The End
THE NATIONAL TIME CAPSULE COMMITTEE
124 F STREET, FOURTH FLOOR
WASHINGTON, D.C.
September 6
Miss Gratuity Tucci
c/o Daniel Landry Middle School
Dear Miss Tucci:
It is my great pleasure to inform you that your essay has been selected from more than 15,000 entries to be included in the National Time Capsule. Your unique story and viewpoint made your composition a true standout and the favorite of many judges. Also, you wrote easily ten times more than any of your fellow students, and we believe that should count for something. Enclosed are your savings bond, worth two hundred dollars at maturity, and twenty shares of Taco Stocko, good for a free Taco Taco at any participating Wall Street Taco Exchange.
We hope this experience inspires you to keep writing. You could well be an author one day! Many national newspapers will be printing portions of your winning essay, and I wouldn’t be surprised if people are curious about the rest of your story: Did you reunite with your mother? What became of J.Lo? What are your thoughts about the Gorg’s defeat at the hands of the heroic Daniel Landry? What is the moral to your story?
I just know one day I’ll be buying your biography.
Once again, congratulations!
Bev Doogan
Chairperson
Gratuity Tucci
Daniel Landry Middle School
8th Grade
THE TRUE MEANING OF SMEKDAY
PART 3: Attack of the Clones
That woman from the time capsule committee was right, sort of. I’m not so much “inspired” to write more as…compelled, I think you’d say. My brain won’t let me stop playing the rest of the story in my head like a movie, and I’m hoping that by writing it all down I can be finished with it.
But I won’t be showing it to anyone. I have reasons. Maybe I’ll leave instructions that no one can read this journal until the time capsule is uncovered, and I’m already gone, and I won’t have to talk about it.
No offense to you.
I’m sure you’re all nice people.
Anyway.
We left Orlando under a cloud. I didn’t even check the atlas—I just drove away from the rising sun, fast, determined to put some distance between us and the Boov, in case they should decide to give chase again. We slid through the streets and highways, following any signs that said “west,” setting out like Lewis and Clark into a wide frontier that had grown wild and unknown all over again.
We passed a flock of flamingos flying low over the wet land like gaudy umbrellas carried by the wind. They barely registered then. Thinking about them now, I realize it was the first I’d ever known that flamingos flew at all. It didn’t suit them—they looked like sprinting drag queens. But at the time they were just another part of this new, haunted America, with its empty cities and huge, sweaty eye in the clouds, watching over it all.
J.Lo was still a pale blue, curled up in his seat and staring at some point just behind the dashboard. Pig was happily dumb to the fact that the world had just ended for the second time in six months. She brushed back and forth against J.Lo and me, trying to get a reaction, then eventually gave up and went to sleep in the back.
I couldn’t drive very far. I hadn’t had any sleep. I thought maybe J.Lo would be more alert, and I didn’t have anything against letting him drive anymore, but when I looked I saw him tipped to the side, fogging up the window with closed eyes. I made it to some little town called I-don’t-know-what and found a scrap metal yard by the highway. It seemed like the right place for the three of us. I pulled Slushious between two massive piles of discarded city and curled up next to Pig.
I cautiously cracked the window for some air. I thought it would stink like every other dump, but the scrap yard just smelled like pennies. It smelled like the U.S. Mint probably smelled, back when it still made money. Back when pennies were pennies, and not little worthless copper medallions, like prizes at a Lincoln look-alike contest. Back when dollar bills were not just wallet-size pictures of Washington.
It was about this time that all the metaphorical bad weather was replaced by the real thing, and the clouds cracked open and rained. I think it was the kind of rain that only Florida gets, the kind that makes you want to start gathering animals in twos, just in case. I looked out the window and saw nothing. The downpour made the world look like a cable channel you hadn’t paid for, all static with an occasional flash of something you thought you knew.
Pig was awake now, restless because of the constant rattle against the windows. She sat in my lap, kneading the skin of my leg with her claws. So we watched the storm, watched the wind push the rain around in billowing sheets like the ghosts of old oceans.
I’m sorry. I always get like this when I think about that day. For what it’s worth, I fell asleep about now. Later, when I woke up, we were nearly killed in a flood, so that should be exciting.
I didn’t dream at all. I just closed my eyes, and when I opened them a second later, it was night.
I wondered for a moment if I was sick. My stomach lurched and settled over and over, and I thought, It’s like I’m on a boat. It’s like I’m taking the ferry across the Delaware. And just as I propped myself up enough to see why, the car was hit by half a washing machine.
It had come tumbling down the junk heap and struck one of our fins hard enough to make it fold up like a cheap chair. Slushious bucked and nearly rolled. There was water seeping up through the floor, and water all around us. At least six feet of it. We were floating through a brand-new river, between banks and hills of loose metal. I watched breathlessly as pieces of scrap took wing and circled above like giant bats.
“Oh my God!” I shouted. “Oh my God, I parked us in a scrap yard during a hurricane! J.Lo!”
J.Lo was waking slowly, crawling back from the front seat. “Mlaaa-ak sis?” he murmured. “Whazit?”
Pig was frantic. She tore around the interior of the car, leaping away from the pools of water on the floor, which were everywhere now.
“Hurricane!” I shouted. “Big storm! Everything’s flooded and we’re floating! And leaking! And…I don’t get it; it was so clear yesterday!”
“It is the Gorg,” said J.Lo, looking out the window. “Their ships, they are too large. They make the weather happen whereverto they go.”
He sounded a little too calm for my taste. I tried to impress him with the seriousness of it.
“We’re floating,” I said. “There’s water coming into the car, and flying metal everywhere, and we were just hit by a washing machine!”