The White Elephant Party at the End of the World

A Short Story

They brought a nylon hairbrush, its uses manifest but unlimited: for scraping dust off thresholds or snow off tarps. Or, as Renee pointed out, for actually brushing hair, though she hadn’t taken hers out of its tight bun for a dozen weather cycles, not since Paul had wandered from the Shelters and not returned.

They brought a mega box of unused crayons, the colors so vibrant everyone touched the box with reverence and awe, as though it came from some holier world. They imagined the candle, a rainbow of melted wax, big enough to last several evenings, a light smelling of half-forgotten kindergarten classrooms. (Do you remember classrooms? Entire spaces of paper that didn’t have to become tinder, fluorescent-lit sanctuaries to learn frivolous things like how to tell time and the shapes of continents. Somewhere safe to send your children for an entire day.)

They brought a collection of tangled power cords, USB ports, and Wifi routers. All the men passed them around and reminisced about their own collections, long ago abandoned for their uselessness. It was the nostalgia of it that made Ben cry as he ran his thumb over the black tubing: to think of all the potential he’d once stashed in a cardboard box under his bed. Renee recalled, with fondness, the argument she’d once had with Paul because he wouldn’t throw out a stockpile of unnecessary cords. He’d wanted to keep them just in case, and she’d taken for granted that he was a man who planned for the future.

They brought a pair of gold high-heeled shoes, intact, the little polyester straps still shiny and not yet repurposed. The women marveled that they had once worn open-toed shoes, that they had sacrificed the luxury of sure-footing for such frivolity. And yet they all wanted to model them, to see if their calloused and pale feet could still model beauty for a moment, despite the cold to their toes. Even Renee caught herself wondering if Paul would have admired the curve of her instep.

They brought tie pins and a potato masher, a bicycle chain and a miniature colander. A cartridge of printer ink sparked hysteria as they argued over how it could be broken open, the ink used to label things or mark territory or even (can you imagine?) to write a poem or a song. Dylan still remembered a few lines of The Wasteland and Genevieve could recall any number of Taylor Swift lyrics. There was a debate about the merits of these classics, the opposing parties championing various meanings of “culture” until the sound of that word and all its long-gone pretensions silenced everyone for a time.

They brought a vinyl record of a forgotten musical artist and Lainey was certain they could track down a record player somewhere, in an abandoned house or in a store that hadn’t been pilfered to pieces. It could take a few months and would maybe be risky venturing from the Shelters that far but wouldn’t it be worth it to hear an actual piece of music, no offense to Genevieve’s singing or Nathan’s makeshift instruments (usually wind or percussion) that ended up going for fuel after a few plays.

They brought a tiny tin of actual green tea leaves—not dried-out, charred pieces of grass from the last time the snow melted during one of the heat blasts—but genuine store-bought tea with actual traces of caffeine in it. It was probably a brand like Lipton. The smell alone infused everyone with energy. When Renee was pregnant with Henry, Paul had made her a cup of green tea everyday, its bitter taste somehow the only drink she could stomach in the mornings.

They brought Legos, not the off-brand kind but the real thing (and the way everyone could still compare the two, the inferiorities and superiorities of tiny plastic blocks). The pieces were only slightly warped by the extreme temperatures of the weather cycles. The children gathered around and some of them had to be shown how they worked. They clapped their hands and shrieked as if shown a magic trick when the pieces clicked together and made a tiny structure. They each asked for a turn and it was a long time before anyone could stop watching them and their wonder, their hands transformed from things of need and cold to tools of imagination. The parents had to remind them to wait their turns and there was such comfort in that nagging. How long since the little feuds among their children had been so trivial? Henry, who had not spoken since Paul disappeared, tugged on Renee’s sleeve and pointed at the blocks, his wordless enthusiasm almost the answer to a prayer she hadn’t stopped praying in months.

They brought an assortment of handmade items—a quilt made of old pot-holders and stitched with the strings of window blinds, a scarf knit from plastic grocery bags, a box made of empty picture frames tethered with electrical wire, a mead of fermented canned fruits that had everyone curious though skeptical.

Photo by Jamison Riley on Unsplash

They sat on the floor of the community warehouse or on overturned crates and the children played games of tag and demolished the meager spread of shared food while the adults took turns selecting their gifts.

