Weaverville, North Carolina—Six months into decline

Mina shielded her eyes from the noon sun as she examined the black beyond the deepening blue of the sky, wondering how long before another storm and how far into space these realities might extend before transmuting into a thing so different as to be virtually nonexistent.

Her water supply was running low. The aspect of the leaves—slightly withered, beginning to dry, some already rusted brown—evoked September harvests, fuller moons, and foggy nights. The recent two-week drought—she had counted the days to sixteen—had depleted half the water reserves, so the romanticized cornucopia of a late summer’s take was too stark a reminder of the difficulty she faced.

The sun moved past its peak at hot summer noon, and her thoughts turned to the bull, more than to the man. That morning, she’d loaded the small handgun in the front bureau, shot it a few times into an old stump for comfort, reloaded it, and slid the infernal thing into her deep front pants’ pocket, folding an apron in half, tying it around her waist to help hide the bulk of the firearm. If necessary, she would kill the man to keep the bull, although she hadn’t quite premeditated this point, only made herself ready for anything. Intuition alone would tell her of his intent. Impulsivity was not her preferred mode of deciding important movements through life, but these circumstances required more than civil patience could afford.

The last message was marked Yesterday 4:50 AM: “Leaving before dawn. Prob 8-hour trek. Slow-moving. Near you early afternoon I reckon. No connection between here and there. Be on lookout.” Did that mean this morning? she wondered; or did he leave before dawn yesterday, and he was somewhere nearby searching for her at this moment?

Reading the message for the hundredth time, the uncertainty grew more threatening. Squeezing the phone, she eased her hands into the wide front pocket of the apron and with the one not gripping the gun clutched the small pruning shears she used to trim her potted plants, scissoring the sharp metal repeatedly, nervously staring down the driveway that led up to her home.

* * *

He had tried sending her a picture of himself and the bull in the days leading up to his decision to seek her out, but it never went through. The library’s Internet connection had been too erratic for media. Hope hobbled along. The apprehensions of meeting a stranger in the before-world might have precluded the encounter, but now anyone whose interest in survival—in sharing, in working together—was worth leaving home for. He was a loner on the road, looking for something to give his young life to, but he worried. Any bad decision could tip the scales toward despair—a state of mind more concerning than death.

When he finally arrived at the general location, he scanned the highway shoulder for mile markers and the northbound ramp she’d told him about. It was Exit 16 going east if the signs and markers hadn’t been overrun by nature or knocked down by angry hordes of teenaged boys, she’d said. He chuckled at that remark, realizing she must have thought he was older. Instinct told him she was at least middle-aged, if not elderly. Her tone was too direct and all-knowing to be his contemporary.

The bull had been walking steadily for the last hour, making up for time spent grazing and moaning. It was thirsty. Between Hot Springs and Weaverville, the ground had dried up; the change from sloppy mud to wispy dust occurred within a mile. Here, the grass was as overgrown as everywhere but yellowing or wilting. Any chance he’d had of staying with her, if the vibe was good, would evaporate if water was scarcer. Would she want to go back to his farm? It was an uncertain proposition, as the main house was falling apart, all the animals were either dead or had run away, and the farming land had gone bad since the fertilizer had run out.

A gentle, thicker breeze pushed against his body, and both he and the bull stopped, raised their heads, and lifted their faces into its pressure. With eyes closed, he perceived a whispering of strange voices, but it was just nature and the hum of God throbbing with life all around him. A wariness grew within his mind, however, as if he was being watched by something, not just looking nor simply seeing. A healthy bull would have a high bounty to the right person, and he worried about the possibility of thieves. He opened his eyes at this shift in intuition, reached behind his back, and momentarily gripped the handle of the farm’s second-best machete, then tugged at the strings on his front to tighten its sheath and trudged on.

Before he saw them, his gut clenched at having sensed them. Three dark forms, all arms and legs, rushed from a mass of taller grasses.

His weapon came easily out of its place as he thrust it high into the air. A chain was instantly latched to the bull’s harness. The large beast groaned, resisting the force of the highwaymen’s assault.

“Nice-lookin’ bull you got there, son,” the point man said, holding a bat with nails protruding from its cap like a makeshift mace. Ant eyed the spikes. The point man smiled, his teeth a brownish mess, bringing the bat to his dominant side.

Ant looked back, checking the position of the other two who smirked at him, seeming to watch, having secured the bull. Both opponents stood their ground, weapons up. Ant fell forward, pushed from behind. The point man swung, striking him atop his scalp, grazing but notching out a small piece of soft flesh; again, quickly the bat lodged into his thigh. The young man roared and, in a swipe, lodged his blade into the man’s crown. The face went blank from shock. Ant wiggled the weapon out from where it was stuck. The second blow almost took the head from its neck. The body teetered, then collapsed. The third blow removed the head completely. Ant turned back.

The one who’d pushed him froze in shock, disbelieving what he saw. The other, Ant could see jogging away to a safer distance, howling for the other to follow.

“Run, you dimwit!”

Blood dripped down Ant’s face and onto his heaving chest as he glared at the loiterer, who stepped back slowly, gulped but had no spit, then tripped away, choking on the thickness of the air. The bull bellowed into the wind.

* * *

The sign for Exit 16 was fully intact. The shirt he’d tied against the gash in his head, he tightened, and limped toward the ramp due north. The bull followed, obedient to its master’s step, without needing the lead of the rope.

* * *

A chill had descended with the slowing of the wind, and Mina smiled, observing the gathering darkness in the clouds. It was a quarter past 4 p.m., and she wondered when he’d show. The power hadn’t come back, but she switched on the generator every hour on the hour to check for messages. Conserving that power was a strictly enforced priority, but this bull was one of a few things she’d allow herself to waste it on.

The encroaching night pushed off the last of the day. Dusk was usually a comfort, but this evening, it made her anxious. Having full view of him was a necessity. She paced the porch, trying not to wring her hands, when she saw a shadow moving within the remnant light, the silhouette of a hunched man and his beast; and the closer he got, the more the reflective paint of the white house illuminated his form. He limped, was injured. She resisted the impulse to run to his aid, gripped the porch railing with one hand, the gun in her pocket with the other, leaving the spur un-cocked.

“You all right?” she called, trying not to sound nervous. He was short of breath, speaking through his exhaustion.

“I’m—I’m hurt,” he forced out.

She continued to eye him.

“Dizzy—” he mumbled. “Please help—” He dropped the lead to the bull and fell to the ground. His tone too earnest to doubt, she ran to him.

“Careful,” she said, pulling him up, resting his arm atop her shoulders. He was younger than she had expected. He set his tired eyes on hers. The motherly instinct relieved the strategizing other as she helped him up the stairs, easing his worn body onto a couch placed outside on the porch under a row of windows running the length of the living room. The bull walked to the base of the house and grazed on the yellowing grasses there.

* * *

Suburbs: Marietta, GA—Eight months into decline

Jeremy’s eyes opened by themselves, that is to say, consciousness had not revived prior to his waking; they shot open like from an instinct to danger. That nebulous state between sleep and wakefulness did not ease him into the day before he found himself staring at the wall, alerted to something—at the ready. Many years in the United States Marine Corps could do that to a man. His father had had wild flashbacks in his dreams, jumping from the bed, pulling off its mattress—and his wife with it—to raise a barrier against incoming at Fallujah, screaming for backup, cupping his hand as if holding a walkie-talkie and spitting fiery words into it. Another time, he’d sleepwalked both fists and arms clean through a glass window. Jeremy had forgotten these childhood disturbances until recently, as the son becomes the father and the son, now the father, remembers his.

In the more recent war provoked by an expectedly swift Chinese invasion of Taiwan, at the Battle of Taipei, Jeremy had endured the stresses of rigorous battle and its greed for life. But this didn’t concern that. This was something far more familiar and far more ruinous. Its darkness was a memory not to be remembered, but his subconscious had hoarded its leftovers, and it was time for him to review the trickiest part of his past. Sweat slipped off his nose as he flipped back the damp top of the sheet.

In the backyard, where he kept a small space for training, he fixed the bulbous leather gloves to his hands, pulling into place the Velcro straps with his teeth. A heavy bag hung from a sturdy branch of a Southern live oak. Jeremy stepped to the cylindrical mass and leaned his forehead against its rough skin as if praying. His two young children, half a world away in Europe, appeared from memory, animated by enthusiasm for his return home someday in what felt like a lifetime past.

He began to beat the sides of the bag slowly, then with a drop of mercy, then faster like a drum while tears and sweat flew from him. The force of each blow rippled down his arm and up the stem of his spine; the images of each babe flashed inside his shut eyes, as if by flashes of lightning. The chain rattled and swayed; the sturdy bough of the tree bobbed as his face twisted more tightly. Destroying the mass before him, a final image of his first and still reviled wife descended into the frame, and his arm shot out like an unholy wrath. The whiplash in the chain broke it free from its place on the bough, and the bag fell as a dumb lump to the ground, bending in half and keeling onto its side, slumped as if defeated. Jeremy’s body mimicked its collapse, falling to his knees, finally unmoved as all emotion was exhausted by the exertion.

* * *

This was a regular event Jenna had gotten used to seeing, however much the frenzy of the activity had bothered her at first—knowing nothing about the children, not even of their existence—thinking nothing about the intensity of Jeremy’s emotional display, not much liking questions about her own, but feeling interrupted by it somehow, like an uninvited schism in the fabric of a reality she’d attempted to define and control for them both. She had never asked him questions about those passions, which to another viewer might have looked like unresolved but inexplicable rage, and assumed it was an exercise of the same extremity of feeling she also had to manage.

Exiting the house near the kitchen, she lugged a pot of fouled water to boil off its contamination for the day’s use. Every drop they took from the tap they put to the flames to avoid sickness of any kind. Any sort of weakness now could spell doom for the long-term chances of their survival.

Jeremy cocked his head, moved his eyes sideways to see if she was watching, but she had moved to the farthest corner of the yard to collect wood for the outdoor hearth they’d constructed from leftover pavers, the final pieces of which they’d taken from the front walk, which had been initially designated for their use. The mound of splinted chop that she’d arranged—something like a marriage between a log cabin and a teepee—seemed to mock the tiny lighter she had filled with an ounce of fluid.

“We need to go easy on that stuff,” Jeremy said, toweling his wet skin dry in the crisp morning air; vaporized sweat rose from his body like smoke. She paused but didn’t look up, aggravated in an instant. “Just sayin’—I mean, I was a Scout and a Marine but never could manage to make fire by rubbing wood. Hated that part of Scouts,” he said into the drift of their emotional exchange.

“What did you learn how to do then?” she deadpanned, easing herself into the victory of a pyre alive with flame.

“Kill things,” he said casually and shrugged.

“In Boy Scouts?” She hid her smile with the clean side of her hand.

“Yeah. Before the nonbinary, gender, whatever-they-were took over.”

“Uh-huh—”

This topic she brushed off, not wanting to reweave the whole of the chaotic tapestry that had defined the country’s politics and preceded its fall. If she gave him a single word on the matter, he’d fly into an unproductive, useless rant, leaving them tangled in unanswerable questions. She always thought best to leave the integrity of people’s struggles to themselves.

“We need more wood,” she said, like an order.

“Roger that,” he replied, removing the other towel around his waist to clothe himself.

“Can you wait?” She put up her hands, wanting to laugh but feeling stuck between humor and agitation. Sometimes, in her eyes, his sexiness seemed to have an ill-timed flagrancy, and he didn’t care, nor even notice. The simple and unencumbered activities of a man, alone in nature, freed of civil pressures, were enough to provoke her basic needs, wishing to rip off her own clothes and jump his bones. But she could not. She must not. Not now. And this might have been the root of her agitation.

He froze in position, his underwear stuffed in his hands, confused. “Why, what does it matter? Never looked at me naked or something?” He laughed like a devil, bouncing his junk around to be funny.

Her smile soured as her mouth tightened, opposing the interruption, more in tune with the consequences of his desires than he was.

“I’m trying to get this ready for breakfast,” she simply pleaded. “And it’s just weird. I don’t know. It’s annoying.”

“What is?”

“Never mind.”

“What’s the matter? We do this all the time.”

“I know. I just—I just don’t want to see anyone’s private parts right now.” She blushed saying the words. “It makes me—” The pressure to say the truth inhibited her ability to say much of anything.

“What?” His hands, palms up, were thrown to his sides like a clueless boyfriend. His briefs dropped to the ground. She couldn’t help but lose a reflexive burst of laughter but regained herself.

“It just bothers me right now, all right?” Her hands, palms down, were thrown to her sides like a referee.

“All right, all right. I’ll go around the house,” he said and kissed her on the forehead on his way, still completely naked.

Her mind had grown unresolved, partially from unsourced guilt, partially from incessant worry, and when he joked or became too playful, it distracted them from all the practical concerns, and she didn’t like it. The only thing they had time for was to secure their safety and survival. Children were out of the question so sex was out of the question.

The remaining lighter fluid measured half a pint, she guessed, then studied the worn furrow that ran the length of the wood she’d previously used to try rubbing a flame to life. Doubt increased her worries. She could always get it to smoke but never to light. They needed fire to boil the water more than anything, and they were running out of the fluid, but she had used it again anyway, warming her palms above the flame.

There were some neighbors left in the development, but one was a disturbed shut-in of a man; an old couple who had decided to die together at home and might already have been gone; and Nelson and Pru, peers who had spent an occasional evening with them to touch base when they all had needed the company. Lately, however, Jenna’s mind played too spasmodically with her thoughts to socialize.

Jeremy returned, fully dressed in the same dirty clothes, and embraced her from behind. She froze, wishing she could melt into the warmth of his hulking body.

“I love you,” he said, knowing she wouldn’t respond. “We’re going to figure this out.” Then he went inside. Intimacy between them had been reduced to him hugging her stiff body. Desperate to return the affection, she couldn’t. Not now. Not for a while. Not for so long that she could no longer imagine when. She couldn’t repeat this to herself enough: The absolute worst thing she could have to deal with in this situation was a pregnancy.

The fire burned evenly at its core, and she watched as the stronger flames attached themselves to the blocks of wood, the bulkiest of which she readjusted, pulling and pushing them with her fingertips to put the logs closer to the more active center.

Kneeling in the dirt, with Mullet trotting all around her, wagging his tail, sniffing at her concerns, she stared at the orange flame, drawing her eye deeper into its preternatural dance—her eyes blind to their perceptions, lulling her mind to leave her body and travel into the past.

Her father stood across the way, younger than he would have been, and she wondered if they all were still alive. The cell service in their area hadn’t worked well in weeks. Sometimes, there was a signal, enough to bring up a website, but it would fail immediately, dashing hope against pain. Calls would go through and then drop. When she’d last spoken to her parents she couldn’t exactly remember, but it felt like months. Jeremy’s family was far away in Texas and never much called anyway.

The logs on top of the heap had fallen into the center as coals, so she prodded them into a glowing mound and laid another, heftier log crosswise above the orange inferno when a shadow darkened her view of the flames.

“Would you go grab the eggs?” she asked without looking up.

Among a shy group of vigilante looters, they had ransacked the local grocery store some weeks prior, doling out fair shares of everything left worth taking. There were subsequent trips back to what was now a simple warehouse with stores of both rotting and select viable foods, only not as efficiently carried out. Jeremy had had to muscle his way into and out of the hoard those final couple of times. It was the end of the easily available food. Current circumstances were decidedly not how either of them would have imagined experiencing married life. The last time they’d left a somewhat viable grocery store, older women, generally empowered by collapse, charged younger men with the heftier tasks as they hauled as much of the nonperishables as a human man could shoulder. From then on, those buildings became infested with rats and mice of all kinds, vermin of all sorts: flies, roaches, maggots—feeding on the remaining, festering foodstuffs.

After that first trip to what they’d quickly christened the doomed depot, Jeremy had dug a six-foot hole in the ground and threw in as much of the ice as they had carried away, once stored deep in the company’s coldest freezers. The eggs and whatever meats that weren’t spoiled they’d kept down there. Mullet was routinely scolded for sniffing at its perimeter.

“Babe?” she asked, looking up, focusing on the grisly figure before her. Mullet, returning from his morning tour of the back woods, stooping his head low, stared at the man, beginning to growl and displaying his canine wrath. She fell backward, caught off guard, losing her breath.

The man looked weathered beyond his years. His beard was dirty and wild; his stare was extinguished of its spark; his hands trembled and were stained with blood.

“Jenna?” he said roughly, when she realized who it was.

“Nelson? Mullet—no. Sit. What the hell happened, Nelson? Are you all right?”

* * *

Jeremy eased out of the house, cautiously observing his neighborhood buddy, as Nelson and Pru had been acquaintances more than good friends. Jeremy had perceived a codependence in them both, a complaint Jenna had disliked, preferring to leave those kinds of judgments alone. But Jeremy’s military training had refined his eye to spot psychological weakness in other soldiers in order to strengthen them. It seemed the lockdown on top of lockdown and the subsequent social decline had wreaked havoc on both Nelson’s and Pru’s psyches and better sense; and finally, the continuous failures of the power grid seemed to Jeremy to have further developed their difficulties into madness.

* * *

Jenna rose to her feet, struck with a sudden feeling about Pru, alarmed for her safety in an instant. Nelson stood, staring at the ground where Jenna had been squatting. Walking behind him, Jenna mouthed the words “Blood. On his hands,” and pointed to the top of one of her own. Jeremy looked at the blood-rusted fingers and nodded back as she jogged away from the yard.

Nausea weakened her pace as she ran, making it difficult to breathe deeply and run faster. Fear inhibited action: Nelson’s already loose switch had flipped. She stumbled, repeating, “Oh my god, Pru. Be alive. Be alive, Pru.” Jenna practically flew up the entry stairs to their home and started banging on the door, but there was nothing. In the backyard, she yelled more loudly, calling Pru’s name. She banged on the glass door there—but no sign of the woman. Through the glass, she could see what looked like a ransacked family room, adding depth to the effect of the couple’s mental fragility. Her heart pulsed at the center of her throat. Back in front, she finally saw Pru like a drugged-up sprite searching aimlessly around the yard.

“Pru!” Jenna sobbed. “Thank god, you’re all right.”

“I’m fine,” she said as if trapped in a distant cloud.

Jenna approached, tears on her face. “I thought—I thought—” she said, stopping herself from saying what would just add more mania to the already tortured circumstances of their lives.

“What’s wrong?” Pru asked, her eyes red and dry. Her lips cracked from thirst, she leaned toward Jenna and pulled her to her chest. A foul iron stench on Pru’s body revived Jenna’s concern.

“Pru? What’s wrong. Something’s happened, I—”

“There’s been an accident,” she said, nodding like a child.

“An accident?”

Pru looked toward the ground but gestured to her womb.

“Oh, god. Let’s go inside.”

Pru’s unnatural calm was an obvious mode to cover shock, shocks to her traumatized system that had built, one by one, since the first of the lockdowns. The more Jenna observed Pru, the more she perceived the depth of her dissociation, a similar look she could see in Nelson, though exporting none of the information that now sprang from his wife. Jenna carefully pulled back the long, knitted shawl Pru had wrapped to her front and saw the tragic mess of the undergarments.

“Do you have clean water?” Jenna asked softly. Pru simply shook her head, eyes fixed to the floor like a lost little girl. “Let’s go back to my house. Nelson is there. We should all be together right now.”

Pru nodded sweetly, coming around to a more present version of herself.

* * *

Jeremy stood over Nelson, who was seated on an old stump, tipping a cup into the dazed man’s half-opened mouth. Water spurt from its sides as he drank. When he saw his wife, Nelson reanimated and dropped to his knees, sobbing her name, lamenting his failure to save their child.

“Oh shit,” Jeremy exclaimed to Jenna specifically. “I didn’t know.”

She shook her head to shut him up, telling Pru to go inside.

“I’ll be right there,” Jenna said.

The silence which followed didn’t need to be filled with explanation. Carefully, she transferred the purified water from the barrel to a bucket, grabbed some ripped cloth towels from behind the hearth, and went to tend to Pru.

“Take Mullet in too,” Jeremy urged before she closed the door.

Inside, the woman lay on the floor, virtually passed out.

“Stay with me, Pru,” Jenna insisted as she cupped a mug full of the water and brought it to her patient’s lips. Pru’s eyes began to brighten as she took the liquid down and its chemical properties revitalized her aspect. Jenna propped the ravaged woman against the wall and then ran up the stairs, rifled through a medicine cabinet for hydrogen peroxide, grabbed some pillows and a blanket from off the bed in the spare room, and hurried back.

“Do you mind if I—”

Pru smiled and grew weepy, softly saying, “No.” Her wet eyes dropped a tear from each duct. Nelson’s moans resounded through the walls of the house. Pru shut her eyes tightly as if not wanting to hear him.

“You’re both going to be fine,” Jenna said, holding back sorrow while she cared for the remains of the miscarriage. Most of the exterior blood had dried and cracked, indicating a length of time dangerous to the mother, making her vulnerable to infection. The final piece of clothing revealed the tiny, lifeless boy, between three and four months old and about the size of an apple. Jenna had to summon the fullest might of self-control to repress the grief it inevitably provoked, touching the deepest points of her hardy spirit.

Her own miscarriage had happened before she and Jeremy had married—at the time, she’d known an ambiguity, both a sadness and a relief, accepting the misfortune as the natural frailty of life but wrangling with a wretched kind of failure. Moving on somewhat easily from that experience seemed callous to her in this moment of profound reflection.

Jenna cupped the child in her hands and placed its body into a cloth and gently wrapped him up, handing back the covered babe to his mother, who held the stiff mound in her delicate palms.

“He tried—” Pru said, holding the baby but looking at Jenna. “He tried to help, but he couldn’t. Once he saw—” She wept, looking down at the parcel and pulling it to her chest.

“I know, I know. I understand.” Jenna dabbed a cloth wet with peroxide around Pru’s thighs and privates, cleaning the mess. Pru sucked at the air between her teeth, then sniffled up the wetness the sharp pain had produced in her nose. Jenna dunked another cloth in the purified water and wiped Pru’s nose, mouth, and face, trying to tidy her distress.

“Thank you. You’re so kind. Thank you for being so kind,” she said.

Jenna nodded and wanted to break down, but feared she’d not regain herself if she gave in to this particular sorrow—the one on top of the many that could push even her to the brink. She had to look away.

“Can we bury him here? Please?” Pru asked. “And can we stay? I can’t go back to that house. Nelson needs Jeremy, and I—”

“Absolutely,” Jenna replied. “You can stay with us. We need you too, but right now, I need to go check on Nelson—”

Pru thanked her again, and Jenna rushed away to the men, to make sure Nelson had gotten his feet beneath him, to dig the grave, looking back once more at the bereaved mother gently cooing to her lost beloved.

* * *

They waited until she came out. Jeremy had talked Nelson back from the edge of his ineptitude. Shook sense into the man, while emphasizing their need to accept things as they are, not as they should be, and set to digging the grave, barely a foot deep into the moist and mushy earth, dug deeper at Jeremy’s insistence. From womb to tomb all people go, Jeremy thought.

Later, the impression of this truth silenced any need to speak while they moved within death’s ritual mime, circling the meager depth of the spot, bowing their heads while Pru laid the babe to rest. Jeremy took the shovel from Nelson’s hand, thrusting his heel onto its step and into the mound of muddy earth.

“No—wait,” Nelson said. “Can you give us a minute?”

“Of course,” Jenna said, taking the shovel from Jeremy’s hands, pulling him away from the site. The reduction of their lives to their certainties intensified an instinct to ceremony. No other distraction was possible, nor more important than this. Jenna clasped Jeremy’s waist; her head fell against his sturdy frame; he rubbed her shoulder and stroked her fair hair.

Nelson and Pru held both hands over their son’s grave and wept. Nelson spoke inaudibly to Pru, who nodded and wept harder. They knelt on the ground and together gently covered their son with earth.

* * *

Jeremy looked up and saw a pair of strange eyes glowering from a dirt-blackened face, leaning behind the thick trunk of the southern oak. Then another set appeared at the opposite yard side. Another body behind that one. A hectic dog on a leash jumped wildly at its side. Two others appeared at the far corner of the house. They were surrounded. Jeremy backed up farther toward the back door.

He whispered to Jenna, “Go get the shot gun.” She leaped inside. The movement provoked the gang to move closer, tightening the circle of the threat.

“Nelson! Get over here!” Jeremy howled.

Nelson pulled an almost lifeless Pru toward the back of the house. Jeremy grabbed two baseball bats leaning against an old grill, threw one to Nelson, who missed the catch.

