So Here We Are

Liz Boysha

Published by Liz Boysha, 2024.

This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

SO HERE WE ARE

First edition. November 25, 2024.

Copyright © 2024 Liz Boysha.

ISBN: 979-8227566508

Written by Liz Boysha.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Now

Breathe. Listen to your heart: it ticks underground amongst the worms and the tardigrades. Mushrooms stick their mycelial tendrils to your flesh, roots dig in with greedy probes. Everywhere a thrumming, a groaning, a moan. The ecstasy of a million forms of life all strung out with purpose. Match your pulse to the Earth’s. Match your breathing to the respiration of the plants. Tiny lightning bolts between the nerves in your fingertips are what allow you to feel: the coarseness of the soil, the grit of your soul. Cold and moist. Warmth, vibrating. You are alive, and the Earth is alive, and you are a part of it.

Grim says things used to be harder, back in his day, when the roads were clogged with traffic and the air with smoke that traffic belched. He says the worst winter now can't compare to commuting through the same weather to a dead end job earning income to pay for gas so you could keep commuting. He tells me about how people used to sacrifice themselves to the old gods of Profit and Economic Growth.

Mom says Grim belongs in a loony bin, but they don't have those anymore. She wishes they did, though, because the two of us are driving her mad with our singing and our chatter and our noises. She squints through a week-old headache and glares at the sharp beams of light that stab through the open doorway.

“Come along, Bug.” Grim leads me out the tiny log cabin we three share. “We need to stretch our wings.” He has a funny way of talking, since neither of us have wings. If I did, I would fly - far, far away from here.

When we walk through the woods, Grim tells me stories about Before. Grim was a child of the Millennium, of computers and internet and plastics. He does not teach me about the ways of Nature and Survival and Winter Storms, because he grew up shielded from those sorts of things. It was Mom who had to learn about them, who teaches them to me now. It is Mom who keeps us all alive.

For Mom’s sake, I hope they reinvent the loony bin. Whatever that is.

Before

The first thing you need to know about Isaac Newton Graves - the only thing you need to know about him, really - is that he was the most beautiful and popular boy at our school.

It sounds like a cliche, sure, but think about it - there had to be someone. Even an enlightened society would have someone whom most people would agree they want to fuck. Excuse my language - someone with whom most people would agree they want to have a drink. Sometimes they are the same person, the drinking and the fucking. Often they are not.

Isaac was gorgeous, and everyone, myself included, could agree on that. Exotic hazel-green eyes and wavy, shining mahogany hair always perfectly styled. It's a wonder he had the time to pull off such a flawlessly effortless look, because he worked part-time and was also lead actor -slash- singer in the drama club musicals, and captain of the debate team, and co-captain of the Ocean Bowl, and star pitcher for the baseball team? Like, who even watched baseball? Everyone loved him, largely due to his effortlessly flawless personality. Isaac was like a god: seductive and untouchable and unknowable. No one could get close to him, emotionally speaking.

No one, except for me. Because Isaac was my best friend, but also because I knew everything about everyone. That was my curse - people would talk to me. Cashiers, teachers, fellow students, random strangers waiting for the light to change so we could cross the street. Without any prompting, without any filter, people loved to spill their deepest, darkest, secrets right onto me.

Now

“How could that possibly be a curse?” I ask incredulously. I want a world where I could struggle with too many people talking to me. One with neighbors and teachers, baseball and traffic lights.

We are walking to the library, which sits in the middle of the mostly abandoned town fifteen miles away from the cabin. Since Grim is old and tired, we only make the journey a few times a year. I could do it alone, even with the wild dogs that roam the streets; the strangers who still occupy the largely abandoned, tightly packed houses; the orange and shining pools of toxic waste that flood the lower parts of town after a heavy rain. It would be faster, alone, even if I wandered and explored along the way, but Grim likes the trip. I like to find little things for him that remind him of a life long gone - a computer mouse, a broken smartphone, battery swollen and pillowed. Grim does not know how these things work or how to repair them, despite growing up glued to a screen. They all require electricity, which we do not have.