Before they began, Renee explained the rules: you can pick a gift from the pile or steal one that’s already been chosen. At the word “steal,” a tension hung palpably over the room. Only a week before, a band of strangers had invaded the Shelters and stolen the stockpiles of several families. There had been a moment—brief but grim—when the other families had locked up their shelters and the ones stolen from became as threatening as thieves. But the community had held: a little offering from each family was enough to rebuild the lost reserves. This party was Renee’s attempt to kindle good-feeling and fraternity. Now, she feared a party built on the premise of stealing things you weren’t supposed to need would shatter this fragile outcropping of civilization. (And hadn’t someone said that among the thieves there had been a man who walked like Paul, whose ragged beard was speckled with premature gray the way Paul’s hair used to be? In the dawn fog, he had walked from her neighbor’s shelters with bundles of their belongings and now she’d gathered them here to steal more from them. Sometimes, she forgot that she and Paul were no longer united in all their efforts, so who was to say that her neighbors might not fail to distinguish their intentions too?)

But then Ben cracked a joke about the lovely wrapping paper—all of it plastic bags or plastic tarps, the faded logos of collapsed corporations lending a kind of ironic festivity to the piles of things—and everyone laughed and mused over how on earth they could choose from such a stunning collection of gifts.

The game revolved for hours and the gray skies blotched over with night and the trashcan fires grew dimmer and the kids alternated between grumpiness and elated energy and the trays of canned beans, canned fruits, dried meats, and stale crackers were long since picked clean. The “cake” Bernadette had concocted of black beans, tree-sap, boiled acorns, and other secret ingredients she wouldn’t reveal had begun to sour in everyone’s stomachs.

Renee had gone first, which meant, according to the rules everyone had scraped from their memories, she could choose to steal from anyone. In her lap was a “cheese” made of foraged mushrooms Andrew had found after the last monsoon. He promised it was edible.

But Renee wanted to know how long she could make the game last, what half-wanted gift she could steal to coax others into stealing, into unraveling their contentment enough to keep the game moving. Could it last until the weather changed again, cold giving way to heat or downpour or merciless wind? Would the children, eventually, tire themselves out and collapse in a heap and could the adults collect the crates and heftier objects and erect them into the shape of a tree? Could they melt the crayons over the dregs of fire and make an array of candles, of colorful lights strewn across the gray and concrete space? When the children awoke, it would be nearly like the celebrations they had once cherished, festivities many of the children were too young to remember. They could cobble together from nostalgia and these things not lost something of joy and peace.

That first Christmas after Henry was born, he had already been crawling and Renee had been afraid to put up the tree. What if, in his immense baby strength, he yanked the whole thing down on himself? Or tried to suck one of the dangling light bulbs and electrocuted himself?

“I guess we just won’t put up Christmas decorations this year,” Renee had told Paul and she was resigned to the heartbreak of it, that this too—after seven months of losing herself in the care of this miraculous but ever-needy person—was something lost to her.

Paul had come home the next day with a baby gate and a Christmas tree from the mall parking lot. He made mulled wine while she put Henry to bed and they stayed up too late decorating and sipping the sour, over-spiced alcohol and in the morning, when Henry was up too early, they took him to the living room and watched the lights in his eyes and let him crawl up to the tree, protected by the solid gate Paul had screwed into the wall. Henry pulled himself up for the first time and let out a squeal and it was all so new, seeing the magic through his eyes, that it felt old and timeless and more like home than Renee’s own childhood. And Renee was overcome with how easy it was to contemplate that original Christmas, and all its inconveniences, when faced with the lovely inconvenience of her own baby. She had leaned into Paul and his arm around her was a promise: they would brave the apocalyptic territory of new parenthood together.

Before Renee made up her mind about her gift, Genevieve and Nathan drummed out a beat on a crate, a carol everyone still knew by heart. The children circled closer to their parents as the shadows elongated, the wind outside a haunted thing against the taped-over windows. But so long as they were gathered here, in the midst of celebration, then the ghosts beyond could be no more than friendly apparitions. She could steal from Ben, beside her, and maybe he’d steal from Lainey who would steal from Dylan and so on and on until morning light or until Henry spoke again or until Paul appeared at the door, his lean figure and clean-shaven face lit by the crayon candles, their wicks dancing in his watery eyes. He’d start to explain—he’d been hunting for food and gone astray or he’d been kidnapped or he had been trying to fix things, to study the weather patterns from a better vantage to discover some clue that could save them all, or he’d simply lost his mind for a time and now he’d come back to himself.

Whatever the reason, Renee would put an arm around him and nudge him into their party. The men would pat his back and the women would offer him a blanket and Henry would scoot into his lap in a wordlessness that was miraculous in its normalcy. They would show him their meager, scraped together gifts, and he would laugh with them about the things they had never needed.

Renee glanced one last time at the door of the warehouse, bolted against a cold that filled the space anyways, and then turned back to her circle of friends. They were too thin and there were shadows beneath their eyes and they huddled closer and closer for warmth. But, for once, their hunger had abated.

“I think I’ll stick with what I have,” she said.