“Get her inside! And pick up that goddamned bat!” Jeremy yelled as he rushed the closest vagrant, swinging the bat at his head and missing, then connecting with his stomach, knocking him to the ground. Pru screamed from inside. Mullet barked uncontrollably beside her. Nelson stood with the bat in his hands, nervously eyeing an ever-closer vagrant.

“Be ready to kill!” Jeremy ordered.

“Jesus!” Nelson exclaimed.

The dog was unleashed.

The horde closed in.

Jenna stepped outside, and Mullet burst through the door behind her.

“Did you want, like, three or four apples, or what?”

Charlie’s partner didn’t respond like most people, those who would be quick to observe and seem to want to please this strikingly handsome man with a jawline chiseled from marble, an intensely lusty brow, dreamy blue eyes, and a megawatt, movie star smile. But Roland was usually content to ignore him.

“Roland, how many do you want?” Charlie sharpened his tone, then brushed aside the question and threw four of the shiny pink orbs into the flimsy plastic bag. “You know, you never have a problem ignoring people when they’re talking to you, but God forbid anyone does it to you when you’re trying to talk to them. The hypocrisy is quite impressive.”

“Be quiet,” Roland finally whispered.

“What?”

“I’m trying to listen to these women,” Roland said between clenched teeth. Charlie quieted and listened with him.

“What am I supposed to do?” one of the women asked. “Just throw out all the food in my fridge and come back here to spend another couple hundred to replace it—if they even have it? These outages have to stop. They go on for days!” She was on the verge of tears. The other woman agreed, empathizing with the stranger confiding in her, these mutual frustrations. “How do they think we are going to afford this? The only good thing is my kids have been playing outside more often.” She tried to laugh through the worry. “But I just can’t afford to keep coming here when the power’s on, driving around to find an open, unaffected restaurant when it’s off at my house, waiting for hours, and hoping there’s food left when we sit. Coming back here to replace spoiled food. It’s too much.”

Overhead, select fluorescent bulbs blinked in sections around the ceiling; the vegetables against the wall seemed to shift beneath the fluctuations of light and dark; the misty veil showering them spurted on and off.

“Oh, god,” Charlie exclaimed, exasperated. The woman looked over at him, teary-eyed and desperate, as if he was to blame.

“When does this stop?” she implored him.

Surprised by the directness of her address, he shrugged. “How could I know?” he asked, looking away. Then, everything went dark, and the woman broke down. The acquaintance moved to guide her new sister toward the exit. The only light shone through the windows at the front entrance, growing dimmer toward the darkest back of the store.

“Let’s go,” Roland ordered. “And bring the basket with you.”

“How are we going to pay for it?”

“Cash.”

On their way out, Roland slammed a hundred-dollar bill into the open hand of a cashier. Around them, others grabbed as much food as they could carry and ran out.

* * *

Roland Woolf, tall and slim with beady eyes like a venomous spider’s, hunched before the decorative Venetian mirror of his master bathroom; his hands gripped the edge of the marble slab beneath it, supporting his wearied frame. He was remembering this episode at the grocery store, which seemed like a decade in the past, but one that had happened only a few weeks before. That was when the outages had begun to last more than a day or two but four or five. The disdain he’d felt for anyone at the time who’d expressed unquiet concern had triggered the memory, believing the calamity a necessary endurance to transform from an economy run by fossil fuels to one that was sustained by clean energy. The disdain lingered as contempt, like the stink of a rankling mold as the guilt it had unreasonably acquired spread like a virally infected fungus. Thereby, guilt and shame were transmuted into rage and back again.

Roland pawed at his wrinkled face, trying to measure what life he had left.

Deep, sustained sleep was a luxury in recent years. At fifty-five, Roland’s brain was abnormally active in quieting itself of intrusive thoughts—too much of life had usurped any hope for contentment. Only his peace pills, as he called all painkillers—two of which currently sat on the countertop—could tame the thundering squall of his mind so that his worn-out body might steal an undisturbed six-hour rest from responsibility. But the pills made him groggy and weak, and weakness was another enemy to his mind. He had forgotten to take his life-saving meds, the important ones, the night before, a once-a-day pill he could not miss, every day, until the end. When he would forget, it was the first thing he had to do immediately the following morning. That pill, dwarfing the other two, was already cupped in his hand.

The fourteen-inch television installed flush to the wall at his left was set to IBBC News. Nothing if not prepared, he’d purchased a generator to supply the juice of the house’s electronics in case of outages. Even if the world lost power, he would not. Most of the fairly wealthy had acquired one in the early days, and the poor were priced out for the demand. As he cleaned his teeth, he gave an ear to the updates on the global turmoil which had upset the supply chain for all types of manufacturing, construction, and distribution. His was a family-owned steel-scraping business that depended on all three sectors. The news segment described how the shipping industry was being particularly hard-hit. He switched the station.

“—has been lost. Officials blame, quote, right-wing terror, as Portland struggles to resume cell service. All metropolitan towers have failed, some of which, it has been confirmed, have indeed been vandalized. Most troubling is the news straight from Central District that, except for small portions of Seattle, all of Washington state is without power for the foreseeable future. Experts on our own program warned of this in early March when parts of western Washington had reported days-long brownouts.”

“Fucking fascists,” Roland mumbled.

Popping the pill into his mouth, he slugged some fusty, overnight water to push it down.

The power had come back early that morning after five straight days. Shirtless, he stood under the largest vent in the master bedroom’s foyer, allowing the cool air to cascade down his half-naked body. Charlie, his partner eight years younger, walked past him to pee.

“You’re up early,” Roland said.

“I slept like shit. Drank too much,” Charlie replied.

“Smoke-a-thon too, huh? I saw butts all over the patio.”

Charlie coughed up some phlegm and laughed. “I had an ashtray—somewhere.”

“Clean it up, will you?”

“As you wish, Lord Over.”

“Very funny. It’s disgusting.”

“I know. I’m sorry. It’s gross. I need to stop,” Charlie said, repeating his line on the recurrent subject as he focused his aim into the bowl.

“You’ve been saying that for probably ten years.”

“And you keep saying you’re going back to the gym, but all I see is that gut getting bigger.”

“You mean my prosperity?” Roland rubbed his slightly protruding middle, diverting to humor for a change.

“Yes, fat boy.” Charlie flipped up his briefs and gave Roland a sweet kiss on the cheek, then rubbed his best friend’s belly. “Ugh—thank God the air is back on. I was about to go full Jack Torrance on you,” he said, developing darker levity as he walked down the hall toward the other side of the house.

“Don’t forget the will’s suspicious circumstances clause!” Roland yelled, teasingly.

Charlie’s obligatory, laughing complement to Roland’s final threat concluded the tired bit as the sound traveled back down the passageway to please the ears of his keeper; one of Charlie’s strengths in mastering such a master was his ability to read the notes of the composition and to sing on cue those needed to maintain the harmony.

Roland stayed under the cool air, also tired of their scripted humor, and closed his eyes. His worry had redoubled since the last outage. A premonition in the form of a feeling drowned his innermost sense. Without detailing a list, he knew that what he wouldn’t do to survive in a time of great calamity would be far overshadowed by the heft of what he would do. He gazed through the half-fogged glass of the French doors before him and into the peace of his private backyard, thinking no more about himself but knowing everything that might occur could steal it all away, and the ultimate nature of his fate could prove the hurricane he’d constantly fled: However privileged his life while living, his death was going to be difficult.

That afternoon, he’d had an appointment at the hospital to extract blood, a routine as regular as a mortgage payment. It was unusual to meet the physician’s assistant at the hospital, but Gary was a friend at this point, and he was picking up shifts at Holy Cross to help with the chaos the staff shortages had triggered.

The exterior of the hospital appeared both abandoned and overcrowded. People streamed in and out of all entrances and exits, but the windows were dull with the absence of their faces. A wetness like water leaked from the majority of the sills to the next level down, staining the concrete as it traveled, until whatever it was dripped onto the pavement below. Roland stood beneath the strongest of the streams to observe the drip and could see its color, a bluish-gray sort of liquid tinted by an accumulation of dirt and debris from the neglected façade of the building, blocky and brutalist in its design and its vibe.

Observing the commotion at the hospital’s entrance, his mind expanded beyond the preconceptions he’d held for life as it should have been, and he absorbed the preternatural contours of the decaying and disorganized scene: Among other strange sights was a woman on the ground, moaning in a language he couldn’t decipher. An old man with a walker, blood streaming down his head, alone and unattended, passed by his right side. Two small children bellowed at their father, who held their hands but stared dumbly at a brick wall. This same hospital, only months before, efficient and well-regarded, had been altered by the gradual misapplication of the sensitivities in human nature, now set conspicuously on the brink: Trivial social concerns had superseded the fundamental interests of the institution. Not a man easily surprised, Roland’s eyes widened with each new sight, as he was forced to note how oblivious he’d been to the unanticipated fluctuations in the social collective’s psyche. There was madness in the air. A preoccupation with phantoms unaffiliated with the present moment. Rather than succumb to the shock, posturing like a madman yelling, What the hell is going on here? he pushed aside the distorting effects to his soul and continued into the pathetic building for the appointment.

Security lines, a routine inconvenience in practically every public place, including gyms and grocery stores added a year prior, and one time especially at pharmacies when they were crammed with people desperate to fill prescriptions—a news report had suggested a collapse in pill manufacturing—had all been deconstructed, given up for urgency, for the need to keep it moving. Society was not so much organized anymore but a sort of managed chaos, a phrase overused by politicians at the waning days of civilization’s peak in the first two thousand years of the Common Era. This new millennium had begun to reveal a darker promise.

Big Government had installed various security apparatuses to inhibit mass shooters initially, and looters latterly, but those killers and thieves had become so abundant during the food shortages and power outages of recent days that rather than blockade entrances with security scanners, fully armed police officers were stationed in these positions instead, an expense paid for by property taxes. Schools had been shuttered the greater part of two years, so those funds were redirected to lethal enforcements. Officers had been trained to kill at the slightest waving of a gun, a program which had caused some controversy among the deniers of present realities, their insistent activism a sorry pretense of the lost era. But the days of moral seething and political preening were over. There was too much discomfort in daily life to give any time to it. Mistakes and accidents surely occurred, but they were as inevitable as death itself.

Drops of dark, muddy blood stained the margins of the lobby floors, leading to the elevators, surely remnants of assaults, murders, rampages that at one time shocked the nation but appeared now as stains on the more innocent past. Violent crime was as regular as the day going into night. Formerly, in the Old World, just a simple population of pathological types would dare to do such things, but now, here, today, in this age—anyone harbored the explosive potential to do vicious things, our animal nature no longer inhibited by the many shimmering rewards and dangling hopes and possibilities keeping it in check. Individuals who might have been lauded in the past for humanitarian careers were now thoughtless to any impulse to rape or pillage what they needed, or worse, what they wanted. However, Roland assumed the custodial staff was as short as the others, or there were bigger messes with which to contend, still refusing, himself, to see the world, as it was, coming to an end.

Patients, terminal or mentally deranged, and whatever family or spouse (or whoever accompanied the sick) far outnumbered those in hospital attire. Ranked among them were even more security guards than nurses, doctors, or administrators. All told, Roland figured the number of individuals who occupied a position in the medical hierarchy was probably a tenth of the lobby’s total population. But it was even unusual to see any of them there—a further sign of the shortages. Those accompanying the sick all seemed to complain, to each other or yelling toward the ceiling, about the insufficiency of the care their loved one was receiving. Roland didn’t count them as much as assign relative numbers to groups and take an average. Though appalled at the dried swaths of bloodstains and overall mess of the floors, littered with tissue paper and all assortment of strewn debris, he marveled at the juxtaposition between the disarray on the floor and the grandiosity of the soaring twentieth-century architecture of the lobby itself. A mural loomed behind him, both of a town and a nation unified by a single vision, a distinctly American town at the dawn of its imperial century—abundant farmlands cascading down and past the perspective of the artist’s eye; women and children reaching toward the sweep of a prominent wind, soaring upward, blending corn with grain, to a kind of cathedral point, nominating the formerly robust civilization to the grace of heaven’s most sacred rewards.

Roland texted Gary since the check-in line was not only overwhelmed with visitors of all kinds and needs but disorganized and poorly run by two overworked young women: one who looked on the verge of tears, and one who looked on the verge of murder.

Where do I go?

He waited roughly thirty minutes before an answer came back:

Third floor, second elevator on the left, second corridor, walking south. Room 341. If you walk up the north wing, you’ll find room 341 but I won’t be in it. Hurry.

Hurry? Roland thought. “I would’ve been there thirty minutes ago,” he mumbled. If it weren’t for all these losers in the lobby.

The compass inlaid at the center of the lobby floor revealed which wing went south, but still he got turned around in the labyrinthine repetition of what seemed like an endless extension of hallways, one branching from another like a many-tentacled leviathan, each room like a suction cup already suffocating a victim.

On the third floor, he at first sensed, then could smell the sour musk of death and dead bodies.

“Roland—over here,” Gary called from a room down the hall. Corpses of the recently deceased, mostly on gurneys, a few on the floor, slumped over onto themselves—all covered in white or light blue sheets—were positioned like leftover hospital wares yet to be tossed out, and Roland wondered just how long they had been left there, ignored for the living: How long before they would begin to rot and fall apart? Gary read his face but said nothing.

“Have a seat and roll up your sleeve, please.”

“Busy day?” Roland deadpanned. “It’s like a morgue up here.”

Gary mimed disbelief. “Tell me about it,” he said almost lacking sarcasm, widening his eyes as he prepared the needle to extract blood from Roland’s arm. He spoke while focusing on his work. “Five straight days without power and our generators are out of diesel because the idiots who are supposed to keep them ready haven’t done their jobs, and people who need machines to live then die. And they will die quickly. Thus, the pileup.”

Roland simply nodded, taking the information reluctantly as the shocking subtlety of ignored but obvious truths moved him further from disbelief and closer to accepting the demoralized state of public life. “Most people have no idea how dependent we are. How fucked we are—”

“They live in the matrix of unreality,” Roland interrupted with the kind of bluntness he used to reserve for friends in private. Suddenly, he had the answers, seeing everything as it was, as if never in denial himself. It wasn’t finally the permission to speak boldly, exactly, but a power play that one could no longer deny anything.

“Seems insane, but it’s true. They are totally disconnected from what is right in front of them. Some will probably try to sue the hospital.” Gary shook his head. “Pointless.”

“I’ll admit to being surprised at the disorder here,” Roland said, trying to regain a moment’s control. “I haven’t left my house in a while.” This, he indicated, was a final word in a discussion he did not care to continue. Gary noted the resistance and didn’t push it further, labeling the vials of blood, trying not to comment under his breath about Roland’s obvious struggle with denialism. The lights began to flicker and then went out; a deep hum sounded throughout the massive building like a galactic spaceship powering down, and the men were hushed while machines were noisily trying to start.

“Please let them work,” Gary whispered.

The hallway bulbs began to flash like a strobe.

“You’d better go,” Gary said. “It’ll be chaos if the generators don’t kick on. Last time, only one worked in the north wing, and everyone tried to cram their way into it.”

Roland nodded. “Are you gonna be all right?” he asked more from pleasantry than from care.

“Yes. Go.”

Back home, Charlie was in the office on a virtual call with his sales team. Roland observed the man with whom he’d spent the last twenty-three years, watching the familiar gestures and expressions he had sometimes resented, not from anger or animus, but habituation: Sameness tended toward redundancy and could provoke his urge to break out and into something, not just new, but wholly different. He turned away, imagining a life diametrically opposed to this, maybe one that might have included a wife and many children—how might that have changed him—when Charlie came into the room.

“That was a quick one,” Roland said, exiting the daydream.

“The COO’s camera went out. We were all just sitting there looking at each other, so we ended it.”

“I heard this morning that Seattle was having some issues,” Roland offered as he moved to his armchair.

“This shit has got to stop.” Charlie stood before the television and swiped it on, repeating what had become for him a constant evaluation of the latest events of decline.

“—for that quick look at weather,” the anchor said, then paused and pressed his hand against his earpiece. “They’re telling me now that Chicago’s O’Hare is experiencing total power loss. Backup systems have failed as the upper Midwest grid is down. Riot police have been dispatched across the region. Ticketed passengers for upcoming flights are advised not to go to this airport. All arriving flights are being diverted to Denver, Dallas, or Atlanta.” He paused, listening. “All departing flights are cancelled. Please call the 800 number at the bottom of your screen or, if possible, visit your carrier’s website for information about specific flights.”

“If someone can’t get online, then they’re not able to watch this program either, jackass,” Charlie said, shooting Roland an angry and urgent look, trying to get him to see the unfolding catastrophe that was the state of the world. Roland met the expression as if subdued by denial and set his eyes on the screen in his lap.

“It’ll all come back and be fine. Stop complaining so much.”

Charlie clenched his teeth, flexing his muscular jawline, pausing to discipline an emotional surge, trying not to yell, but instead, he exploded. “You’re a goddamned fool! You always think everything will be fine. You and I are not seeing things the same way anymore. Look around you! What the hell do you think is happening? This isn’t some random glitch, and we aren’t going back to normal. Wake up!” He snatched the superfluous remote control and flung it at his partner, who flinched, defending himself against the projectile.

As Charlie left the room, Roland sensed the trap of the very characteristics that had used to serve him: stubbornness, resiliency, defiance, and a fear, not new, but threatening to overwhelm his notoriously ironclad reserve. If things really did collapse—if society as they had known it ceased to function—then all supplies and services, not at all limited to but certainly including medical assistance and availability of medication, would cease as well. That would cause some problems for him. Calmly, he swiped the television back on and resumed his work.

* * *

Two Miles East of Weaverville, NC—Four months into decline

Mina Galani lowered the volume of the iPad, a once out-of-date model now like a luxury appliance, that sat next to her easel and switched from an outdated news-pod to an outdated arts-pod, the episodes for which she’d downloaded a year before, programs, at this point, she’d listened to a thousand times. The old news was too bleak to support the joyous feel of the peonies she had been painting for nearly two weeks. The last time she’d cared to listen to a live broadcast, she’d noted how straightforward the coverage had become, no longer making excuses for “central power” as the political far right had begun to call the federal government, who in turn had quickly labeled them “enemies of the state.”

The “Red State” governors had long ceased taking orders from the federal executive and the DC power bloc at large; and Texas—at the vanguard of the opposition, a state with its own power grid, which had been modernized after notorious brownouts a good ten years before the rest of the country, ever the rugged separatists—finally hearing the cold whisper of its history, was becoming the independent nation it had once promised itself to become.

A war raged but in pockets; it was sectarian and regional. American versus American or mostly unaffiliated, undocumented individuals versus whoever, as was the history of the territorial wars of the nation (the first civil war the only possible exception), some imported for this specific conflict to further confuse sides as cover for the most corrupted minority in American history. All soldiers fought through their divisions to the point of blood—to the death, instant or extended.

In her small and quiet corner of the South, it had yet to materialize as relentless war. Certainly, it was as potentially dangerous a region as any: Thieves, murderers, and miscreants of all kinds roamed like nineteenth-century highwaymen—road agents, as they had been called—but this was almost a Southern tradition. Crime had begun to spiral, even before the initial signs of energy insecurity, resulting from the political prohibition on punishing criminals, mostly marginalized men and a handful of women who apparently had no choice but to commit violent crimes. A deeper look into their lives would certainly catalyze this understanding; they were, in fact, impossibly far from acquiring the attributes of a decent life and would not tolerate the poverty consigned to them. Excuses endlessly promoted the crimes.

On any given morning, however, Mina could enjoy the tranquility of nature—her sighs, songs, and sounds: a mellifluous gush of a motherly tune—as if war were an artless fantasy of historical men. But Mina knew what was happening, and it pained her, unable to express the angst, the blue-black angst that colored womanly disgust for the rough-hewn needs in men, except by nurturing the bounty of life around her. Painting had become her sole personal recreation, a distraction from the destruction, a way to mirror Mother Nature and to find peace.

The power was on one day, off the next, but her Wi-Fi had totally gone out, so she’d continued to rely on satellite Internet—a temperamental technology, depending on the wind and the weather—connecting to stations when she could, replaying programming from better days.

At fifty, Mina was retired from the world and increasingly reclusive—no longer a member of the many organizations she’d previously patronized, not that they much existed anymore. Years before, already the creative arts had devolved into an uncritical, insipid mediocrity, her tolerance for which had died far before the community had imploded. She could only wonder at the decrepitude of its current critical state, or if artistic productions of any kind were anything measurable to merit. The overproduction of bad art was as old as culture. That’s not what bothered her; it was the recent idealization of it, the narcissism of its makers, the limitless investment in egotistical fare whose only interest was the reciprocity of praise, however false: The more servile the praise, the more value had been given to the piece. The three-year-old coverage on the program she was replaying discussed a contemporary exhibition and sale of an obscure artist in Holland whose piece on “the blankness of genius” had sold for an offensively high price.

“Piece of shit, more like,” she grumbled as she lightly stroked a fine pink highlight onto the edges of the principal flower on her canvas.

About two decades she’d spent in Massachusetts, near Cambridge in Boston, but once the cell towers had failed for the avenue of New England-proper, off of which Boston had fed its need for juice, she’d had to travel south, first in a carpool, then by bus, traveling through regions that hadn’t restricted interstate transportation. Some of the trip she’d made by foot in the exodus of electricity refugees—most of whom stopped in the New York City or Washington, D.C. metro areas because New York attracted like-minded metropolitan types, both high and low (many of whom had been eager to exploit the new vulnerabilities of the wealthy who had refused to leave the city for prejudice toward the rest of the country). And in D.C., the power had yet to even flicker, a perennially privileged bubble doing well to maintain the belief that not much had changed since 1998. Avoiding predatory police seeking to fine or even to arrest those migrating to more secure territory had been a pitfall she’d managed to evade with feminine sleights of hand: masterly feints of helplessness or endless compliments on the bravery of their mission and rather large muscular frames.

Mina had followed the fallout from the failing cell towers in the Pacific Northwest and the subsequent violence that had been the first scaled confrontation in the country, as well as the first sign of the rest of the nation’s contiguity to total collapse. This provoked the immediate if slightly rash migration of those in other parts of the country where oppressive government dictates seemed to suggest an approaching and similar fate. In the months after that first infrastructural failure, those who could move from areas where similar trends could be discerned did so.

Too much of life had been transferred to phones, immobilizing the very idea of self-reliance in most of the citizens but instigating its resurgence in some others. There were those who believed social collapse was a combination of terrorism and bureaucratic incompetence, in both government and private sectors, but they were the minority. The two sides mostly believed one and vilified the other. Once it came to a head in the streets, those regional hot wars had begun and were still being waged with lives.

The elegant, if understated, North Carolina cottage home her family had owned for close to fifty years had been purchased by her intrepid grandfather, the stoic Greek American and often critical man who had raised her. Ever-prepared with secondary and tertiary plans for the possibilities of the nuclear-armed world, he had purchased the four acres after a clandestine promotion to the newly coordinated Central Intelligence Agency, an evolution of foreign intelligence-gathering as old as the Revolutionary period. Its preceding incarnation as the Office of Strategic Services was made on the heels of the colossal victories of World War II. The nation had then entered its imperial phase, however tentatively. It was to be the patriarch’s off-the-grid hideout, installing the latest in DIY technologies he could acquire, being one of the first with satellite television in 1980. It was a well-rigged joint, however decrepit and expired most of the technology had become.

When she wasn’t painting, Mina nursed her garden, which by necessity had become exclusively devoted to sustenance: hardy vegetables, herbs (ryegrass for the cow and goats), and what fruits the Carolina climate would support. There was a pear tree, an apple tree, and a plum tree that the old Greek had planted in a cluster of three like the triune of a loving God, dropping their fruit to His children. A religious man from another era, seemingly a parallel world that had cultivated prosperity by faith, this North American primogenitor had made the effort to include the symbols of his gratitude for divine grace wherever he could.

Beyond the rows of roughage, she’d kept three hens and a rooster, a single heifer, who was ready to breed (but Mina had no bull) and two goats which did breed occasionally to some success. She had traded one of the recent kids to a local young couple who’d also determined to live independent of civilization. Between the two homesteads, they’d taught each other how to trade and barter appropriate to their needs by fairly measured, reciprocal offerings.

With the foresight instilled by her family’s example, Mina had purchased ten solar panels before the supply chain for nonessential goods had broken its essential links. Some were installed like rooftop gables on the ground facing east and west, and some lay flat facing heaven—all to catch the most direct rays of nuclear fire dawn, doom, and dusk. Since the panels were five years old, she’d had to learn to arrange and maintain them without guidance from a more seasoned user so they might last.

