“So, is there school today?” Sean asked his mom, excitedly.
“So far,” she answered.
“Oh,” came the dejected reply. “I don’t understand. Shouldn’t there not be any power or water or anything?”
“You’d think,” she said putting a peanut butter sandwich into a plastic bag. “But the big cities all installed workarounds a few years ago, especially now that there is some huge, violent event that seems to happens every summer.” She put the bag into a lunchbox.
Sean grabbed a toaster pastry from the pantry, and opened its foil pouch.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Remember when all of Cincinnati became vampires?”
“I forgot about that. I think that lasted from for, like two years. I guess everybody there now is like, ‘hey neighbor, sorry I ate your dog’ or whatever.”
“Granny was telling me that it was different when she was a girl,” Sean said, pastry crumbs tumbling from his mouth.
“I dunno. I guess a lot of weird stuff happened back then, but it didn’t last as long. Alien cabbages took over her town when she was little, but it only lasted like a day.” She sighed. “Now everything is dragged out for months.”
“Ugh. Do you think this will be dragged out for months? I’ve got tickets to see JukeBox Money in Rockford in August.”
“Oh,” she replied, thinking about the various timelines and alternate realities she had experienced in her lifetime before reassuring him, “the city should be out of this bottle and unshrunk by then.”