Sarah Black
Give Me Shelter
1966
Second grade, and the gloves come off. “Let’s say you have a bomb shelter with only room for ten people.”
Sister Maria Goretti explained the need for people with essential skills who could also repopulate the planet.
She had a nose like a potato and her thin pale mouth had never known lipstick. Was she planning to be noble
and give up her seat in the bomb shelter, or was she going to dash on some Peachy Keen lip gloss and
do her duty? Whatever that might be?
Mary, Registered Nurse, Age 24 got the first seat. The second went to Alice, Teacher, Age 26. Then we gave
them a man, a lawyer, so he could set up all the rules and laws and so forth when the Geiger counters stopped ticking and they emerged into the barren wasteland to start again.
The artist didn’t get in, too old at fifty-eight and you only have so much food in those shelters, we were reminded.
1976
First boyfriend who breached the portals, and I stared into the gentle, Christ-like eyes of my Bobby Sherman poster over his bare shoulder. We were dressed again when he explained that it was a sin, but it wasn’t until I saw Dorothy wearing his letter jacket that I kicked his sorry butt out of the bomb shelter. I would be living high on Ritz crackers and corned beef, busy repopulating the planet, while outside his blackened skeleton turned to ash and blew away in the wind. Yes, it’s you, S.L. that I’m talking about, and no, you have not been forgiven.
1992
Somehow my intentions to repopulate the planet became urgent and personal right about age thirty, so I proceeded on my own when no husband stepped up to claim his seat in the bomb shelter. Naturally I was a nurse. The first seat was mine, though I had no doubt Sister Maria Goretti would toss my fornicating ass out of there. I drew a tiny chair, a booster seat, and appended it to mine in the shelter. My work was done. Nurse, check. Repopulating planet, check. Wrapped up in a white blanket, he was the size of a loaf of bread. He stared up into my eyes as if I were the sun. “You can be an artist,” Mommy said. “You can be anything. I took care of it.”
2006
A very nice pediatrician lost his seat in the bomb shelter when he explained autism spectrum disorders to me, and it didn’t take long before the entire tribe of child psychologists and teachers had been consigned to the ice and bitter hunger of nuclear winter. Ditto all insurance company executives.
We will build a small shelter of our own. Just room for a mom and boy, and we’ll live high on the hog, fruit cocktail and chicken noodle soup, play Go Fish and listen to the blues and draw pictures like a couple of artists until the electricity winks out.
©2007 by Sarah Black