All of the work required of a farmer had reformed Mina’s once slightly chubby midsection. Now, she had never been fitter, having to take in the waists of many pants. Gazing into the full-length mirror of the guest bedroom, where all her sewing needs were achieved, she pulled at the roots of her once raven-black hair, using her fingers to comb through the dominant gray and white layered among the remaining black. Dark eyes and olive skin decided her Greek appearance, while her intellect could match that ancient country’s legacy for inspired thought.

It had been six weeks since the power grid was largely operational, coming off and on the past two, but in preparation, she’d already begun to live as off-grid as she could since first arriving at the cottage. Ultimately, the gas-powered generators would be a vital crutch (for which she had one thirty-gallon vat of fuel remaining), and she had three large battery packs to charge the few computer products she’d acquired during last days that would someday match their expiry. She’d only use this auxiliary energy when absolutely necessary during a blackout; otherwise, she’d wait until power was restored, not knowing when or if it would go out forever.

These days, the words of an American commonsense philosopher, Reginald Sowes, from an interview she’d watched a dozen times, floated through her thoughts like a native melody: “Every man thinks talk of total breakdown is foolish—if not downright lunatic—until it comes, and then, with a sudden shift, everything fails, the pillars of the holy temple collapse, and a new dark age, born of moral desolation, begins.”

Ten pounds of freshly cut ryegrass began to limp and lose its hydration in the late-summer sun while she fetched buckets for distribution to the cow and goats. In the side yard, she’d grown the over-seeded ryegrass and kept it fully lush, except for older patches which would eventually die off in the coldest part of winter. She clipped it with a manual reel mower, collecting the grass in piles before feeding the livestock. Nearer to the corn, on an elevated mound of earth that drained and dried out the fastest, she’d grown oats, almost twelve weeks from the plot’s last grazing, and they were ready to harvest again.

Keeping this makeshift farm was her new workaday way. Life before had been so different; she’d never dreamed she’d work her own private farm to survive, and as Sowes had suggested, no one could have imagined this would come to pass. And yet, it worked. Never had the sense of security been like the feeling of working the methods of one’s very survival. Never stronger, nor healthier, the strict determination to live had enlivened her spirit, reestablished her faith, and returned her mind to its inquisitive nature.

The American Brown Swiss, Sally Baby, shuffled over to the fence. Her large, moist nose grazed Mina’s sweaty chin as it swiped the air, then it nuzzled at her side where the bucket appeared, into which the animal’s head vanished. Mina was desperate to find a bull. Milk would be nice; cheese, even better. If she failed at breeding the young cow, she’d have to slaughter it for the meat; otherwise, Sally Baby was just a time-consuming, labor-intensive pet.

The goats were reproducing, providing their sweet, grassy milk, though one of the two latest kids had been snatched in the middle of the night, yet by what was still a question that continued to trouble her. The kid that remained was healthy and very securely sheltered inside a little shed each night with its parents.

Whenever the power was on, Mina would spend precious time searching the regional community apps to see if any local farmer had a bull but no heifer or would accept some sort of trade for a breeding session if they had both. Mina didn’t have much to barter but fruit and vegetables, a painting if they desired, but she would offer what she could, even her labor: time teaching children, picking fruit and nuts or whatever needed harvesting. She hadn’t been a farmer long enough to be accustomed to the desperation of spilling the blood of her keep to survive.

Out of the two rows of corn she grew, a third of it was feed. Five husks shucked earlier that morning were left in the hot sun, so the shaved kernels off the cob were a little drier, making it easier to toss to the chickens. “Before you shuck the cob, it’s called an ear,” she said out loud as she worked the corn bare, imagining a gathering of farmer’s children at her feet. “The cob is the fibrous pole. The husk is the case of protective leaves.” She spoke to herself or to the animals like a teacher or a midwife of the land, doing all her own husbandry. It kept her sane, though it wouldn’t appear so. Culling all the bits of chopped kernels, she swept the cutting board, and they filed into a stainless steel bowl, throwing it out to the fowl in handfuls, then retreating for a tall glass of water.

Mina used the public water from the faucets to clean farming tools and wares, never to drink. She didn’t trust it. There had been a polio outbreak in the Charlotte metro area, and though she’d been vaccinated, it had been many decades since those shots, and it was a certainty that disease festered in the neglected municipal pipes. It was perhaps less likely out in the country, she’d guessed, but this particular risk could be avoided.

For when it rained, she’d maintained a system, the original structure of which was left over from her grandfather’s tenure, a simple system to collect the house’s runoff into a vat of activated charcoal—coals burnt red hot to become more porous and filter-effective—underneath which was a layer of aquarium filter sponge, and beneath that collected the more purified water.

If it had stormed for more than a few hours, a flowing creek, large enough to wade through in parts, effusive when it had rained for days, collected in clear pools from which the animals usually drank. Any water used for cooking or drinking had to come from the six barrels stationed around the house’s perimeter.

Mina rarely thought about her fate but obsessed over the weather. Mostly the rain. Forecasts were hard to find, not just because of the outages, but broadcasters had almost entirely stopped posting them for the interruptions and the near impossibility of accuracy. The disruptions in time had inhibited the service, so when the power was on, finding one could take hours and too much digging online. And the more she dug into the search, the less reliable the source would be. There had been an amateur meteorologist who’d had a page. It was broad enough to make room for the gaps but didn’t stray far from the region’s annual patterns that were already assumed. So, she carried on with this life, virtually alone and surprisingly contented. To her mind and upbringing, acceptance of one’s circumstances was a sister to success.

* * *

Two months later—

On what felt like a Sunday, Mina twirled soft yarn around her fingers and wrist, winding and unwinding the fuzzy rope, remembering her brother, who had passed from the suggestive effects of the pandemic that had taken root in his soiled mind during the second and much more socially disruptive lockdown. He hadn’t caught the illness but had started to drink, not having been much of a drinker prior to. Dennis, whom she’d called Denny, had been twelve years her senior, unmarried, with no children. He’d been caretaker of the cottage—keeping the animals alive—but chose to live in a rented trailer two miles east of the property. Once, she had found him collapsed in his home and then started making regular visits to comfort him. But it wasn’t enough, and finally, she’d found him one gray afternoon under thick, oppressive clouds, hanging from a tree by a rope. He’d left no note, nor explanation, just wanting out.

While she mused on the sadness in Dennis’s life, though feeling his presence and a peace his memory had brought with him, seeming to prefer the other side, the power suddenly came on, and her phone made its synchronistic ding, a sound she hadn’t heard in months. It was more of an intrusion, startling her from the emotional mixture of her memories. She dabbed her wet eyes dry and checked the screen. There was a text from a young man farther west toward Hampsburg, deeper country with fewer people, a man with whom she’d had one exchange two months prior. He had a bull, but he’d had “other things to tend to,” he’d said. Over the course of their chat, she’d told him the name of her town and some of the local markers for finding the residence, informing him that she was armed and not alone, just in case. Finally, she sent her address, knowing the risk and prepared to defend her life, but growing desperate beyond caution for life to become something more than enduring apocalyptic solitude.

The text she’d received said that he had lost everything, was prepared to risk what was left, and would be walking the animal her way by morning.

Suburbs: Marietta, Georgia—The Beginning

“I’m nervous.”

She laughed at him.

“What?” He chuckled. “I am. I hate parties. I’m no good at small talk.”

“Yeah, yeah—you and everyone else,” she said.

“Put me on a battlefield, I’m fine. A fancy dinner party? I’m toast.”

“No, you’re not. Calm down.” She searched for a quick line to pacify his fragility. “You’re the caviar on the toast—” she teased. “You’re handsome and amazing and wonderful and never stop talking once you start—” He hadn’t gotten the joke.

“I just gotta get comfortable. That’s the part I hate.” He pointed to the space in front of him as they walked.

“Everyone does. Relax, please. They’re nice,” she said. “And you get weird

when you’re nervous.”

“I know,” he said sheepishly. “What does he do, again?”

“Real estate.”

He rolled his eyes. “And she?”

“Stays home, I think. I don’t know. I think she has some online business thing.”

“Of course, she does.”

“Look, you don’t like it, you can excuse yourself and walk back home. No big deal.”

They hurried, and as they approached the walkway leading to one of the bigger houses in the development, the felicity of a Super Bowl office party well underway met the more silent conditions of the chilly night air. The peak days of winter’s chill kept the outside frozen quiet. But a mass of people was gathered in the great foyer of the colonial manse; a slender woman peered through the glass in the door and out at them, then opened it.

“Jenna, you made it!” The couple smiled in unison, eliminating their truer feelings. “And you must be Jeremy.” She reached out her hand to shake his. He’d almost saluted her from nerves but caught Jenna’s encouraging eye and gently took his host’s hand, hesitating, wondering whether he should kiss it. “Come in—it’s freezing out here!” she said, continuing the exclamatory assault.

Inside, the house was alive with vibrant light—the whole house afire—making every available corner of the extensive floor plan visible to guests. It was a mixed party, attended by both neighborhood folks and businesspeople: employees, clients, executives—most of whom were acquainted with the inclusive hospitalities of their hosts: the gregarious charms of the wife and the kingly generosity of the husband.

Pru escorted the newly arrived and least known couple into the dining room where a makeshift bar had been placed for the evening. “We have just about every kind of liquor, wine, or beer you could want,” she explained.

“Are all of these people from our side of the hood?” Jenna asked with only partial irony as her eyes toured the room, estimating the revelers and their associations by degree and type of their finery. Most of the men wore sports coats, few had on ties. The women had donned flirty cocktail dresses or pants with structured tops: the latter more likely to be corporate climbers, the former more likely to be wives or wives-to-be.

“It’s just us, babe. Nelson and I, and you two. Everyone else is either Nelson’s client—past or present—their significant other, or one from his small army of agents. There’s a smattering of neighborhood peeps, but they’re from the west side,” she said. “We’re keepin’ it real on the east side,” she continued, making what she imagined was a gang sign with her right hand’s fingers, but looking more like an arthritic grandma pointing at some irrelevant thing pestering her clouded vision. Jenna tried not to laugh in her face. Jeremy shut his eyes in pain of the tortured humiliations to which some white people would stoop to seem cool by adopting something, they knew not what, the depth, pain, danger and belonging to which, they couldn’t possibly understand.

All around the house, the lights began to flicker and then went out. The music stopped. A rush of exclamation infused the space above their heads, traveling up and down the stairs and into the many bedrooms and closets, filling the house with drunken innuendo. It remained dark, as the thrill adopted a conspiratorial whisper, a kind of fearful fretting that the party was over just at its peak, and that they’d have no choice but to stop what they were doing, discontinue their conversations, abandon new friendships, and leave without the satisfaction of a proper ending. The nervous excitement had passed beyond the point of titillation and now persisted for too long.

“Who’s being silly?” Pru questioned playfully, hands on her bony hips. After the chattering settled into mumbling, she asked, “What’s going on?” more seriously, as if someone in her service would have an answer. The power suddenly restored, electric music reanimated the air, and the party continued as if ever uninterrupted.

In the distraction, Jeremy had broken from the women’s company and ordered a beer.

“That was weird, right?” He threw the question like a comment as opposed to a more personal greeting. “You from around here?” he asked the young man back at work, shaking an icy drink he had silenced in the outage.

“Nah, from up north a bit. I do these gigs, when I can, for college expenses.” The extra information seemed like an excuse.

“Pizza and beer?”

“What else, right?”

“I’m in school myself,” Jeremy announced, trying to develop the conversation, trying to relax. He leaned his elbow on the bar’s edge, but it slipped off the glossy, imitation wood. The younger man observed him more closely as if he was too old to admit the fact, knowing he was being used as a test subject for more important figures floating in the sea of drunken revelers. Jeremy smiled and looked away, tucking his other hand under the mistaken elbow, propping it up as he drank.

“Nice,” the bartender said with an enthusiasm he’d used to ironize disinterest. Jeremy pivoted and relaxed the supporting arm, placed his beer on the bar.

“I was in the military my whole career. Just got out. Decided to get my degree, make good on all that free money,” he said, beginning the speech he’d planned earlier in the shower, then looked around the room. “Maybe get into logistics, or hell—even real estate with these folks right here.” Jeremy gripped the beer and gestured toward the buzzing crowd. The bartender just nodded at the speaker and took an order from another guest keen to get a round of drinks. Still not comfortable with how he might present himself, Jeremy crossed the room and entered another where he could stand back and observe the crowd. Inevitably, if he talked to strangers he was trying to impress, he would ramble.

Touring the perimeter of the spacious den, packed with clusters of murmuring professionals, he edged closer to a trio of two men and one woman who looked like the kind of people he wanted to be around, maybe emulate: neither too serious nor too flamboyant. Well-dressed but not to impress, and their eye movements, assessing the crowd, seemed to match his own skepticism. Their unselfconscious coolness magnetized his attention.

“I wonder how many people here do?” he heard the woman ask.

“Who knows? It’s like a mind virus.”

“Seriously.”

“I had to go to some mandatory HR training—well, they didn’t call it mandatory, but the way they presented it, it sure sounded like a threat not to miss it.” The two men murmured in sympathy. The woman shook her head, as if to rid herself of disbelief. “Anyway, it was about pronouns and how to use them and who is using them and how to announce them in meetings. It was crazy what they were saying. I wasn’t even sure I understood what it all meant.”

“Don’t forget the ‘whiteness’ crap,” the first man said.

“What do you mean whiteness?” she asked, astounded.

“You haven’t heard that one yet?” The others listened more carefully. “You know, the whole privilege thing—if you’re white, you’re automatically granted certain privileges in society, et cetera. You haven’t had to work for anything—you just have everything, somehow.” They nodded but didn’t respond. “And being on time and doing your job efficiently, expecting others to be efficient and on time—it’s—it’s hard to figure why they’re doing this.”

“One of the pronoun sets was, like, zeer or zer or something? What the hell even is that?” the woman asked, not expecting an answer.

“No clue,” said the first man.

Jeremy disengaged, intuiting an awkwardness if he spoke, given the subject, and tried casually to walk off for another beer as if he hadn’t heard a word. He’d had strained experiences with other kinds of people, especially tourists to his native Hawaii, where a conflict between rich mainlanders (who had been acquiring, then fencing off ancestral lands) and real-born Hawaiians grew uglier by the season. But Jeremy harbored no hate; it was more like a kind of wariness until character could be proved, and once proved, never doubted, a trait his time in the military had helped to distinguish within him. A man of good character only had to wait for time to catch up with the ignorant surmising of greedy minds.

Jenna had apparently spied her wandering husband before he had a chance to see her, startling him when she spoke from behind his shoulder.

“A penny for your thoughts,” she said quietly, like her grandma used to say.

“Not even worth that much,” he replied, avoiding her request.

“Having fun?”

He didn’t respond, just looked at her like she knew well enough to know he’d rather be at home with their new puppy, making a sad face.

“I know, but he’ll be fine in the crate for at least another hour.”

“An hour?”

“Thirty minutes, minimum. We can’t just walk in here, say hello, have a drink, and walk out. Pru said this was sort of a welcome to the neighborhood for us. We can’t be ungrateful.”

“Fine.”

Smiling at his frown, she said, “You should go and find Nelson. Introduce yourself. Actually—there he is.” She pointed in the direction of a prosperous voice. “I’ll go with you.”

Their other host stood before a large flat-screen unit that played highlights of the playoff games from weeks before, holding court over his newly recruited agents. Jenna found the right moment and introduced herself, then Jeremy. Nelson obliged the interruption with a cursory handshake, then resumed his extemporaneous routine.

The program was suddenly interrupted. A voice-over proclaimed a special announcement. Some of the guests quieted; some still chatted. One man said, “I know what this is. There’s a virus. In the Far East. It’s spreading.”

“I read about that last week,” an eager new hire added.

“What?” a few people asked, and then the chatter increased.

Pru gripped the wood siding of the threshold and drunkenly stepped her high-heeled shoes down into the sunken room one at a time. “What’s going on in here?” she asked absently.

Nelson turned up the volume. “Everyone quiet down!”

“This is an NBC News special report.” The next image was the President of the United States broadcasting live from the Oval Office:

“My fellow Americans, tonight I want to speak with you about our nation’s unprecedented response to a viral outbreak, originating in southeast Asian swamplands, now spreading throughout the world.

“Today, the World Health Organization officially announced that this is a global pandemic. We have been in frequent contact with our allies, and we are marshaling the full power of the federal government and the private sector to protect the American people.

“This is the most aggressive and comprehensive effort to confront a foreign virus in modern history. I am confident that by continuing to take these tough measures, we will significantly reduce the threat to our citizens, and we will ultimately and expeditiously prevail over this deadly virus.”

Pru’s delicate, bejeweled hand covered her open mouth. A simple dread spread slowly across her face. “Oh my god.”

* * *

Two years later—

Jenna paused in the small hallway between the bedroom and master bath listening to Jeremy’s gentle snores. The husky sibilance of his snoring eased the urgency of her otherwise hectic day. He had calmed her, not just in this moment, but fundamentally. Almost two years since they’d moved into this first new house, the excitement for renewed life and a first marriage—a future family—had brightened what was becoming a personal gloom—forever single workaholic had not been a goal per se, but it certainly had been her trajectory, pre-Jeremy. Advancement was an unarticulated expectation she’d held since childhood. But that had dissipated, as all things do, and she contented herself with possibilities previously tossed outside the scope of her pursuits. Children ranked among the top in this new era of her womanhood, and, rather than a shock, it was revelatory to imagine herself doing the work of raising children with a loving and devoted husband.

Jenna peered deeper into the darkened bedroom. The early sun peeked around the gaps of the shades, making the room look warmer. Jeremy’s body, large and protective, heaved up and down in deep sleep. The ancestral kakau he’d had hammered into his flesh moved as if narrating a silent story with each undulating breath, rolling like the waves on the crest of a foaming sea. Quietly, she closed the door and went downstairs to make a decisive start to the relentless distractions of the workday which lay before her.

As a newly minted Executive Director of Marketing for a startup health foods firm, she had learned that meetings had become a way of doing work. Over the past two years—the pandemics, and their corresponding lockdowns—they were virtual, and the practice had carried over into the reawakened world. No one had gone into an office building since it began; special events, held a few times per quarter, were conducted at resorts, restaurants, or private homes: a time for executives to mingle, show off, glad-hand, or act inappropriately. She’d hated having to go.

Above her pajama bottoms, she wore a blouse and a single string of pearls her grandmother had given her upon graduating from college. Light makeup highlighted her more delicate features, and her hair, she’d twisted back into a knot, pinning it to the crown of her head. Twenty minutes before the call, she went to pour a generous cup of coffee to sit and collect her thoughts.

Grabbing the pot with her left hand, reaching for the mug with her right, she pulled it off too easily from its base. It was empty.

“What the heck?”

Looking more closely, she saw that the machine was off. There was no light behind the function screen. She leaned down to see the plug still inserted into the outlet. The stove’s digital clock was blank, not even blinking from a remedied overnight loss. Just black.

“Fuck,” she whispered.

Her laptop was still plugged into the wall. Flipped open, the screen illuminated, but the battery was at 20 percent—way too low for the newfangled holographic projection marketing had insisted they start using. Her phone on the countertop read 25 percent. This was too important a day for delays.

The power company’s line just kept ringing. The Wi-Fi was down, but the weak regional signal was enough to search PGI’s website for a customer service number. The outage map gradually populated with little red flags, which slowly and eventually covered a majority of the service area except for a fine vertical line running through it, where the cell towers stood.

“Power’s out,” she said flatly to the unlit kitchen, as if it were a joke for someone else. Two-year-old Mullet looked up when she spoke and began panting, which caused her to look around, finally noticing the lack of air-conditioning, wondering at how it had made everything look a little heavier. Helpless, but used to taking action, she swiped her keys from the rack and went out to buy some coffee, denying the futility of the reflex, hoping the local coffee chain would have a fresh pot.

The eager dog hopped onto the front seat, sniffing at the vents, anxious to feel the cool draft to which he’d become accustomed. As they began to blow, he stopped sniffing and gently shifted his head side to side, his furry snout hair fluttering wildly in the false wind. Jenna plugged the phone into its charge and called her director.

Another line that kept ringing. Not even voicemail picked up the call.

“This is weird,” she said toward the windshield, scanning the empty road ahead.

During lockdown, the wait at any drive-through had become an everyday ritual, but this one was empty. Not a coffee fiend in sight. A sign was taped to the inside of the window that read: No Power/No Coffee. A figure darted across the background beyond the glare on the glass. She honked. A young man approached the window and slid it open.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Sorry—I just—want some coffee.”

“There is none.”

“Really? None?”

He stared at her dumbly and nodded.

“Why are you here then?”

“Had to move the ice outside.” He gestured to the side of the building. “So it don’t melt nowhere inside.” He gestured behind him.

She nodded, pushing Mullet’s sniffing nose away from her face, staring at the ice but through it too.

“And now I’m fixin’ to leave.” His face was blank. “Have a blessed day,” he said as he smacked the window into place and hitched the latch.

She remained in the drive as if mesmerized by some parallel, subconscious state. She thought of another store nearby before accepting what she’d seen earlier on the map, how widespread the outage actually was.

Her phone lit up with a voicemail. She hadn’t even heard it vibrate when the call came in. An automated voice began:

“Hello, this is an automated message from the Portland home office. You are employed in one of Fresh Farm’s southeastern territories. Due to the outage in four regional states, business as usual is cancelled until energy is restored. Thank you.”

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “Four states?”

She scrolled the news, most of which she’d usually ignore, and sat there reading all the headlines about the loss of power. It wasn’t just the Southeast, but major outages across the Mid and Southwest too. Intermixed among the headlines, links, and threads were the inevitable social consequences: videos and images of the violence and looting that always accompanies a stark failure of the system. Then her phone lost its connection completely.

* * *

“Apparently, it’s out all over the place. Can you believe this shit?” she asked, throwing her keys onto the granite countertop. Jeremy was more distracted by the mismatched pajama bottoms and silk blouse.

“Where’d you go all gussied up like that?” He laughed.

“To look for coffee.”

He nodded. “You look like a crazy person.”

“Right now, I feel crazy.”

“Why, because the power went out? This is, like, the third time this month.”

“Really?” She was incredulous.

“Yeah. Paying attention to the world around you much?”

“I’m always in my head, you know that.”

“I do. Today more than ever.” He pointed to her outfit. “Plus, crude is, like, a zillion dollars a barrel, so let’s not take trips that have no plunder, okay? Here—” He plated her breakfast. “Have some eggs. At least the gas in the stove still works.”

“And I almost said no to that,” she said into the stuffy air.

“That’s right. You fought me on that—and if you had won, would you be eating my delicious, frothy scrambled eggs right now?”

She shook her head like a schoolgirl as she tore off a chunk of bread from a soft and chewy breakfast roll that he had handed to her.

“I love your frothy scrambled eggs,” she said, her mouth stuffed with the bread.

“That’s why I make them.” He bent down to kiss her forehead, but noticed a sudden, faraway look in her eyes. “Hey—” He tried to assure her. “Everything’s fine. It’s a power outage. It happens. No big deal,” he said, wiping beads of sweat from his forehead.

“I know, I know. I don’t know why, but it really freaked me out this time. Like it’s just going to keep happening until it all shuts down, and we have to fend for ourselves in a zombie-land apocalypse.”

“That’s right. That seems sane. Keeping thinking that,” he teased and playfully nodded like at an asylum patient.

The low hum of the AC unit interrupted the pause in the dialogue between them as it pushed out cooler air. The digital clock on the stove began to blink; Jenna’s laptop dinged alive, and the couple exchanged a quiet expression—a kind of relief unspoiled by uncertainty. The easy modernity of their lives, the disruption of which was once unthinkable, had already unmoored itself from permanence, but they remained ensconced in the views of a prior decade. Jeremy swiped at the television menu from an app projected by his phone in parallel to the television that then projected the image above him, selecting the morning news show in the middle of an emergency segment.

“—so, I really think these massive outages, however shocking, are not the result of any incompetence in public service or the power companies themselves,” the expert said, “but a large population which relies too heavily on their homes being entirely air-conditioned at all times. It’s these first-world indulgences that have caused the failures.”

“And the too-large population who refuses to sacrifice,” another quickly added. “And some populations are better equipped for the heat than others and therefore do less damage. I would also like to include, with some urgency, that climate change is no small part of this. Every state in the nation should follow California’s example and ban all gas-powered vehicles, confiscate the ones whose owners will not comply, and implement a window for tax breaks on the purchase of any new EV transportation.”