That there is still a library - albeit unofficially - which is after all these years still packed full of books kept safe and protected from the elements by still standing brick walls and mostly whole glass windows, is, according to Grim, a miracle. He lived through book bans and burnings, through television and movies and something called TikTok. “Everyone in my generation,” he claims, “was practically illiterate.

Reading is itself a miracle, I think: the right arrangement of circles and lines can transplant ideas from before I was ever born, before Mom or Grim or even Socrates, straight into my head. Sometimes I laugh or cry while I am reading, just because the right arrangement of symbols told me to.

According to Mom, the library is proof that human beings value knowledge above all other things. She has her own collection of reference books, printed volumes on everything from making gunpowder to nursing babies. “Fiction,” Mom says, “is a waste of everyone's time.” How many years of human history have been wasted on fantasy? Too many, she is certain. Just look at Grim.

But I know the truth: the library exists because of us. Me and Grim and the handful of other strangers who keep coming back to reshelf the books and borrow new ones, but also: fortify the boarded windows, check the doors are closed and the roof free from leaks, scare away the feral dogs who threaten to break in.

“It is a curse,” Grim explains patiently, “Because you never want to know everyone’s deepest, darkest secrets. Trust me.”

Before

People talked to me a lot, so I knew a lot about them. People knew who I was, but they never really knew me. I was certainly never royalty, not like Isaac, but I was still infamous in high school for the time I accidentally turned in the notorious serial killer known as the Elkhead Butcher.

For decades, this man terrorized the county in a quiet, subtle way, picking off victims randomly enough to avoid major detection until he had accumulated several mason jars full of teeth. He showed me a picture of them on his phone, shades of grey and yellow and brown specks in jars all lined up on a windowsill. My stomach churned and I looked around the packed bus desperately, willing someone else to hear, to intervene as he described his latest victim, “a nice young man, not so different from yourself!” To be honest, even coming from a serial killer, the affirmation was nice, and I wasn't even really aware of myself at the time. The man described the sound it makes when teeth are ripped out of a dead body, how it's a different sound if the body is still alive. He saw the greenish hue on my face and confessed, “It makes me a little squeamish, too. I'm kind of done with it all.”

It was the longest bus ride of my life, and when we finally got to my stop, I wasn't sure he would let me go. As I slipped past him on the seat, the back of my legs brushing his knees, he handed me a business card and said, “I'll be seeing you, I'm sure.”

And he did, in the courtroom, smiling broadly the whole time I recounted his confession on the stand. The defense attorney asked why I didn't say anything at the time, to the bus driver or any passengers. She demanded to know why I waited nearly a week to turn him in. I shrugged, which got me a reprimand from the judge, then said, “I don't like cops.” I was thirteen, and the Elkhead Butcher, a local family dentist known to most as Dr. Davis, was sentenced to death.

I wish I could say his was the worst confession anyone has ever spontaneously dropped on my lap, but there's just something about me that makes people want to spill out their souls all over me. I'm not trying to imply that everyone back then was a dirty psychopath at heart. Most people were boring, to be honest, which is why I never really bothered to remember them. Relationship drama was the number one topic of discussion, followed by secret aspirations. It's just. Some people's aspirations were really out there.

Anyway, people in school knew of me, but they didn't really know about me. They never stopped talking long enough to find out.

Except, of course, Isaac.

Now

I've never been to a dentist. When I was six, I got four wiggly teeth all at once, and Mom pulled them out one each day using yellow embroidery thread. It was a loud, screaming, bloody experience during which I accused her of being possessed by a demon each time. She explained to me that losing your teeth as a child is probably the most universal experience on the planet. Everyone loses their baby teeth. Even animals do, the ones that have teeth at least. And losing your teeth as an adult is a universal terror; everyone, even extinct elephants, has nightmares about their teeth falling out, Mom says.

Grim has nightmares about going to school naked. Mom has nightmares about snow storms and withered crops.

I do not have nightmares. I am afraid nearly every waking hour, but my dreams are pleasant, so I almost prefer to be asleep. I dream that I am a springtail, chewing on detritus and bouncing around the sweet scented soil. I dream that I am a bluebird, singing for company that never appears.

