Heart Shaped

I gotta finish these beans.

Two years in and I’m running low on supplies. I should have probably stockpiled more, but I knew enough to get what I got. That was good enough to last me until now.

Sounder keeps scratching at the door. I chalk that up to some idiotic animal instinct that compels him to explore, to go outside, to do something other than remain in the safety afforded to us by my preparations. After all, the only reason he’s even around to scratch at that door is because I took the time to prepare.

He eventually gets tired of scratching and goes over to his toybox, where he rummages through long-since-destroyed plush animals with broken squeakers until he finds one suitable enough to bring to me for a game of fetch. This time, it’s a tattered rabbit.

“You sure do like to chase things,” I remark, grinning to myself. “Stupid.”

He bounces his paws excitedly on the astroturf as I rear up to throw. I think he knows exactly where it’s going to land at this point, but his excitement is genuine nonetheless. The room is only 18-feet wide by 30-feet long. I throw it at the opposite wall every time. But every time, it might as well be a brand new game to him.

I chuck the rabbit at the same empty spot I always do, and he dives after it in a frenzy. He pounces on it and sinks his jaws into the soft cotton a few times, before reporting back to me and dropping it at my feet again.

It must be hell to be an animal.

Every instinctual impulse commands immediate fulfillment. Animals don’t ever take a step back to see the bigger picture. Instead, they just blindly bounce from desire to desire, aimlessly traversing a life of basic, simple pleasures, without taking into account the gravity of it all. Just simple creatures with simple desires.

I glance back at my desk, where, for two years, a solitary newspaper front page has sat, neatly folded on display.

THREAT TO HUMANITY? ASTRONOMERS ANNOUNCE NEIGHBORING STAR BECOMING SUPERNOVA

I’m not a simple man. I’m strategic and cerebral, and I’m not ashamed to say it. I possess an almost-superhuman ability to navigate risk, and it served me well for many years as a stock broker. My clients were always satisfied with my work, and I made fantastic money.

If I ever get too cynical, I tell myself the money was what attracted Sylvia to me. But I have the depth to recognize when I’m being moody, and I then distract myself with a book or a puzzle.

Looking back on it, I should have probably gotten more things that were of some use to pass time in here. But, I tell myself, that is only a personal failure. The important thing is that I’ve succeeded enough to be afforded the luxury of such an introspection. I feel like most of the population fell short of even that.

The fact that I’m running out of food has been weighing heavily on me. Could I have done more? Could I have spent more time, or more money, getting more supplies together to last longer?

The answer, of course, is always yes. You could always have done more, or done a better job, or tried a little harder. But, having never seen a lifetime supply of food, alongside Sylvia’s constant doubts about the extreme sobriety with which I approached this situation, I did what I could.

Sylvia wasn’t simple either, but she failed to recognize a catastrophe when she saw one. I tried endlessly-- I begged her, even-- to truly appreciate what was happening here. I told her, “Proxima Centauri is the closest star to Earth. This is a disaster the likes of which humanity has never seen, and is ill-equipped to even process. To say it’s not a disaster, though,” I warned her, “is to absolutely betray the capabilities of the human brain.”

Sounder comes back with the toy again, and his expression also conveys a vague sense of worry.

“I don’t know what you’re worried about,” I tell him. “Your bowl’s full of food, you prick.”

I scoop up his toy and rear it back behind my head. He perks up like usual, waiting for it to sail across the room.

A sharp pain suddenly stings my arm, and my normal throw instead hooks far to the left, sending the rabbit gracelessly across my tightly-made bed. It tumbles further and knocks the lamp off the nightstand.

Sounder begins to prance towards it, but he freezes instead. He whips around back to me, his head cocked, his eyes wide and curious.

“I’m getting old, all right?!” I grumble, and I shoo him off.

He gallops towards the toy and snatches it off the bed, while I limp behind him to remedy the mess that’s been made. It takes me a little while to get all the way across the room with my legs as feeble and atrophied as they’ve become, but I eventually arrive at the tipped-over lamp that lies on the floor.

With a strained grunt I bend down, scoop it up, and return it to its place on the nightstand. The shade has bent and now hangs preposterously crooked. I struggle to restore it to its correct position as something seems to be impeding it. Getting frustrated, I pick it up and slam it on the nightstand, and something breaks loose from it.

Good job, I scold myself. Such conduct is certainly befitting of such a cerebral mind.

Frustrated further still, I turn to the floor to see what’s tumbled out.

It’s the other half of her locket.

