Final Exam
By Megan Arkenberg, first published in Asimov's Science Fiction
After monsters emerge from the ocean and begin attacking, a woman rifles through disjointed memories of the beginning of the apocalypse and her failed marriage.
Author
Published in
Year
Words
Genres
Plot Summary
A woman stares out at the ocean and feels nothing but the sea spray on her face. She thinks back to the time that her ex-husband, Donald, tried to recreate her first time at the beach for their honeymoon. She also thinks of the time that, out of anger, Donald ripped a drawer from the cabinet and threw a butter knife near her. One day, at couples counseling, she sees on the TV in the waiting room a sea monster emerge from the sea and eat a news reporter in a pink suit. The scene is horrifying and the cameraman doesn’t turn away. She believes that the monsters come from an alternate dimension, but the working theory is that they are just evolved creatures from the bottom of the ocean. She begins to track how over time her and Donald slowly fell out of love as they drifted further and further apart. During the apocalypse, the woman is running away from one of the sea monsters while she holds a gun she doesn’t know how to use. She decides that the only way to escape it is to go to Oregon where her sister lives and stay with her for a few months. She thinks back to how she could have saved her marriage, but she knows there was nothing she could’ve done. Donald leaves the woman because he meets another woman on a bus name, Nora. After Donald and Nora are together for a while, Nora eventually joins a cult and kills herself. This causes Donald to kill himself later with a razor, except he doesn’t think of Nora, but instead of the woman being the love of his life. The woman doesn’t completely understand why all of the machines at her work stopped working the day of the apocalypse; why, later, the water in her motel room turned to blood; or why she fell for Donald in the first place. On a bus, the woman thinks that there is a monster attached to the bus and the driver kicks her off. She stains her shirt with her own blood. She regrets one night, turning away from Donald as he tries to kiss her and he misses the taste of his mouth. She also regrets how she was unable to keep a little boy alive because she missed when shooting at a sea monster. She has nightmares where the sounds of the sea monsters are radio static. As she looks out into the ocean she misses Donald.