“I’d like to add,” the host interjected, “that every homeowner should get a tax break for covering their roof with solar panels.”

“Hear, hear.”

“Agreed. This should have been done twenty, thirty years ago.”

The co-host negotiated the final point: “The bottom line is this: We have a climate change problem that is beginning to do its work; we have an energy shortage because of it; and we must implement major social justice reforms required to make all of it right again. It’s all linked.”

Jeremy and Jenna, shaking theirs, watched as each of the nodding five heads concluded the segment glaring into their respective cameras. Jeremy swiped at the air and shut it off.

“You heard from Nelson or Pru lately?” he asked, suddenly curious.

“Not since I went over there, however long ago that was now.”

“And they were all weird, right?”

“Yeah. Both double-masked, eyes like hostages. Backed away when I walked up the steps to hand them the dish.”

“Crazy.”

Ava spent the evening in the motel room. The minutes clicked away while she planned. The night grew old and then young again. It was two in the morning, and she was sleepless. She looked at the clock as the hour changed from two to three, then to four. At 4:00 a.m., she gathered her things together and placed them into the backpack. She put on her light jacket, removing the gun from the pocket. She opened the cylinder, making sure it was fully loaded, doubting her ability to use it, but needing it nonetheless. Her mind was clear as if fear had purged all her thoughts.

She made for the highway. It was still dark, and the quiet of the early morning lent to each step, each scrape against the gravel, a grave and solemn import. Along the way, she could see the two men, picturing their smug, laughing faces, the one with the huge scar across his face and the one who had owned a vineyard in California. She couldn’t see that one as clearly, but she remembered enough to describe him. She wanted their names. Their identities. Their home addresses, if she could get them. She wanted to know where they were, where they hid their true faces from the oblivious, conspiring world. Her outrage mixed with fear, giving her a new kind of momentum as she walked. She couldn’t believe she had made it to this point in her journey: an event both dreaded and necessary. In confronting Maxime, a woman who had inspired terror in all of the girls, she would confront everything. She refused to focus on the fear; instead, she focused on the men and the information she required.

“That’s all I want,” she said to herself as she quickened her pace, like practicing the lines she would use on Maxime when she got there. “That’s all I want. That is all I want,” she repeated, trying to match justice to conviction.

* * * *

Maxime awoke in the small chamber where she’d spent the night after the handlers had called in a panic, ordering her to the reenforced room. The pill she had taken to force her to sleep had made her groggy. She checked the time on the monitor, and it was only 5 a.m. Even the pill hadn’t worked to quell the anxiety the handlers’ call had provoked within her. She’d spent the night in worry, not sleeping until the medicine had knocked her out. The gun she had been given was at her side. Maxime looked at it with the same disgust she had felt for being sequestered from the larger world for so long. The isolation over time had worn her down to almost nothing.

She rummaged through the protocols she’d been given for how to conduct herself during the “period of bereavement” which was semi-coded language cynically employed by the handlers, trying to be funny. She clicked on the cameras surrounding the house, checked the phone line to make sure it wasn’t cut, sent a message that all was well, and then flipped on the audio system for the entire house. She hadn’t before used any of this technology, taking for granted the mechanisms put in place for her protection.

A buzzer rang in the tiny room, startling her. She inspected the monitors for the source of the noise. It was an alert connected to the doorbell of the front entrance. Looking toward the camera situated there, she saw the edge of a dark figure moving out of the frame. The south-facing camera showed nothing in its view. She squinted to see if she could make out any cars coming up the drive, but it was too difficult to see beyond the false hue of the night vision of the camera. Turning to the north-facing camera, she saw the same figure again moving out of view. She stopped to listen, but she heard nothing because of the thick walls of the specialized room and turned to the monitor again, checking the camera facing east. Within the frame was the image of a young woman standing against the sliding door, staring inside, her face and form illuminated by the lamp Maxime had left on when she’d rushed to the secured room.

“Who the hell is that?” she asked herself. “What now, mon dieu,” she said, slipping into her native language. Rubbing her eyes, she exited the room, walking into the master bedroom, looking around, half expecting someone to jump out at her. Her nerves began to fray, but she no longer cared what might happen. She wasn’t supposed to leave the panic room until she was told it was clear, but she’d had enough of this life. She went back for the gun, then went to meet the visitor.

When she got to the first floor, she could see the woman standing with her back to the glass of the sliding door. She placed the gun on the side table closest to her position, but out of view. She fluffed her hair, slapped the sides of her face to perk herself up, and then unlocked and pulled open the door.

“May I help you?” she asked, stepping onto the patio.

Ava turned to face her. The soft tints of morning had begun to glow. “Hello, Maxime.”

Maxime stuttered and then asked, “Do I know you? What do you want?”

“We knew each other. A long time ago.” Ava’s hands went into her coat pockets.

Maxime swallowed, suddenly fearful, only somewhat recognizing the young woman, but guessing she should know her, being the approximate age of so many she had thrown to the wolves.

“I’m sorry. I don’t recognize you,” she lied, having just realized the identity of the woman standing before her, but forgetting her name. She fought a mortal panic and almost lunged for the gun.

“I’m Ava. Ava Rose Anderson.”

“I see,” Maxime said, trying to remain calm, the lingering past returning to her all at once, filling her with dread. She looked down and then flipped her head back up. “And what can I do for you today, Ava?” She had regained her spite.

“I just want to talk,” Ava said.

“Is that all?” Maxime replied, almost laughing. “How did you find me? You must be very clever to have found this place out.”

“It wasn’t easy. I went through a lot of shit to get here.”

“I bet! Haven’t we all, ma petite?”

“Yes. Yes, we have.” Ava gripped the gun.

Maxime noticed the movement of her hand, looking back at her own weapon.

“Look, I’m only going to ask you one more time what do you want before I call the police.”

“Don’t be afraid, Maxime.”

“What do you mean afraid? Afraid?” She huffed and scoffed at the suggestion. “Why should I be afraid?” She smiled. “I am well protected.” She finished, looking around and beyond Ava, who only nodded.

* * * *

As they talked, Reginald viewed the scene, having heard the higher pitch of voices rising in tension echo across the valley. He had been awake and pacing all night, readjusting his plans for any unforeseen and unwelcome contingencies, expecting that meddling officer to reappear. He corrected the lenses of the night-vision binoculars to resolve the image. It was 5:45 a.m., but the sun had yet to fully illuminate the scene. He considered calling the handlers but figured their time for control was at an end—he’d been too impulsive, firing that shot, a consequence of the long-term inaction of a psychopath. Instead, he watched and waited, analyzing the scene minute by minute to make of it as he saw fit. These were the improvisational moments of his trade when he excelled.

* * * *

“I saw a girl raped,” Ava blurted out, wasting no more time. “That last trip I took, they raped a girl in the middle of the night. They’d drugged me. Probably all of us.” Ava’s voice quivered on the verge of something. An emotional gust began to rise within her. “And . . .” She could barely say it. “And I think I saw a little—a little girl.” Ava’s eyes welled at the admission, never sure if that horrific vision had been real, a hallucination, or a terrible dream.

Maxime waved her hand to the side, ignoring what Ava had said, and looked up at her like a ruined mother to a questing daughter. “You stupid girl, a lot of them were raped,” she said without empathy. And moving forward with a jolt of anger she yelled, “I was raped!” She was breathing heavily, fighting back tears, but kept glancing back at the gun inside. “We were all raped.” She seethed.

“I’m sorry,” Ava said without emotion, only half believing the wretched woman in front of her. But Maxime only sneered at the false apology. Ava turned her back. Maxime stepped closer to the door, but Ava turned around before Maxime could make her move.

“All these years, I thought I wanted to know why. Why did this happen? Why did this happen to all of these girls? Why me? Why did you do it?” Maxime rolled her eyes. Ava took notice and gave words to the expression. “But you’re right, Maxime, you’re right. Wanting to know why is as foolish as getting involved in the first place.”

“That’s right,” Maxime said, smirking. “You were involved too.” She pointed her finger straight at Ava’s face. “Save some of that anger and, how do you say it, your self-righteousness for a judge!” She laughed.

* * * *

The sky had brightened but faintly. Reginald could now see well enough to pick up the rifle and look through its view, aiming at both women, undecided which one he would shoot first. The women below gestured at one another, sometimes wildly, getting in the way of a clean hit.

“Fucking dames, always flouncing around so damned much,” he mumbled.

* * * *

“Your guilt is the same as mine!” Maxime yelled.

Ava waited long enough for Maxime to calm down before she spoke again. “I know,” she said. “I was involved. And I am prepared to face it if and when or however it comes. I’m not going to hide out, like you. But right now, I only want to know two things.”

“And what is that?” Maxime practically spit out the question, crossing her arms in defiance.

“I want to know the names of two of the men who were there that night.”

Maxime mocked her. “What are you going to do, hunt them down?” She laughed in Ava’s face. “And do you really think I remember the names of every one of those goddamned beasts?” There was a long pause as Maxime looked off and into the valley then turned to face Ava. “Do you really want to know why?” she asked. Ava regarded Maxime’s trembling face but gave no response. “I’ll tell you why.” She looked beyond Ava and into the adjacent woods where Reginald lay watching, unaware of his position but sensing his presence. “I like manipulating powerful men. Or any man.” A smirk lit up her face. “Their desperation, their complete weakness at the promise to fulfill their most pigheaded desires. Nothing is more gratifying than controlling men.”

“But the girls. You were destroying the lives of those girls!”

“They would have learned to hate them soon enough. Might as well get the early start.” She basked in what she considered the hard-won wisdom of a woman.

The cynicism of her words and the smugness of her aspect were a concise illustration of her problem. Ava disregarded the explanation and continued to probe Maxime for the names. “One of them had a deep scar across his face.” Ava traced the place and length of the scar on her own face. “And the other one owned a vineyard in California.”

Maxime’s face dropped and froze, a mixture of disappointment in Ava’s disinterest in her views and the sudden recollection of one of the names the girl sought. “Sex,” she said, looking up, “is a terrible thing.”

* * * *

Detective Valdivia had climbed up the same path she had been on just hours before, almost inching her way toward her target. She lifted her binoculars and could see the dark outline of the man crouched in place, holding a rifle in firing position aimed at the back of the house.

“Oh, fuck no,” she said, bringing her own rifle up to her eye. She had no view of what transpired on the backside of the house, but she knew for damn sure that this man was a danger to whoever it was standing there. She reached into the rifle bag and brought out a walkie-talkie.

“Central, this is Valdivia—over.” There was silence as she waited for a response. She spoke again. “Central, this is Detective Valdivia—over.” Still, nothing. It was too early, perhaps—or it was during the transition from the night to day crew, and no one was there. She pressed the button again and spoke quietly but urgently repeating: “Central, this is Detective Valdivia. I need backup at the big house on Mountain Trail Road immediately. Sniper in the woods. Valdivia requesting immediate backup at the house on Mountain Trail—”

“Roger that, Valdivia,” the responder said. “Four squads on their way. Ten minutes.” Valdivia dropped the walkie-talkie and refocused her aim.

* * * *

Maxime looked away from Ava, realizing the girl wouldn’t leave without the name. “Cliff.” She paused. “Kelly. That’s his name.”

“The one with the scar? The one who was there with President Carey?”

Maxime cut her eyes back to Ava, irritated by the reference to the powerful man. “The other one, I don’t remember.” She waved off the other man like a fly in her face.

“But the other one was Cliff Kelly?” Ava asked again, anxious for confirmation.

Maxime looked dead into Ava’s eyes. “Clifford J. Kelly. New York. Finance. Hedge fund. That’s all I can remember for you.”

Ava looked to the sky and took a breath.

“Is that all you came for? Will you leave now?” Maxime asked.

“Well—” Ava’s hand gripped the gun. Maxime’s eyes widened with rage and fear.

* * * *

Valdivia could hear deep murmurings coming from the road near the gate, like purposely subdued arguing among men, but it was too soon for the backup squads to have arrived. She didn’t look back, keeping her eye focused on her target, who hadn’t moved a millimeter, frozen in his pose, readying his strike.

* * * *

The satellite phone began to buzz incessantly, but Reginald didn’t pick it up to answer, keeping his eye locked on the two targets. A message came through the text line across the front of the phone: SHOOT TO KILL! SHOOT TO KILL! He glanced down to read it, then back at the two women, getting a clear view of Maxime’s head. He aligned the target accordingly.

* * * *

A crackling burst echoed across the valley as an army of SUVs crashed through the gate, tearing up the drive. Reginald fired, the bullet ripping through Maxime’s throat, severing her spine, killing her instantly. Ava jumped back in horror. Valdivia fired, striking Reginald in the chest, throwing his full body back and to the ground, gasping for air as he bled out.

For mere seconds after the calamity, the valley was as still as the death it subsumed.

* * * *

Ava stood there in shock, staring down at Maxime’s lifeless body; the commotion from the front of the house grew louder and closer. As the agents approached, Ava came to her senses, rushing into the woods and out of sight.

* * * *

Valdivia threw down her rifle and ran up to where Reginald lay dying and jumped on top of him.

“Who are you?” she demanded, grabbing him by the collar. He gurgled and blood oozed from his mouth. “Did you kill Mia Green?” she yelled into his face.

A smile broke across his cruel mouth; his bloodied lips and wayward tongue attempted speech. “Who?” He tried to laugh but had no room in his lungs for the air. His teeth were coated in blood.

“You know who I mean.” She shook him again, annoyed at the refusal to tell her, knowing he’d soon be dead. Still, she stared into his eyes for an answer. “Did you kill her?!”

He laughed, successful with it this time. “Who—else—?”

Valdivia knew instantly. “Rick!” she yelled into the void. Her mind felt warped by the confusion, her suspicions, the sudden clarity, her inability to solve it until now.

“As good a name as any,” Reginald said, the death rattle invading his speech. He was losing consciousness but tried to breathe once more, speaking but incoherent. “. . . alone for a chat.” More blood oozed from his mouth. “Men like me will do anything . . . for money,” he said, and then he was dead. His head dropped back, and his body went limp in her hands.

Valdivia wasted no time and ran back to her cruiser, jumped into the driver’s seat, and tore down the road toward Rick’s apartment, passing the coming squads she had summoned as she went.

Ava stayed hidden in the bushes, afraid to move. She listened though her ears rang from shock. The whole world and her spirit with it seemed mute to sense. Confused by the chaos, she focused on regaining her breath. The new day was coming as fading shadows of the crepuscular hour twitched and scattered throughout the ghostly valley. She could hear the faint and tense conversation of the people above, not knowing who they were or why they were there. She moved behind a large tree to steady herself. When her senses stabilized, the voices were suddenly closer, and a man in a navy shirt with FBI printed boldly on its front stood on the other side, feet from discovering her. His head was turned north. She stepped back farther behind the tree, holding her breath, crouching toward the ground as slowly and as silently as she could. There was chatter on his walkie-talkie, but it was too garbled to make out. She had to wait for him to pass by or to find her. She closed her eyes tightly since she had nothing more that she could do to avoid him. But he hadn’t seen her, and he walked back up to the house. She slipped off and into the remaining shadows, on the line between night and day, off to finish what she had begun.

Ava trudged through the woods just off Mountain Trail Road, hands in her pockets, looking down at the wet ground as she went—still in a daze from the shock—when she noticed the dark red stains slashed across her windbreaker. She stopped, pulled her hands from her pockets to see the red that stained them too, the still-sticky blood on her fingers and palms. She had held up her hands at the moment of impact, and the blood had splattered across her front. A large mound of moss grew at the base of an old oak, so she raked her hands and fingers in the dewy wetness it contained, washing off as much of Maxime’s blood as she could. She used the wetness to clean away any splatter that had hit her face and neck and began to cry as if suddenly realizing everything that had happened. Could she go on? Would she? These were not questions she would consider anymore.

Standing up, she took off the coat, putting the revolver behind the waist of her pants, pulling her shirt out and over its bulge. Taking a deep breath, she began to walk again, thinking about those men, thinking about that final night on the island, about all of the girls she had known and wronged, thinking about her guilt, thinking about justice, repeating Clifford J. Kelly’s name over and over and over, like an objective become a mantra. The mission had never been clearer.

Ava reached the highway again. Not a soul was in sight. Not a car, not a bird, and certainly no man. Just one woman walking into a new era of her life, into the hope for a future, another dawn, another day, as the morning sun rose above the mountain crest, painting her face with light.

The End.

The police had surrounded me within minutes of shooting Joey. I still had Penny’s body draped over my legs with my hands up in the air. Guns were drawn on me from every possible angle. All I could do was signal my submission. Once they assessed that I was not an immediate threat, their weapons came down, and one of them cuffed my wrists behind my back.

“I’m not the shooter,” was all I could say at first, over and over, choking on suppressed tears. Aside from the shock of everything, I was exhausted and dehydrated. I hadn’t drunk much water, too distracted to think of anything but incapacitating the shooter. I was brought to sit beside a boulder while an EMT tended to Penny’s body. I watched him as he carefully placed her arms at her sides, adjusted her precious head, cleaned the blood from the face I had loved. I was expressionless, too sad for any more tears. I watched as Penny was wrapped in a white sheet, then placed into a body bag—a terrible image, the reality of which I could not look away from. I watched less intently as Joey’s body bag passed in front of me. I let it go by as a black blur, preferring to secure Penny’s last moments in the world as the more valued part of this memory.

An FBI agent approached me. “Which one are you?” he asked.

I looked up into his sunglasses. “What do you mean?”

“Who did you shoot? Who did you kill?”

“I shot the shooter. That’s it.”

“The kid?”

“Yes.” I paused, remembering just how young Joey was. “The kid.”

“Who is the female?”

“My girlfriend.”

“And why was she here?”

“She followed me without my knowledge.”

“Were you tracking him deliberately?”

I was quiet again, wondering how much I should tell without a lawyer, but decided to be entirely truthful with or without the protection of representation. To be utterly honest, what did anything matter now?

“Yes.”

“How did you know him?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I would think so. I would like to hear it.” He looked off. “So will the whole county, I reckon.”

“Do you think I’ll go to jail?”

“At first, that’s where you’re going, yes. In the long run, it will all depend on your story and how the evidence matches to it; that you don’t lie. All that sorta thing.” He smiled but not a friendly smile, an occupational one.

Another detective approached. “Are you the kook who called our precinct?” It was the same detective who had questioned me the night I was arrested without my gun license. His casual brusqueness put me off.

“Yes.”

“Wait a minute, I know you. You look familiar.”

“You questioned me once, weeks ago.” I looked down, not interested in recognition of any kind.

“That’s right. I’ll be damned.” He walked off, shaking his head like chance was the imbecile. I wanted to shout at him that I had tried to tell him, but it would have changed nothing, and I doubted that I really did look familiar to him. I thought he just needed something to say before he walked off.

I was taken to the nearest police headquarters and placed in a holding room. Over many hours, I was visited by agents, as well as the sheriff and higher-ranking officers of the local police. They were not happy with me. Vigilante justice had gotten in the way of their management of crime and criminals. My only defense was that he would have killed more. He had, after all, murdered Penny moments before he turned and shot up the baseball field. Fortunately, I was told, he was only able to shoot one dad in the leg and an older brother in the shoulder. He was too frantic to aim well enough to shoot with any accuracy. I retold the entire story as I knew it as many times as I was asked. I left nothing out that seemed even a little bit important.

One of the agents sat with me to match what they knew to what I knew. “They were coordinated. Did you know that ahead of time?” he asked.

“No, I did not. Not officially. I only thought to track this one. I thought you were wrong about Fozzie and somehow messed up the name. I haven’t been thinking well for a long time. I had a gut instinct that turned out wrong but right at the same time.”

“Yeah, Fozzie was there too, just on the northwest side of the park, overlooking the volleyball courts.”

“That makes sense now,” I said, not having much left to add.

“Fozzie and Fonzie were cousins, or so they proclaimed online. Our tech guys are still going though it now. We’re not sure of a biological connection, but that will be determined eventually. In any case, they were the main conspirators and preyed on disaffected young guys who were desperate to belong to something… Boys like your nephew, I’m sorry to say, who were vulnerable to these more aggressive ones.”

“Did Joey—is that his real name?” I interrupted myself.

“No.” He flipped through some pages in front of him. “Joey Dillinger’s real name was Martin Hauser, online alias Fonzie. Born in West New York, ran away at sixteen. Been a grifter con artist ever since. Obvious psychopath.”

“I see.” I stared off, ashamed of myself for my involvement in it all. “And he lived with me. What a stupid thing to have done.”

The agent nodded his head in sorry agreement. “This isn’t 1955, my friend. Don’t be this naïve anymore. You’re a little bit older, with all due respect, but you don’t know this generation maybe as well as I do. They’re messy. Some have no values, even the ones who aren’t psychopaths. Whole thing’s out of control.”

“I see.”

“You lost a loved one over it.”

“Two,” I said, affirming Luke’s life, however tragic and misguided it was at the end.

“Martin, or Joey, was also a drug dealer. That job he told you he had? That was a lie too. He sold heroin at Lou Betty Park downtown, often laced with heavy doses of fentanyl.”

I looked up. “He what?”

“He was a daytime drug dealer. When he told you he was working in landscaping? He was at the park dealing drugs.”

“My nephew was found unconscious in that park – from a heroin overdose.” This new information stabbed me all over again, and my head sunk into my chest, trying to fight off another bout of suffering. I felt guilty; felt immense responsibility for all of it. I had allowed the piece of garbage who sold my nephew the drugs that killed him to live with me like a son. At that point, the thought of going to prison didn’t bother me one bit. Having all the facts presented to me, all the connections, still didn’t keep me from the sharp pangs of what felt like an endlessly tragic revelation I had to hear and rehear to set it right in my mind. But it never would be.

Chapter 29

I suppose I had known in my gut that Joey was Fonzie. That first night, when he jumped me in my front yard, I could sense something very wrong with him, but I chose to ignore my instincts, to give a young man the benefit of the doubt because he was like Luke. Perhaps that was why I had taken him in. I wanted to rehabilitate him, and I had thought it was working, but he was much cleverer and more deceitful than I could have accepted then or even now. Evil knows no bounds, and it was that very boundlessness that was impossible to anticipate.

When I was released from my handcuffs, the police chief—after he and the FBI had questioned me, and after he was personally convinced by my story—showed me a note that was lodged at the bottom of Joey’s backpack. It read: evil needs no explanation. I disagreed, grabbed it from his gloved hands, crumpled it up, and threw it onto the floor. The chief picked it up saying, “That’s evidence, Mr. Warner.” He put the crumpled paper in a bag and zipped it up. Then he showed me another piece of paper. “Here’s a list of all the shooters, their online aliases and what we think are their real names matched to their designated shooting locations. We believe they were a gang of shooters using the dark web, and that they planned this whole mess as a chain of murders.” He handed me the list.

Macy’s—Alias: Freakdeaky; Legal name: Randal Pits

4-H—Alias: Wanderluster; Legal name: Michael Derekson

Home Depot—Alias: Crackbaby2; Legal name: Forester Logie

Movie Theater—Alias: Lonerlife; Legal name: Luke Robinson

“Add Fozzie and Fonzie to this list from today, and we got the whole crew of them. All dead, either from heroin or gunshot, except Fozzie. He’s in custody now. We got him just as he was settin’ up on the northwest side, otherwise, he’d be dead too.” He paused. “And he almost got killed in the gunfire anyway.”

I winced at seeing Luke’s name on the list, and I tried to piece together the timeline for it all.

“But Luke Robinson was dead before the theater shooting.” My voice shook.

“Correct,” he said.

“So why is he on this list?”

“He was the intended shooter that particular day. The theater shooting was meant to be his. Fozzie has basically confessed that he was the theater shooter, but I wanted you to see the original list because, as we’ve confirmed, Luke was your nephew. I think over time it will be important for you to know the whole truth as painful as it is to hear right now.”

I handed back the paper saying simply, almost inaudibly, “Yes.”

“I’m sorry,” he said as he walked away, and I remained still, reviewing the past two months in my mind over and over again.

If Luke was Lonerlife, and he was supposed to have been in on these shootings, then he had obviously told Joey about me, and instead of Luke showing up to collect the money, Joey had come in his place. Or maybe Joey did the hacking and took over dealing with me at that point? They had planned to put me off their trail. Joey was meant to distract me. It all came sharply into focus. My heart was heavy, and my chest heaved when I remembered Luke in the hospital, that last time I saw him, trying to tell me, but too afraid and in too deep. I knew why he had died. I was quietly grateful that he’d had the better sense to kill himself rather than innocent people. It was nothing to be proud of, but something to know.

