My neighbor’s urging me to stock up on powdered milk and mylar bags of dried mango. Put any leftover money in XRP and silver, he says. The world is up in flames again: a thousand reasons to worry about tomorrow, a thousand more next week.
Coincidentally, I’ve got a bit of extra cash lying around. I made a hundred and fifty bucks in tips last night, singing the songs my dad used to play on his record player while he vacuumed the house so that he didn’t have to go to church with the rest of us. Clean living, he called it.
I’m not listening to my neighbor, though. I’m taking that one fifty and driving my daughters to the new strip mall. When you live on an island, spending time at the new strip mall is like visiting the Louvre.
We’ll crank “Imploding the Mirage” until Mom’s leftover coffee spills: a decibel level she’d never approve. We’ll eat lunch at Ikkyu Ramen, the new Japanese spot run by a Chinese family. My kids will order chicken strips and fries. I’ll get the mapo tofu and pretend I’m living in Beijing again. They’ll ask if we can go to Goodwill. I’ll sit on an egg yolk-stained fifty-dollar sofa, fighting the urge to check my phone while they gush over pink telephone paperweights and bicycles with crooked handlebars.
“Look, Dad, this is only $1.59!” my second-born will shout across the store, holding up a bottle of crisped-coconut body spray.
If there’s any money left, we’ll cross the parking lot, holding hands, praying The Pudgee Panda’s open. I’ll convince them that the small ice cream cups are too big not to share, just so that I’ll have enough to sneak in a hot Americano from the empty coffee shop next door.
If I’m lucky, they’ll fall asleep on the drive home. If I’m blessed, they’ll ask to play “Pressure Machine” turned up until it clips. Cruising five miles below the speed limit, I’ll wonder how life could get any better.
It’s not every day you get to live like the world’s ending tomorrow.
Luke Beling is a South African–born singer-songwriter and author living on Hawaiʻi Island. His songs and prose share the same ground: the ordinary rendered with close attention. His new album, Sea Queen, produced by Sam Kassirer, is out November 2026 on MDDN/Atlantic Records. He is the author of the novel The Field of Plenty and the short story collection Maybe It’s Not Too Late, and is at work on a second novel set in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa.
