Nonfiction | May 02, 2025

The Midnight Cry

Sarah Mullens

Also because it’s nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it’s only a manner of speaking.

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

In the leadup to Y2K, my mother called grocery trips supply missions. We snaked H-E-B aisles and filled buggies with canned beans. Once, giddy, we stacked twenty-pound propane tanks in the back of her Volkswagen van. We listened to Alex Jones broadcast about the coming apocalypse, and I, age nine, held only a loose grip on the problem. Computers stored years in two digits rather than four, so on 1/1/00, they’d crash all at once, thinking it was 1900. The grid would fall. Grocery stores would become battle sites. The one-world government would impose martial law, flood the streets with tanks, and tell us it was for our safety. To me, it all felt like a game.

I’d come to Austin to visit my mother and Maya, her longtime roommate, for the summer. (Although by then I knew they were lesbians, no one ever uttered the word.) From their apartment, we could bike to Zilker Park and Barton Springs. While my mother worked, Maya, an elementary school teacher on summer break, planned elaborate days. We brought lunches to white-trash Barton Springs, what we called the swimming hole just outside the pay gates. We rented canoes on Town Lake and held ourselves against dead tree limbs to watch the turtles sunbathe. We snuck into other apartment complexes and rated their facilities—ten points for a fountain, twenty for pool-side laundry machines.