The press gave me a lot of distance. I wasn’t lionized, and my image wasn’t plastered in every corner of the local media. There were two or three profiles of the crimes, which included my photo, in the regional press, but all in all, it was very discreet coverage. I asked for that, and they honored it. I was and still am very grateful for that. At least the journalists in this part of the country still had integrity. The national news was different, and for a few days, my face and story were everywhere, but I ignored it, knowing it would eventually go away. The last thing I’d ever have wanted was to tarnish the memory of Penny, or Luke, or any of the victims with my image as a hero at the center. I was not a hero. I took huge risks. I could have been wrong. I could have killed an innocent person. I was unhinged. Who knows what could have happened?

The national coverage of the story died over a short period, as more shootings would occur in the aftermath, and this would become just another in a long chain of stories in this bloody saga. I went back to work, to what now felt like my nothing life. Living next door to Penny’s house was unbearable. I’d slept in her bed for the first few days I was back at home, but decided if I’d done that much longer, I might never have broken free from it. I had to leave.

Her niece flew out almost immediately to pack up her things, and to put the house on the market. I had her over for dinner and breakfast while she was there, and I was able to talk about Penny with someone who was family to her. It was a great comfort. My apologies for Penny’s fate were met with forgiveness and understanding, but as if nothing could change things in any case. I accepted it formally, but knew her forgiveness could never be fully sincere. She couldn’t and wouldn’t truly absolve me of responsibility for Penny’s death. I could feel that from her. And I felt it myself. I was to blame. I would hold that guilt forever within me.

The last conversation I had before I left the station that awful day was with the sheriff of Franklin-Betty County, a kindly, older gentleman, but close enough in age to be a brother to me. He expressed his concern over my vigilantism.

“You might want to talk to someone once this is all over.”

“Talk to someone? Like a shrink?”

“Maybe. Someone who can help you sort through this nightmare.”

“Do you think I’ll go to prison?” I hadn’t expected to be so concerned over jailtime. As confident of my heroic innocence as I’d been on the ridge, I was then as much in doubt of it. I had killed a young man.

He nodded his head assuredly. “You will likely be charged, but you might be allowed to make a plea to a lesser offense. Wait and see.”

“I see.”

“Look, my concern is the solo nature of the action you took.”

“I contacted police more than once, the FBI, I—”

He gestured his hand, moving it down in a quieting manner. “I know, I know, but you gotta leave that stuff to us, regardless of the outcome. You put yourself in danger, and I’m sorry to be so blunt, but your girlfriend is dead because of your hubris, or your outrage, or whatever it is you call it. It was arrogant, and it was egotistical, and it was dangerous. I’m sorry, but what you did was wrong.”

I bowed my head to my chest. “I know. It’s gonna haunt me forever. I know.”

“That’s why I say you also need some help. Get some. I’ll call up the hospital to get some names for you. We don’t want any more people to die than we can help.”

“I know.”

“You might want to get out of here for a while, too, if you can. Break away from it. Get some fresh air. Just get away from here. It’ll be good for you. Nothing lasts forever.” He placed his hand on my shoulder and looked at me gravely, with compassion, but not without the need for me to understand just exactly what he was saying. I did.

I decided to take his advice. There was the whole summer in front of me. I put my house on the market. It was too painful, and I’d always been the type to cut the cord as quickly and completely as possible once I realized it was not a good thing, whatever it was. One terrible thing I had learned from all of this was that Americans were not always one big happy family, not always one out of many. And it was a treachery against truth to pretend otherwise. We were the wilds of the West. Always had been, always would be. I also had learned that a person must confront evil, in themselves and others, to have a chance at being good, though that goodness is hard-won and impure.

Eventually, I was charged with manslaughter, but given the evidence – Joey’s obvious psychopathy, and the fact that I shot him after he had killed Penny – I was acquitted. I could not, however, acquit myself of what I had done.

I knew I would forever question the quality of my moral character. I would never be able to forget my role in those dark days, or that Penny was dead because of it, but I had to move on. I had to keep living as much as I fought against that fact. I quit my job. And I hit the road. I figured I would do nothing but wander, for however long I could manage it, spending a month here and there, wherever. Maybe to relax. Maybe to escape. Maybe to sort through the turmoil within me.

The End

When I got to the southeast entrance, I drove very cautiously into a spot in the small lot. My heart practically burst through my chest, but I wasn’t exactly nervous or scared. I was excited in the most crazed possible way – still collected, still composed. The importance of this confrontation steadied my hand. This was my one chance to redeem the community from chaos. I’d never had so much purpose behind every step.

There was a mountain bike chained to a post, but that was it. No one was around. It was an eerie and full silence. I secured the water bottle to the side of the backpack, putting the straps around my shoulders. I got the rifle out from the back seat with the bag in which I had stored the walkie-talkie, binoculars, the telescope viewfinder, and the Wolverine noise suppressor. I looked around one last time to see if there was anyone watching me: I detected nothing but the sun, the trees, and a mild breeze brushing against anything that would rustle. A natural peace descended, and I made for the trail.

The angle of ascent gained in steepness as I climbed higher into the ridges, stepping onto foot-sized rocks and human-sized boulders, kicking dust and debris along the trail. The angle grew to roughly thirty degrees, which, being a third of ninety, is impressively steep on the trail, if not on paper. I was winded from the climb and the intensity of the moment.

Every tenth of the first half-mile up the trail, I stopped for breath, took a swig from my water bottle, and tried to enjoy the tremendous views of the upper Ozarks. Nature absorbed the gravity and severity of the situation, swallowed it whole, like one man hunting another, who in turn was hunting others, was the most natural thing for the species to do. Nature would not prevent it nor condemn it, too contented to supply the setting for the scene.

Only in the deepest nature can someone truly be free. If you ever went camping as a child or a teen, you know it was frightening or exciting, depending on the others you traveled with because personalities transform in the woods. Character emerged in whatever form it might. Strength could bound out of an otherwise timid guy. Weakness from the loudest mouth you ever knew. You could be man or animal, hunter or hunted: it depended on the will within. Psychological fortitude alone decided the various fates of human beings, not physical strength.

I arrived at the first ridge in just over twenty minutes, extremely careful to keep a lookout for anyone, but especially any darker forms roaming in the distance. I figured he would wear the same all-black costume he’d worn in the final video Snap. There was nothing. No one was around. It was so quiet I could just hear some of the game’s sounds, the rise and fall of cheers coming up and over the two ridges from the baseball field. I found a nook in a wall of rock and dirt behind the first ridge and settled there for what felt like hours. I took the time to fix the scope onto its rail above the trigger and to screw the noise suppressor to the end of the rifle. I was convinced this would be the place.

Just over the ridge behind me, against which I camped, there was a rustling, an agitation of underbrush and twigs. I froze. Shit, I thought. It couldn’t be him. It was too early, and everything would be fucked. I twisted my body very gently toward the rifle, which lay on the dusty ground about three feet to my right. I had never been more careful not to make a sound. Strength vacated my guts from fear, though second by second, it built slowly back up the more I assessed and prepared for the worst-case scenario. Fortunately, I had taken the time to assemble the weapon.

The rustling stopped. I stood, listening, taking slow, deliberate breaths. I brought the rifle up to my face, pulled its butt to my shoulder, aimed at the ridgeline just above my camp and eyed the scope. I could see the taller grass being pushed around and then go still. Was he setting up there? It was probably the second-best position to take in relation to the baseball field. But the best position, the outcrop on the lower ridge in front of me, seemed way too obvious to reject. I wasn’t sure. Then I realized he might have spotted me and was moving in to kill me first. I had to act as if that were the case and prepare to kill in an instant.

The top of his dirty-blonde head began to break the line of sight.

“Come on, you little fuck,” I murmured. I secured the rifle tightly against my frame, focusing my aim. I would shoot as soon as I saw his face.

Static and other noise burst from the walkie-talkie. “Attention: squads one-three-two and one-five-six. Move to positions, Piedmont.”

He jumped from the cliff, I fired, and a body dropped dead at my feet. The gunshot echoed down the ridgeline. A large jackrabbit hopped off and down the trail. I saw a coyote, lying broken on its side, breathing very quickly. It was mortally wounded, but still living. I clutched my chest, falling back against the dirt wall and into the deepest relief I’d ever known. Now I could feel the depth of my fear. I squatted beside the body, sorry for the animal, and stroked the full length of pale and reddish fur from its head to its haunches, lulling it to sleep.

Once the animal had passed, I pulled its carcass behind a small boulder. I reset my position to clear my mind of the interruption, made sure the gun was fully loaded, and looked around to see which moving speck on the western horizon might mean trouble. I expected him from that direction. It was the logical approach. I had taken the less obvious route to always have an eye on his.

I looked at my watch, and wondered how long I’d already been there. I added the hike to the setup, plus the coyote—must’ve been an hour at least. I could still hear the roar of cheers from the games, however muffled. It must be an all-day type of tournament, I thought, though I did not know. The blue of the sky seemed thick and dense that day, not at all wispy like it sometimes did. If I stared hard enough, I thought I could see the black of space.

One of the distant specks I had spotted minutes earlier on the horizon increased in size as I looked over to it once, then twice; then on the third time, I could see movement. I pulled the gun to its place against my shoulder and looked through the scope. The figure was that of a man, that was all I could tell. As he approached, I didn’t see anything around him; he didn’t have the bulk of an assassin – just a stick, a large walking stick he likely had picked up on his hike.

I relaxed my grip and looked through the binoculars. He was old, older than me anyway. Maybe mid-sixties. I didn’t think about how strange I must have looked, squatting where I was with a loaded rifle in my lap. These were not typical hunting grounds, and hunting may have been illegal in the reserve altogether. I had the coyote carcass, which I could pretend to have hunted, but that was my only explanation, legal or not. When he saw me, he walked directly toward my camp. I was a little unnerved by this move, considering my mission and the unpredictability of the timing of it all; however, I was now aware of how easy I was to spot.

“How far away could you see me?”

“About a quarter mile,” he was quick to respond.

“A quarter mile and you could see me?” I didn’t believe him.

“At that point, you were a speck of white.” He gestured at my T-shirt. I hadn’t even bothered to think about camouflage.

“You huntin’?” he asked, like he had no faith in the answer.

“Yeah. Yes, sir. Got a coyote back there.”

He peered around me and grimaced at the carcass.

“Nuisance, those things.”

“That’s why we can shoot ‘em.” I altered my voice and amplified my accent enough to sound different though I knew that he was skeptical of the whole scene.

“What are you really doing here?”

I decided to be bold and not tell him anything. “Just waitin’ around.” I smiled.

He nodded his head, but maintained his apprehension.

“I sure don’t want any trouble. I’m just walking by.” He started to move away with no increase to his pace. He just kept walking.

“Good day to you,” I said pleasantly.

“And you.” He raised his hand to his head and swatted it back down. He passed down the ridge and disappeared into the woods.

I picked up a bunch of dirt in my hands and rubbed it all over my white tee shirt to make it blend with the surroundings, then settled back into my spot and laid on my stomach, looking through the binoculars. Nothing came; no sound was made. Nature around me stayed motionless. Even the wind had died. I was sweating and wiped my face clean of it. I was beginning to lose energy.

Finally, he came. He appeared over the farther ridge to the west, moving toward the best position eastward above the baseball field. He sauntered like a wraith across the ridge’s edge. A figure all in black, but no mask like before: a hoodie, instead. He was a mirage of death in the desert either of my mind, or of the bleak times we faced. He was too far away to see clearly with my eyes, so I used the binoculars to see his larger backpack and some kind of semi-automatic gun in his hands, walking confidently, straight onto the ridge in front of me. He was, in fact, wearing a mask under the hoodie. All of my doubts, all of my worry for my sanity, vanished in an instant. I was vindicated. I was nothing but pure, unadulterated resolve. Everything I needed was now on my side.

He was, I guessed, roughly two to three hundred yards away. I’d never shot that far in my life and I wasn’t sure I could pull this off. I continued to use the small binoculars to watch his every move. He walked farther down the end of his ridge to a cliff, farther than where I had been sitting on the ridge behind. I was no longer directly parallel with his position. I got up and crept along the dirt wall, trying to remain unseen, careful not to kick any rocks. I found another nook, a little carved-out spot where I had an even better view of his position, aimed right at him, but hidden by a slight recess in the dirt wall behind me. I cautiously lifted the rifle into position.

My cell phone began to vibrate. I looked down at the illuminated face. Penny was calling me. I had no time for anything; no room for distraction. I had to ignore it. The call was followed by a text message. I glanced down at it, but could only make out that it was from her. I shoved the phone into a dirt pile at the base of the rocky wall. I couldn’t spare the hand movements needed to turn it off.

I reclaimed my composure. I surveilled his location with the scope. He had found an outcrop, stopped, and set himself up. He took out what looked like a sandwich and started to eat.

I placed the walkie-talkie to my side on medium-low volume. If the police were coming, I wanted to know. If they figured this out and handled it, then I would stand down. I laid in the dirt and eyed the scope. I watched the back of his head looking through his own rifle, and down toward the field full of players, parents, and siblings. My heart beat at a steady, powerful pace.

I heard the officers calling out their positions from the talkie. It sounded like there were police snipers all around. I looked around and saw no one. Were they still in the northwest section of the park? I heard a faint frenzy of sirens nearby, however, so I knew they were close. I was convinced they were coming here, confident they had heard me and changed course.

Then, another and unexpected figure came into view at my left, on the trail leading to the shooter’s ridge, threatening everything.

“Who the fuck is that?” I said to myself. “Shit!”

I fumbled with the binoculars. I did my best to see through the brush, but every time I was about to get a good look, the person passed behind some shrubs or trees or a rock and went out of view. I laid back down in the dirt and looked through the viewfinder scope. The shooter was distracted and had turned around and appeared to be talking to this person. What the hell was going on? Was that an accomplice? At that point, my phone buzzed again. Not thinking, I reached for it to see a text from Elizabeth:

Finally washed the clothes Luke wore on his last day. Practically killed me to do it. But I found a little note in his pocket that said, “tell Uncle Jack that I was Lonerlife.” Does that mean anything to you? Please call me as soon as you get this.

The pain of Luke’s life and now this revelation threatened this all-important moment. The events of the past months flashed before my eyes. My head was spinning, and I felt suddenly dizzy. I threw down the phone and picked up the binoculars to see the shooter had turned violent and had started throwing his arms in the air. I couldn’t focus. Luke was Lonerlife? How? The shooter was yelling and screaming, shooing the person away, who then came jogging toward me, trying to run as quickly as they could over the trail that connected the two ridges. They were looking in my direction and waving their hands seeming to shout at me when their face and form came into the binocular’s view. It was Penny. I could see her wide-brimmed hat. She was waving her arms like crazy, now running hard toward me.

Using the binoculars, I looked over to the shooter, but he was not in his spot. I looked back at Penny, still moving toward me. I waved my arm and hand. He came up suddenly behind her and shot; she fell to the ground. He ran back to the outcrop, aimed his weapon at the field, and fired into the game, into the crowd of families and children. He fired frantically, desperate to kill as many as he could. A barrage of noise came through the walkie-talkie: men yelling, guns firing, tons of commotion. But there was no sign of the police here. They were yelling at someone, and I could hear it through the walkie-talkie. Resolve hardened my stomach in the most acute way.

On the verge of howling, I gripped my weapon, aimed for a spot on his neck right under the skull, and shot. I wasn’t sure where it hit, but he fell violently to the ground.

I ran down to Penny. Blood was pouring out of her mouth, and she couldn’t speak. Heaving and sobbing, I picked her up into my arms. I could barely speak.

“Penny! Penny! Why did you follow me here?” Tears rushed down my face as she slowly touched my hand and then gently disappeared from life. I could feel my whole body sink into hers. “Oh my God!” My spirit was finally crushed. I held her tightly for a few minutes, staring into her lovely face, then gently laid her head onto the dusty earth. I was breathing, but no longer felt alive.

I got up and walked over to the shooter’s body, turned him over, pulled off the mask, and my darkest suspicion was confirmed. It was poor, wasted Joey. That was why she had been waving me down: to stop me. She didn’t know everything that was going on, but she didn’t want anyone to die. Like in all things, she had sensed it. She had put it together—knowing us better than we knew ourselves. I looked over the ridge and could see people running all around, police cars showing up, an ambulance had pulled up beside third base. Joey had shot a few people before I’d had a chance to take him out.

“Dammit!” I yelled into the distance.

I looked back at Joey’s lifeless body. I was sorry for him, for all of it. In that moment, all of the anger, the rage, the pain, the sorrow that had built up within me over the last months came raging out of my soul like a thunderbolt to the heavens. I stood and cursed god, screaming at the black depth of the sky. I dropped to the ground near his body and looked over at the pathetic lump of flesh. I wanted to push it over the cliff and out of my life forever.

Instead, I chose to ignore it. I approached the outcrop and stood as high as I could, waving my hands to get the officers’ attention below. I heard a bullet fly past me, so I crouched down and looked through Joey’s backpack. He had two peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, apple juice cartons, chopped carrots, a picture of Lenin, copies of Mein Kampf and The Prague Cemetery – two books I had never, nor would ever, read. I looked at him once more, hardly composed as a person anymore, and wondered how a human being could be so devious. It would chill my trust forever. There was a livestream camera on his chest, which I recognized from the news reports of the first few shootings. I tore it off his body, knowing Penny’s murder was recorded there, and, not wanting that to see the light of day, I smashed it against a rock and chucked it as hard as I could into the surrounding cliffs.

Desperate to absorb the last moments of warmth from her life, I ran back to Penny, picked her up, and held her close to my body. I rocked back and forth with her there, in that sorrowful spot, until the police arrived.

Subscribe now

by Jonathan Epps

All are fallen . . .

Part One

DECLINE

Prelude

Energy stopped that summer. It was on and off, at first. A few minutes here or there. Then hours. Whole days. Couple weeks. We sweat like rigged-up field horses. The electricity came on once again for forty-eight consecutive hours, and we thought we were saved. But then it stopped. For good. Connection to the Internet was like some futuristic thing. Police station and public library had it spotty, I guess, but no one else. At least in our neck. That’s when Gordon Pickford grabbed his shotgun, went out back to his toolshed, and blew his brains out all over the chicken coop. Some people thought it was dramatic or cowardly. They said the season would soon change and the temperature drop. That he should have held out. What with the two years of lockdowns from the virus and now the power trouble, it didn’t surprise me.

Gordon wasn’t wrong in what he’d said lay ahead, just wrong to go out like that and leave his family all alone. He knew what most people had brushed off, them saying we’d done it before. The human race had done it, made do without electricity, I mean, but none of us had. That might as well have been ancient history.

It was going to be tough. And not only was it tougher, but it was brutal. Gordon Pickford knew that.

And those were just the early days . . .

Chapter One

Three Miles Outside Hot Springs, North Carolina—Six months into decline

His kin had called him Ant, short for Antonio, because he was much stronger than he had appeared in childhood and he’d kept the name, though resenting everyone at first for noticing his slighter stature. He’d since grown into a robust young man, slightly taller than average, which was like a small miracle for how long it had seemed to take for him to get there.

The Hobbes family went back generations in this quieter part of the country, of mostly African descent but met with the shock of European blood when the two civilizations clashed, perhaps merged, in the slave trade. The Hobbes name being given rather than adopted, the original patriarch had kept it once he’d become literate as a symbol of the admixture of ancestors whose lives it took to get him to the point of literacy and hope for a future in this English republic. The Hobbes bloodline had withstood all the travails of American history to become a well-off farming clan, the most recent patriarch of which had a take-no-prisoners style, especially when it came to dragging everyone to church.

Ant had never minded. His grandfather did his damnedest to be a good man and a better example, sharing his knowledge, his know-how, and his wisdom, even if his love came through the instruction of those things that, with his passing and in the middle of a national disaster, were much more lasting expressions of love than the occasional hug. Those, his grandmother had provided in abundance. “Hugs ’n cookies,” she’d say. “That’s what I’m here for.” Though she’d undersell her influence in deference to the man, more for love and for show than what in reality was the case. Equally weighted in all the family’s lives, they organized and managed their kin as if heads of some bucolic state untainted by envy but motivated by joy for life and love of the Lord.

Ant’s parents had worked the farm, too, but were more aloof to the boy’s daily care, not from neglect but from preoccupation with daily toil and his grandfather’s need to be centrally involved with everything. They had lived, mostly unprovoked, by the old man’s favorite phrase, “Everybody’s happier when they do it my way,” though his wife would improvise a comic note each time she heard it. But, to Ant’s grandfather’s mind, the world was too precarious, the popular culture too seductive, the tawdry influences too available to let his legacy of effort and prosperity fall to those cheaper forces.

Expected to read a passage from the King James Bible every Saturday and Sunday morning, Ant better understood the Christian spirit, its dedication to making good sense of suffering, than most of his white counterparts. Formerly embarrassed by his religious upbringing, he now cherished it, however carefully he would manage the expression of his belief around others. A Christian man, whatever his race, was once a figure worthy of imitation; now, the same type of man, even a black man, was vilified as equivalent to a white supremacist.

Ant walked with his head down along the country road, the first of a few muddied roads before the highway, where cars were rarely observed like endangered species. A federal bill to phase out gas-powered vehicles completely—thence to favor the coal-burning ruse of electric power—had made driving the fossil fuel-reliant engines a misdemeanor, liable to a large fine, but more importantly a social taboo, liable to ruination.

A weathered cowboy hat shielded his face from the bake of the sun. His grandfather had called them “rancher caps,” despising the word “cowboy” as it illustrated to his memory a shiftless rider, more often law-troubled than industrious—men he’d known in his early days, the rare ones of whom disregarded basic differences in appearance. His grandfather’s voice was a constant murmur among Ant’s thoughts, and one scene kept replaying in his mind as he continued the journey on foot, leading his bull to the house of a stranger in the hope of finding a heifer to mate it to, one day for food and right now for luck. The murmur returned that moody memory to his thoughts, set on the kind of evening that quiets all passions and resolves one’s soul within the body, and it occurred sometime near the beginning of the power troubles.

Electricity could be unreliable in the countryside in good times, especially in the wake of severe storms, but the constant in and out of the power was not yet the daily norm. Everyone had had their theories about the flickers once a pattern had been discerned, as countryfolk did and do, where they find themselves, but managed on with life as if it were the least of their concerns. Strife was just one parcel in their total package.

Ant had been summoned to the reading room. Walking toward it, he’d heard the old man bickering with himself.

“Goddamned light,” he said, like an ancient schoolmaster disgruntled at a problem that never went away. A faint rattling of metal filled the hall. Ant stood at the entrance to the reading room and watched as his grandfather choked a lamp like a goose.

“What’re you laughin’ at?” he asked his grandson, both from humor and annoyance at his predicament.

“Nothing, sir.”

The old man released his hand from the ceramic base. “This thing won’t stop blinking.”

“Have you checked the lightbulb?”

“Have I checked the lightbulb?” he asked the air, bewildered. “Course I have.” The old man reached under the lamp’s shade and gripped the loose bulb, twisting it tighter. He turned the switch again, and instantly it shone, illuminating his creased and disgruntled face. “Come, sit,” he said, giving Ant an eyeful, directing his grandson to the chair facing his. “Do you know why I’ve asked you here?”

“No, sir.”

“Have you talked to your mother today?”

“A little.”

“She say anything particular?”

“No.”

His right hand stroked his grizzled mouth and chin, as he stalled to find the words. The tension in the man unnerved the boy. “Your mother, son—” He fought back tears. “She’s not doin’ well at present.” Ant shuffled in his seat. “You seen her go to her room a lot?”

“Yes.”

“Well, she’s got a sickness. She’s got a cancer in her.”

Ant’s eyes widened at the news, his stomach tightening at the way it had been phrased.

“Don’t get scared, now. Don’t get weak on me. I need you. I need you to be as strong as I used to be.” Ant nodded, fighting it back. “Your father—” He paused again, then looked directly into his grandson’s eyes. “You’re a man now. Been one for a while. I’ll say this to you once. Your father—he ain’t worth shit.” Ant nodded some, more reluctantly this time. “You best know that from me.” He leaned forward. “I don’t know how long I have for this world either, and your mother is going to get sicker. She’s seein’ the doctor in town, and we’re gonna try and do all that we can, but you need to brace yourself for the worst of it, you hear?” Ant nodded more forcefully. “And with these power outages and this strange stuff happenin’ in this world today, you better do more than nod at that. I’m counting on you.” His pointed finger tapped the young man’s chest, near his heart. The landline rang.

