reminded him of their first night together after he had taken her up Mount LaRue. She hadn’t paid any attention to him when they’d first met months earlier, but he hadn’t been able to keep his eyes off of her. It wasn’t until he showed her who he really was, a climber, that she showed him who she really was. They lay on their backs on a patch of grass on what felt like the top of the world and she’d pointed out different constellations to him. Some he knew and some he didn’t, but in the same way she hadn’t let on if she knew something during his climbing instruction, he kept his mouth shut. Now, though, he wasn’t looking for constellations in the sky. He was looking for his wife. Which little speck in the sea of debris was Karen? It was the thing he had never been willing to tell himself. His wife was dead. Sometime he’d wished that he’d seen her fall, so he’d known for sure that she was gone. Maybe it would have been easier then. Or maybe it would have been worse. He’d engaged in the fantasy that she was out there somewhere, trying to make her way home. These were stories he only reserved for himself. But it had been four years. And this place holding he had been doing hadn’t been working. She wasn’t going to come and tag him out. It was time for him to step up and become #1 parent.

     Nate had been sitting there a while when the sun started dropping back down into the sky from behind the earth. “It doesn’t do that.” But then, instead of dropping down farther, the sun began to spread out over the horizon. It wasn’t the sun he was seeing. It was fire. Little bits of light began to drop like the opposite of shooting stars, not randomly, but in a pattern, moving from left to right and then right to left. A thing started to dawn on him then, a thing that felt like hope. “People,” he said. He was watching something being done by people.

 

     Nate couldn’t wait until morning and broke his own rule by climbing home in the dark. By the time he arrived home he had already formulated a plan. His family would relocate to Super Foods. From there, Nate and Michael would return home and start dismantling the path to the grocery store and begin a new one that led to the new people. Judging by how far away the fire was, Nate figured they could be there in six months, maybe less. 

     Nate dropped on the ceiling of his darkened house. “I’m home,” he called. He felt his way first to Michael’s room and burst in the door. “Michael!” he said, but the only movement was the curtains blowing in the open window.

     Next he tried Bea’s room, almost tripping on the toys scattered about her floor. “Bea. Wake up.” But she wasn’t in her bed.

     “Michael! Beatrix!” he called through his house. “It’s just me!” He climbed the slippery slope up to the basement and called for them. Next he called out the back to see if they were on the tree, and then climbed to the garage to check there. Nothing.

     Larry’s house was empty too, as was the Huntsman’s three houses down.

     “Michael.” Nate said. “Beatrix.” He was back home. Where had they gone? He was heading towards the back door when he stepped on something slippery and fell face first onto the lintel between the kitchen and living room. His head felt not-right, and when he put his hand to his face, it was wet. He found the thing on the floor that he had slipped on. It was a book that proved to be The Giving Tree when he held it in a beam of moonlight shining through a window. He began to page through the book, but when he came to the part where his son and begun crafting his own vision, the pages had been torn out and were scattered on the floor.

     “Oh no,” he said. “Oh no.” he used the wall to stand up and felt his way to the open back Door. Still hanging from the attic window across the street was Larry’s failed noose. “Michael!” Nate screamed down at the sky. “Beatrix!” and then the world faded from dark to black.