Assistant Managing Editor Bess Winter: Those who went through puberty during the Y2K scare will well-remember the adults around them sweating bullets about what would happen when the clocks on their Dell desktops ticked a second past midnight. Here Addison Zeller creates, with a surprising amount of heart and empathy, a portrait of a father who is both protective of his family and hungry for apocalypse. While the look backward is charming, even funny, it also casts in sharp relief the future apocalypses this father could never predict, including the inevitable individuation of his child.
To hear Zeller read the piece, click below:
When He Heard about the Y2K Bug
Dad added forty or fifty canned hams to the family. He brought in another two each grocery run, stacked them along the wall by the sump pump. I just thought of something, we’ll need a kerosene lamp—he said that kind of thing to Mom, as they lay in bed. That lamp, canned food for two years, propane tanks, a portable grill: all safely hidden in the only room with no access to natural light. He’d flick off the switch and creep around in there like an ancient Celt inspecting his souterrain. This is how it’ll be, he said. The dog circled his feet, excited by the dark. I’m doing this for you, Dad told it, so we won’t have to eat you. His face glowed orange over the glass-lamp chimney. He was proud and happy—the proudest and happiest I ever saw him. He kept a metal box in a wall crack by the furnace. Sometimes I peered in and saw the key sticking out of the lock. He would take it out and show me the handgun. It was an obsession with him: I even got to hold it so long as he kept his fingers on the butt. People will notice who has food and who doesn’t, he said. That’s the thing.
He had a plan for us. We’d sleep in the finished part of the basement, and he’d get up to do his rounds at midnight, then closer to dawn I’d do mine. That’s how it’d be. We’d listen at the windows, make sure the doors were locked tight. Just us and the dog and the lamp and the gun. Then we’d go down again and fall back to sleep while the others slept on.
The hams dreamed in their silver caskets like dead bandits out for display in a Western town.
Addison Zeller‘s fiction appears or is forthcoming in 3:AM, Epiphany, Ligeia, minor literature[s}, ergot., Hex, Roi Fainéant, and elsewhere. He lives in Wooster, Ohio.
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