“Hel-lo.” A neighborly expression removed the sadness from his face. “Uh-huh. I’ll be right over.” He returned the receiver to its base and stood. “You come with me now. Gordon Pickford’s locked himself in his room again an’ won’t come out.”

* * *

Before Ant set out and down the road, he rummaged through an old box in the front hall closet—the morning hour was sadder than his memories—looking for anything that might be handy to have on the journey, or anything he might want to look at for strength: an overlooked tool, family photos, some kind of memento—anything to give him a reason to continue valuing his life. He picked out his grandfather’s old handheld radio and checked the underside, which was missing its cover, but two AA batteries were secured in their slots. Surprisingly, it switched on, and he turned the dial until the static resolved into a clearer sound. A grave-sounding voice droned from the box like an aging man flattering an impetuous child:

“Now, I want to be very clear—” Soft applause from a previous statement fell into silence. “Too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal. I know this. You know this. We know this . . .”

Ant caught himself nodding with the opening sentiment, but shook free of it, remembering his distrust of the man, of all of government. The monotonous rambling, like a mesmeric spell, continued in the background of Ant’s spiritual defiance.

“. . . our problems . . . change so that we may reemerge a monarch and fly on into the future . . .”

Then came the aggression, the offensive posture held for any countryman who might question the will of his superiors.

“. . . the Other Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated . . . former president and the Bleed Red cohort . . . threat to this country. They lie . . . everything is doomed. This is a lie. We have never been stronger, nor more united. The economy is back. Jobs are everywhere . . .”

Ant didn’t have to reflect much to remember the countless hungry souls he knew who’d turned to drugs because their education was inadequate, and the jobs had fled the country to some other place.

“ . . . threaten the very foundations of this republic. They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this nation.”

The scuff marks on the old radio box came off easily with a little spit and thumbing. Ant’s hands could busy themselves, but his higher senses were distracted out the window toward the family gravesite; he shook his head at the hypocrisies of day, the tyrants his grandfather would have confronted without hesitation—the world gone totally mad with lies and the kind of fraud that hid behind unimpeachable language. Language to nod at, a heresy to reject or to deny.

That night, he couldn’t sleep, too focused on the threat he felt embedded in the President’s speech. He had wanted to sign up to Bleed Red after hearing one of them speak at the paint-stripped recreation center in town. Now, the government called anyone affiliated with them terrorists. Ant was a young black man. There were other black men from his community at the same talk. The reps from Bleed Red were all different colors, but the main speaker was a brown-skinned Hispanic of some kind. Ant couldn’t help but bristle to think his forefathers had been ostracized for their color once before and now for their politics. Now, they were white supremacists too. It was almost uncanny, but he clung to himself as surely as ever. No one would ever tell him what or who he was.

The journey was a country eight-hour walk for the thirty-odd miles, making room for the time needed to locate the woman’s homestead and the slower pace for being tethered to the large beast, which would pull the harness to every puddle that passed under its nose.

The animal stopped. Ant tugged at the rope, not looking back, as it pushed its front hooves into the mud, making the man a raft to a barge. It either needed to shit or to defy the enforced activity from natural instinct. Ant stared into its eyes, which stared dumbly back. It shook and jerked its massive head backward, whipping the rope, pulling the man to the ground as it grunted. The leather sheath strapped to Ant’s back had loosened in the fall. He pulled the strings at his front to keep the scabbard from chafing his shoulder blades, then pushed away the bull’s head now hovering over his own.

On one knee, he sighed into the distance of the open road, exasperated with the slowness of the animal. It groaned as globs of shit dropped from its backside, splatting onto the moist earth in a pile. The scent filled the space around them, moving downwind as Ant swatted the air, pulling the rope line, jerking the bull’s head generally southeast toward their destination.

Boldly, the woman had given him her cell number and the address, but he’d have to find it on foot. The satellites used for public GPS had been quickly restricted to military access, but that was no matter. The now-dead phone in his pocket couldn’t have been of use anyway, but he’d brought it in case this woman still had access to some power. His response to her post from the message board a month and a half before his family fell apart said he’d be open to breeding his bull to her heifer for a fee, wanting to contribute more directly to the finances his grandfather had been struggling to keep on balance. Her response hadn’t come within the time his interest in the opportunity matched his attention to it, so he’d forgotten, cast it off as one of many empty hopes. When she did respond, the only Internet Ant could have accessed was the library’s own sketchy satellite, and that was a good five miles from the farmstead, so her message went unanswered.

Just before GPS was disabled, his grandfather died. Ant paired the two because his mother was struggling at the height of her illness when his grandfather passed, and then his father fled in the midst of these troubles in a personal panic. Losing his grandfather, mother, father, and the GPS combined in his mind as an unwelcome promise of his fate to be alone and lose his way.

Once the grander man and patriarch was gone, Ant’s father’s reawakened lusts triggered long-dormant dreams of a different life, but in his will to freedom was a mental angst for lost time. He and Ant’s mother argued about his plans to get to the big city, a fool’s errand in its own right for the danger, but he was convinced things would be better there. He’d pulled one of the sharper machetes on his son during the young man’s final plea for him to remain sane and stay with the family; its high sheen reflected a wicked slash of the sun into Ant’s desperate eyes. It was then, watching his crazed, middle-aged father trip across the furrows of the ploughed field as he ran, fallow before the planting season, that Ant had realized he had inherited not only his grandfather’s position but his reason, his will, and his determination to be in control of his life. Finding the better way would have to work out by the application of his particular motives and no one else’s.

At this convergence of events, his mother, Mabel, lay sweaty and dying on a cracked leather sofa in the parlor, the thin edges of which cracks cut into her sides, the only pain to distract from the cancer for its difference in kind. There was no relief. She died as if she had lived like a nineteenth-century country woman in the unattended agonies of death.

“I see you,” she whispered. Ant knew she wasn’t speaking to him. Her eyes unseeing, her soul spoke out. “Coming. I am coming. My people. My family,” she said, staring into the greater beyond. “My love.”

Every evening and into the night before she passed, Ant would do his best to console her body, patting a cool washcloth on her fiery head and wet, heaving chest. Unable to remain still, she writhed against the malignancy of the hateful mass plotting within her; like a black hole extinguishing all sources of light, the tumor extended its wrath to encompass as much space inside of her fragile body as possible before its villainy could no longer grow darker inside the whole of her kindlier self.

Finally, one early morning, she had settled, seeming to sleep: Relief overwhelmed her body and his mind—all giving in to exhaustion. At some point, fighting had become death’s ally in pain. Securing her mind to fate and the expanding love of God, she’d drifted peacefully, slowly; and then silently, she breathed her last breath.

Ant stood and moved to the kitchen as she appeared to sleep, thankful she rested, thinking nothing more, before hearing a sudden and loud gulp of air trailed by a rattling coo, startling him. He ran back into the room and gently pulled her lifeless body to his, shedding tears above her quieted form, a rousing in himself, surprisingly deep, he’d had no power to suppress. He cried for her absence, for her pain, for the knowledge that he was now totally alone as the last in the distinguished line of the farm’s progenitors, the only man of the Hobbes clan left standing, and his longing for her return was subsumed by the silence.

The grave lay parallel to his grandfather’s. Ant wrapped her frail body in the cleanest of the remaining sheets and eased it into place. Holding the family Bible, he improvised a prayer, a plea to preserve the souls of those who had loved him and whom he still loved, praising the day he would come to join them. Many subsequent mornings, he would stare at her plot, watching as the bright brown dirt regained its modest kinship with the dull earth, and the past shuffled down its winding coil to revisit upon a wearied mind the losses and remembrances he alone would maintain. Once the image of her grave lost its distinction in time, he made the trek to the library, where a signal, however weak, revealed the woman’s answer. The certainties of the recent past had transformed themselves into mystery.

His father had freed the horses on the morning he’d abandoned the family, suddenly incensed by the symbolism of their captivity, so Ant had to walk with the bull. Tossing off the heavy thought and indecision of his memories, he quickened the pace once the ornery bull, plodding down the sorrow-filled road with its master, had again adapted to the consistent motion of the walk.

As he strove forward, Ant’s heart proved incapable of abandoning the past, his mind revealing another ghastly sight, the first he had seen in the happier, more comfortable days, just at the cusp of trouble: Gordon Pickford’s morbid body contorted on its side. His brains were sprayed upward against the wooden siding of the weathered shed. That was the omen of doom, but no one had appreciated its eager message, except for his grandfather, who’d brought the younger Ant to help care for the body so the man’s wife and children did not have to see it. The only other image from that barren, pale morning that Ant had kept in his mind was his grandfather’s face, not shocked nor disgusted but understanding, serious, and, for the first time, afraid.

And like all impressive allegories—legends, myths, and fairytales—in which gallant heroes and stubborn heroines must confront the dreadful challenges of the cryptic world, the spirits and spells cast against the most adventurous among us, harnessed by shady devils and sprinkled by their dancing sprites—a legion of unholy forces aligned to figure and then to forge the mechanism of our Superstar’s demise. But she was wise. Perhaps more shrewd than sensible. But proving the worthiest subject for the Prince of the Power of the Air; the soulful Tempter; the despotic Dragon of the highest mountain top; the Great Serpent of the Earth Mother’s garden, around his slithering, a natural undulation of flowering vines, honeybees and suckle trees, flitting green-eyed flies, bouncing baby bunnies of the thorny brush, and teal-blue skies mellowed by highly placed clouds floating peaceably across the plain of all creation. These are the mere archetypes of his image. Finally, he is the colossus of the cosmic deep, the king grotesque of any beast or mortal fright with limbs as long as light years, titanic suns for eyes, a void for a mouth as vacant as the blackest hole, subsequently sucking and then swallowing even the entropic throb of continuous space and time. Galactic webs for hands, their spirals for his fingers, bejeweled by sparkling nebulae, raking infinite depths for glory.

But when he heard of Man, and of Woman by his side, a breed of minor gods by nature in kind to his own mind—forged of a fancy by the One and Only God, the Great Om Himself—the Prince of Darkness could not leave them unmolested by his knowing, by the Tarot of his divine conception: Riddles and games, what-ifs and why-nots, the doubts essential to the corruption of unadulterated hearts and minds. For, he thought to himself, how could they otherwise survive? By right, he claimed a challenge to their native faith in the benign goodness of their substance, once protected by God, who had already mastered him. The single resolution he had carried across eons of light and time was that no one and none would ever replace him. How ever endowed by lordly position, he would remain imprisoned within the darker frame of all eternity, forever denied the gift of heavenly grace; therefore, in exchange for this sentence to the edge of time, this endlessly material thing, a consciousness unused to rest, he reserved the supreme right to intervene in the lives of men.

So, he descended to the Earth. And could take any shape or form or spirit he readily desired, any most expedient to him. And though many have given him hooves and horns, reddish skin, a pointy beard, eyes of the blackest fire, he bears no such things but comes as a handsome one, a gentle, a helpful, a kind of other and hides his greed for what is good. Though he would like to snarl at and to snatch the living soul from every life, in an instant and all at once—each breath and happy call a child might cry—and sate the lust this undead appetite required, his conditioning would not allow it; and so, sadism became the best way for him to pass the intervals of his age.

In the cauldron of these energies, the story begins in a working-class town outside a once major hub for industry and manufactured goods. In an honest and humble hamlet tucked beneath the Great Lakes of the American Midwest, a large Catholic family sought its place. And since many of the best tragedies begin with one, their young and vibrant mother is cast to die too soon and leave her brood of bantering young children lost in simple dreams of motherly love. Among them is an innocent little girl. Our Superstar.

Ordained to endure an absence as great as this, she learns the hardest lesson first about life and love: You lose them both. The average human being is not required to reconcile these truths so early, at the age of five—To begin, as it were, at the end. What might that do or have done to your soul and psyche? It is easy to judge the life choices and trajectory of another, but to have such heavy judgement so early in life, judgment in the form of pity and somehow shame, as if the children were to blame, is an estrangement from society and all other attachments so intensely private that your soul can only know it if you have lived it.

“Too on-the-nose?” the agent asked.

Carelessly, I shrugged. “Isn’t any myth made of important reductions of actual life?”

He appeared to agree but withheld a definite yes. “We’ll see. I haven’t read the pages.”

Surprised by this unprofessionalism, I tried to blink through it instead of revealing my displeasure. I wanted inscrutability to be my vibe.

He tapped his buzzing watch. “That’s my time up,” he said abruptly and rose, pulling his belt higher toward his waist, but his gut forced them back where they had rested. “Look, I’m gonna be blunt. I would shake your hand, but I don’t want you to think we’ve made any deals. You’re eager. And you show it. All over your face. We don’t like that. Reeks of desperation. And nobody wants to read a book by a desperado. Good luck.” Sort of nodding at me, he walked out and left me with the bill.

But, you see, this story will be told. It is too important to ignore. Not the story you know, your neighbor knows, even your geriatric auntie knows, the forbidden one that people hint at but never explain. The one that involves the sacrifice. And that’s all it is, mere sacrifice. This happens every day to millions of us. We give something up for something else or nothing at all. Given freely or persuaded, forced or maybe tempted, inadvertent or intentional, sacrifice serves us like a currency; money itself is one of its primary symbolic modes. And this young girl’s mother’s life would be the courier of that exchange, like a primal urge, the complete loss of a mother’s love by early death, a complete and permanent trauma, burned like a fire in the proof to God, the thief of all good things, that she was worthy.

Too young to rationalize, she felt more than understood the loss. Held up to view her mother’s corpse, perfumed by the sweet melancholy of gardenia bushes in fullest bloom, the unfamiliar lifelessness of her mother’s old form rather provoked curiosity at the detachment and the nothingness she felt toward it.

“Papa?” she asked.

“Yes?”

“Why is she grey?”

Unable to answer, her grandfather turned her away from the viewing and rest her head on his shoulder where she began quietly to sob.

* * *

To satisfy your interest in her early years, I will say this: She carried on, day by day, within a human mind and body increasingly in touch with itself. This is a troubling characteristic—the kind of self-consciousness that arrives too early, multiplied by the usual differences in wealth, class, education, sex, race and any other defining trait that makes growing up harder than we’d hoped it would be when we were children. Her troubles, her limitations, her doubts about who and what and why she was gathered like a hurricane of dust. At once, uncertain; at once, heavy with meaning. And it was a chaos of many meanings. The swirl of its propulsion inhibited the unity of herself and her soul, further fragmenting her mind. At the center of this heroic storm sat the great nothing within which the burgeoning artist thought about herself.

Lady Faustina

By Jonathan Epps

Book One

London Town—The present

“Appalling—“

“Yes,” I agreed, to the delicate clink of our cocktails.

“Just appalling courage.” He smirked and then winked, leaning ever forward, sipping the first drop of a dream from his dirty martini. I couldn’t help but wish the hairs sprouting from his meaty knuckles would at least be trimmed. A stiff waiter in starched white serving attire gently removed the empty silver dish that had held an assortment of candied nuts. The remnants from which speckled the American agent’s pink tie.

Rich gossip slinked around the lounge. Pairs of eyes darted at and away from us. The rumor of a libelous manuscript popping up in query boxes caught the dying winds of waning sails of the once intrepid literary world, and I was the unknown entity making its pitch. That morning, the American agent had arrived from New York, agreeing to hear out a writer of unremarkable stature on the insistence of his first assistant who had read the query and first ten pages.

I pet the cool flank of the blue velvet couch beneath me. “Not so much courage,” I said. “Fearlessness.”

“Like a monster,” he replied, a rush of sudden fear pulled his face downward, while he pieced together opposing ideas to form a picture.

“Yes.” I nodded calmly. “Like that.”

“A genius, to be sure,” he added.

I nodded again. “Of a sort,” I said.

As quickly, a regularity regained its rightful place before restoring garish smugness to his face. Apparently proud of making dialectical sense of this lady, from monster to genius—a woman whose inexhaustible story had many times been told but never quite like this—he leaned into the back of his seat and clasped his hands to signal readiness. A face worn by secret need, the seriousness of its current figuration pricked at the sides of my confidence.

I composed myself to deliver a captivating account, the logline for which I had practiced until I didn’t know how I should say it.

“Do you know the Germanic literary tradition?”

He cocked his head as if already unimpressed. Neither nodding, nor shaking it, a vague familiarity with European lore urged me to continue.

“Go on,” he said.

Although compared to Satan, himself, no one could have known the dynamism and depth of that otherwise tired accusation. Among the business-arts class, her massive fortune alone would turn any deeper analysis by detractors and religious zealots into meager affronts. Morality was a simpleton’s pursuit to this kind. But, by uncomfortable degrees, her legend kept hidden a kind of inexplicable origin, the very point at which I devised the craft of my retelling.

And while my intention here is to regale the reader with a story as incalculably mystifying as this one, I have no interest in fame for my own sake. I intend to publish the fable anonymously. Fame is the force and sovereign realm of our divine heroine. It is her one claim and single right to possess, having given up the most precious but immaterial part of a person to acquire it: Her soul. And by this, I mean her quietude. Her peace. The kind of contentment only true faith in the one God could bestow; the kind only the express renunciation of selfish interests could allow. A thing to which she later aspired but, eternally forbidden to embody, per contract, permitted only to parrot the essence of what it might be to sell as a further commodity of vice, the medium of popular craft.

Surprisingly, she is dead; and it therefore follows that the true substance of her life must be told, a supernova whose radiance still ripples across the cultural halo of our globe. A star. The brightest of any within the limits of what is and can be seen. One that cast into shade all the others. The existence of one greater than she—only in theory.

How do I know this? Why should you place your confidence in an anonymous scribe? Because I am just a fan who watched her from afar, how could I reconstruct the fundaments of her preternatural success? I am a practiced observer, yes. I am a reader of biography. But more than this, I have been appointed to know it. By admixture of intuition and experience, parallel in failure to her ineffable achievement, I have come to know it all. Like the negative of a photograph, I am inversely endowed with knowing to an equivalent as she was by fame. Now that she is gone, I may put these words to the light.

What I confronted in me, I saw everywhere walking, morosely, in the cool refinement of fresh Pacific breeze. Only tourists and the wealthy, suspended by a different preoccupation, hanging by cords that pulled them feet above the concrete they would have walked, could afford to smile, able only to see what, not who else, survived below them.

My three nights and four days in Seattle confirmed the social blights I’d only heard about, imagining it all to be not as bad as it was. I’d rented a studio apartment seven blocks east of the famous Pike’s Place market arcades. The video of the space I had been sent prior to signing the lease presented a clean, decent little hovel to restart my life: A journey no 48 year old should undertake without much better preparations. Upon arrival, I parked my car in the spot inside a lot I had rented for one month and walked the few blocks to the building, a horror-show of filth and decomposition.

Broken windows, an unwashed and chipping facade, dozens of flies hovered and darted about the front entrance. I entered the lobby still invigorated by the otherwise fresh air and clean beauty of the town; but, step by step, my wariness and optimism fell through a void so large it was all anyone would otherwise see before falling. The foul and ancient odor stung my nostrils with its sour, stale death. Years of cooked food, dirt, grim, potent body odor, cigarette smoke, and God-knows-what swirled unfiltered among glum, stained furniture and residents milling about, chattering in many languages foreign to me.

I met with the landlady, a cheerful but watchful Asian woman who immediately showed me to my apartment, an obsequiousness in her hid something familiar to capitulation. I smiled and returned the genuine hospitality. But I was fretting on the inside.

At the 8th floor, the elevator opened into a hallway, the carpeting for which hadn’t been cleaned in probably 30 years. The general miasma of the air was somehow worse. Marijuana stench seeped from under entryways though warnings not to smoke inside the building were posted everywhere. The landlady opened the apartment door. It was cleaner than the hallway, though the smell persisted. The view of the downtown city was unobstructed by another high-rise so the sun shown brightly through a mottled film of hard water spots on the windows. I nodded as she spoke and tried to appear contented. But I was not. But I was there; I had signed the lease. I was trapped. And she left me to confront this ubiquity of our mutual despair.

A window by the sink was cracked open, and since it was ten degrees warmer in there than outside—there was no air conditioning, only a small, built-in floor heater for the months when Seattle is referred to as Rain City—I went to raise it higher, and it easily slid up its railings; but, when I let go, it as easily slid back into its cracked position. It would not stay open, and it would not close, and it had no lock. None of the four windows had locks. I raised one of the larger ones in the main room and looked out. Plants - or weeds - sprouted from every crack and open space that could gather geologic dust, and I noticed there were no stairs to escape a fire.

I was fucked—Stuck in a seething fire gaining ground within the hundred-year-old walls about to lick the edge of airy hope.

I had enough money to pay the rent for a while without income—further fostering a cavalier attitude that got me into this mess—but no job. And here I was in a veritable slum. I knew no one in town, another major mistake; so, after I moved my stuff into the sad and sunny room, I went for a walk.

I am fairly liberal by the sense of freedom in my human interests. I am a Christian renewed, though I am scarred by mortal wounds that have since been sewn, and I stay strolling the margins of any organized sect. I believe in a working, productive community, but I am much more conservative in how that should come to be. As I walked, I passed many of the Leftist types of internet lore embellished by unnaturally colored hair and antisocial piercings. Of course, I knew they would be there, I just didn’t realize how totally alien I would feel around them. I am a gay man, though it still bewilders and bothers me to distraction. I grew up in New Jersey, came of age in the late 90s, and spent my late teens and early twenties yukking it up in Manhattan clubs and bars. But this version of what I might also have become, had I been born later, is different. It is not personhood but personified ideology. A renunciation of self for cause. A faithless need for belonging to community that rejects connection. You know this. I know this. But I hadn’t experienced it first hand.

And I am a sucker for learning lessons in the hardest ways.

I trudged a broken sidewalk up the advancing steep onto the limits of Capitol Hill, the gayberhood. It was messy, unkempt. The unpolished streets and avenues showcased abandoned storefronts; “all-welcoming” churches adorned by trans and inclusively queer flags, seeming to imply only a narrower segment of locals was actually welcome and allowed entry; and, of course, clubs and bars, within one of which I had a coke and a smoke around a group of men pointlessly bantering about all manner of biological functions, one of whom was dressed in a full-length fishnet bodysuit, genitals and buttocks exposed for rent. I finished my soda and walked out.

I didn't know where to go or what to do, not yet completely overwhelmed by the hyper-vigilant freak-out that would soon come. I leaned against a wall and made my habitual tour of apps and email. A group of guys in normal conversation passed by, and I decided to follow them to see where they might go; but they sensed my interest, seeming to presume it was other than it was. And that was another symptom of the public awareness there: Constant and instant suspicion of the other. I genuinely wondered where they were heading, not interested in them for another reason. But I felt instantly awkward and paused before crossing the street, but then I crossed the street, stopping at the other side to turn around. Across the way from which I’d walked, I noticed three men standing outside the open door of the Covenant Church, and I recognized them.

It was an AA meeting. AA talks about God entering your life daily, but this redirection felt acutely guided. I approached. They were friendly as members are when another recovering soul meets the fellowship. And we had a meeting downstairs in the basement.

For that evening, I felt I could do it. Surely, I could reestablish myself in this place. The natural beauty alone would sustain my needs. But that wasn’t to be.

Each night, I woke almost hourly to the hideous panic of a known mistake, a colossal one; one that I might not escape. But I would drift back and deeper into the dark confines of Hypnos’ dreamy lair near Lethe, sipping the subconscious waters of forgetfulness, longing never to wake. But in the morning, I woke and tried again. I allowed the coolness of the neutral air to pet my face like a master to his dog, assuring that all was and would be well.

And then I was followed. On the streets of the town are many poor and deranged souls, ripping apart their flesh for drugs and money, money and drugs, howling into the mist of lost time. Screeching, beeping, ticking like bombs awaiting mass destruction. Twice, I was followed by younger but bigger men with that psychopathic stare either derived from genuine psychopathy or the psychological bereavement of a mind unmade by the hardest living. Where I turned, he turned. When I looked back, he looked up and at me, a smirk creeping across his face at my concern.

Fortunately, I have an old friend who knows me better than anyone ever has. I texted him. We spoke on the phone. He offered, in fact urged me, to leave and drive to the Midwest where he lives to regroup. Early on the morning of the fourth day, I cancelled the power account, the WiFi, packed my things back into my car before the hour the landlady appeared in her office and waited for her to arrive. When she did, I broke the lease and abandoned this misconstrued attempt at a new life.

