Lucille can still taste the smoke from the barbecue, infusing itself with the smell from Dale’s cigarette. She can’t hear the cicadas anymore — that’s gone away with age — but she knows they’re chirping off in the marsh. It’s a feeling. She can still sense the day’s heat radiating off the deck, clinging to her skin.

      She can hear Dale talking, holding court as he always does. She can’t quite hear the words. He’s talking to the Maitlands. His daughters, her granddaughters, have been quiet. Louise is nursing her new baby. Renée has hardly said a word all evening.

      Renée has told her there’s an asteroid coming, and in a few days, they’ll have to pack up all their things and drive to a bunker to wait out the ensuing calamity. She believes her — Renée has always been very smart, always done well in school. Much smarter than Louise, who first married that god-awful deadbeat, then married the middling man in the camping chair next to her soon after. Renée says she’s too busy to start a family right now, but it would be nice for Louise’s little ones to have some cousins to play with. The Maitland children are too old for them.

      She’s not sure if the asteroid is God’s punishment, or if it’s got anything to do with God at all. She hasn’t been to church in a while, not since Dale took the car keys away. If anything, the asteroid seems like something out of the cartoons he’d watched as a boy.

      She can feel the arthritis in her knees, planting her soundly in the warped wood of her deck chair. She can’t see the marsh very well, even at this hour, as the light is just turning to gold. She suspects that when the time comes for Dale to drive her to the bunker, she’ll request to stay seated right here, soaking in the last of the heat and light.
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      Dale grabs another beer from the cooler and cracks it open, taking slow, steady sips between puffs of his cigarette. The Maitlands are talking to Louise about how the kids are handling things, so he stares out towards the marsh, grasses lit up like hot coals. 

      Nothing could be more perfect than this evening, he thinks, but he knows that it’s a lie. He’d burnt the ribs on the grill, distracted as he was by Louise’s husband’s verbal intrusions — it had taken every ounce of his strength not to throw his tongs at the wimp to shut him up. Now, having eaten, having drank, having baked in the heat for a couple hours, the conversation has sunk into relative lethargy. Renée, his eldest, back home for the first time since two Christmases ago, has barely spoken at all.

      He’ll go with them all to the bunker, to make Renée happy, if nothing else. If he had his way, he’d stay right here and watch the thing rip the sky open like the Fourth of July. He imagines they’ll be back out in a couple weeks, once all the caterwauling dies down.

      He looks at his mother in her ancient deck chair, glassy eyes gazing off into the marsh just like him. He has a feeling she won’t be leaving with them, no matter how much Renée pleads. She’s always been stubborn.
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      Renée hasn’t said a word all evening, not since she sat down. She worries that if she starts speaking it will all spill out.

      She doesn’t want them to know that she quit her job before coming here. She doesn’t want them to know that most of her department has too, after the extensive campaign of misinformation they’ve been made to spread, after the bureaucratic nightmare that was organizing millions of people into bunkers and convincing them that it will save them. It won’t.

      She looks at her father, his aging face framed in smoke. “Your papaw smoked all day and night and his lungs were as clean as a whistle,” he would joke. She knows he doesn’t believe in the asteroid, or believes he’ll be back on this deck cracking open another beer after a couple weeks of waiting. He’s always been this way. The virus, not real. The planet heating up, not real. The cabals of young satanist revolutionaries and human traffickers, those were real. 

      But this time, she feels like the conspiracy theorist. She knows what the government and the scientists and the media are hiding. And for once, she won’t attempt to explain herself, because the truth is impossible to stomach. On Tuesday, she’ll drive down to the bunker with Lucille, and Dale, and Louise and Curtis and the kids, and there they will spend their final days, and she won’t say a word. 

      She watches as baby Stella wraps her hand around Louise’s finger. Her sister’s other children must be out playing near the marsh, Martin with that Maitland boy, Lucy just beyond the deck. She can’t even think about the kids right now — her mind makes impact against a wall of solid grief. 

      She’d spent so long avoiding this place, these people, and now she knows it’s the only place on Earth she could bear to be, at the end of it all.
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      Martin sits back in the long shadows at the edge of the marsh, Harvey reclining next to him. The older Maitland boy’s hair catches the golden light just like the tall grass enclosing them, but infinitely more vibrant, more alive. He watches the boy run a hand through it, noting every articulation of his slender fingers. When the boy laughs, it is the same colour as the light. 

      The Maitlands are driving several hours north tomorrow, staying in a different bunker in a different state, to be with Harvey’s grandparents. Martin hasn’t quite thought of how he’ll say goodbye to Harvey tonight, after the sky grows dark, when they face each other awkwardly in the driveway. 

      If there was any justice in this world at all, he would hold him, hold him tighter than anyone has held anyone since the dawn of time. He would kiss him. He would drive north with the Maitlands, live out weeks or months or even years in their bunker, away from his mom and stepdad and sisters and aunt and grandfather and great-grandmother. 

      But he can’t. Touching Harvey is as impossible as touching the golden light of the evening, impossible as holding onto summer. 

      Harvey holds a hand above his eyes and looks towards the sun. Martin does the same, imagining that he can see the rock barreling through space towards them.
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      Lucy crouches in the grass that stands taller than her, intent on a cicada clinging to a stalk. When she touches him, he chirps angrily. This was funny the first couple times, but she doesn’t want to annoy him so much that he flies away. She stares at him instead. Sometimes, he crawls a little bit forwards.

      Mama told her not to play too far from the deck. She can’t see where the deck is, because she’s afraid that if she stops looking at the cicada, he’ll disappear. Mama also told her that soon, they’ll go on a road trip together, and stay in a house underground with Aunt Renée and Grandpa Dale and Memaw. She thinks it would be more fun to stay here at Memaw’s house, where she can play in the grass and look for bugs and get freezer pops from the cooler and eat them with Marty and Harvey by the marsh. She doesn’t want to be underground in a house with baby Stella crying and Memaw’s bony smelly hands reaching for her, making her sit in her lap. 

      She pokes the cicada, and he chirps again.

      She notices his red eye, and his red legs, and his body so black it’s almost blue, and the orange criss-crossing lines in his wings.  She notices all his tiny spikes and segments.

      She notices, for the first time, that he is beautiful. If she could, she would bring him with her. If she could, she would stay in this golden field forever.