2025: Unearthing a lost story

I first published this ten years ago, and it disappeared into the ether. Now it seems weirdly relevant? Plus: A writing prompt for you!

Photographer unknown, but huge props to whoever they are

This somewhat off-kilter post is really the fault of Alexandra Samuel, a wonderful writer I’ve worked with in various capacities, who was the biggest fan of my antler-woman-inspired story “2025,” remembered it all these years later, and nudged me to dig it out of the Wayback Machine! Thank you for remembering and for caring, Alex!

Here’s the deal: Once upon a time there was a neat publication called People Holding. They’d send you a picture of people holding things (I think at first it was always antlers, as is the case in my image), and you were to write a related short story for their site. I was honored to be asked to write something for them back in 2015 — it was a fairly fallow period for me creatively, so a project like this was very welcome.

I received the photograph of two underclothed warrioressess that you see above, and I was inspired to write the flash/humor piece I’m pasting below. I thought these gals had a certain Endtimes-Taylor-Swift charm to them, and while I started off poking fun at them, by the end of my writing process I was kind of obsessed with them and wanted to be included in their dystopian sorority.

WRITING PROMPT: Rereading this piece reminded me of how much I loved being given this prompt in a moment when I felt creatively stuck. And so I invite you to share it now: Look at that image above of the women and the antlers, and write your own story or piece about them! Let us know in the comments how it goes.

Anyway, as Alex pointed out to me via email: It’s now 2025, and turns out I’m a prophet!

“2025,” by Amy Shearn

Originally published in People Holding, May 6, 2015

Here’s the thing that people forgot in those first years when they were ugly-crying in their bunkers, or searching through poo-water for stockpiles of canned goods and tube socks: the apocalypse is, like, kind of awesome. For sure I was NOT feeling it at first. Like, everyone died of the superbug, and then the surviving people were all psychologically gnarly, and things got pretty rapey and pillagey…I was like, I can’t even. *Stares sadly at dead iPhone for 3 years*

But then, after falling in with this wack marauder hoodrat for a while, I met Vonda at an Electricity Meetup. I could not stop looking at her hair, which was like, pre-CDC-warnings on fleek. Turns out she’d made curlers out of squirrel bones AND she cut some bitch for a blow dryer. Haters gonna hate, but just because New York City’s a cholera-riddled ghost town and LA’s a scorpion-infested desert doesn’t mean you have to go around all a hot mess. And not to fangirl too much but Vonda, who grew up out west before it was The No Man’s Land, can hunt with a bow and arrow like one of the scarier winners of Survivor, spearing a deer without ruffling a ringlet. I mean. Scorched-earth sway, right?

So #RealTalk, here’s life now. We spend our nights in the woods, Vonda and me, one sleeping and one awake on watch, cuddled up not in like a lesbian way UNLESS there’s a cute woodsman nearby to get all hot and bothered by it. (You can stop judging me about that because if I am gonna fuck I have to do it now before my IUD rusts or whatever it’s gonna do. BTW someone better reinvent gynecology soon because now that thing is just stranded up there, like a tiny copper satellite from another civilization.)

Vonda and me, we get up early as shit, but there’s nothing to do at night so who cares. We get dressed in our camo gear for, like, safety. We blow dry our hair for, like, dignity. Then we head out with the horses we stole after fucking these Militia Men, and Vonda gets all Katniss Everdeen on some bucks. We take the meat and do whatever the hell we can remember from Little House on the Prairie, and the antlers we trade to the traveling peddlers for food and gasoline to run the generator for our blow dryer. Turns out antlers are hella great for carving into knives. In those first years, so many boujie apartments were ransacked for their ironic decorative antlers, it’s not even funny. Or maybe it’s exactly funny, IDK, we don’t really have “funny” anymore. Point is, they are valuable. And we’ve got em.

You see what I’m saying? Girls like me and Vonda – we were waitresses IRL, okay? We were just about to claw through our 30s trying to do everything we were supposed to do. We were about to settle down. Remember that? How people would talk about settling down? But now? There’s no settling down. You settle down and a pack of feral children eats your fucking face off while you sleep. Vonda and me – we’re wild and free and the hottest girls alive, and it’s miserable and it’s magical. It’s sure not how I thought things would turn out, but whatevs. So tell me – look at my eyes, they’re up here – how many antlers do you want?

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Hey NYC friends, feeling literary? Please join me at one of these book launch events in March: 3/19 @ P&T Knitwear with Ada Calhoun and/or 3/20 @ Books Are Magic with

Emily Schultz

!

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And speaking of prompts, I have a couple generative classes coming up: Writing for Women on the Verge, and Journaling Toward Clarity. Grab your spot today!