Apocalypse by Nancy Springer

how the propaganda tried to say they had nothing to do with poverty and dirt.
    She climbed (rapidly; use calories) the steep old stairs to the fifth grade classroom on the second floor. (Put the bigger kids up there, she imagined some teacher saying, Hope they’ll be responsible enough not to push each other over the railings splat on the foyer floor. And some other teacher saying, I can think of a few we can splat.)
    She found the microscope set up on a windowsill. She looked at the louse.
    And gasped, a small sound, quickly stilled. And gawked. She had expected something like a flea, some sort of insect, but this was like nothing so easily apprehended. Under the microscope it seemed to come at her, looming out of a black porthole, swimming, translucent, and entirely too leggy. Though she was not sure whether the numerous long protuberances were legs, or hairs, or feelers of some sort, or … Something like the clinging tendrils on a squash plant, but many, many, and Cally did not look long enough to entirely decipher what she had seen. She turned away with a shudder, remembering the dish of cold spaghetti in the Boy Scout Halloween House of Horrors—“Feel here, these are his guts!”—remembering the long tentacles of a childish old nightmare, feeling the memory as she sometimes felt the bloodsucking touch of Hoadley.
    Or of family.
    Cally’s father, a frozen-meat salesman, had made a modest success of himself, had grown prosperous, supported his wife and children in a manner to be proud of, and died before his time of heart failure. He had been a decent, hard-working man, entitled to rest and be let alone when he was home. He and Cally’s mother had slept in twin beds. She had never seen her parents argue, never seen them kiss. Cally’s mother, clinically depressed all her adult life, had perturbed her adult children by regaining her mental health with alacrity shortly after her husband died. She lived in the Finger Lakes district of New York state, wintered on the Gulf coast of Florida, and devoted her days to cards, clubs and luncheons as she had once devoted them to doctor’s appointments, self-help books, counseling, isometrics, religion, aerobics, health-food catalogues, psychiatry, bee pollen pills, revival meetings, astrology, and the I Ching. There had been little time and no energy in her for her children beyond the basics of their physical upkeep. Though adequately fed, Cally had grown up hungry for her parents. Her hunger for them was their hold on her. That grip clung, leeched, threw out long tentacles around her even at the distance of death and time and place.
    Cally’s childhood daydreams had been of beatings and torments. Sometimes, in the fantasies, her father and mother had been the perpetrators of torture. The dreams had been pleasant, because after suffering she had felt that she deserved love. The imaginary abuse had its bittersweet pleasures; the real neglect had none.
    Suffer, her Cinderella mythology had said, and someone will rescue you and love you and take care of you forever. And make you happy. And there had been Mark, and he had brought her to Hoadley. Her new family.
    And she turned away from looking at the louse and shivered, for the new family had much the same slithering feel to her as the old.
    In the evening Cally took the children to her in-laws for supper because of the viewings. When mourners were in the Home, no cooking odors could intrude their tactless presence from the apartment upstairs, no childish thumpings and scamperings and vociferations were allowed overhead, and even ordinary footsteps were discouraged—when she had to be around, Cally laid old pillows on the floor and walked on them. But generally she and the kids cleared out.
    On this May day, warm at last after the long Hoadley winter, the beautiful day the omens began, there was no hurry; they walked. Ten-year-old Tammy and her younger brother Owen, full of the pent-up