Karen cut the kernels off the last of the hundred or so ears of corn and stretched her fingers open and closed to get out the cramping feeling. She shoved the mounds of corn into the freezer bags almost resentfully. Why do this exhausting labor when the local supermarket produced delicious frozen corn that could be purchased on the way home from work?
But what if the supermarkets closed? And all the food at supermarkets was undeniably tainted by corporate agricultural travesties that destroyed the economy, that destroyed the land and the bugs, that destroyed the very food itself with chemicals and monoculture. The end of the world was indeed coming as predicted.
Karen knew that her world views were strongly tainted by the apocalyptic sect that had raised her. Every murder, dead tree or new house built was a sign of the end. In fact, every change of any kind was a sign of the end. Even the presence of a toad on the front porch was a sign of the end. She was a closet prepper, storing food and battening down the hatches against the possible collapses be they ecological, economic or social.
She also knew that her own actions were hypocritical. The slippery zip lock bags were themselves unecological. The over-full stand-up freezer wouldn’t be any good if the power went out anyway. Look what had happened when the other freezer broke down! The dog sniffing it had alerted them to an apocalypse of rot right in their own basement.
“Keep going, Karen,” she thought. She watched the beautiful piles of yellow bags grow. She imagined the chowders, the mashed potatoes and corn, the soups that would materialize. She imagined how lovely an addition the color yellow would be to the piles in her freezer.
It was said that one would be taken and one would be left behind. Her sect had definitely had interpreted this backwards to think that the taken ones were the lucky saved ones. No, the taken ones were the ones who were gone. That was what apocalypse was, destruction. The apocalypse came for the taken ones early. Those left behind were the ones who still had time in this beautiful world with its sore hands and endless labor. She hoped she would be left behind long enough to enjoy some of this corn.
