text: My name is Dante, and we get to eat the last box of cookies today. We’ve been saving them for something special. Today is special because I am five. I was four yesterday, and before that I was three, two, and one. Before I was one, I was in Babe’s tummy. Drake put me there. Drake is twenty-two. Babe is twenty-one. I’m so excited for the cookies. We will get to eat them instead of potatoes from the bathroom. Babe and Drake put a garden in the bathroom when I was two. I put poo in there to feed the food. We put seeds in there from old food, but they can’t be wet seeds. Seeds must dry before they grow. Never eat seeds, even if you are really hungry. Babe always says “Eating a potato seed today won’t fill you up the way a potato would tomorrow.” The rest of the cookies were gone a long time ago. Babe ate them when I was in her tummy. I’m so hungry that sometimes I will eat the leaves off of the plants when Drake isn’t in the bathroom. Drake was in the bathroom all night trying to fix the generator. We stopped using the generator for seeing lights when I was two. Now we only use it for the food lights in the bathroom. The food lights feed plants like the sun used to do. I’ve never seen the sun. The sun lives Outside with God and dogs and cars and rain and heaven and trees and buildings. It used to make light Outside until it stopped. Drake says God isn’t real, but Babe always yells at him when he says that. I don’t think God or the sun is real. Babe tried to show me a picture of the sun once. It was in the kindling. Babe will stare at the kindling for hours with her brown hair hiding her face before giving it to Drake to make fire. She says the stories hide in the kindling. I shook the kindling as hard as I could, but no stories fell out. It’s really cold everywhere in Wal-Mart. Yesterday, it was warm in the bathroom because of the food lights. Today it isn’t because we don’t have any more oil. Oil smells bad. We make it warm near the dressing room by making fire. Drake will start by setting fire to kindling with the old sparks from the night before. Then Babe will add pieces of chairs, or shelves to make it burn longer. I tried to make fire to surprise them once, but I messed up. The fire on the kindling was so pretty; I tried to pick it up to show Drake. My hands are rough and scratchy where the fire bit me. The floor is black where I held the fire. Babe sometimes points to different places on the floor and tells me stories about the spots. The biggest spot is brown and black. It’s outside the dressing room. That’s where I left Babe’s tummy. There is a brown spot where the floor changes from carpet to tile. I threw up there back when I was sick. Babe was really scared because the medicine was old. She didn’t want to give me medicine to make me better because it might have made me dead. I didn’t want to eat the medicine either, but Drake made me and I got better. Everyday I go shopping with Babe. I push the cart to make my muscles strong and Babe puts food in the cart for us to eat. I don’t know why she never adds more food. I used to ask her to put more food in, but she would start crying. I don’t ask anymore. There’s not much food on the shelf anymore. That’s why we can’t eat as much. Once a week, we take the cart to the toy aisle and I get to put a toy in the cart. I like the puzzles the best. The pieces fit together and make a picture. When I’m done with a puzzle Babe tells me all about the picture. My favorite puzzle had bears on it. Bears eat salmon. When I finish a puzzle, Drake adds it to the kindling. After we shop, Drake meets us in the dressing room. We eat on the futon where we sleep. We have eleven blankets to make the futon softer. Babe and Drake keep me warm with their bodies. Drake’s hair smells like oil. It makes me sneeze. Babe tells me a story every night before we sleep. My favorite story is about how Babe and Drake came to Wal-Mart. ••• Goldville was evacuated. Evacuated means everybody left. Goldville is with the sun and God and dogs and cars and rain and heaven and trees and buildings. Babe and Drake were driving the car that’s by the gates. Then there was an earthquake. That means the floor shook a lot. Drake got distracted by the earthquake and crashed into the doors. The doors used to be where the gate is. The bathroom has a door. The dressing rooms don’t have doors. They have curtains. Babe and Drake sat in the car for a while until Drake’s ears heard a jingle. The gates were closing. They shut with a bang! The gates were supposed to keep bad people from stealing food from Wal-Mart. Stealing means taking things without giving money for it. Babe says I don’t need to know what money is because it’s too complicated. We aren’t stealing because we aren’t taking the food Outside of Wal-Mart. The roads Outside were broken, and a lamppost fell over in front of the Wal-Mart. A lamppost is a really tall seeing light for when the sun leaves at night. It’s always night now. Babe and Drake couldn’t get out because of the gates were blocking the Outside, so they went back to the car and turned on the radio. The radio beeped and then turned on the emergency station. The guy hiding in the radio said, “The earthquake has reached 7.6 on the Richter Magnitude scale. Its epicenter is in Gardiner, Montana.” “That’s only a few hours north of here!” shouted Babe. “What are we going to do?” “Babe, calm down.” Drake comforted Babe this way ever since they met. “This building is solid. It’s not going anywhere. You-” He was interrupted by the radio’s fuzzy voice. “Prepare for aftershocks. Find shelter under a doorframe, or sturdy table. If you are Outside move away from buildings and power lines that can fall on you. Crouch on the ground and tuck your head into your knees. Protect your neck with your hands.” The radio kept talking as Drake and Babe fought about what to do. “Drake! We have to get out! The building might fall in!” Babe was very scared. Tears