In another time and place, though I don’t know which, the number of homeless people, the stench of human excrement, the demoralized faces and battered beings would be cause enough for correction—help, recovery, amelioration. A scrawled piece of graffiti caught my attention and will forever be the symbol of these discoveries. It read: If you could help would you - without punctuation, just a statement in the form of a question. The amount of wealth in Seattle could be enough to reorganize the blight that lurks on its streets, in its parks, around its sharpest corners. But it is unaddressed. It is simply allowed to foment its figurative social finality. And help is not sought by those who need it most. This is too typical of the pride in human beings, even or especially in the most desperate.

I would know. I have been through the cycle of my own mental and spiritual devolution. But I was saved by someone who loved me and not just my dear friend who was once again providing me refuge but by God.

In those three nights, I would listen to an internet channel, like the many rainstorm or animated oldies music streams meant to help encourage sleep, that features an image of Christ lying within the halo of divine peace or walking with his disciples in gentle talk that lulled and quieted my beating mind, spoken in a soft paternal voice. In Mathew and Luke, Christ addresses his followers’ worry for the immediacy they feel incapable of stilling in their hearts from fear, from the daily extremities of life that we must face. He says:

"Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God. Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows."

I could not help but be fathered by these and other words from the son of God. And I could not help but think of all the abandoned men and women, young and old, I had witnessed on the streets in horrible agonies of untempered threats to their lives and eternal wholeness. How flitting, like a host of distempered birds in mental anguish, evading bodily death, bought and sold by demonic powers for meager or major profits; but by faith, how might we be restored into a spiral, a heavenly host, spiraling upward, an angelic host of many sparrows?

This image seems insufficient, though it is not. An image, a work of art, a gesture of reunification seems not enough to cure the ills of our society; even if it is (and it is), it requires action. Realization. Commitment. Humility. Help. Not merely a nod or a rush of aesthetic identification. Action that is not being taken but continuously put off, suspended by the needs of material concerns or self-aggrandizing sloganeering. We are all guilty of this lack of action, preferring the anesthetizing drone of our own voices. At present, we seem a cacophony of many birds, harping and chirping for our pains, begging to be sold for pennies, at present not able to see that we are more than this.

Stirring the steaming pot, Lucy Olivia gritted her teeth, finally fearing to erupt; instead, she squeezed the handle of the wooden spoon and brought it down to the counter and pressed it onto the cool top. Evelyn, seeing the pressure of blood in her better sister’s hand, caught a quick fright and removed herself from the room, “hey, Daddy?” she called as she walked away.

“What?” Jessica Kat said as if offended by Lucy’s silent wrath.

“When are you going to grow out of this teenaged nonsense you carry around with you everywhere? You are almost thirty years old, girl.”

“Yeah, and you’re two years younger.”

For once, there was strenuous hate in Lucy’s eyes. “You are vile, Jessica. You don’t have a single good word for anyone. And we are growing tired of it. You act like a spoiled little child. Nothing is ever good enough. Nothing can ever satisfy you. And by the look of this pattern, nothing ever will.” Jessica opened her mouth to speak but was hushed by the continued glare in Lucy’s eyes who stepped closer to her. “And one day?” Lucy continued, “One day you will find yourself decrepit and alone and needy and sad and not a single one of us will care.”

Miraculously, this silenced the brooding older one, ever-disbelieving Lucy had it in her to confront anything real.

“What’s going on over there?” John Robert called out from the sun room.

“We are cooking,’ Lucy answered curtly. The sound of movement from their father—a culminating wrath within him growing too—the newspaper slapped onto the ottoman and worked its historical fear into both young women. He shouldered Evelyn’s quiet sobs as he addressed the other two.

“Why is Evelyn upset?” he asked, rather demandingly.

“Really?” Jessica asked with her newborn Yankee scorn. “That’s your question?”

“Don’t you talk to me like that, young lady. That is not how we raised you to speak to us.”

“She’s spent too much time up yonder, and it’s gone and infected her brains,” Joan Ann said from behind, startling them all.

“All right!” Jessica yelled. “I’ve had it with this family!” She fought her tears with gritty pride. “You all know what?”

“What?” All three asked at the same time, almost destabilizing the snide strength of Jessica’s indictment.

“You all—” She pointed with a shaky, incriminating forefinger. “Are a bunch of white supremacist southern trash.”

Silence overwhelmed their unbearable pain on hearing these words, spoken with terrible spite, from their once-beloved first born; this sordid accusation, this ultimate of all betrayals was like to shatter the room and the smudgy mirrors of their fractured lives like glass. But before a molten torrent spilled down Jessica’s cheeks in rage, in sorrow, in the deepest kind of familial detachment, she stormed down the hall and out the large, Mahogany door, pulling it hard and firmly into its place for its stubborn refusal to be slammed.

Chapter Two

“Wyatt—” she called from the parlor. “Are you near?” she asked the ether, only hearing the hum of air from the floor vents and the soft ticking from the brain of the Howard Miller clock, standing like a butler, like her only steadfast man against the pink and green floral pattern in the wallpaper. “Wyatt, dear?”

Riding down the hall on a softening sound, she could now discern the timid clank of the antechamber between the reception foyer and the outside world. Perhaps that’s him, she thought, forgetting how alone she was in this grandest of the old manor homes up Cottonwood Wind Road, the “road” being added as a clumsy addition when too many tourists couldn’t understand Cottonwood Wind was appropriate enough to name the winding country lane. She heard his footsteps on the polished marble coming toward the parlor; flipping the cashmere throw across her bathrobe, she positioned herself to appear less just-out-of-bed than she was.

“Aunt Sarah?” he asked, coming closer to Mrs. Witherington’s second favorite apartment in the thirty-room house.

“Yes, Junior, I’m in here.”

“That’s a nickname I haven’t heard in years,” he said, showing his face at the entrance to the darkened room. He approached one of two broad picture windows framing the fireplace and drew back the twelve-foot drapery.

“You have not given me a proper visit in ages, dear boy. And you know how we like our diminutives around here.”

“I’m sure I haven’t forgotten that. It’s just my father calls me Bubba and Mamma calls me—”

“Sugar. Darlin’, she calls everybody sugar.” They sat in the kind of quiet pause between relatives who know one another well but from a now, more distant past. “I trust your room is warm and full of the flavors of home?” she asked gently.

“Yes, everything is very fine, thank you.”

“And the housemaids don’t intrude?”

“Everyone is polite and quite all right by me.”

“And how are your business interests evolving?”

“Things are looking up,” he said as if talking to a member of the board. “We’ve added chickens and tobacco to the soybeans and sweet potatoes.”

“Ugh—” Mrs. Witherington projected. “Those chickens are so vile. The stench!”

“All livestock have their odors and thus their detractors, yes. But highly profitable. And anyway, the new water technology sweeps out the refuse much quicker—”

“Much more quickly,” she corrected.

“Much more quickly than the men can do.”

“That’s an improvement then. And your father? How is he?”

“Not well.”

“Oh, I know. I keep meanin’ to visit. But I always feel so stuck inside this house.”

“But it’s so big, how could anyone feel stuck in here?”

“It’s like a kind of magic, Junior. A kind of spell, I think. I think some preachy occultist back when August was alive cast it into the soul of this house.” She patted the soft front of the lilac cashmere that brought out the lightness of her eyes. “In any event, I am very happy your business is profitable.” Wyatt nodded confidently. “And that you are a man of your own means.” He smiled toward the lively oriental rug. “Because I couldn’t have imagined ever having this visit or the conversations we will have to have while you are here, but after Trad passed—” She forced herself through the dependent clause. “You emerged as the only one of the group who could handle the inorganic weight of our legacy and our, for the time being let’s call it, our responsibilities. To family and town, and finally, to country.” Wyatt nodded politely again. “Although, why we continue to endorse all these inept politicians is beyond my grade to say.”

Wyatt turned his head to view the rolling expanse of property from the uncovered picture window beside the mantle, following a wooden and white fence up and down its little hills into the grey fire of the distant horizon.

“But I do have a favor to ask this afternoon.” He turned back to face his imperious aunt once more. “I’ve left two Chinese dynasty vases at the church I’d donated especially for Mr. Brooke’s funeral. Would you mind retrieving them for me? I would send Martin, but he has the day off, and I want to get them sooner rather than later.”

“Of course,” he said.

“Oh my God, you’re so obnoxious,” Jessica Kat answered with the immediacy of routine. “And who’s that tall boy walking you home? Is he one of those weird young men for Christ? I bet he’s a pervert.”

“You wouldn’t know anything about him!” Evelyn sniped. “You’re a godless liberal. A hell-bound atheist.”

Lucy drifted down the hall from the kitchen. “How was church?” she asked, happy to see her little sister.

Jessica Kat, reading in a living room wingback nearest the threshold to the hall’s foyer, drew the window’s drape across its wooden rod. “By the sound of that defense, she’s already intended to the beloved man of Christ.”

“What?” Lucy asked, astounded by the weirdness of Jessica’s language. “Who were you looking at?”

“Just some gawky boy who walked this one home.”

“Could you not say it like that—”

“He’s not gawky! Shut up, Jessica!” Evelyn burst into tears and ran up the front hall stairs.

“Mom’s resting—” Lucy exclaimed urgently to the second floor, seconds after Evelyn had slammed her bedroom door.

There was a soft knock followed by a gentle scratch. A pause, then a tap.

“Go away!” Evelyn yelled. The door slowly opened. Evelyn was sobbing into her pillow as her mother sat lightly on the edge of the bed.

“Darlin’,” she said, stroking the silky back of the young girl’s head.

Evelyn stopped crying and turned her head. “Mom?”

“Yes, love. Please sit up so we can talk.”

Evelyn rose to sit as Joan Ann gestured for her to swing her legs around the side of the bedframe then put her closer hand onto her daughter’s thigh.

“I want you to know somethin’ special,” Joan said. “Your sister loves you very much.”

Evelyn rolled her eyes to the side to stare at her mother. “She does not. She hates me. And I hate her.”

“Listen, my dear, I don’t have long, I don’t think.”

“Mom, I can’t talk about this—”

“You’re gonna sit and listen regardless.” She sighed as deeply as a mother could love. “Hatefulness in a family is the most terrible thing. God wants no one of us to hate the other. He knows there’s plenty a-folks who do and who will, whether we hate them back or not. Politics is a foolish thing, girl. There’s nothing in the world that it makes right. But your sister? She’s your blood. She’s a part of your lifeforce—and your entire life thus far. No one in the world knows you or loves you better than your family. Even when it hurts.”

Evelyn had grown passive. “She hurts me a lot.”

“And you hurt her every day too.”

“I don’t mean to. All I do is defend myself.”

“With vicious attacks. That is no better.” The silence between them was like a murmur of understanding in the girl. “I can’t have this war at the end of my life. I need peace. We all need peace when it’s too late for a fully figured reconciliation.” Evelyn crunched her forehead, confused by the expression. “You don’t think I have my resentments against the world? You never lose the desire to fight and to defend all that you believe in. But it is a lost cause.”

“What are you saying? That I give in?”

“Not even an inch.” Now Evelyn sighed. “I’m saying you have to fake it until somehow, somewhere inside, you can understand why any one other person would want to hurt you. And that you have the same need. The rest, you give up to God.”

“That’s not what Anthony says.”

“And who is Anthony?” Joan asked dubiously, pulling back for clarity.

Evelyn shrugged it off. “He’s just a boy I used to like.”

“Darlin’—” Joan Ann wrapped her arm around Evelyn like a shawl. “Stop listening to boys; they’re not like us. You let them be like them and you and Maddie and your other girlfriends be like you. At least for now. One day, I hope you will meet a young man who will love and cherish you like your father and I do. Someone who will protect and join together with you in such a way that I can’t express.”

“Do you and Dad have that?”

“It’s close enough.”

“But he never talks anymore. Just sits and reads and seems grumpy all the time.”

“Those are just his old man ways. You hear me talkin’ trash about every such a thing in this world? That’s what old women do.”

“You’re not that old.”

“But I’m dyin’ anyway, dear one.”

Evelyn’s wet eyes refilled instantly with tears that dropped down her rosy cheeks.

“We’re all betrayed by time. Can you imagine how I felt when Jessica Kat decided to go up northward for her college studies?”

“Virginia’s not the north, mom.”

“Tell that to Lincoln.”

“Lincoln? Like, the president?”

“It’s just an old expression, child. And now I’m tired again. Walk me to my room if you would.”

* * *

Downstairs, Jessica Kat sat in the same wingback trying to read but was instead distracted by the windful bluster smacking branches against the windowpane. She marveled at the delicate daffodils whipping back and forth against the ground while regaining their stance in a brief lull of the spiteful currents in the air.

“Jessica?” Evelyn gently asked. Her oldest sister merely bent her head to the floor, awaiting another spark to battle.

“What?” she asked without warmth.

“Momma said we should be nicer to one another.”

Jessica was quiet, letting the enemy’s gentle tone resolve in her mind like a smidge of hope. After a pause too long and awkward for a teenager’s forbearance to take, she said, “Then we should. But let’s start by keeping our distance.” Picking up her novel, she buried her eyes in the words as an ending, unable to make sense of a single line of text.

“Evelyn, is that you in there?” Lucy Olivia called from the kitchen. Evelyn rolled her eyes at Jessica, twirling swiftly around to go toward the kitchen. Once she appeared at the threshold between the grand width of the hallway and the modern kitchen, once a cozy library more useful to the house’s 19^thcentury inhabitants, Evelyn observed Lucy chopping at carrots and celery the length of a man’s arm.

“Where’d you get those?” She grabbed a bunch by the leafy hair they hung from. “I’ve never seen carrots this big.”

“You know that new organic store on West Highbury?”

“No.”

“Well—there.” She continued to chop. “I’m making a lamb stew.” Evelyn made a ghastly face. “Stop that. It will be delicious. I thought I’d experiment with the season. Anyway, Daddy won’t help with the prep so I need you to chop that bunch of celery right there.” John Robert cleared his throat in the sun room as the pitch from turning pages of newspaper filtered the comment from his ears.

The younger adolescents wiggled in their seats, more distracted by one another and a particular group of boys were busy trying to catch a view of their own primary representative’s lap who played Enemy Territory on his phone. The adolescent girls rolled their eyes at these male cohorts and scooted their chairs closer to the front panel of older, more mature men.

Evelyn Jane, sixteen going on seventeen, had remained at church for this last-minute session of the youth group to discuss an up-coming fundraiser for the local food bank, trying not to ogle as obviously as her peers though her urgent proclivity to romanticize young Anthony had more than unnerved her usual chill. Instead of looking up, she looked down toward her own lap, discreetly inspecting the manicure she’d recently given herself. Her closest girlfriend, Maddie Lawrence, shook her head ironically.

“Don’t pretend you aren’t dying right now,” she whispered, smiling like an impish fairy.

“I’m not,” Evelyn whispered back. Maddie simply nodded, disbelieving her best friend.

“Ladies? Ah, ladies—” Anthony said. “Please, listen.”

“See?” Evelyn said, almost hissing for the embarrassment. Wanting to die instead, Evelyn resumed the surreptitious inspection of her trimmed cuticles.

For the remainder of the meeting, Evelyn’s embarrassment had bent her mind out of time, wandering, not to fantasy of a future with her white knight in tight chinos and a red necktie but to something stranger, something oddly lonesome and anonymous—a room, a chair, a fireplace—maybe. It was grey and raining behind the sole window through which she gazed trying to find meaning in a past within which she sat now as the present.

“Evie,” Maddie whispered, gently shaking her friend’s upper arm. “Evie—it’s almost time for us to say our thing.”

Evelyn’s eyes shot back into focus. “Okay.”

“Ladies?” Adam asked again, more perturbed than before.

The two stood, but Maddie made the announcement while Evelyn smiled foolishly, trying to remember what they were supposed to be saying.

On suspension of the meeting, Evelyn folded her chair and carried it to the line of youth group members, who had the strength to carry one, to be placed back into the trolly which stored them.

“Let me get that,” the pleasant voice said from behind, a stronger arm swooped under the hood of the chair’s backside pulling its weight from Evelyn’s arm.

“Thanks,” she said bashfully seeing it was Anthony who had lately given her some courtly attention, having abandoned another. But she almost didn’t care anymore, having spent weeks overindulging her fantasy of them marrying and having children, raising that family in a beautiful home in Durham where he’d teach classes at the university, and she’d stay home and raise their family. It had gotten stale. And her embarrassment during the meeting served as a point of exit.

“May I walk you home?” he asked sweetly.

“If you’d like,” she said casually. Maddie and two others whispered to one another watching the exchange.

Across the vestibule, the deacon’s monthly budgetary meeting had ended, and Anthony’s father stood chatting to another fatherly congregant about community matters. Anthony approached the two men, holding Evelyn’s hand who trailed behind.

“Dad?” he asked, interrupting. His father ignored him at first. “Dad?”

“What is it, son, really? Don’t you see I’m in a conversation?”

Evelyn’s surprise at the man’s fairly posh English accent garnered Anthony’s pride as she noticed.

“Sorry, Dad. I just wanted to see if it was all right if I walked Evelyn home?”

“Yes, of course. It’s fine. Just don’t loiter at her home and worry her parents about you.” Mr. Adams smiled at Evelyn as he said, “Off you go, now, Tony.”

Helping Evelyn with her coat, Anthony beamed like a groomsman on the eve of his betrothal. It unnerved her, as a sudden disinterest in the young man threatened to overwhelm her ability to talk on the way home, though she had a few questions.

“Tony?” she asked, but he flinched. “Is that what they call you at home?”

“My father does, yes.”

“Not your mother?”

“No. She prefers Anthony.”

“And your dad is from England?”

“Yes.”

“But you were born here.”

“Yes. My mother too. Dad met her on a book tour in Raleigh.”

“And he’s a professor, right?”

“He was. Now he does research but mostly makes investments for people.”

“I always wanted to marry a college professor.”

“You did? I couldn’t imagine anything worse.”

“I did. He would be a professor of physics or some sort of science I didn’t understand. And I would stay at home and raise our children.” It was like she was attempting to burn off her own fantasies of Anthony by revealing them to him. But he only appeared confused as if the conversation had gotten away from his intended objective.

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Do you have dreams like that?”

“About my wife?” he mused. “I don’t know. I don’t think so,” he said.

“I don’t anymore, either,” she said, looking off in the direction away from him. “And why Tony?” she suddenly asked, turning back to him.

“It’s my nickname.” He paused at the face of her doubt. “It’s short for Anthony.”

“I know,” she said, nodding. “But it just sounded weird for some reason. It’s his accent, I think.”

“A lot of Englishmen are called Tony.”

“I just never thought of it.”

“It’s not like the New York mafia or something—”

“Yeah,” she said in a drawl. “I think that’s why it’s weird to hear.”

“It’s all context. Life is full of strange and different contexts.”

“I’ve never even been up north.”

“I’ve been to New York City,” he said. “But I was a kid.”

“What was it like?” she asked, suddenly curious.

“I only remember the smells, strong and potent like a stench and then sometimes sweet and sugary.”

“Huh—”

“That’s your house across the way there, isn’t it?”

“Yes! Isn’t it pretty,” she added, for once admiring her mother’s garden. She wasn’t sure if she wanted him to be jealous of her home or not.

“How is she?” she asked both empathically and abruptly.

John Robert nodded toward the plush carpeting that softened the volume of conversation. “Not well.”

Mrs. Witherington’s forehead crunched her brow. “I’m so sorry, John,” she said. “The garden club is bereft without her. We miss her dearly. I haven’t wanted, well, I have wanted to stop by but I don’t want to impose or make her feel uncomfortable.”

“She would love a visit, I’m sure,” he said.

“I just hate—well, I hate seeing people I love in a weakened state.”

“She’s dying, Sarah,” he said firmly as if one shouldn’t play coy with death.

Mrs. Witherington’s eyes grew teary as she pressed a wadded ball of Kleenex into their sockets. “Yes.”

* * *

Strolling home from church, her arm linked into her father’s, Lucy Olivia welcomed the sweet scent of spring into the fineness of her soul. This renewed the latent gratitude she’d harbored in winter for the elegant splendor of her mother’s work in the colonial home’s ancestral gardens. Daffodils in clumps of brilliant yellow enlivened the greening of the earthly grasses. Two hickory trees towered like wizened guardsmen at the top of the walk that led to the portico, a thirty-foot entrance whose thick, white columns honored the regal dignity of those trees. Southern magnolias lined the drive, their white, perfumed flowers still gathering petals within bulbous cocoons. And peeking from the house’s corner back side in the farthest section of the yard, a flame of pink framed the corner of the lot as the Caerhays Belle magnolia was the first of the flowering trees to reach peak bloom.

Inside, a waft of fragrance danced within the warmer air, a clean wisp like a whip of fresh flowers greeted them further. A repeated but crisp cutting of stems filled out the otherwise solemn quiet in the front hall.

“Is your mother up?” John Robert asked bewildered at the chance.

Lucy Olivia couldn’t have known but removed the thin wool coat while moving in the direction of the activity. Mrs. Clancy, the current and former treasurer of the garden club, stood behind the kitchen’s island above the smooth Corian countertop using garden shears to snip the ends of each stem, preparing them as an approximation of a future arrangement on the flat surface.

“Hello, dear,” she said, addressing Lucy Olivia like a conduit of her mother’s own voice. “Joan Ann had given me a key, and figuring y’all had gone to church, I let myself in to make a surprise for your return. But I hadn’t moved fast enough this morning to get it done in time.”

“Those are gorgeous. And the smell—”

“From the florist down the street. Flower beds won’t have this kind of bounty for weeks just yet.”

“Have you seen her?” Lucy asked politely.

“Not yet—” Mrs. Clancy said, pausing, slapping the shears onto the counter with one hand, stopping the tears with the other. Lucy said nothing but looked to the floor. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think I’d cry so easily at that.”

“It’s okay, of course. Do you want to see her?”

“I would but I—”

“I can go up and see if she’s feeling up to it.”

“Would you? I don’t want to impose or disturb her in any way.”

“I’ll go see.”

John Robert had entered the room as she left. “Mighty fine day for a stroll through town,” he announced to Mrs. Clancy.

“Well, is it now, Mr. Dixon?” Mrs. Clancy playfully retorted.

The clarity of their voices reduced to a murmur as Lucy took the front hall stairs to her mother’s bedroom, a place Joan Ann hadn’t left in weeks approaching a month. The heavy door moved easily into the darkened, carpeted room. Little shots of light streamed in from cracks in the drapery. The walk to the bed was long enough to surmise the lady’s current condition, lying on her back, her head propped up by two or three downy pillows.

“Is Nona here?” she asked, referring to Mrs. Clancy.

“Yes. She’s brought flowers for us.”

“That’s kind.” Joan Ann’s tone was labored, not quite capable of happiness.

“She’d love to say hello if you’re up for it. How are you feeling?”

“Tired of being asked that question, dear. It’s about the only one your father thinks to ask me.”

Lucy smiled. “He’s trying. He was very sociable at church today.”

“Did he sulk in the corner like a dumb bull and leer at everyone?” Joan Ann asked sarcastically.

“And even spoke to Mrs. Witherington,” Lucy answered, laughing.

“That’s a start. How is that old bag of money?”

“I don’t know. I stay away from that kind of drama.”

“Always served me well,” Joan Ann said, pulling herself around to the side of the bed.

“Did you want to get up or go downstairs?”

“No—I wanted to pull my legs around to the floor so I could stare at a different wall.”

Lucy frowned comically at the pessimism. “You know, sarcasm is a sign of an active mind.”

“Then hopefully it moves down the full length of my wretched little body.”

“Did you want Mrs. Clancy to come up?”

“Just hand me my robe first, if you please.”

Downstairs, Lucy Olivia announced the way was clear. “She’s in bitter spirits this morning, I should warn you.”

“Bitter? Oh, my small child of God, that’s only just a southern woman’s right to hatefulness when she’s down. It’s how we get our strength back.”

“Then we can be assured of a full recovery,” John Robert submitted.

“Let’s all see to it then,” she said as she exited the kitchen.

Lucy set to wiping the counter of floral detritus as John Robert took to his lounge in the sleeping room. The rustle of newspaper fluttered like wings of a dusty bird.

“When’a you gonna use that tablet we bought explicitly for you?” Lucy asked, astonished by her father’s lack of engagement with the modern world.

“When the federal government abolishes the I. R. S.,” he said emphatically, as if retelling the time of day to a deaf old man.

These enviable characteristics, she overthrew as endemic in all people and doubtful characters, seeing the beauty and the gifts of every member of our kind. Soulful appreciation for the collage of human enterprise in living endured as the original fount of her most fundamental drives.

