When Sophie said the world was going to end, Mimi didn’t think anything of it.  Sophie was always saying things like that, like when she said her cousin was dying and then he didn’t.  But then Sophie added, “Sister Inez says so.”

            That was different.  Sister Inez, Mimi knew, was Sophie’s teacher. Sophie went to the parochial school. Sister Inez was a nun.

            It was the sort of day when sudden gusts and the dark shadows of clouds cut through the sun’s bright warmth, the month moving inexorably toward Halloween. Mimi had been thinking she’d be a figure skater. A figure skater was so graceful and elegant. And brave, teetering toe-top to twirl on a slippery surface of ice. She’d wear the black leotard and tights leftover from ballet lessons, and her crisp crinoline slip cut short to fan out like a tutu, pretty as a parasol. But she didn’t tell Sophie because Sophie said she wasn’t going to trick-or-treat this year, she was too old for it. Sophie was nearly thirteen, almost two years older than Mimi.

            The girls were on their way to the barn where they kept horses. Ponies really, nothing fancy. Their riding pants, in the style of the time, bulged from their young hips like lollipops. They’d been walking fast. There was no time to lose; their mothers wanted them home before dark and already, at three-thirty, there was a sense of the day ending.  But now Mimi stopped at the side of the road.

            “How does she know?” she asked.

            Sophie explained. “Because a hundred years ago a peasant girl in France had a vision of the Virgin Mary and there was a letter that couldn’t be opened for a hundred years and the monks guarded it in the monastery.”

            Mimi didn’t understand how the letter and the vision were connected but she didn’t dare ask. Sophie was so critical lately. You ask too many questions she’d said one day. Don’t you know anything. Grow up. 

            “Now the hundred years are up,” Sophie said, “and they opened the letter. It says the world will end at four o’clock on the third Thursday of October 1957.”

            “That’s tomorrow!” said Mimi.

            “That’s what I said, isn’t it?” Sophie responded impatiently. “Sister Inez told me and another girl on the playground.”

            Mimi had never seen Sister Inez but now imagined her with a round featureless face and wearing great black skirts. She pictured the great black skirts swirling in the wind as Sister Inez called to Sophie and the other girl on a playground not unlike the blacktop of her own school, a large hard square of pavement surrounded by chainlink fence, the boys playing dodgeball or shooting baskets, the girls jumping rope or playing hopscotch on smudged chalked courts. She imagined the great black skirts settling and growing still as the eye of a storm as Sister Inez bent to tell Sophie and the other girl that the world was coming to an end.  And when Sophie said, “She made us promise not to tell anyone,” Mimi saw the great black skirts tremble and buffet about in a new gust and wind around the legs of Sophie and the other girl, and brown fallen leaves gather in cones and skitter across the blacktop like miniature tornadoes.

            “But you’re telling me!” she exclaimed.

            “Just don’t tell anyone else.”

            “Do you think it’s true?”

            “I don’t know.”

            “A nun wouldn’t tell a lie, would she?”

            Sophie shrugged.

            Still, Mimi knew, it could happen. The world could come to an end. Only that day they’d had an air raid drill at school, which everyone knew was in case the Russians dropped the bomb. The siren went off during reading and Miss Dunbar said all right class, you know what to do and be quiet about it, no talking. They dragged their chairs out of the way, scraping them hard across the floor, leaving skid marks, and pushed their desks together in the middle of the room and ducked underneath. The linoleum smelled a mix of dirt and disinfectant. Miss Dunbar lowered the shades on the big windows strewn with cut-outs of jack-o-lanterns and ghosts. Drawing the shades, she said, would keep broken glass from hitting them. Billy Russo, a boy who’d been expelled from three other schools before landing in Miss Dunbar’s class, said if the bomb dropped they’d all be incinerated so what did it matter. Miss Dunbar told him to be quiet or she’d send him to the principal. Her high heels clacked in a slow march around their fortress of desks. Then Billy Russo uttered an eerie ghost sound and everyone giggled, but Mimi closed her fingers around a paper-wrapped sugarlump in her pocket, trying to tuck herself away in a safe place in her mind. The sugar was for Inky, her pony. She kept a stash in her bedside table–for Inky, but also for herself, her mother, her brothers. Just in case the bomb dropped. At least they’d have something to eat.

            “Let’s skip,” Sophie called out over her shoulder, already on her way. “Race you to the barn!”      

