Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Nigh

Farah lets Beth light the second, too. It lasts a little longer, but then the oxygen is gone, and the matchstick smokes over dunes of sand and pink gravel. Farah holds out her hand for the matchbox.

The third House is the desert, layered with miniature cacti in shades of green and pale, waxy blue. The fourth is a rainforest, as much as Farah could fit in the little box, broad leaves, flower petals, two inches of water along the bottom. The fourth flame burns halfway up the matchstick before it suffocates.

The fifth match is Beth’s again, and it takes three tries to strike. Beth curses under her breath, worrying that it’s the air, but of course it’s just her stiff fingers. The red tip catches, and she pushes it into the fifth box; Farah has added a chain-link fence to the low gravel mounds, bright flecks of paper caught along its foot. The sixth House holds a tiny city block, the colonial rowhouses tall, identical, red and white, with red brick sidewalks and slender trees marching along the front. The sixth flame rises as high as the fourth.

Beth passes the matchbox to Farah. “Thank you,” she says.

The seventh House is a flight of shallow white steps leading down to a sheet of dark, reflective glass. Farah closes her eyes. It is a race to see which is consumed first: the oxygen, or the match.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Megan Arkenberg lives and writes in California. Her short stories have appeared in Lightspeed , Asimov’s , Strange Horizons , and dozens of other places. She procrastinates by editing the fantasy e-zine Mirror Dance .

“There’s a rabid badger in my skull,” Toivo said. He looked up from the bucket in which his face had been hidden for the last ten minutes. “I’m sure of it, eh?”

George tried to ignore Toivo. He took another look at his poker hand, as if somehow the cards had changed in the four seconds since he’d looked at them last: nope, still three kings.

He looked across the table. Jaco had a glint in his eye, at least as much of one as George could see behind the cabin light glaring off Jaco’s huge glasses. Jaco was a good player—as one of the top accountants in Houghton, he could do the math with the best of them—but the little guy had never been able to control his tells. The tip of his tongue peeked out from the left corner of his mouth. That only happened when Jaco had something good, but was what he had good enough to beat three kings?

You’ve got two pair, you little shit, I can tell. Your lip twitches like that when you have two pair .

Toivo let out a long groan. “Oh, jeeze,” he said. “I don’t feel so good, eh? And it’s freezing in here, did someone leave da door open again?”

To George’s left, Bernie set his cards flat on the table, set them down hard enough to rattle the empty cans of Pabst and jostle the semi-full ones.

“Holy crap , Toivo,” Bernie said. “Either get back in da game, go to sleep, or just shut up. We’re trying to play cards here.”

“A woodchuck,” Toivo said. “Rabid. I’m telling ya.”

George sighed, annoyed that Toivo’s whining was cutting into the game.

“You just drank too much,” he said. “I told you sausage doesn’t soak up beer in your belly—that’s a wives’ tale. And it’s cold in here because it’s November, you idiot. Put on a third sweater if you’re cold.”

Toivo burped. “A grown man can never drink too much.”

Arnold laughed. He was seated at George’s right. Arnold—or Mister Ekola , as he had been known when George was a kid—had been coming here longer than any of them, had once shared this place with his grade school friends. Now his son Bernie did the same, the tradition passed down from one generation to the next.

Arnold’s friends had died off over the years, the victims of age, heart disease, cancer… whatever the Grim Reaper could come up with, really. Creeping middle age made George realize, more and more every day, that the same fate awaited he, Jaco, Toivo, and Bernie. Many winters from now, which one of them would be like Arnold?

“Well, Toivo, then maybe you aren’t a grown man,” Arnold said. “Now be quiet so I can take these losers’ money. I know when my son is bluffing.”

“Screw you, Dad,” Bernie said.

Toivo put his face in his hands. “Oh, jeeze … maybe I should go to da hospital.”

George lowered his cards. “Sure, Toivo. That little access road outside is snowed shut, so you can’t take the truck. Hell, M-26 is probably snowed shut, too, so how about you take the snowmobile and drive to Lake Linden? Should only take you an hour and a half.”

“Dress warm,” Arnold said. “About ten below out there, eh?”

Jaco snorted. “Ten, hell. More like thirty with wind chill.”

“Thirty easy ,” Bernie said. “And if you drive that Arctic Cat off da trail, snow’s at least four feet deep. Hey, Toivo—if you get stuck and die, can I have your thirty-thirty? That’s a nice gun.”

Toivo stared at each of the four men in turn. “You guys are dicks,” he said, then put his face back in the bucket and threw up again.

George decided to risk his three kings against whatever Jaco had. Arnold’s wrinkled old fingers were holding his cards an inch from his face, so close his bushy eyebrows almost brushed against the five faded logos of a white “G” inside a yellow oval set against a green background. Arnold didn’t like wearing his glasses at deer camp, unless they were actually out hunting, which meant he almost never wore them. His glasses—much thinner than Jaco’s heavy frames—lay folded up in front of his can of Pabst.

This scene: the game, the people, the beers, the cabin, the freezing cold, Toivo over-imbibing like he did every year, it was all part of a grand tradition. If they counted Arnold’s glory years, this group had been coming to this shack in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula—the U.P., or “da Yoop,” as the locals called it—every November for over forty years. Unless any of them visited Milwaukee, which wasn’t that often, this annual two-week trip was the only time George saw his childhood friends and the only man who had bothered to teach him right from wrong. So many little rituals, from the cheap beer to cases of ammo that were never used, from opening-night bratwurst to the closing-day cleaning party, it was all to be celebrated and treasured.

Maybe George had moved on in life, sure. Maybe he’d worked to get rid of his Yooper accent, learned to say “the” instead of “da,” “yes” instead of “yah,” because in the big city he thought that made him sound dumb. Just because he felt the need to change, though, didn’t mean he thought his friends should. Bernie, Toivo, and Jaco looked a little older every year, but to George they would be forever ten, forever fifteen, forever eighteen, forever the ages they’d been as—together—they had discovered who they were.

But as kids or adults, what they weren’t were good card players.

George stared at Arnold, trying to pick off Arnold’s tells. Unlike Jaco, though, Arnold was damn near unreadable. He might have a full house, he might have crap—there was almost no way to tell.

Bernard smacked his cards down on the table again. “Dammit, George, you going to play or what?”

George was. These boys were about to learn a valuable—and extremely costly—lesson.

“Okay, Bernie,” George said. “I’ll see your five—” George took a five dollar bill off his pile and set it on top of the stack of money at the table’s center “—and let’s send the kiddies home so the adults can play. I’ll raise you ten .”