Grim and I walk past trees blackened and burnt long ago by fire. We walk past pines dried out and red from beetle infestations. We walk through endless swaths of grassland where trees once sank their roots and stretched their limbs for hundreds of years before some men came through and cut them all down in a week. Stumps stick out like blackened, deadened teeth, and I think about a windowsill, jars packed full of dead, powdery leaves.

We make our way to a highway: a long, straight line of black that cuts through dusty tan fields, cracking and crumbling from disuse. Weedy green plants push through the asphalt each spring. With no cars left to squash them down they grow and grow, stinking of tar in the summer heat. In the winter, the road looks like a river, frozen over with smooth sheets of sparkling snow. In winter, we wear snowshoes to dance on top of the powder, to trek to the outhouse or the chicken coop. We pile firewood up next to the cabin so I can reach out the window to grab a log when the fire needs to be stoked in the middle of the night. Mice use the stacks for homes, and when I accidentally uncover a nest, baby pink beans wiggling blindly around on their plush bed of fur and dried grass, I gently replace the log and select another one. I dream that I am blind and amorphous and helpless, but warm in a nest of soft fur. I dream that I am never alone.

Before

Isaac was my neighbor, and in my earliest memories he would come over to my house almost every day. When we were very little he would show up caked in dirt and smelling of cat piss, and my mother would plop him into the bathtub, where the water turned a rusty brown around him. We would share apple slices and watch Bluey with an iPad propped up on the table between us as mother brushed his teeth and combed his long, tangled hair, tsking about his parents, those crackheads next door, and the strange, feral child transformed before my eyes into a friend. I called him Izzy.

What is Bluey? Drivel, of course. You are lucky to have grown up without cartoons. The television raised me, that's why I'm so crazy.

I don't really remember becoming friends, only that we always were; and, with the rare exception, a certainty that we always would be.

How wrong was I about that!

Well, the second thing you need to know about Izzy Graves is that he died young, at least a hell of a lot younger than me. Also, that his death precipitated the Last War which caused the collapse of society as we knew it. I watched it on livestream, along with your mother and millions of others whose hopes were pinned on his rocketship to the Moon and the promises of a better world - a colony founded on justice and equality. Pssh. Whatever that means.

Don't put all your eggs in one basket, as they say.

I knew all of Isaac’s secrets. I had to teach him to read, because his parents never bothered to enroll him in kindergarten. I knew he wet the bed until he was ten years old; I knew that his father would beat him for it. I watched through my window all the times his social worker would show up and take him away with rarely fulfilled promises of safety and three square meals a day. I watched as she inevitably dragged him back to his crackhead parents weeks or months later. I knew about his fear of ants and being alone and his first wet dream -

Good Lord, Bug, don't give me that face. I've washed your laundry, I know you know what I'm talking about. That you never came crying to me, afraid you're dying of kidney failure or whatever, puts you a step ahead of young Izzy.

I knew about his first crush, which was on a boy, and spent weeks trying to convince him that it was okay to be gay. Later, he fell in love with a girl, and I had to convince him it was okay to be bi. Isaac was always in love with someone, or else horny for someone, or friends with benefits with multiple someones at a time. The word for it then was polyamorous, and I'm sure people are still doing it today.

But I need you to understand: Isaac and I, we barely even kissed. We weren't like that.

I'm ace, you see? I don't do sex.

Now

I try to imagine a world with a great enough population density of people not related to me that I could date or have sex. When I feel like I need to, I wander into the woods to jerk off; our cabin offers too little privacy otherwise. I feel a small, peculiar shiver of shame as I spill out into the soil, and I wonder if the ants, the spiders, the birds are judging me.

There are magazines at the library, tucked away behind a counter, which were never meant to be there, because they're ancient and pornographic. I sneak one or two into my bag whenever we visit. I love the human body, how it folds and forms together in intimacy; the flush of ecstasy; a hard, thick cock. I take some comfort in Grin's assurances, though indirect, that there is nothing wrong with being gay, even if he doesn't yet know.

