Eliot Strange and the Prince of the Apocalypse

2) The Girl Tells Her Story

Whimper.

The world ends. It may not be loud or quick or a surprise. It may just end, kind of fade away gradually over time in a whimper of protest. Or so said T. S. Eliot in a famous poem he wrote a long time ago. A poem most high school seniors don't know, but I do because my name is Eliot. A strange name for a girl, but not if your father is a T.S. Eliot fan.

T.S. Eliot was a famous, Nobel prize winning poet who was dead before my father was born. My father is not a reader or a poet, but he admired Eliot's world-ending words of prophecy and because of this admiration, he named his only daughter after a man. My mother did not know, at least I hope she did not know, because what mom would name their baby in homage to a man who wrote lines of despair, however beautiful and haunting.

My father is a man who waited all his life for the end of days. He made sure I was prepared for the end to come because it was coming, ready or not.

When I was little, I worshiped my father and held onto his every word. I wanted to be a survivor. I wanted to be the smart one who knew what to do when the time came, just like my daddy said. I listened and I learned. I tramped silently through the woods. I baited the trap. I killed the rabbit. I skinned it, and I cooked it, and then we ate it.

I was the dutiful, eager student who learned at the feet of the master.

As the years passed, I too started to see like my mother, that my father was a fanatic. He was obsessed with a bleak future that no one wanted to survive, much less live on in. My mother wanted him to be in her here and now, not preparing to make a life in a world soon-to-be destroyed. My father was a paranoid, crazed person who proclaimed the world was ending to anyone who would listen. And people did listen, he had quite the following.

My father worked as a computer programmer for a small business that he and my mom started, but he was making some money on the side with his YouTube channel. He had used his college ROTC training and later Army Reserves training to become an expert in his field. Seemed like a lot of people felt the same way he did - the world was going to hell in a handbasket and you better get ready. If you wanted tips on surviving a catastrophe, my dad was the man to teach you.

As I got older, my father's actions and words became embarrassing to me. I was of the age that everyone's parents were an embarrassment, but my dad made me a bully magnet. It did not help that my last name was Strange. Eliot Strange. My name alone condemned me, but my dad didn't help. Kids at school called my dad names - Dr. Strange, Survivor, Rambo, Fruitcake, Nut Job - and these were the nicer names.

I began to feel different, and no one wants to be different in middle school. My tormentors were merciless, and I was sad, but relieved, when my mother and I left my father and western North Carolina to make a less scary life 200 miles to the east.

I still saw my father, but when I became a teenager and had a choice, I quit visiting my dad for the summers. I quit opening the birthday gifts he sent because I did not need any more survival gear. We kept our visits to the occasional weekend where I refused to discuss anything to do with preparing for doomsday.

Turns out my father, the town crier announcing - The End is Near! - was right. The world did end, and it was like any other day. It was only later that we knew it was all officially over because the world didn't end with a big, loud kaboom. It ended like a whimper - quiet, yet powerful and full of secrets begging to be heard.

If I had listened to my dad, I would have been safe when his predictions became truth. 

But I didn't listen, and I wasn't safe.