I was a child when the bombs fell, great flashes of light on the horizons that I watched through the handheld screen of a tablet. I remember the cake that my mother had brought home sitting on the counter with a plastic case over it so I couldn’t get my fingers into the colored icing. I was at the ripe age where I knew the brightly wrapped presents in the closet were mine, and that opening them before the designated time would result in the wrath of my mother and the loss of whatever toys were so neatly wrapped in those boxes. 

We weren’t lucky enough to be evaporated in those blasts. That right had been reserved for those living in highly populated metropolises of the coasts. Nor were we rich enough to afford the shuttle flights up to the stations where they put you to sleep for the long journey to Europa or Callisto where new worlds were being built. Instead, the midwestern suburbs suffered the third fate: chaos. 

The day after the bombs, my birthday, was the beginning of that chaos. Overnight the stores had been ransacked and were left only with bent shelving smeared in the blood of the poor unfortunates who had been trampled, beaten, or even killed in the pursuit of toilet paper and bottled water. My mother took me to the toy section, a relatively unscathed aisle and told me I could pick whatever my heart desired while my father searched the rest of the store for anything left that might be salvageable. 

When we walked out with our shopping cart full of leftover odd and ends my mother told me that it was okay that we didn’t pay at the register because it was all part of my birthday present from the store. Later, they began to leave their credit and debit cards at the empty registers to assure me we weren’t stealing. Those first few weeks were a whirlwind after we loaded up the car with whatever we could scrounge and drove north to visit my grandparents, sometimes taking long scenic detours to avoid cities and traffic jams. Mom had a handful of movies to play in the built-in car player so that I didn’t have to see the horrors outside of those tinted windows.

We eventually made it to grandma and grandpa’s farm, out in the middle of nowhere with the closest neighbors being at least two miles away. I remember grandma hugging me tightly and that night, after they had put me to bed, she told my parents that her and grandpa’s prescriptions only had a supply for sixty days, but the cellar was stocked with canned goods and preservatives that could last us for two to three years, longer if we were still able to grow anything or hunt in that time. 

Grandpa died a month after his heart medication ran out. Grandma followed soon after. Mom got sick the sixth summer post chaos and Dad joined her the next winter. Tomorrow will be my 15th birthday.