Everything else I know about sex and masturbation and nocturnal emissions comes from Mom’s reference books. Most of what I know about anything comes from books.

Like Grim, I will probably die a virgin, but unlike him it will not be by choice, but from a lack of options. I have met very few people my own age, and each of those interactions has been tantalizingly fleeting. There is one girl around my age, who regularly visits the library - more frequently than Grim or I, it seems - who has learned to predict our visits better than we can. There are the handful of kids ranging from infancy to lanky, awkward preteens who attend the annual Rendezvous, where we exchange our ever-dwindling supplies.

If I am honest, as much as I dream of it, eagerly anticipating the day weeks in advance, being in a crowd makes my chest tight and my heart jitter and skip. I am not an excellent conversationalist; I have spent far too much time just listening to Grim. He must be compensating for all those years of listening to others, because now he never shuts up.

Those are Mom’s words, not my own. She doesn't seem to like Grim very much; she does not really like me, either. Why she bothered to keep us alive all these years is a mystery we rarely discuss. Life, to my mother, is suffering; it is nasty, brutish, and, in at least some cases (glaring pointedly at Grim), far too long. When she gets a migraine, which is often, she suffers for days. In addition to the headache and nausea, her right leg and arm go limp, pins and needles stabbing relentlessly beneath her skin. She hides away in the relative darkness of the loft and cries quietly to herself.

Before

Isaac used to get migraines, too, but his were the consequence of a brain injury courtesy of a homophobic foster father during freshman year of high school. I wasn't talking to him at the time; it was the first of a few long periods of silence between us, this time caused by my own selfishness and embarrassment. What can I say? I blamed him for a situation I had put myself in.

There is only so much emotional dumping a person can take before it starts to affect them personally. I was a sad and angsty teenager, depression exacerbated by unrecognized gender dysphoria and an addiction to bad news. And the news was always bad: ever increasing climate disasters, dozens of wars threatening to break out across the globe, plagues and social unrest and a re-elected president hell bent on making it all worse. It wasn't the end of the world, not yet, but it sure felt like it at times. The summer air was choked with wildfire smoke and violent dust storms; the winters increasingly warm, with devastating flooding in between. What's normal now was a terrible aberration, then.

I lived a relatively privileged life, especially if you compared it to Isaac; though my mother raised me alone, she was a nurse, and a kind and compassionate one, too. Her only flaw was the long hours demanded of her by the hospital, so we didn't spend much time together, and when we did, she used the time to dump all her trauma on me. That is why she never noticed I was sinking ever deeper into a black pit of despair.

But Isaac did, and he turned to her, and she sent me to the mental hospital for a few weeks the summer after eighth grade. That's the loony bin your mother is referring to - such an insensitive term. I was involuntarily hospitalized again over a decade later due to my “extremist views.”

Nevermind that now.

What started it all was: in seventh grade my class was all paired up with a “Big Buddy” - a senior from the high school, who was meant to take us out to do community service and teach us about the world. My Big Buddy was named Melissa, and she took me out for ice cream and spent twenty minutes describing how she cuts herself “just to feel alive.”

Well, it didn't make me feel alive, but it made me feel something, I guess. Who knows, anymore? They called it a cry for help, a grasp at control, an intrinsic need to punish myself. Some good did come from that stay: I finally had the words to describe my feelings towards gender. I always hated my body - I've always been short, and stout, but before I cut them off I had huge tits as well, that bounced and ached and stood out like a train wreck. I tried to strap them down to stop them from growing; when that didn't work, I started cutting them. A mess! How could Isaac not notice the bloody scars all over. How could he not do whatever he thought he needed to make me stop. How could I possibly hold it against him!

Because I'm the king of grudges.

Being trans meant it was just a medical issue, and I was no stranger to medical issues. I was already completely deaf in one ear, and the other was constantly getting infected. I had juvenile arthritis and endometriosis. I lost my sense of smell after COVID in second grade. My glasses were untenably thick by that point, and I was only a couple months away from the first hole in my retina.

Better yet, there was treatment! I just had to wait a few more years and I could lop off whatever parts I didn't want and take hormones to compensate for the rest. Except! Except my right to access said healthcare was rapidly being chewed away by the current government administration, and the looming supply chain failures meant medicine in any form was going to be inaccessible.