Paging through a glossy book that comprised an assortment of colorized photos from the previous century’s wars and romantic reunions, a book her little sister by ten years, Evelyn Jane, had insisted she review, Lucy Olivia, of a sudden quirk in time, remembered she’d promised the rigid young teenager to play consort to her devotion and join her for church, which, being Carolina Methodists amounted to a social outing in outfits opposing comfort, singing a few hymns, and sipping non-alcoholic cordials in the parlor to update the older folks on their lives. It was a chore more than a blessing.

“I really don’t get why you bother with that boring place. Half the people who used to go when we were kids, don’t anymore. And the other half are pretentious, shithead republicans,” Jessica Kat, the eldest—by two years to Lucy Olivia and twelve years to Evelyn Jane—couldn’t resist inserting contemporary wrath into the morning’s plans.

“It’s Easter Advent,” Lucy reminded her. “And Evelyn is religious.”

“In March? It’s so fucking weird,” she answered.

“Yeah, it’s earlier this year. What are you doing home, anyway?” Lucy asked.

“If you hadn’t noticed, I dyed my hair again. And I needed mom’s bigger sink.”

“Why do you keep dying it purple?”

“I like it. It looks good.”

“It really doesn’t,” Evelyn said, popping into the room, speaking directly to Jessica Kat, who could barely recognize her baby sister’s presence. “A guy online says all of you who dye your hair neon, bright colors are like venomous animals but psychotic rather than poisonous.”

“Evelyn—” Jessica began curtly but then stopped. “I can’t believe we’re related.”

“Neither can I.”

“I have a trad-wife for a little sister who takes her world view from Jordan Peterson.”

“And I have a trad-fem for an older one.”

“I am not trad-fem, you little witch. Trad-fems are anti-trans bigots.”

Evelyn rolled her eyes.

“Don’t make that look. Who do you think you are?” Jessica turned to Lucy. “I cannot believe this girl. We spent decades advancing the cause for women, and girls her age want to get married, have babies, and reenter the kitchen. It’s unbelievable how ungrateful—”

“What’s more unbelievable is your lack of employment, being the empowered and independent woman that you are,” Evelyn sniped.

“You little bitch.”

“That’s enough. These conversations go nowhere but ugly,” Lucy chimed in.

Evelyn laughed it off, almost haughtily but lacking the requisite sophistication to pull off the attitude.

“You’re already bigoted against your own sex; careful, you don’t become a racist too,” Jessica suggested more than warned.

“That’s not fair!” Evelyn yelled, making Jessica smile, knowing she’d won the present contest in righteousness.

“You both need to ignore each other. It’s too impossible for peace otherwise. Come on, Evelyn. Let’s go,” Lucy said, finalizing the standoff with an admonition, but giving Jessica a blank and angry look. Once Evelyn had run out of the sunroom, she said, “You’re twelve years older than her. Do you really need to do this?”

Leaving her alone, Jessica remained smiling as her joy in triumph faded, transforming into confusion, sadness, and doubt.

Church on a cheery middle-March Sunday held within its breast the bounty of the good life: high-up and vaulted ideals unachievable to time. Humor was essential to endure it. The random inconsistency of the weather, breaking out from the freeze of winter, birthing from wetness another spring, worked like a chair in a grandmother’s day room, rocking back and forth like a sailor on high seas, braving the shifts in nature, braiding stringy wool into a knit more relevant to life.

Mr. Rodgers, hunched like a bespectacled genius over his most important discoveries, raced his fingers across the keys of the looming, silver pipe organ, the largest pipes of which were the thickness of a telephone pole; the smallest, as skinny as a pencil, arranged from tallest to shortest like a glorious bow missing its arrow pointing toward heaven. A simple, unornamented wooden cross hung at the center of the off-white wall rising behind dual pulpits. Deep, burgundy red carpeting covered the entirety of the floor. The pews ran in rows making fifteen encompassing the whole of the congregants’ seat of worship and a minor balcony above, covering a fifth of the total space.

The grandest feature of the rounded nave stood two full-length, original Tiffany, stained glass windows depicting the life of Christ and his twelve disciples, moving through the story of redemption through love, compassion, and temperance. Purples and reds, yellows and greens of the narrative sparkled as if jewels illuminated by the light of God’s eyes on a crystal-clear day. Since childhood, Lucy Olivia had spent hours studying or gazing into the beauty of this glass, ever-wondering at the truth it held and tried to convey. She and Jessica spent years in the choir and youth group before young Evelyn and her nascent evangelicalism had begun to reveal a flair for strict adherence to scripture and the moral laws of God, as she phrased it.

“How did you find the sermon?” Mr. McCluskey asked, waiting gently by her side for a cup of punch.

“Would you like some punch, dear?” Mrs. Ottoway asked.

Lucy Olivia smiled and held out her hand to take the paper cup then turned to Mr. McCluskey. “I thought it was vague,” she said. “Like he didn’t want to say something.”

“Hiding belief.”

“I think so,” she said. “God only knows what.” Mr. McCluskey leaned toward her generously, trying to suppress a chuckle.

“If only he’d tell us all.”

“Someday,” Lucy answered sweetly.

“Are you enjoying being back home?” he asked. “Pardon me for revealing the intel.” He winked and shot a sneaky glance toward Mrs. Ottoway, busy filling paper cups with punch, as if pointing to the source of his information.

“I am,” she said confidently, more trying to convince herself.

Mr. McCluskey detected the willful enthusiasm. “We older folk know how hard it is for you, young folk.” Lucy wanted to protest for optimism. “I read the news. Try not to with all the horrors on display.” She nodded as he offered compassion. “I really can’t imagine trying to achieve my blessings now compared to when I was your age.”

Lucy’s ingratiating smile began to fade.

“But I mean no pessimism. I should stop talking.”

“What is he going on about now?” Mrs. McCluskey said, coming up to their conversation. “I could see your face change, Lucy. What infernal nonsense are you feeding her?” she asked her husband of forty-five years.

“Well—” he said. “I just worry, that’s all. I mean well. My fear is that young folks try too hard to deny the problems.”

“We see them,” Lucy politely interjected. “We just don’t know what to do, like you. All we can do is try to do whatever it is we intend to do.”

“Well said, dear,” Mrs. McCluskey added.

“Fairly inarticulately, but thank you.”

Mrs. McCluskey pulled at her husband’s arm, sensing a flirtatious interest in the young woman becoming too obvious to all. “Don’t you worry about a thing,” she said. “You will be fine.”

“Now, wait a minute. I want to ask about her family.”

“No time for that, dear.”

Mr. McCluskey shrugged and nodded his head like a gentleman as he was whisked away to more restrictive territories.

As they left, Lucy couldn’t help but confront the falsity within the comment, however well-intended. How inopportune her options actually were. An anthropology major found only an impossible struggle in the hunt for employment, however insistently her mentors had pushed her into the subject, once she’d demonstrated some interest and aptitude, guaranteeing there would be jobs for young women like her.

Evelyn and her latest object for adoration stood in a small group of happy teenagers, trying too purposefully to stand upright, trying too deliberately to move and talk and gesture like the elders they’d too soon hoped to emulate; the extremity of their wishes the sole hallmark of their actual, post-adolescent age.

I was never able to live here. At middle age, I’m glad I never attempted it. I don’t make a lot of money, and I would have been too susceptible to the underworld NYC disguises in the active shadows of its global import. As hard as it has been to get to this stable point in my life, I am fairly sure of a great chance that I would not have made it had I lived here at that eager, impressionable age.

I grew up in New Jersey, less than an hour from the City. I haven’t been back in years, but I am here now to be by my father’s side at his deathbed.

Death is not a thing to be romanticized. It is otherworldly, certainly, to see a loved one staring into the great above in a body ravaged by its inability to function. But it is not a literary experience of tragedy, not an epic final monologue on the triumphant end of a figure, but a devolution of life that forbids interpretation.

I love my father. Seeing him on the verge of death, fighting for one more chance to live, is difficult. We were not close, more estranged over my lifetime, and I almost didn’t come. So often, people use the death of a parent, especially, to showcase themselves. I am doing that here, in a way, but writing about him, our limited relationship, and his death is a method to sublimate sadness and the confusions that resound within my still greatest weaknesses.

My parents’ insensible marriage, their two families invariably in direct conflict, his limited interest in me and my life all return. And in fairness to him, I made sure to maintain those limitations over time. Death ushers these pains to center stage, and the past reforms itself, appearing as family I haven’t seen in decades, resentments I have lain to rest but whose ghosts still hover in the ether, sibling tensions we have worked so hard to overcome.

Because death is final for us all, the death of others and our own that approaches, it has the potential to relieve the burdens of things past. At middle age, far away from the young and foolishly ambitious man that I was, seeking myriad potential in my future self, I see instead the loving potential for deep acceptance at the cosmic cliff of life.

I got the cover art for it the other day. I’ve shared it in notes but wanted to make it official in a post.

Here’s the back cover blurb:

When Brian Hardy is a toddler, his father, Charles “Chuck” Hardy isn’t sure of him. Something seems off in the boy. Samantha, his wife, plays her part but could not care less, busy pursuing petty indulgences and other men.

By his early teens, Brian shows signs of estrangement: from Chuck. His peers. Himself. Chuck thinks he has done all he can to set the boy on the right path, but Brian’s character seems to darken as the years pass.

However, college redirects the young man, and there he meets gorgeous and charming Brandy Stiles, whose Instagram page is taking off, bringing her instant influence and wealth. The two dreamers get together and head west to indulge the #vanlife trend becoming increasingly popular on the social media site.

But a haunting from the past begins to rise up: within Chuck, within Brian. A woman, Carly Hart, reenters their lives in dramatic and frightening style, leaving both men torn, confused, and vulnerable to the most tragic impulses that lie dormant in all other men.

Pushed to the edge, can they be stopped?

Superlative is fitting because the false enthusiasm that each actor in this all-too-earnest film forcefully infuses into their performances is exhausting, however effectively it distracts from the distractible script.

Throughout, it feels as if the actors are trying to impress their NYC acting school coaches, not even trying to land an audition, just preening for praise. The lead female, Daisy Edgar-Jones, is so self-consciously being in a movie that whatever coyness she’s attempting is just dull and uninspired. This inhibition or immaturity of skill inhibits the better skills of most of her co-stars. Hers is a Julia Roberts-inspired character, though Helen Hunt played in the original 90’s version; but the actress seems intent on doing-the-thing more than evoking a character, no matter how one-dimensional. The beauty of many well-made 90’s blockbuster comedies (which is what this film basically tries to be) is they were grounded enough in the competencies required for producing a coherent whole that even the potentially trite was made charming. It’s like she’s pretending to act which makes the potentially trite but charming demonstrably awkward. Most of the secondary and tertiary performers are quite good. And the one female who mans the drone should have been the lead, in my opinion. These actors are either underused or given wayward instruction to incessantly scream their lines.

The lead male, Glen Powell, is a caricature of a Tom Cruise figure on high-octane Red Bull. He never relaxes into the comic machismo of the role. Although he is not untalented and buzzes with sexual charm, in this film, it rings false, unlike his performance in Top Gun: Maverick where he saves the day in an impressive tertiary role to which he applies an even, maturing masculinity. But not here. It’s all cowboy cardboard cutout, and it’s a disappointment. He’s got the flare, but the director seems to have insisted all the actors mean every word of their lines. It’s not melodramatic but adolescent.

The script tries to convince us of unproven meteorological concepts to take down a tornado in such a frantic and undisciplined manner that the emotional kitsch used to cover whatever weaknesses there are in the science turns suspending disbelief into a technical irony that takes the viewer out of the narrative.

The whole thing is silly.

The female lead’s trauma from the opening scene is never given the depth it would require for it to add any weight and emotional impact to the tone of the film. And everyone is trying to steal the show. No one character supports another with the kind of submission to the narrative whole that supporting roles demand, the sole exception being veteran actress, Maura Tierney, who knows her place in the script and steals the scenes she’s in. There’s more chemistry between her and Powell’s character in just thirty seconds of film time than he ever has with his intended counterpart.

The only sophisticated product of this film is the CGI used for the storms which are dramatized without losing their realism but to little effect as they are never properly personified, never threatening nor scary enough, not even when they are sucking human lives into their vortices. This seems to me to be the most post-modern flaw in this chaotic narrative weave: real components of natural phenomena forced into histrionic, nonsensical context to shallow, self-destructive effect.

And forget about the hobbled romance at the center: the antagonism between the male and female leads has no precedent. She hates the cowboy just because he’s a cowboy but prejudice is not enough for sparks to fly. There needed to be some kind of a catalyst for this tension, an episode between them that provoked her scorn, but it’s simply his existence that does it. He’s too personable and attractive for that to be believable.

The one other actor who shows real quality of engagement is David Corenswet (studios really have stopped changing actor’s names for marquee quality easiness). He is the underused antagonist in the film’s human thread of the script, but he’s never given enough back-story or scenes which clearly demonstrate his intentions or ulterior drives. He’s just demanding and wants to win, but what that is, the film never cares to reveal exactly. The better view of the storm? More detailed data? For what? For whom? Why? Corenswet has real presence and the best acting chops of the lot, but the script fails to develop him to its detriment.

There are a couple of good jump-scares and a couple of hardy chuckles, but mostly I laughed at the film itself. Much like the heroine’s goal of engineering an implosion inside the tornado, the film collapses into itself from the weight of its competing energies: uneven, trite, and overdone.

As an eX-Twitter user, for my part, it was a mixed bag of reactionary impulses and assumed objectivity—attempted intellectual coolness.

But I’ve deactivated. More than free of it, I feel protected from it.

It’s essentially a spiteful platform and not because Musk has taken it over. It’s always been, whether one partisan army has control or the other. Although X seems freer than Twitter, more Wild West than communist China of the previous regime, both managerial styles produce hotheaded vengefulness in its users, and everyone knows this.

It’s a conversational framework without the conversation, vulnerable to misinterpretation, misreading, misanthropy. Amplification of bias is its primary mode of operation—and it’s a Barbie Dreamland for narcissists.

It’s like being on a reality show where the most intentional conflict gets the views. Like being in the house of a perpetual season of MTV’s The Real World, but there’s millions of people in the house, hiding behind doors, eavesdropping, plotting, ambushing you while you sip your morning coffee, or nip at a nipperkin of your preferred afternoon drink.

Of course, there are housemates you like, even love—you think. But even they are just as prone as you to the vagaries of human impulse, especially when there’s potentially thousands—millions of eyes watching your every move, hearing your most questionable confessions, straining for your most offensive whispers.

But it’s fun.

Or entertaining.

Obsessive. Compulsive.

Like an addiction.

In the end (as of yesterday), I was spending hours a day on it: posting, replying, reposting. First thing in the morning, I would pour my coffee, grab my phone and cigarettes, chain-smoke, and doom scroll.

In the evening—repeat. But with wine: a bottle, and a half, or two.

In short, eX-Twitter had mesmerized me into a co-dependent trance, needful of its pronouncements, opinions, barbs, and blather—its praise; and, in the process of my zombification, I’d exacerbated multiple addictions. So distracted by The Dialogue, I’d ignore just how many extinguished butts were in the tray, just how much wine I’d drunk.

Today is the first morning of an eX-Twitter user. Hardly a habit kicked. But with my coffee this AM, I’d only smoked two cigarettes instead of six or seven. I’ve selected the 12 month reactivation time-allotment, mostly because the longer I have, the more likely I will forget about it. Thirty days is too short a period for an addict to have to decide his fate.

More than smoking, I loved seeing the newest, wittiest takes from my favorite ironists, intellectuals-in-the-middle, sparring left and right (but mostly left), all of whom are liberals or liberally-minded in that classical sense that has been branded dangerous, but only because of their lethal capacity to mock the institutionally deranged for the disreputable status-clowns that they are.

As a former lefty, it was a joy to behold, or a rush, a high—a false euphoria.

I am a Xennial, born in 1978, neither as cool as older Gen-X, nor as self-assured as Millennials—somewhere in between, in the nether-lands of influence, just narcissistic enough to believe eX-Twitter could be a place to be seen, heard, and maybe, hopefully (God, I hope—pick me!) admired.

And there’s the rub: everyone is on there to be appreciated at least; praised, adored, worshipped at worst—the most talkative ones anyway. The quiet ones are a nebulous bunch. The psychopaths only speak when they want to dismember someone. Real dialogue is basically non-existent. Any long threads are monologues with approximate replies of “thanks!” and “you’re right” receiving grateful mere emojis from the author of the thread. The only time two users engage for longer is during an argument, a fight, or prolonged mutual slanders. Some have substance but rarely, exceptionally, and even then, you can sense the heat building, the rising temptation to ad hominem. It gets petty and vicious very quickly, and, we, the common users, the ones without much to lose, are most prone to this trap. It’s the street junkies who kill or maim each other most frequently, not the kingpins, although they, too, assassinate their rivals, any incisive threat to their hegemony.

Genuine, relationship-building exchange is virtually non-existent. I’d only met two of my eX-Twitter mutuals in real life. One, I’d hit it off with instantly; the other I’d met at a loud concert, and though I liked him just as well, it was hard to get a clearer sense of our social compatibility.

And it didn’t matter, ultimately. We all went back online and to our addiction to saying the things, liking the other things, decrying the debasement of the things. We live far apart in the real world but even farther apart online—all of us, I mean. Because it’s a flimsy substitute for communication. It is a solipsistic construct for social decline, a one-way street full of armored assault tanks, while most of us carry Nerf Blasters in hand.

When I wrote my vigilante thriller, No Winter Lasts Forever, back in 2019, I’d remembered a nightly newsmagazine segment from 2011-2012 that I had forgotten, but it obviously stayed with me, because it resurfaced with a powerfully instructive force, giving more focus to this novel about confronting the scourge of mass shootings. The segment showed young men—late teens to early twenties—who gathered in anonymous chat rooms where they’d pretended to be serial killers, pedophiles, rapists—all manner of psychopaths, and I used that online context as the meeting-ground for the killers and their sycophants in the novel. This is the worst of online communication, of course, but there is an aspect of what this sad situation illustrated to all of it—even within the well-intentioned niches—the platforms play on the pretend, the unreal, the virtual, the imaginary self, churning a cauldron of uncertain outcomes.

Social media is place of pretense, a place where otherwise subconscious drives are given full expression, no matter how artfully intoned—even when most passively consumed. The license to indulge unmitigated thoughts and feelings remains. Its potential to devolve into a life-sucking void of chaotic, unstructured humanity is too high. Online speech forums seem like a good idea; they seem like the best use of quick and effective modernity, but, for all the quickness, it’s hardly effective, if by effective we mean properly productive, supporting and ordering a civil society.

I will miss my wicked-smaht mutuals. I will miss the injection of their wits. I will miss their righteous bent. Their humor, their admirable detachment. I am sure it’s a pleasure and a privilege to know them. I imagine it is. I can only wish to have those kinds of friends in actual life.

But imagining identity, the escape to some superior notion of yourself, is the foundational insubstantiality of any addiction.

Barbie has gone bombshell, now surpassing 1 billion at the global box office on a 100-200 million total budget, a certified record-making blockbuster, both for the genre of female-led comedies and a first of its profit-size for a female writer/director. My instant reaction was to call it smart, mindless entertainment—and it is, but it is something worse too.

Oppenheimer has done half the business with roughly the same total budget, so very profitable but not a true banger; impressively in the black nonetheless, a color well-matched to its pessimistic themes about world destruction and the moral chaos of war-time decision-making. At three hours, it moves very quickly, owing that to masterful direction/editing and superb acting. My instant reaction, however, was to call it fast-paced but dull, like a bomb with asymmetrical implosion.

The two summer successes have a lot in common beyond being structurally undramatic clunkers. Neither was dreadfully hard to watch but both missed their marks.

Unfortunately, the most important characteristic binding these two films isn’t their success; it isn’t their existential search for the limits of a single life and mind, of a civilization (they both do this)—it’s their inability to cohere as dramatic structural narrative. If these are our best filmmakers, both more than competent in their assigned strengths, (Greta Gerwig’s wit generates genuine LOLs; Nolan’s eye and timing are exact.) they both fail at story-telling.

Barbie fails in the third act; but it also prefers the online quip style of comedy to its chivalric-romantic plot during the entire film; Oppenheimer fails in the first and third acts. The first act is far too expository to produce rising tension; the characters say, “Oppenheimer!” many more times than the Barbies intone “patriarchy”. The second act of Oppenheimer showcases its central drama: the making of the A-bomb with a nice but undeveloped secondary spy plot. This act should have been extended as the whole film, possibly showing scenes of Heisenberg’s attempt to make one for the Nazis, who fail, likely because Heisenberg sabotaged the science. All of this would have made for more dramatic engagement and would not have diminished Oppenheimer’s biographical interest.

The oddest thing about Barbie is the comedy, having little to do with the existential crisis-journey of the romance at the center of the plot. It seems ashamed of Barbie and Ken’s obviously romanced destiny when the ending—its most woke, most earnest, most flattened mid-lib self-care tropism: “It’s Barbie AND it’s Ken”—turns the pink to grey. (Mostly, I missed this at first because it ran too long, and I was ready to leave the theater.)

The jokes are good but isolated, almost outside of the plot, hovering over it, as if composed by an X-obsessed wit or something approximating that (say, like Twitter): in tune with the frequencies of top-tier pop-esoteria while placating the earnestness of the mid-level head-nodders. One of a handful of smart, anon X accounts I follow, , posted: “The Barbie movie is a text. Very explicitly. It invites exegesis because it is self-consciously full of tropes and call-backs to and quotations from The Discourse.”

Insightful and telling. The Discourse (i.e. smart posts about the socio-political wars) is composed of fractured, or ever-blooming ironies, burgeoning like a nuclear cloud, one take more layered than the next. But there is rarely narrative cohesion to these “tropes, call-backs and quotations”. It’s all just great fodder for inside jokes among the ironists and their admirers. Like if Ferris Bueller starred in War Games, volleying clever barbs about global thermonuclear annihilation with the voiced computer-character, while ignoring their pursuit of it.

The central conflict of Barbie initiates when she admits to thinking about dying, because she pretends Ken doesn’t really exist—he’s a replicant, and she’s somehow not. The movie takes great pains to show all the many multi-racial, multi-professional Barbies as if she (“stereotypical Barbie”) isn’t the holy-one-and-only around whom the entire Dreamland revolves. But somehow, her subconscious mind (the writer’s who is playing with this doll) wonders if she should exist at all. A great, unexploited irony here is that most “plastic” people—real human beings obsessed by youth and looks—are morbidly preoccupied by their mortality. In this moment, Barbie becomes potentially human—The Little Mermaid only self-obsessed.

In a better and truer comedy, if she’d learned anything at all, Barbie would have fallen head-over-heals for “stereotypical” Ken, her most loyal suitor or rejected him outright to be the cosmic and eternal queen bitch Barbie she and the film suggests she should rather be. But neither occurs. The unshaped, textual resolution of the ending is its most contemptuously contemporaneous feature. It proposes the film’s most woke moment: self-abnegation by eternally-single self-care.

Oppenheimer fails as fast-paced dullness. Like a great History Channel documentary but no great drama. The story’s arc is weak, almost nonexistent. The last hour when he’s interrogated with a McCarthy-like, Red Scare intensity is superfluous. We learn nothing we didn’t already know. There is no dramatic conflict except that he’s been framed by a capitalist would-be political actor in Lewis Strauss (played very well by Robert Downey Jr.) But Strauss is a flat character given too much screen time, barely interacting with Oppenheimer’s more important threads, and seems to be scorned by a casual humiliation (relative to its importance) which is a flimsy point of drama within an otherwise hefty moral subject. Strauss would have been better featured in that more developed spy plot. Oppenheimer’s script also seems too influenced by social media threads that attempt to chronicle something and end up becoming a distracted mess of competing “what-about-isms”.

It is another paradoxical film. It ends just as uninspiringly as Barbie; however Nolan distracts the viewer from this by finally reminding us of the world-changing bomb that was central to that period in history. But for the hobbled drama at play, it feels like a gimmick.

It’s a compelling-enough film for reasons of craft and because that period in history, the Manhattan Project itself, have so much moral tension; but my same complaint with Nolan’s films remains: the script/story arc is often the weakest part: too expository at times with unbalanced dramatic interests. Oppenheimer is unresolved as a dramatic story; it is too much of the life writ large. Dramatic biopics should focus on the life as history most remembers them and extrapolate character through tighter dramatic structure, with a little mystery, a little sense, and as many new insights as could be allowed without fabrication.

Both of these highly watchable films are very well made in every way at the expense of their stories. Barbie ignores its central conflict for the self-glamorizing glitz; Oppenheimer tries to convince us of too many.