Everychild

Abstract

It should have been their senior year. Everychild was seventeen going on a hundred, what with everything that lay ahead. They were pale after months chained to their laptop, pale and blond and exceedingly white, though this too galled them, to be no more than an ally as the world went up in flames. Time to think about college applications, their parents began to chirp in October, Covid month seven “What’s the point?” Everychild’s voice was flat. “We’ll all be climate refugees, and you’ll be dead.” Afterward, Mom and Dad cast their minds back. Was there a precise moment, some tipping point they’d missed? Time had become so folded upon itself that year. Perhaps it began right after the Day No One Could Breathe. When the birds, disoriented, failed to lift into the orange-black sky. When they and Everychild and Younger Brother all woke to the same suffocating murk, six months into the pandemic. It coated them inside and out: skin, feathers, alveoli. The entire state of California was aflame, Silicon Valley run aground on the Exxon Valdez. Outside was the world they had made, both visible and invisible: smoke and ash and fire and virus. They couldn’t leave the house, even if they hadn’t been sheltering in place. They couldn’t even step into the yard. The pool water was slick with platinum ash. © 2022, Missouri Review. All rights reserved.