She Doesn’t Anymore
The weather girl at the end of the world starts throwing bottles at billboards bearing her face. She collects them from convenience stores in ten-cent plastic bags, tea bottles, beer bottles, cheap pink wine. The clanking they make as she carries them is louder than anything left.
It is so quiet, she thinks, so empty, throws bottle after bottle after bottle, the crackle of glass-shatter and split, till they are gone, all used up, sun-sparkle on the ground.
The weather girl at the end of the world lights a cigarette, leaves scarlet mouthprint ringed around the white, stares up at her oversized face, says goddammit, breathes out smoke and smoke and smoke.
At the end of the world, the weather girl can do anything she ever wanted.
She curls up on her couch under a hand-me-down afghan, stares at the blank television, her face reflected in its dark screen.
Is this me, she says. Is this me.
Outside, there is the whisper of wind, teakettle hiss through the window that would never quite go all-the-way closed. Outside, there is sun and cloud and blue sky.
The weather girl remembers charts and green screens, cold fronts and El Nino. She remembers saying button up, folks. It’s going to be a cold one.
She remembers her coffee gone cold on her desk, the sportscaster’s barcode comb-over, the jittery smile of the evening anchor when she signed off for the last time, though they didn’t know then it would be the last time, how the anchor said to her in the parking lot see you tomorrow and she said see you and they went their separate ways under buzz of fluorescent light.
In her bed, the weather girl dreams vividly. Dark comes heavy and quiet, and she cocoons herself into it, entwines herself in tangled sheets. She dreams there is someone lying beside her. She dreams she is not alone.
Before the world ended, the weather girl used to go to bars by herself, carry her purse at her side, darken her mouth with the lipstick they liked best for on-the-air. There were bars and bars to choose from and, at every one of them, a man who said aren’t you the weather girl, a man who would buy her a drink, a man who wanted her to say Channel 7 News. We know the weather just like she did on television, a man who would take her back to his place, a man who wouldn’t mind her leaving in the morning-dark, clutching purse in hand.
She remembers the sound of her heels on creaking wooden stairs, the way she’d press her hand against the wall for balance as she went down, down, down.
There are, in the city, two hundred and seventeen billboards with the weather girl’s face on them. There are convenience stores and groceries and gas stations and glass, glass, glass.
The weather girl isn’t afraid of cutting her hands on broken shards. The weather girl doesn’t wear her heels anymore.
She turns her face to the sky. Says: It looks like rain.
Cathy Ulrich has vivid dreams where she can smell and taste things. It makes waking up very confusing. Her work has been published in various journals, including Last Exit, Sundog and Forge Lit Mag