slid down her pink cheeks, but Drake calmed her down and made her stay in the car. The car would protect them from falling stuff. The shelves are all bolted to the floor so they didn’t fall, but everything fell off the shelves. The floor started to shake again and Babe and Drake crouched on the seats until it stopped. Glass bottles crashed to the ground and broke. The guy in the radio kept talking but Babe and Drake couldn’t hear anything over the rumbling. The floor makes noise when an earthquake happens. “The after shock...rumble rumble...Yellowstone.... Erupting ... Crash!... Ash in the air..Boom!...Seal doors and windows...Bang!” Then, the radio stopped working and the second earthquake stopped. There were a lot more tiny earthquakes before Drake got out of the car to look around. There was broken glass everywhere. Don’t touch broken glass or you will bleed. Tables were knocked over and a lot of signs broke off of the walls. Fish tanks in the pet aisle were broken and fish flopped all over the floor in the glass. Drake tried to save the fish and put them in a big bucket of water. The fish all died and he later used that water to fertilize the bathroom. The pink tub for my bath used to be that bucket. Drake wasn’t scared at all until he looked Outside. In the sky was a big gray cloud moving closer and closer. It was the ash from the volcano. A volcano is an evil mountain that squirts lava and ash into the air. “Get out of the car!” Drake yelled. Babe didn’t want to leave the safety of the car, but she had to help. They grabbed the same cart that we still use for shopping and picked stuff from the mess. Babe and Drake worked together to put layers of tarps, blankets, and shower curtains over the gates to keep the ash from making their lungs not work. Lungs keep you alive by making you breathe. They didn’t just cover the gates. They covered windows and cracks in the walls attaching them all with a nail gun and duct tape. Anywhere that air could get in was protected from the ash. It took a whole day for them to start eating the food because they didn’t have money to pay for it. Drake and Babe were scared of getting in trouble. Nobody came to help by then so Drake got some yogurt from the refrigeration section. Dairy stuff was eaten first so it didn’t expire. Expired food can make you sick. After a week they started to eat the meat, it was cooked in the Subway. The Subway used to be filled with sandwich stuff but it’s all gone now. The layer of blankets by the gate was starting to bulge by then. The ash was falling and building up in front of the store. Babe felt it through the tarps. Eventually the ash would’ve broken through the blankets and tarps. Babe and Drake could’ve been buried alive. So they nailed some flat boards from the shelves to the wall and put layers of shelves in front of the gates to keep the ash out. They took tabletops from subway to block the windows once the ash started to reach window height as well. They ate the produce and frozen stuff together. I remember the last package of hot dogs. They tasted so good. The fire makes a crinkly black part on the hot dogs. It looked like my hands. I liked hotdogs because they were like me. On the last day of hotdogs, I ate an entire half! Some of the produce rotted before we got to eat it, but Drake took the seeds to the bathroom to make new food. Not all of the seeds grew but the ones that did, became food. Now we only have non-perishables left. That means the food won’t go bad. But the potatoes are dying and there’s not much food left. ••• One month later... I have a new favorite story now, and I would like to tell it to you today. It starts the day after my birthday. Babe was crying about how we were all going to die. She told me all about the outside world and why we couldn’t leave even if we wanted to because the ash built up taller than the doors long ago. Drake was listening to the story too and suddenly stood up. For the first time ever Drake told a story. It wasn’t about the past. It was about the future. He remembered that Wal-Mart shared a wall with a grocery store Outside. A grocery store is a place like Wal-Mart but filled with food. If we broke the wall, we would just end up inside of the grocery store. He tapped all along the wall to find a place in the concrete without metal beams and drew a door on the wall with chalk. Then he got a big hammer that’s called a sledgehammer and he started hitting the wall with it. He must’ve hit it over a gazillion times! Soon enough we could see through the hole. After 3 days worth of work there was a hole big enough for me to crawl though. I was really scared but Babe pushed me through the hole. Babe and Drake couldn’t fit though the hole because they are adults. I crawled out into the dark, and it smelled like inside the bathroom. Then my eyes started to see from the fire on the Wal-Mart side of the hole. There were inches and inches of gray dust on everything. There was shelf in front of me and boxes on the floor. There were so many boxes everywhere. I picked one up that looked familiar. I brushed off the gray dust, and there was a picture of cookies on the front! I opened the box from the top carefully to not rip the kindling. I did it just like Drake showed me. There were twelve precious cookies and I ate them all as fast as I could. Babe couldn’t stop me from the other side of the hole. I ate two more boxes before I remembered why I was here. I took as many boxes as I could back to the hole and pushed them through. Drake and Babe pulled me through and then we all ate together. It was the happiest moment of my life. The next day, Drake made the hole bigger and we all went shopping in the grocery store. There was a gazillion cans of food. All the produce was rotten but we found seeds for the garden and batteries for our flashlights. Babe says the grocery store is called Super Giant. I think she’s wrong. The grocery store is called heaven.