#beginneraut

My family called me paranoid in the way people called children silly. Affectionately, yes, and without malice, but with the undertone of disbelief and dismissal.

Not that I blamed them.

I was a dweller. A spiraler.

I could take a passing comment, a strange headline, a statistic ripped from context and worry it between my teeth until it became something else entirely. Something bigger. Something sharper.

Facts and fears had a habit of tangling together in my head until I couldn't tell where one ended and the other began.

More often than not, I frightened myself for nothing.

But here it was again.

Biting.

No, Gnawing.

Chewing at the fabric of my soul while I looked at the plump faces of my children and imagined all the ways the world could end. A war. A plague. An invasion. The dead clawing their way from the earth.

Anything.

Everything.

I pictured underground cellars and boarded windows. Emergency food stores and escape routes. How quickly I could gather them if I had to run. Which child I'd carry. Which hand I'd hold.

I hated those thoughts.

Most of all, I hated how real they felt.

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My husband was the kind of man who walked out of the house without locking it and left the keys still hanging from the car door.

"Confident," he'd call it.

I'd call it complacency.

Unfortunately for me, the universe seemed determined to reward him for it.

Nothing bad ever happened.

No one stole the car.

No one broke into the house.

No hidden cameras appeared in hotel rooms.

No stranger turned dangerous.

The world met his carelessness with a patience it had never once extended to me.

He loved me. I never doubted that. But he listened to my worries the way a therapist listened to a patient spiral into delusion. Patiently. Affectionately. 

Never seriously.

"Jo, I wouldn't worry about it."

"No, Jo. I'd never let anything happen to you."

"You need to get off the internet."

Or my personal favorite:

"Why is the sky falling today, Josephine?"

He'd laugh when he said it...Sometimes I'd laugh too.

That was the worst part.

For a little while, he'd make me wonder if I really was crazy.

Maybe I was.

Today we sat at the kitchen table.

Plywood and vinyl made to look more expensive than it was. Manufactured charm. I liked it. I liked the two-hundred-dollar price tag even more.

Across from me, my husband stared over the rim of his coffee mug.

He took it black. Strong. Bitter. Uncomplicated. The kind of coffee that didn't need cream or sugar or reassurance. Very much like him.

 "What are your plans for the day?"

I shrugged. "I don't know." 

"You don't know?" 

"No."

He hummed and took another sip. "Gas prices are probably about to go up." My eyes flicked toward him. "Are they?" "Yeah. Apparently, we bombed Iran."

The words landed on the table between us with all the weight of a grocery list. I stared. He didn't. He just took another drink. I felt something cold unravel in my stomach. "What?" My brows furrowed. My thumbnail immediately found the skin beside my other thumb, scratching at it without thought. A nervous habit. An old one.

"What do you mean we bombed Iran?"

"Jo."

The warning came instantly. Not harsh. Not annoyed. Worse.

Amused.

"We're not doing this."

"I'm asking a question."

"You've got that look."

"What look?"

"The look where you're about thirty seconds away from explaining how this turns into World War Three."

I opened my mouth. Then closed it. Because the worst part was that he wasn't wrong.

He sighed. "Don't start." He pointed at me with his coffee mug. "I'm serious."

"I'm not starting anything."

"Good." Another sip.

Then, casually:

"I'm just saying we should probably be a little more frugal if prices go up."

That smile appeared. That slow smile. The one that said everything would be fine. The one that said the world had survived worse. The one that suggested I was being ridiculous before I'd even spoken.

I smiled back. Because that's what married people do.

They smile. They reassure. They make each other feel better.

But while he drank his coffee, I was already imagining supply chains. Oil. Markets. Retaliation. Escalation. Missiles. War. And somewhere deep inside me, that thing with the sharp little teeth started chewing again.

He left for work. Forgot his phone. He wouldn't turn around for it. One day without a phone wouldn't bother a man who never worried about who he'd call if disaster struck. Besides, if something happened, I had the numbers of half his coworkers.

Eight hours wouldn't kill him.

At least, that's what he'd say.

Meanwhile, I stood over a frying pan making breakfast while an entire symphony of doom played behind my eyes. Political retaliation. Escalation. Supply chains. Cyber attacks. Missiles. War. My children being blown into squishy little smithereens.

Morbid.

My mind usually was when it got like this.

The eggs hissed. The toast popped up. The apocalypse in my mind continued uninterrupted.

My phone vibrated against the counter. The sound hit me like the nuke had gone off in my kitchen instead of my imagination.

