The Zombie Apocalypse (and the Single Mom) Part I

March 20, 2020

The clouds hung low and foreboding. The highway, strangely quiet as we sped East on Highway 44. Though it was mid-March, the fauna, still suspended in winter grey-brown, did not harken to spring or new life. My son and I really needed to stop to go to the bathroom, but we had such a small bottle of hand sanitizer and the world of contagion seemed so large.

“Let’s stop before Columbia,” I said.

The kids and I glanced at one another — I made eye contact with my daughter in the back seat.

“College town,” I said authoritatively, conveying the unsettling new reality of a world where we understood students called back to the U.S. from semesters abroad would be a greater risk to us.

Since I’ve cultivated a not hefty, but decent stream of dystopian and apocalyptic fiction in my interior landscape from the time I read The Stand at age 19, driving through the Ozark mountains of southwest Missouri, in the first week of sheltering in place, felt eerily like my own version of being a prepper for the past thirty years. And I finally knew what I’d been prepping for.

I’m kind of scared, I thought.

I’ve got this. I whistled passed the graveyard. Well, probably I’ve got this.