Well. Here I am - flat chested, infertile, and I will never have a beard.

What a shame.

Now

Grim has two thick, ropy scars and dozens or hundreds of thinner white ones on his chest and arms, and a few more tiny ones on his stomach. As a kid I would imagine they were battle wounds from a war or a riot. When I asked him about them, he first told me the truth - “I did them to myself” - but Mom scowled at him for being inappropriate and he backtracked. “Lost a fight to a chicken, yeah?” I have always been a little afraid of the nearly feral chickens.

Injuries now are a terrifying ordeal, with antibiotics a forgotten memory and no nurses or hospitals around. I once broke my arm falling out of a tree, and Mom had to splint it with an old sheet cut into strips. I once cut my hand deep enough that she had to stitch it shut with sewing thread. It got infected, swelling up and oozing pus and sending hot waves of fever throughout my whole body. I spent an infinite number of days shivering under piles of blankets, groaning when Grim would wake me up to drop water or salty broth down my throat. I am terrified of injuries and illnesses. I am afraid of a lot of things, almost all the time.

Breathe. The air around you is roughly 77% Nitrogen, 20% Oxygen, 2% Water, and 1% Argon, Carbon Dioxide, Neon, Helium, Methane, Krypton, Hydrogen, Nitrous Oxide, Carbon Monoxide, Xenon, Ozone, Nitrogen Dioxide, Iodine, and Ammonia. The amount of carbon dioxide has nearly doubled since before the industrial revolution, and temperatures have increased accordingly. Grim says this was all very predictable. Long before he was even born, they knew greenhouse gas emissions would kill us all.

“They just didn't care,” he says. They just kept producing more.

He rests beside me, coughing and wheezing and groaning. He is the one who taught me to meditate, to breathe deliberately and count when I am frightened. He says: when the object of my fear is internal, the only way I can control it is by controlling myself. So I control my breathing; I control my awareness of my surroundings. Eyes closed, I feel the rough dirt under my palms and rocks digging into my butt; the hot rays of sun on my dark hair; my lips dry and parched. A light wind relentlessly whips dust into the dry air. I can smell sagebrush, which we use for heat in the winter but which burns wild and out of control in late summer heat waves. We mix the soot with water and vinegar to make ink and dye. We make the vinegar by soaking fruit peels. We grow the fruit in trees outside the cabin, which may or may not survive each terrible drought, each burying blizzard.

Another thing to fear: fires, droughts, heat waves, wicked winds. We lost a greenhouse one year, and my mom cried for days until Grim and I were able to rebuild it - but nothing could be done for her fragile young plants, beaten and bruised and frozen overnight. The growing season is too short to seed straight in the ground; the greenhouse lets us start them long before the final frost and plant seedlings strong enough to withstand the violent winds.

Inhale. Deep inside your lungs, your blood exchanges carbon dioxide for fresh oxygen, which clings to your hemoglobin like rust on a skillet. You exhale carbon dioxide, a waste product for you but a necessary component of photosynthesis in plants. When everything works together, the world breathes in harmony, but when a single thing is thrown out of sync, it can all explode.

Before

Isaac died because of hubris. I even told him he should name his rocket Icarus, and he did! What a fucking idiot.

Excuse my language. Idiot is offensive.

My biggest regret in life was letting Isaac fly up there in his hubris machine. How we argued about it, and for years! I should have kidnapped him and tied him up in this cabin for the rest of his life. What if Icarus had never exploded? Would we have the promised moon colonies and equality for all? Pssh. The War was already brewing and everyone just needed an excuse to fire the first shot. The explosion seen ‘round the world.

I cried more afterwards than your mother did as a baby. I failed her in so many ways, but I was never meant to raise her. Isaac promised to come back for her, for me, to take us both back to the moon.

Ha!

It was never going to happen. I knew that. Everyone knew that. What happens to a moon colony when the world below breaks out in nuclear war? Life support failure, that's what. Isaac was lucky that he died quick.

