BOAT - "Sore Toes and Elbows"

Devon and Devin had been dating 6 months before World Mitosis. When the oceans drained like dishwater and got pulled apart in equal halves, the continents cleaved in twain in the great gloomp that took a day. They had been taking it slow and Devon had just got another toothbrush to leave at Devin's apartment. Devin almost typed love by accident in a text. And the Catskills were now their own South Pole and 8 million people had been churned under the sucking mulch of Earth's fiery stomach. Devon and Devin, now consumed, as all life, with the current self-dividing phenomenon, assumed the other was dead.

Devon had been at a vernissage while Devin was trying another pear crisp, he was dunking the oat-crusted pan in the water when it all sucked away and the sink crumpled like a paper cup, he went up to the roof and the sun was swinging like a batted bulb in the sky. He thought about Devon, but only in the way that she would probably be bonding with Brad, the gallery curator and volunteer firefighter about this situation. Brad was probably everybody's fucking hero right about now.

So when they saw each other again, skimming the rims of the world's new stretch marks, makeshift heat suits and surgical masks, Devin was the first to spot her. That hair and that walk. He called out her name, his name, which he had said made him feel close to her right away, and she turned around. And they traveled for months together in the group with the others, Brad long dead, and they were civil with each other, but something had changed. Every night he didn't get up to see if she was cold, every day she didn't wash his dish in the nearby falls, they grew further apart, until eventually neither felt the pull at all. Everything, magnets included, was totally and permanently fucked up.

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