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Saturday, May 21, 2011

June 22 Book: "things we didn't see coming" by Steve Amsterdam

Join us at Peter L's house with the author. Steve Amsterdam will read from his new book, "Things we didnt see coming"
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2 comments :

David Madison said...

She’s been with me since the second judgment day. Camping, the old man with the bible on his lap, had been wrong with his first prediction, but was right that May 21 was just the beginning of the end. By the time October 21 came around, no one was mocking him any more. The tornados came first, taking out portions of our state, which had rarely been visited by them in the historic past. The first one killed a few people and brought on what the governor at the time considered a “state of emergency.” Once they started coming more regularly, the floods followed and people started dying or moving up to the hilltowns, where I had always lived.

The first thing the new, local government did was to make parking free all over town, not just near the school, and anyone that complained was warned once, then shot. After a day or two, no one complained about parking. The next rule was to allow anyone to sell cocaine and not have to worry about it, but all the pharmacies had already burned to the ground, and the war-heroin traffic had come to a standstill, but it was still referred to as Rule Number Two for a long time afterwards. Rule Number Three had something to do with the father from To Kill a Mockingbird, but I can’t remember what it was and I never really liked that book anyhow.

After they shut down air travel – too many worries about spreading contamination after the meltdowns in Japan, Russia, Finland and a few of our southwestern states – people started adding their own rules. A basketball teammate moved in with his dogs and guns. He said he had always liked my wife and my house on the hill, and figured the house and the wife would be better off with more protection. He’d lost his family to the first flu, even though his neighbor had all the drugs, and my kids had gone fast, one of them to a rabid fishercat, the other to a Wizard-of-Oz-like tornado that probably took her someplace further than Kansas. She’d forgotten to snap her leg-chain shut and just zipped right out of my hands. The basketball buddy didn’t last long, although he did help me build a moat and get the tapper on the basement keg working better. He got careless with his guns one Magic Hat-filled night and he and my wife died in some sort of an accident.

I’d been staying down in different houses near the former college when I made my midnight rambles for supplies. Once the Alaskans took over Washington, all the doctors disappeared. It was hard for the towns, but their houses usually had nice sound systems and decent medicine cabinets. With the dogs and the guns, I was usually able to make it through a night unprovoked.

I ransacked Gleason’s Hardware one night. Let the dogs sniff their way through it, but it seemed like no one had known it was there, and I got enough supplies to last me until the real Judgment Day. She followed me home that night -- must have gone the twelve miles without making a sound because I didn’t note her presence until she walked in my door.

6/21/2011 3:02 PM
Kevin Oslo said...

I told her to get out real quick but she told me real quick that she was clean and took her clothes off fast so I could see there wasn’t even any rash. I told her to put them back on and head out just the same, but she said her brother had stashed cars and gas across the country and she had all the keys now that he had died. I told her to put the clothes back on anyhow, but that she could stay for some food. Later we danced to Frampton Comes Alive on an old 8-track. That was the first mistake. The second was letting the thing play until “Baby, I Love Your Way,” because she moved in close and the dancing got slow. “My moms always liked this song,” she said.

“Where’d they go to college?” I asked. She named some place I didn’t recognize, so I figured at least I’d never danced with one of them, which was the way I was thinking back then. There were rules that had fallen fast to the wayside, but breaking them still put a little stuck in your craw. So I let her burrow in, although I kept her hands from the gun I had stuffed in the back of my pants. Accidents can happen, believe me.

“Is it true?” she asked.

“Is what true?”

“California?”

I just kept dancing and she cried a little bit, but then she licked my neck. I moved her away from me, but still held her shoulders. “What’s that all about?” I asked.

“It’s in The Book,” she said. “Thou shalt lick the neck of the one that shall protect you. Amsterdam 3: 2-5.”

“The Bible?”

“No, there’s no Amsterdam in the Bible, dipshit,” she said. “Sorry about the dipshit line, but no one’s reading the Bible anymore. After the Word of Camping, everyone follows Amsterdam now.”

“Thus the neck licking?”

“It’s as The Book foretells,” she said. “You are henceforth and furthermore obligated to protect the one who licks the neck.”

“You got any other protection?” I asked.

She nodded and we certified the arrangement right then and there, while the dogs watched and Paris burned.

6/21/2011 3:03 PM

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