But he bought us this cabin, and set us up to survive whatever came next. Alone.

My second biggest regret is that I never came out to him, not really. By the time they let me out of the hospital he was in foster care again, and I didn't try to find out where he ended up. My mother took me out for a haircut, to a thrift shop for clothes because nurses didn't make that much even back then. She dealt with the school and my new name and if there was any backlash, she shielded me from it.

How spoiled I was! Isaac was hiding in the closet for his life. If he was surprised to see the new me after classes started, to hear my teachers call me “Liam,” I would never know. I refused to even look at him.

More regrets: if I had known he was screwing around with his openly homophobic foster-father’s son, I would have smacked him. Pssh. What a fucking idiot!

Isaac told me all about it, after my mother dragged me to the hospital to mend bridges, and he looked so pathetic with his eyes black and a front tooth chipped that I let him. Caught on his knees, dick in his mouth. He jumped in front and the other guy got away, affording him the chance to call 911, saving his life but not before a fractured skull, dislocated jaw, and several broken ribs.

“I was out of it for most of it,” Isaac muttered, lips barely moving. “But I woke up and he was pissing on me.”

What do you even say to that? I crawled onto the hospital bed, crying and hugging him until my mother had to pry me away when visiting hours ended.

“He'll be okay,” she assured me, and he was - but he was also different. He would never be the same again. There were the migraines, and the fear, and a shame he could never shake no matter what he insisted. A temper and irritability that never escalated too far but transformed into an insatiable hunger for justice and a desire to get away.

Far, far away.

Now

The library is the farthest I have ever been from the cabin. We have no reason to go further, through forests and over mountains to the city beyond that is now a nuclear wasteland.

Probably.

“Who knows how many died!” Grim says, “Who knows how many survived?”

Rolling hills give way to a scant town, decaying streets and caved in roofs. We pass by the remnants of an enormous store, mostly looted. We pass by old storage facilities, left surprisingly untouched. Grim and I open one each year, never knowing what strange and useless items people left behind. Giant clocks, clothing, blankets, furniture, videos that Grim remembers fondly but I will never get to watch. Apparently infinite supplies of guns and ammo, more than we could ever use. I flip through crackling photo albums, pretending they are family. Grim looks for glasses, “as if I'll ever find ones thick enough for my rotten eyes.”

Rarely, a miracle: we find bottles of medication, like pills for Mom's headaches. Less usefully, we once found an entire methamphetamine lab, minus the useful ingredients. We very carefully carried the fragile distiller glassware back to the cabin, and now Grim can make what he drinks and calls rotgut, but is equally useful for cleaning wounds.

Sometimes, other strangers dig through the remains, take what they need. Our paths rarely cross.

Most of the people who could leave this town did long before I was born, before the supply chain crashed and the cities exploded. Those who were left behind either survived, or they didn't. There are varying levels of sociability among us survivors, but we are on the extreme low end of the spectrum. We are friendly with the families we are likely to run into around the cabin, and we attend a Rendezvous every year during harvest.

I am starting to see how holidays got started.

Before

For six blissful months following his skull fracture, Isaac lived with a family that not only didn't treat him like dirt, but actually treated him well. They had family dinners each night, gave him gifts for Christmas, and even made him a cake for his birthday. For a while he was tired and forgetful, and his foster parents were understanding, quietly shushing the younger kids in the house, keeping them away from his room. They gave him his own room where he could hide away in the darkness. I would sit next to him on his bed, just barely not touching, and scroll through my phone as he pretended to sleep. I wasn't supposed to be reading the news - my therapy involved ignoring the things I couldn't personally change - but I was addicted.

