Vivian Apple Needs a Miracle by Katie Coyle

comments?” I ask hopefully, pulling myself up on my elbow.
    â€œStill nothing. I’m researching other Rapture theories. There are thousands, Viv. Blogs, hashtags, whole forums. Listen to this guy.” She reads out loud. “‘When will these sheeple accept what the rest of us have known since well before March twenty-fourth: that Beaton Frick and his ilk are extraterrestrial life forms who abducted the Raptured for their own nefarious purposes. They’re long gone, folks—they’re getting cut up like rare steak in a laboratory on Venus.’ There are one hundred fifty replies to this guy, all praising his sound logic. I posted a link to the blog in the comments, but why would people like this ever listen to a story like ours?”
    â€œI don’t know. Some people will go for the most outrageous answer, I guess. It’s a weird thing that happened—why not believe it’s part of something weirder?”
    Harp sighs and pulls up a different page. “This one’s from a professor of psychology at NYU. She says, ‘The Church of America resembles not a system of belief so much as a cult. Various factors—its charismatic leader, dogmatic principles, elaborate system of reward and punishment—raise red flags for those of us in the psychological community. While it would be intellectually irresponsible to hazard a guess as to the fate of the missing three thousand, one is sadly reminded of such tragedies as Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate, mass murders and suicide pacts orchestrated by leaders who suspected their hold on their community to be slipping.’”
    I sit up, electrified. “Harp, write to her! Send her our story! She can help us!”
    But Harp shakes her head. “I can’t. She’s dead. Apparent suicide, although her family has questions.” She looks up, and I see the distress in her eyes. “It’s dangerous to say this stuff out loud. It’s dangerous to tell the truth and believe it. If it’s safer to say the Rapture was freaky alien shit—if believing that
people
did this could get you killed—why wouldn’t you believe the freaky alien shit? And even if you didn’t, wouldn’t you want to? It’s like the Believers: better to convince yourself you’re a good person, that someone’s going to save you, than to believe you might be as flawed as everyone else, and that in the end, you’re alone.”
    â€œWe can’t control what anyone else believes. All we can do right now is speak up and hope somebody listens.”
    â€œBut there’s no time!” Harp exclaims in a tight voice. “Here’s another article—a scientist from Iowa, who went missing last week. He says, ‘We’re dealing with alarming climate change across the globe, and it’s not an act of God—it’s manmade. We’ll make it past September twenty-fourth without issue, but after that our path is unclear. We have maybe forty or fifty years until major food shortages slowly begin to eat away at the global population, and that’s assuming something cataclysmic—an asteroid, a nuclear war, the explosion of the supervolcano underneath Yellowstone—doesn’t occur first. We could conceivably slow this destruction down, but it would require huge overarching changes in the structure of our society—the kind of change we’ll never achieve so long as we remain distracted by imaginary acts of God.’”
    She stares at the screen a moment, then closes the laptop. I wait for her to lie down, but she doesn’t.
    â€œWe knew that, Harp,” I say softly. “We knew the Church doesn’t control the weather. You said it yourself—it’s definitely coming. Whether in three months or in three hundred years.”
    â€œI thought it would be much closer to three hundred years,” she whispers.
    I don’t know what to tell her. I want our story