Review: Waiting for the Miracle
Jason DeYoung
44 pages
The Cupboard Pamphlet (Volume 42, 2020)
Read this if you like: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Carmen Maria Machado, character-driven apocalyptic horror
tl;dr summary: Three people survive together during a quiet apocalypse
See the book on The Cupboard’s website
I’m going through a mild obsession with small books. Combined with my ongoing fascination with all things apocalypse, this made Waiting for the Miracle kind of the perfect pickup from AWP, and now that I’ve read it I’m glad I put it toward the top of my stack.
With a book this short, there isn’t much space to build a world or backstory, and the way Waiting for the Miracle tackles that challenge is the first thing I love about it. The very first sentence does a lot of heavy lifting:
“We have been told for a long time that everything was going to end—that the world and everything alive on it would kill itself—but we’re still here.”
…and that isn’t just a turn of phrase. That’s really the way this apocalypse is happening: mass global suicide, of other animals as well as people. The mechanism and reason for this isn’t really explained. Nor is the reader given any reason why the characters in the story are still alive—something they themselves wonder multiple times, which proves an effective way to deflect needing to answer the question. The uncertainty is the point, in a sense. The characters are stuck in a kind of living limbo, isolated from the world they knew, suspecting that each day will be their last and never sure why it isn’t, or what to do with all the empty time they find themselves with.
The isolation of the characters works well for the story’s length because it keeps the scope small and focused. There are just two characters at first, the narrator and Daisy, who have been living on their own in the woods since meeting in the hospital just after the official announcement that the world was ending about a year prior. Soon after the story starts they’re joined by the genderfluid child Roberta. Few details are given about any of their lives before the end, just like there is little discussion of the broader world. There are brief incursions—a visit to a nearby church, the arrival of a lone stranger, a break-in by unseen thieves who make it clear there are other people still out there, somewhere. For the most part, though, the story stays focused on the present of these three people who find each other by chance and become a kind of family unit over the course of the story.
From a craft standpoint, the thing that impressed me most about Waiting for the Miracle is its economy of space. All three characters feel like real people and the reader becomes invested in their survival pretty quickly, despite knowing almost nothing about them. Even the few details given are largely sprinkled in later; for the first half of the story, all the reader knows is who Daisy, Roberta, and the narrator are in the present. They are on the back end of a big-picture “before and after” that has fractured their world so cleanly that what happened before doesn’t even really matter anymore. All of this is conveyed within the first few pages, in a very nuanced way that pulls the reader instantly into the world.
This story is also densely packed from a meaning and theme standpoint. The idea of death comes up a lot, naturally, but there is also a recurring theme of warnings. They’d been told for a long time that things were going to end but still can’t figure out when that ending is supposed to start. There are clear parallels there to be drawn to our current predicament as a society, but I see this as a thematic thread in a broader sense, too. There are other moments they seek meaning and contact but can’t find it—in the radio they find, for instance, or their repeated watching of Friends. This even comes through in the strange crackling sound that’s pervasive in the background of the world now, a new detail that they’re sure means something but can’t figure out exactly what until it’s far too late to do anything about it.
I like that the rabbit is used as the cover image, too, because that’s another central image in the story. Without giving any details that feel like spoilers, I will say that the rabbit seems to represent a kind of emotional turning point—it’s a symbol for the moment they tilt fully toward the end and realize that things will never go back to the way they were before. In a sense, it serves as a kind of fuzzy harbinger of doom, making it clear that nobody is going to get out of this alive.
Something else nice about books this size: they’re not a huge commitment. Waiting for the Miracle is definitely short enough to read in an afternoon, and it’s well worth spending the time to sink into such a beautifully desolate little world.
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