Except for the couple months immediately following his concussion, Isaac was an excellent student, which made us an odd pair because I was absolute trash. It's hardly my fault - if I tried to get help, I would end up hearing my teachers’ life stories. I knew that Mrs. Roswell, history, was always low-key drunk after spiking her coffee. I knew that Mr. Richardson, chemistry, couldn't get it up for his wife unless she was cheating in front of him. I knew that Ms. Osgood, english, never wanted to teach, and her salary never justified the free college. She was a sexy maid on the side and cleaned a shocking number of students’ houses as their fathers (or, rarely, mothers) oggled her with poorly concealed erections tenting their pants. Jesus. The security guards were dealing drugs, the coaches were all on steroids, and white supremacists were drawing swastikas in the bathrooms. Most of the kids were okay but some sneered slurs around Isaac, though at least two would try to hook up with him later. Although I wasn't harassed, it was more due to my curse than anything. Can't be transphobic if you're too busy dumping all your problems on me. Some people even forgot I was ever anyone else.

The teachers and administration didn't forget, though. I wasn't allowed to use the boy’s bathroom, because I lacked the proper equipment. I wasn't allowed to use the girl's bathroom, because my appearance might make them uncomfortable. Where the fuck could I go? A single occupancy bathroom near the auditorium, away from all my classes. I abused the crap out of the excuse to be late to class. What was the point of school?! People with master’s degrees were begging for unpaid internships. Well-paid jobs were as tenuous and fleeting as the stock market. A new field would open - in science, or technology, or some meshing of the two - bereft of qualified employees. A flood of academic programs and boot camps would demand money from the desperate with promises of future employment; they would find themselves overworked and underpaid within a few years of graduation. Pssh.

Sometimes, I skipped class just to go to the library. I would pick a book at random and spend the rest of the day with it. Isaac would find me after the bell rang, curled up out of sight from the librarian in a chair that stank of a thousand students' asses, disapproval in those gorgeous eyes.

“You're going to fail,” he’d warn me.

“The fuck do I care?” I’d retort. I went home and grabbed my mother's phone off the coffee table - her passed out on the couch next to it, exhausted from an overnight shift - and I used my old voice to excuse my own absences for illness.

Now

If I had a school, I would not squander it. I would go to every class and complete every homework assignment, grateful for my education.

That's what I think, anyway.

“You would hate it,” Grim insists, “you would have to sit still for longer than five seconds.” He must have been patient to teach me how to read and write and basic math, as well as how to cook; all things that require stillness or caution. Mom has taught me gardens and chickens and weather patterns and sewing and how to build fires for warmth or for cooking; all things she had to learn to survive. She attended only a handful of years of school before it shut down entirely, “and it gave me nothing useful.”

The library is next to her old school, a blocky rectangular building with broken windows and water damaged floors. It has been mostly looted, but not before Grim was able to rescue a lifetime’s worth of art supplies and a microscope for me. I like to replicate the natural world: flowers and leaves, insects, feathers, cloud patterns, the colors of the setting sun. Grim watched the environment rapidly decay around him - the Anthropocene extinction that left us with just a sad fraction of the biodiversity we had a century ago - and I feel an obligation to record what is left before it disappears entirely. Before I disappear entirely.

The school is largely inhabited by feral dogs, the hybrid offspring of abandoned strays and pestilent coyotes. With lean, narrow frames, long legs and long teeth, and thick fur ranging from white to muddy brown or grey, the dogs are nothing like the pets described in books.

Except: when they are puppies. Then they squeak and whimper and cry, their tiny fragile teeth needle sharp against my skin.

“She probably has rabies,” Grim’s voice comes from somewhere behind me. “I bet that's what killed her mom.” The pup’s mother is dead down the road, blood leaking out her open mouth.

“Ouch,” I say, jerking back. Tiny scarlet drops ooze out two neat holes on the back of my hand.

“Now you have rabies too,” he says mildly. “We’ll have to shoot you. Then Kate will shoot me, too.” He is referring to Mom.

I say nothing, but keep petting the pup. She is hungry, and Grim’s unenthusiastic protestations hum around me as I feed her some tack, a few pieces of rabbit jerky. They're wild, she will grow, she could be sick, another mouth to feed, Mom will kill us both.

“They're feral,” he repeats, but he does not mean it.

“They don't know any better,” I reply, scratching behind the puppy’s fuzzy ears. She rolls onto her back, displaying a round speckled belly. “She can learn to fit in.” Her fur is dark grey and gritty, her paws pink and soft and socked in white. The tip of her tail is also white, a beacon that blurs when she wags it happily. She stares up at me with bright yellow eyes as I stand. She rolls to her feet and follows us to the library.