Elizabeth. Or Liz. My best friend. The other half of my chaotic soul. A woman I was fairly certain I would've married if she'd only had the decency to be born a man. Which, in hindsight, would've been a catastrophic marriage. The world wasn't prepared for two of us under the same roof. I answered immediately. Her face filled the screen.

Mahogany hair.

Blue eyes.

The same lopsided bun she always wore.

Motherhood had done to her exactly what it had done to me.

Mainly, stolen any illusion that she'd ever have time to brush her hair properly again. "Where's my goddaughter?" I asked before she could even say hello. I scanned the screen for chubby cheeks. For wild little blue eyes. For Lily. I didn't have daughters. Liz didn't want sons. Together we'd somehow managed to cheat the system. Her daughter was mine. My boys were hers. The arrangement suited everyone involved.

"Well, good morning  to you too," Liz said dryly. "Good morning, sunshine. I need to clean my kitchen. You?" "Always."

It was a routine we'd fallen into years ago.

I cleaned. She cleaned. We sat on video call while accomplishing tasks neither of us seemed capable of doing alone.

Body doubling.

That's what the internet called it. All I knew was that I could scrub an entire bathroom while listening to Liz explain why her step mother was the villain of the week.

Without her? I'd somehow spend three hours staring at a laundry basket while accomplishing absolutely nothing.

The call remained propped against the fruit bowl while we worked. Dishes. Counters. Toys. Laundry. The familiar soundtrack of domestic life punctuated by Liz's running commentary. Television shows. Neighborhood gossip. Family drama. A recipe she'd found and immediately decided she was never making.

The usual.

Eventually both houses reached an acceptable level of cleanliness. The children wandered off. The chores ended. And, as always, the conversation drifted. We settled onto opposite ends of our respective couches. iPads balanced on our knees. Styluses in hand. Drawing. Murmuring. Existing.

The dangerous part of the day.

Because this was when our brains became unsupervised.

Liz glanced up from her screen. "Did you hear?"

There it was. The opening notes of a disaster. I didn't even have to ask.

"Hear what?"

"We might go to war with Iran."

I snorted. "Might?"

"What?"

"We are at war with Iran."

"No, like—"

She lowered her stylus.

I lowered mine.

An invisible shift occurred.

The same one that always did when one of us stumbled across information neither of us was emotionally equipped to process.

"They bombed Iran." I said cutting her off, my thumb digging into the flesh of my lower lip. "Again."

Across the screen, Liz looked up.

"What?"

"Yeah, Jackson just told me this morning...They bombed Iran."

The words sat between us.

Neither of us were foreign policy experts. Neither of us could have pointed to half the countries involved on a map if someone put a gun to our heads.

That wasn't the point.

"What does that mean?" I asked. "For oil? Gas prices? Medicine? Shipping? What happens if it escalates?"

"I don't know."

Neither did I.

That was the problem.

My Amazon cart already held three months of emergency food, water purification tablets, first aid supplies, and enough batteries to survive a small extinction event.

Liz's wasn't much better.

Lily babbled somewhere off screen. My youngest was asleep upstairs. Before I could stop myself, I was calculating distances.

Could I get to them if I had to?

Could they get to me?

If flights stopped. If roads closed. If something happened.

The monster stirred.

Not in my chest.

Deeper.

The place where fear went when it wanted to make a home.

A door opened somewhere beyond Liz's camera.

Heavy footsteps. The unmistakable sound of keys being dropped into a ceramic bowl.

Ben.

I watched Liz glance over her shoulder. "Bad day?" she called. "Every day is a bad day." The response came from somewhere deeper in the house.

A cabinet opened.

Closed.

A few seconds later he appeared behind her, already halfway through unbuttoning his uniform shirt. His eyes flicked to the screen of her ipad.

Then to me.

And immediately I got that look.

That why is the sky falling today, Josephine? look.

The one everyone seemed to have reserved for me.

"Hi Ben," I murmured.

"Hi, Jo."

"The world's ending."

"Always is with you two."

Now, it wasn't as if Ben thought the world was a good place. If anything, he knew better than most. He'd seen people die. Seen families shattered by a single phone call. Seen things that made him question God and humanity on a regular basis. He knew exactly how ugly the world could be. But something about his five-foot-nothing wife and her equally anxious best friend building escape routes across continents and filling Amazon carts with emergency rations made the whole thing seem a little ridiculous.

Not impossible.

Just ridiculous.

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Yall Im in my creative writing era... probably i was super nervous to post this before I just sent it