Into the Inferno by Earl Emerson Page B

as a kernel of corn.
    My life was no different from anybody else’s. My days passed pretty much like everybody else’s. I got up in the morning and looked in the cupboard for a box of cereal. Thought about the fact that I needed to take the girls shopping for school clothes, that I’d forgotten to write a check for the phone bill. That the car needed gas. I found my wallet empty and went to the cash machine. Like those around me, I was consumed with the minutiae of daily life, by the fact that the driver in the next lane cut me off, by how much of a raise the fire department might expect from the city next year. Crap, all of it. Absolute crap.
    Rarely did anything that mattered touch my thoughts.
    The downpour of daily trifles was so constant and so steady I rarely had time to look up at the sky.
    It sounds foolish to say it, but the feeling of my own impending death seemed to fill the pickup truck. Some philosopher said that when we feel sad for somebody else’s death, we are actually mourning our own. He might have been writing about me.
    When I rolled down the window, the cool night air tossed around some papers on the seat beside me right before it brought tears to my eyes.

DAY TWO
    11. WEAK LEGS, MILD HEADACHE,
THE HANDS TAKE ON A WAXY APPEARANCE
    I woke up unable to breathe.
    When I opened my eyes, a seven-year-old was sitting on my chest, a nine-year-old alongside straddling my pillow as if it were a horse. Britney was skinny as a pencil. She’d been bugging me to cut her hair, which was the same shade of red her mother’s had been as a child. Her older sister, Allyson, had black hair that fell just beyond her shoulders, almost the same color as mine; she thought she wanted to keep hers long. Or short. Alternating opinions by the hour. Allyson was already beginning to stretch out into the elegant young woman she would become.
    Even though I discouraged it, Allyson had taken up the unofficial mantle of mother in the family, striving to be the voice of reason in any familial endeavor or discussion. Allyson had become the sober one, taking after my father and myself, Britney the free spirit, as Lorie had been, as my mother had been in her youth and now was again.
    The three of us had stayed up late playing Monopoly and listening to a Britney Spears CD. “Come on, Dad,” Britney said. “Your alarm’s been going off for hours. You have to wake up. Time to go to work.”
    “Oh, yeah?”
    I’d slept like a rock, which was unusual because I was generally a light sleeper, especially after a day as fraught with emotional scenes as yesterday. Now I had a headache. I wondered if I’d picked up a bug at Tacoma General. But then, I doubted a bug I’d picked up last night could strike so quickly.
    “It’s ten after seven,” Britney said. “You’re not going to have time for breakfast.”
    “The alarm go off? I didn’t hear it.”
    “Been buzzing for hours,” said Allyson, as if already bored with the day, rearranging my hair with one hand.
    “Your alarm woke us up, and we were all the way in the other room,” said Britney. “We’re just little. We’re supposed to sleep through anything.”
    “Know what else?” Allyson asked.
    “What?”
    “If you’re going to find a really good stepmother for us, you’re going to have to stop wasting your time on bimbos.”
    “What makes you think I was with a bimbo last night?”
    “You said yourself she was foxy.”
    “I meant foxlike. As in sharp teeth.” I gnashed my teeth. They laughed.
    “You always say we’d sleep through a
nuclear saster
,” said Britney.
    “Nuclear disaster, honey. And I didn’t hear my alarm.”
    “Buzzing for
hours
,” said Allyson.
    “Yup,” confirmed Britney, sighing. “I don’t know what you’re going to do about breakfast.”
    “I’ll grab a bite at the station.”
    “Dad, what happened to your hands?” Allyson picked up my right hand and showed it Britney.
    “Oh, ick,” said Britney as the front doorbell rang.