When the Republic fell, I was at work.

An attempt at flash fiction.

When the Republic fell, I was at work. Of course I was at work. Where else would I be? I was at work for all the important events. When the planes hit. When the fires spread out West and the smoke turned our sky orange. When armed men grabbed someone out of the school pickup line and the PTA had to do a fundraiser so their kid could cover that month’s rent. When the kids at the high school walked out of class to protest the government. When the water went out for three weeks because of climate change or terrorism or a stupid pissing match between the mayor and the governor. When a fleeing suspect hid behind our building and Lara’s windows got shot out in the ensuing firefight and a tear gas grenade landed in my kitchen and I had to throw out all my food. When all of those things happened, I was at work. We were all at work. We were always at work.

Every evening I moved from home office to couch and worried, and tried to do my second job and my side hustle, and every morning I went back to work. We all joked about it. “Are we still supposed to go to work during the end of the world?”

But if I didn’t do it, it wouldn’t get done. And maybe my work isn’t that critical, but it still needs to get done. When the health department ran out of marketing budget and we couldn’t pay to put vaccination reminders in people’s feeds, thousands of people died. Maybe it was their fault for not setting their own reminders, but that didn’t stop them from dying. Everyone knew who’d made the cuts, and everyone knows now how it turned out once people experienced the results, but that doesn’t fix anything at all.

“The new world struggles to be born,” they say. It certainly does. There’s screaming and blood and shit and and the tearing of flesh, and then exhaustion and sleeplessness and crying. Nothing really makes sense, or at least it didn’t for me, except that life kept going on, all those responsibilities and obligations and laundry and dirt and work piling up endlessly.

But things don’t actually need to make sense. You just need to get up and go to work.

Longer

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