            Skipping seemed somehow unfitting, what with the world coming to an end, but Mimi wanted to keep up and before long, moving through the October air, arms swinging, legs pumping, wind flinging falling leaves, she was filled with exhilaration and couldn’t wait to press her face into the soft warmth of Inky’s burgeoning winter coat.

#

            “How was school?” her mother asked at the dinner table that night.

            “We had an air raid drill,” said Mimi.

            “Whole school did,” Eric added.

            “Me too,” said Daniel, the youngest of them.

            “Did you go outside?” their mother asked, indifferently.

            “Air raid’s inside, Mom,” Eric said. “In case the big one drops. Pum! Pow! Zowie!” He made outlandish gestures with his arms, punching the air.

            Daniel chimed in and launched green peas off his knife at Mimi, and Mimi screamed at him.

            Their mother said in her tired, fed-up voice, “Stop it. Not at the table. If your father were here….” Her voice trailed off. It made them all fall silent, as it did every time, the way it tumbled out and hung in the air unfinished. Mimi longed to hear the end of the sentence…if your father were here things would be different… happier…safer….

            “I meant,” their mother said, “did you play outside in all the wind and everything?”

            The great black skirts swirled to mind. For a moment Mimi thought to tell what Sister Inez had said. But she couldn’t, she’d promised Sophie. And who knew what would happen if she did tell.

            “If the world comes to an end,” Mimi said, “how will it happen?”

            “The bomb,” Eric said. “The Russians will drop the bomb.”

            “It’ll explode,” said Daniel with a certain amount of glee.

            “We would be incinerated,” Mimi said, remembering Billy Russo’s word.

            “Burned up,” Eric said.

            “Burned alive,” said Daniel.

            “Who would like a baked apple?”  Mom called from the counter.

            “But maybe the planet would crack open,” Eric said.

            Mimi imagined Earth breaking apart and everyone and everything flung into the dark rarified space of an unending universe. “Would we float in space?”

            “In outer space!” cried Daniel, his eyes wide with excitement.

            “Baked apple anybody?”

            “It might implode,” Eric offered. He illustrated with the motion of his hands. “We’d be sucked into its molten core.”

            “What’s molten?” asked Daniel.

            Mom hovered over the table with a Pyrex and spatula.  “I’m not going to ask again. Who wants baked apple?”

            They all ate baked apples and watched Captain Video.

            At bedtime, when she said her prayers, Mimi made the extra effort of kneeling on the floor, knees pressed hard against the rough coils of braided rug. She God-blessed everyone in her family, and Sophie, and the horses, and ended, as always, with God bless daddy in heaven but added, please God don’t let the world end tomorrow.

            Under the covers, with her eyes closed, she wondered if the earth exploded, or imploded, or broke up, or spun off its axis and fell through the universe, what would happen to the sky. Where would Heaven be?

#

            The next morning was overcast and so still it didn’t seem the right sort of weather for the world to end. Sophie called Mimi before they left for their respective bus stops and they made plans to ride to the old cemetery at the top of the ridge after school. It was Sophie’s idea. If the world was going to end, she said, they might as well be in a graveyard.

            Everything at school proceeded as usual until afternoon in social studies. They were reading about truck farms in the mid-Atlantic when suddenly Miss Dunbar told them to close their books and push their desks not to the center, as they did for air raids, but to the edges of the room. She was going to teach them to waltz.

            She had them line up and instructed them to move their feet one-two-three, left-right-together. Then she assigned boys to girls. Mimi ended up with Billy Russo. Miss Dunbar told the boys to take the girl’s right hand and put their other hand on her waist, and the girls to put their left hand on the boy’s shoulder. Then she removed a record from its jacket, holding it gingerly at its edges and gazing at it before turning to the class and saying Billy Russo, what is the capital of Missouri? Billy Russo said Kansas City and Miss Dunbar said wrong, try again, and Billy Russo, a boy who’d been expelled from three schools, who had no fear of teachers or principals, who greased his hair and cursed and was caught smoking in the boys’ room, Billy Russo hung his thumbs in his pants pockets and said how the hell should I know and who cares what the capital of Missouri is anyway. Miss Dunbar glowered at Billy Russo. Don’t you ever dare talk to me like that again, she said. Class, what’s the capital of Missouri? Mimi and several other students called out Jefferson City. Then Miss Dunbar blew gently on the record and set it on the turntable. When she lifted the arm she held it poised over the revolving LP, saying, as if it meant something special to her, boys and girls, this is the Missouri Waltz.