After several painful seconds of exertion, I take a weary seat on the bed, studying it in my hand. It’s half of a heart, containing her picture. I used to wear it every day until I permanently moved into the bunker, where it served as only a painful memory of my failure to persuade her. At some point, I must have thrown it across the room, where it landed in the lampshade.

She saw something in me that nobody else ever has. She had a keen idea of some sort of wholesomeness within me that I’d never experienced before. There were times we spent together where, briefly, I almost felt it.

As a successful money manager, it was my job to invoke a sense of ease within people. Cynical me thinks Sylvia never figured out, or never allowed herself to figure out, that I only did the same thing to her. But I don’t think I really believe that.

Sounder scratches at the door again.

“Get off the door!” I holler, hurling the locket at him. From where I sit, I can hear the gold half-heart knock against his forehead. He whines and scampers under my desk.

“Sounder!” I exclaim, trying to get up off the bed, but the pain in my weary legs draws me immediately to the floor. “Sounder, I’m sorry!” I holler.

He just whimpers beneath the desk.

That kind of temper isn’t good for a father to have, Logan, she’d say to me.

At first, I was able to laugh it off. Foolish me, right? But as she started bringing it up more and more --How would a child interpret that? Isn’t that something to think about?-- I grew colder and colder about it.

“Sounder!” I cry, now crawling across the floor towards the terrified animal. “I didn’t mean it!”

I’m worried you need help, she’d finally said to me.

I couldn’t make her appreciate the dwelling I’d toiled over, dug the hole for, welded the steel for, laid the astroturf inside of for some vague notion of comfort --for her!

You really don’t think it’s worth it, she’d lamented. You think it’s all risk. You really think it’s all pain.

“Didn’t you read the papers?!” I’d screamed at her. “Don’t you get it?! Don’t you understand the catastrophe we’re about to endure? And you’d be so selfish to subject a child to this?!”

“Sounder!” I holler, getting nearer to the frightened dog now.

He growls at me, stuffing himself further into the corner beneath the desk. His front paws violently shove his food bowl away from him, sliding it along the floor until it collides solidly with my chin.

A loud banging rings out against the door. We both freeze our stares upon each other. His eyes are wide with a sense of-- something--

He crashes through the legs of the desk, breaking them free and causing it to collapse into a chaotic heap upon the floor. The newspaper flutters through the air and lands against my face.

He scratches and barks violently at the door, like a prisoner begging for escape.

To my abject horror, the door creaks open, and something bestial overtakes me.

LOCAL MAN LOCATED IN “DOOMSDAY BUNKER” AFTER TWO YEARS MISSING

On Saturday afternoon, Rudy Bishop was taking his dog Sandy for their nightly stroll before bed when he heard what he believed to be a man yelling on Redwood Street. He followed the sound to discover it appeared to be coming from the yard of an abandoned residence. Once he hopped the fence and entered the yard, however, he very quickly became confused.

“It was coming from underground,” he said. “Sandy liked to sniff along the fence a lot, which I thought was kind of odd, but I never expected something like this.”

Sandy began to dig furiously into a patch of grass, revealing what appeared to be some sort of latch.

“I just started banging on it,” said Bishop. “I thought someone was in trouble. Then I heard a dog barking, and me and Sandy started to dig faster.”

When they finally uncovered the door and opened it, they were met with a gruesome sight: a man sprawled on the floor, screaming, his face buried in a bowl of dog food, and a newspaper draped over his head.

“It wasn’t what I expected,” said Bishop.

The man was 38-year-old financial advisor Logan Dyer, who had been missing for two years. Sources close to the man say he panicked over the Proxima Centauri Supernova Crisis, and began exhibiting bizarre behavior before finally going missing.

“It’s crazy to think about someone getting so upset over it,” mused Bishop. “Didn’t they blow it up after, like, two months?”

Dyer appears to have acted so quickly in the construction of his bunker, he was never made aware of the multinational efforts of the Worldwide Celestial Atomic Bomb Project, which effectively neutralized the star before it ever truly posed a threat to mankind.

Rescuers described his demeanor as “violent, delusional, and psychotic.”

Dyer was brought to Spring Valley Memorial Hospital, where he was treated for malnourishment, and placed into an indefinite psychiatric hold.

Despite his advanced state of psychosis, an anonymous source from inside the hospital claims there is one person who can get him to calm down. The nurse, who will remain unnamed, is the only person for whom he will cease his disturbed behavior.

“It’s so strange,” the source told us. “He calmed right down when she walked in to feed him. Then, I heard him say ‘Maybe being an animal isn’t so bad.”

When asked what that could have meant, the source just shrugged. “Beats me. Didn’t seem to faze her, either. She just told him to finish his beans.”