by Brooke Middlebrook

The best part about living in the Anthropocene is not being sure what will come next, epoch-wise. I’d like to race around the room when the spirit moves me like the dog does when she has the zoomies. Does she know something I don’t? I know scientists found the layer of earth that confirms the asteroid impact because there are spherules of vaporized rock, encased, that fell back down like beads on Mardi Gras. I know the word spherules is hard to pronounce quickly. I know that some people claim to speak in tongues when the spirit calls them but I never got the chance because I’m Catholic, even though I imagined what it would feel like, to be dropped into language like that, taken over in a flash. After church as a child, I once joked that the altar boys didn’t need to hold those gold Communion plates under our cupped hands to receive the wafer; if it fell, just wait three days and it would rise again. My mom got mad at me but still she laughed. I get mad at you when you forget to cut the six-pack rings into strips before throwing them in the trash, so birds and turtles won’t get stuck in them as they surf the rising tide. I get mad at you when you sing the opening lines to that song I hate, the one from the movie about an asteroid headed for earth, because if I hear even a little bit it will be stuck in my head forever. It takes over me. One way to get a song unstuck is to listen to it all the way to the end. But when is it really the end if the whole thing just fades out? The more I try to exorcise it from my brain the deeper it gets buried, encased in my gray matter. The band said they only recorded that song as a way to survive, to not be forgotten, to reignite their career. This seems like a joke because before their return, their guitarist had been badly burned in an explosion caused by pumping gas into his car with the engine running. Fossil fuels may come for us in the end, or even before. Somehow I’ve been in not one but two Ubers when the driver tried to do what this guitarist did and each time I held my breath, waiting, considering probability or prayer. All this breath, or spirit if you prefer, running around encased in our bodies just waiting. The end could be fast or slow, loud or soft. You sing that song to the dog while you brush your teeth, and lying in bed I don’t want to close my eyes until you get in because she’s just going to flop from my side to yours, finally calm, the small cathedral of her ribcage rising and falling. You said the double-paned windows would be insulating, energy-saving, but I’m glad that in the morning I can still hear the birds singing through my dreams. I wake with my hands cupped, expecting a tiny dinosaur to land.

Brooke Middlebrook grew up in the hills of western Massachusetts and now lives in Birmingham, Alabama. She received her MFA in nonfiction from Bennington College, and her latest work appears in Fugue, The Cincinnati Review’s miCRo series, and Lost Balloon. Instagram: @brooke_squared.