            Mimi and Billy Russo moved their feet awkwardly to the music. He tried not to step on her toes. She tried not to bump him. But his warmth, like the heat of a horse, aroused a slight trembling in her. It was as if she liked him. And you weren’t supposed to like Billy Russo. Not someone like Billy Russo.

            When the waltz ended, he said thank you, she said you’re welcome, and they quickly turned from each other.

#

            To reach the cemetery by four the girls rode the trails as fast as they dared, cantering wherever the rocky footing gave over to smooth earth, galloping the hayfield to the top of the ridge. By the time they came out on the road the horses were breathing hard, sweating under their half-sprung winter coats.

            Up ahead a car was parked near the cemetery gate. The driver was sitting in it.

A man, Mimi could tell by the back of the head. She rode close by the passenger side. The window was rolled down and she glanced in. Her view across the seat revealed the man’s lap, his fly open, his hand cupped. Immediately she knew she was seeing something she wasn’t supposed to. The man turned his head and their eyes met. His look bore into her, a glance both fierce and frightened as a wild cornered animal.

            In the same moment Sophie rushed by, saying hurry up, it’s almost four. And Inky bounded forward to follow close on Sophie’s mare’s rump.

            They jumped the low iron railing into the graveyard and trotted swiftly, dodging headstones, some toppled, some flat to the ground, stones revealing birth and death dates only a few years or months or even days apart–what had startled Mimi on a previous visit–until they reached the now near-leafless maple in the middle of the cemetery.

            “The man in the car–” Mimi started breathlessly…she would tell Sophie…Sophie would know…

            Sophie put her finger to her lips. “Ssshh! It’s time!”

            Time for the world to blow up. Or break apart. Or cave in. Mimi looked back and saw the car drive off and disappear down the road.

            The girls waited. They listened for a rumble, a sizzle, a wind’s gathering roar, but there were only the soft chewing sounds of the horses and a few errant chirps from the last surviving peepers rising from the wetlands at the bottom of the hill, a reminder of summer past.

            Finally Sophie said, “Sister Inez is nuts.”

            And they started home.

#

            Coming in the house at dusk Mimi hung her jacket in the back hall and sat on the bench to pull off her boots. It was a hard tug; she was outgrowing them. She had the thought she could be Zorro for Halloween instead of a figure skater. She would wear the boots and a black cape and mask and carry a sword.

            She could hear her mother on the phone in the kitchen, the sound muffled until her mother’s voice suddenly chimed out loud and clear, “I told him I’m Billy Sunday on a Saturday night.”

            Billy Sunday on a Saturday night! The words seemed to dance in the air.  What could it mean? And then her mother laughed in a way Mimi hadn’t heard her laugh in a long time.

            Mimi stood the two boots upright next to each other and marched into the kitchen.

Her mother had just hung the phone down and was wiping tears of laughter from her face. When she saw Mimi she threw open her arms and Mimi ran into them.

            Her mother hugged her tightly. “Did you have a good day?”

            Even as a blur of images–Sister Inez and Sophie, Billy Mason, the man in the car–reeled through her mind, Mimi said, “Miss Dunbar taught us to waltz today.”

            “That’s nice.”

            “Who’s Billy Sunday, Mom?”

            Her mother laughed.  “Oh you heard that, did you? I was just making a joke.”

            “But who is he?”

            “He was an evangelist back in the twenties and thirties. A prohibitionist.  Nothing you need to know about. It doesn’t matter. “

            Maybe not. It was the change in her mother’s voice that mattered. It was light and full of warmth. It was the way the words Billy Sunday on a Saturday night  had danced in the air.

            “Do you know the Missouri Waltz?” Mimi asked.

            “Everyone knows the Missouri Waltz,” her mother said and sang, hush-a-bye my baby, slumber time is coming soon.

            Hearing the melody gave Mimi a quiver. She felt suddenly as if she were spinning in the air like a figure skater above a slick uncertain surface.

            She slid her foot, knee sock bunched at the ankle, over the linoleum.

            “I may be Zorro for Halloween,” she said. And she slashed the air with a pretend sword.

Catholic school coming of age dread Halloween Litro USA prophecy short story