Status Updates From Why Aren't You Dead Yet?

“Whimsy, even after the world ended.
Especially after the world ended.”

“He heaved his not-yet rotten body onto the stage and bowed to his six-legged audience. The everyman had perished, but the vermin lived on.”

“Then, for six nights a week and a Sunday matinee, the Orpheum had turned him into a god.
Despite what the graffiti claimed, God had not forgotten.”

“His fingers traced the playbills while he trudged on. Grey dust speckled his gloves, as if he'd gathered San Francisco's fog in his palm. You couldn't walk through these halls without turning a little magical.”

“And how we pretended the hole she'd burned in the ground was from roasting marshmallows?" His breathing labored. One more pull and he'd make it over the top. "It was such a cute scene."
Fear laced their words, but a smile crept into Glimmer's tone, "Are you saying being chased by cops is the same as that?"
"No, I'm saying we should buy some marshmallows soon. Haven't had s'mores in forever."

“There was a refuge not far from here, walls that had once held his dreams and might now hold him for a few hours until the pigs had moved on, found new truffles to remove from their homogenous fields.”

“Humanity, repulsed by its own beauty, had tortured itself to death. Its soul writhed with maggots.”

“Leasing her out was the only way they could keep the lights on, he'd said.”

“I realised that dystopia relies so deeply on fear of the other, of the sick, and I couldn't perpetuate it. Humanity is defined by its community, its care of others. Hope is a radical thing, a habit hard to form, but vital and difficult, and entirely worth it."

“But for the first day, Penelope manages to forget the context.
They're just two chronically ill girls walking through ruins, co-parenting a cat with tragic survival instincts.”

“An ache that lodged one day in her chest and never left. Friends disappearing, one cancelled plan after another, until suddenly she was twenty-five, a university drop-out in a one-bedroom flat, holding on with clawed fingers to the part-time, work-from-home job she'd managed to maintain.
Society collapsed for her long before the end of the world.”

2/2

“Penelope used to be a dancer. Used to be popular. Used to get academic awards for English and write poetry about the sky and wear skinny jeans, high heels, elaborate makeup.
Her decline was a steady one. A dislocated joint here and there. Bad reactions to one food, then another.”
1/2

“But laying here and doing nothing but watching feels wrong when it's not your own will and gravity holding you down.”

“Once, when the fat farms first hit the news just like all the other things-fat-blasting needles, fat-killing antibodies, fat-shredding shakes-she told you about her parents and how she loathed the idea of your fat being sold to them, made you promise you wouldn't sell yourself like that, like it was written all over your face just how much you'd love to have someone vacuum your body clean.”

“When you were much younger, you used to sit on the bed after your shower, grabbing the bulb of your stomach and squeezing like you could possibly wring it of its size, of its wobble when you walked.”

“Here, I'm meant to exist for him-to feed his arrogance and sate his hunger
—and I know just how to do it. Even when my mind lives elsewhere and feeds itself differently.
"Well then, I would hate to leave you wanting." His smile twists wide into the grin of a hungry beast, and I follow him into his den. After all, meat is a well-paid gig.”

“After all, every human's future literally promises disability; it's just a question of how long you live.”

“It's a genre that circles around the same anxiety over and over: what happens when a body refuses to comply?”

“Hmm. What if society deemed your life, and the lives of the people in your community, as less-than, as acceptable losses? Living, laughing, loving it!”

“As a disabled person, I often see my own oppression played back at me as if it is a "what if?" scenario. What if your government forced you to live below the poverty line because of something you cannot control? Been there! What if you couldn't get the resources you need to live because a faceless entity says you don't actually need it? Done that! What if a disease ravaged the populace and we couldn't stop it?”

“The dystopian genre foregrounds the political stakes of who is allowed to survive, thrive, or be eliminated, and that is something disabled people all over the globe have had to contend with for a long time.”