Emily Rinkema: MAYBE THIS IS WHAT THE END IS LIKE • Cleaver Magazine

Flash by Emily Rinkema
MAYBE THIS IS WHAT THE END IS LIKE

“We could eat the dog,” Sam says. He takes a piece of bread and mops up the sauce left on his plate. It’s his favorite, a roasted red pepper and garlic sauce, a recipe from my mother.

“Lucy?” I look down at our fat lab, curled under the table as she always is during meals. Her ear twitches.

“No,” he says, “Not Lucy. It’s hypothetical, so it would be a hypothetical dog.”

I set down my fork. “That’s not how it works,” I say. “Hypothetical doesn’t mean made up. It doesn’t mean not real. It doesn’t mean you get to just magically have the dog not be our dog if you’re hungry.”

“You didn’t say hungry, you said starving to death,” Sam says. He puts his napkin on the table. “And you said it’s an apocalypse. A zombie apocalypse. Not real.”

“Never mind,” I say. “It was a stupid question. I don’t want to play anymore.”

We’d been laughing just a moment ago, buzzed after a few glasses of wine, trying to make light of the latest news, of the soaring egg prices, of the escalating protests, of the children dying, of the storms hitting, of the planes crashing, of the judges being arrested, of the borders closing. We were being absurd. It was just a game. Sam was right, it wasn’t real.

I finish my glass of wine and push my chair back from the table. Sam starts eating again. Lucy lifts her head, trying to decide whether to go with me or stay near the food.

“We’re okay, baby,” I say to her, because it’s true, even though it’s not.

Emily Rinkema lives and writes in northern Vermont, USA. Her writing has recently appeared in Flash Frog, Gone Lawn, Ghost Parachute, and Wigleaf, and she won the 2024 Cambridge Prize and the 2024 Lascaux Prize for flash fiction. You can read her work at her website or follow her on X, BS, or IG @emilyrinkema.