I would like to report as not missing
Excerpts from “After the Rapture” by Nancy Stohlman
Something bad happened before the rapture and people were horrified and they cried and they played the details over and over like a particularly painful heartbreak. And someone decided that a memorial should be built and everyone should wear red and once a year everyone wore red and remembered the bad thing and it seemed right.
The next time something bad happened, people decided it was only appropriate to refer to a different color – white this time – and people wore white, and some people wore red and white together to show how the two were bad things were connected and that seemed to be right.
But the bad things kept happening. Soon the primary colors were gone – then the secondary colors. Recent tragedies were forced to develop creative colors like teal or lavender, and soon it went beyond color — people mourning a specific tragedy could either wear the color or buy a bracelet in that color, and some people had 10 –15 bracelets until it was pointed out that the bracelets were not produced in an environmentally friendly way and then people threw away all the bracelets and tried to go back to the colors, but the colors didn’t work now either because each color was associated with a tragedy, and if, for example, you were wearing lime green pants but didn’t know what bad thing was being mourned in lime green, you might have been called a show-off and accused of trivializing other people’s sufferings.
And yet the bad things kept increasing until there were several bad things every week, and new symbols had to be devised to express your horror: praying hands and beating hearts and hugging arms, which you send electronically or in magnetic bumper stickers for cars or bikes and you could also swap out your electronic picture frame for one specially made to announce your devastation at the new bad thing, but sometimes another bad thing happened the same day and you wouldn’t know if you got the original picture frame should keep to mourn the first bad thing or whether you should update to mourn the last bad thing, and those who updated would be labeled insensitive by those who had not yet finished mourning the first bad thing .
It got to the point where the bad things had to compete with the other bad things, and one thing that would have been pretty bad in the primaries days was now all but ignored. And people left the picture frames, but they didn’t know what symbols to use now, which led them to create new symbols, like baking cakes in the shape of tragedies that needed to be mourned, and sometimes they traveled to the Places of bad things just to feel the awfulness more, and they got nervous like kids in troubled households trying to read the signs and see the next bad thing coming, so sometimes they saw normal things as bad and jumped at it Watching prayer hands together or heart beating or hugging arms until they went numb and the bad things kept happening but they ran out of color and ideas so they ended up doing nothing.
I went to Walmart to get a bag of ice cream, which I never do because I don’t like Walmart, and I don’t like ice cream, and of course the ice cream was next to the missing persons wall and there I was: missing. My picture, which I got for my passport last year, hung next to an artist’s rendering of what I would look like now, a year later, which was basically the same but with longer bangs, which is how I actually looked. I stood confused reading my height and weight. It said I was last seen at Walmart a year ago, probably when I needed ice cream too.
There was a number for information so I called. A woman answered. Missing persons hotline, she said.
I want to report a missing person sighting, I said.
Where?
Here at Walmart. It’s me. I mean the missing person is me. I won’t be missed, I’m right here. I’m not sure what’s going on.
She sounded unconcerned. Well, it definitely says you’re missed. For almost 11 months. Where have you been?
I was nowhere, I said.
What did you do?
I was, you know, just doing normal stuff. Who reported me missing?
All information from sources is kept anonymous, she said. You have to understand why. People might be afraid to come forward if they had to give their names.
Can you report me as not missing now?
Secure. However, we must first take you to the police station to have your fingerprints taken.
I showed up at the train station and they sent me to the missing persons department. I was sitting in the lobby and it seemed everyone was staring at me, looking at my picture on the wall and then looking at me again. A woman finally approached the receptionist and said in a half whisper: I want to report a missing person.
I can hear you, I said. I’m not even missed. An error has occurred.
They took my fingerprints, verified my identity, and then thanked me for reaching out. Thanks to citizens like you, we’re able to rescue people who may be missing, she said, handing me a wet wipe for my inky fingers.
A week later I went back to Walmart to see if they had removed my poster but it had only been updated: Last seen at Walmart. Please call with all information.
Before the rapture, all romaine lettuce was quietly removed from grocery store shelves as if it had never been there. Luckily, there were other types of lettuce like green leaf and butter lettuce, but it was alarming to see those large empty spaces in the product aisles, like a mouth full of missing teeth.
Then the ground beef, and that hit a little harder. Then chicken cholera, as it was later called, which attacked both chickens and eggs and surprised no one. Then swine herpes, which has been dubbed “the gravest insult against humanity yet.”
At this point, vegans were feeling pretty complacent even without a salad, until locusts attacked the wheat, soy, and corn crops and left them withering in the fields.
People continued to shop cautiously off the pre-packaged shelves until a report confirmed what we’d all suspected for years — the hormones in plastic were altering the genetic makeup of children and adolescents, and women and men were now entering menopause in their 20s, with breasts growing and falling out their asses were bleeding. So all of that had to go.
Then there was arsenic in the rice. Then poisonous cinnamon. Then Coca-Cola dumped half a million gallons of soda in the landfills as if disposing of evidence.
And then, as quietly as it began, everything was put back on the grocery store shelves as if there had never been a mistake. As if we had dreamed the other. Now the strawberries were the size of lemons, the steaks were perfectly marbled, the roast turkeys were glazed like a porn star’s lips, and the dollops of whipped cream were flawless angels, landing on a pillow of key lime.
Only later did we ask ourselves how we could be so stupid. Laboratory rats consume enough poison to kill themselves if given slowly and with a pleasant taste; you can cook a frog alive if done in increasingly slow batches, so we ended up doing it to ourselves.
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