Before

For six months, Isaac had a taste of what it felt like to feel wanted in a big family; a foreign feeling even with my relatively cushy life. He was gaining in popularity at school, by which I mean he was getting around, and he earned a minor role in the winter musical, so didn't have a lot of time for me.

Maybe I deserved it. I had stonewalled him for being concerned about my mental health, after all, but it hurt. Especially because I had a nasty habit of running into him with his hands up someone's shirt, his tongue down their throat. This was before we could even admit we had feelings for each other, let alone work out how to love each other without that all important sexual compatibility. Asexuality wasn't yet on my radar. Did I get jealous? If that's a pit in your stomach and a white hot sadness, I did. It's not like I was great company - Isaac called me Grim, for my obsession with war and genocide and climate disasters and the collapse of civilization as we know it.

Ha! and look who was right all along. Vindication tastes like shit.

Then, one day near the end of the school year, Isaac skipped school, which was unheard of. I found him at the skatepark, which he learned early on was a good place to kill a lot of time when he didn't have a safe home to go to. The park was otherwise empty on the weekday morning, and as I watched him skate I could tell he was angry; there was a harsh, careless manner to his jumps and landings. He was not wearing a helmet, which was an unusual and especially dangerous move so soon after a severe concussion. One particularly rough landing on the edge of the bowl sent his board flying, and Isaac slid down the smooth concrete sides out of sight. He was on his back, staring at the yellow-blue sky as I approached the edge, my shadow crossing over him.

“I'm fine,” he said, “I just want to lay here a bit.” He was crying. I slid down on my shoes and sat next to him, placed my hand on his arm. I never really liked physical contact; I'm not exactly repulsed, but it wasn't something that came naturally to me. I had to remind myself that people found touches comforting. I noticed his elbow, skinned and bleeding onto the concrete, and tried not to think about it.

“They're making me go back,” Isaac said finally, still looking at the sky. “To my parents, I mean.” It had been nearly a year since he lived at that house after a drug conviction landed both in rehab.

“What the fuck,” I said, “Why?”

“Supposedly, they're clean now,” he muttered.

I personally knew this wasn't true, because I had run into his mother at the mailbox a few days earlier, where she had spoken to me at length about her new dealer’s dick tattoo, but I didn't want to confirm that. “Hey, at least we'll be able to walk to school together again.”

He gave me a look. “It's almost summer.”

“Next year, then.”

“You think I'll still be there in August?” He sat up and scrubbed his hand over his face, wet with tears, and sighed. “I really liked this family.”

“Me too,” I agreed weakly. They were even nice to me, and not getting state stipends for it. I hesitated, then asked, “Do you want a hug?”

Isaac didn't answer, just leaned in and folded me into his arms.

Now

Annabelle, a girl a couple years younger than me with fire-red hair and sky-blue eyes, is at the library as she often is when Grim and I arrive. I do not know if she times her visits to match ours or just goes to the library enough that our paths are more likely than not to cross; I have never asked. I do know that she is not supposed to ever be here.

The pup, whom I have elected to just name Dog, discovers her. She stumbles chaotically back and forth between rows of stacked bookshelves, pressing her wet black nose to the dirty, worn carpet. She disappears into a side room, the children’s library, and I hear a scream and a yelp.

My heart is thrumming in my ears, muffling the space around me as I race into the room. Annabelle is standing on a table, Dog cowering beneath it. They both look relieved to see me, Dog scrambling out from under the table to sit on my feet.

“Careful, William!” Annabelle screeches, and the name gives me pause; I am never accustomed to hearing my name, since Grim only ever calls me Bug and Mom rarely calls me at all.

“She's alright,” I say, bending over to pet Dog. The puppy is trembling, pink tongue panting.

“It's a wild animal,” Annabelle says from above; Grim's words, but with a sneer that makes my stomach hurt.

“So’m I, kinda,” I mutter. Compared to Annabelle, I'm feral. She lives in something like a commune; she has a handful of younger siblings and lives alongside several other growing families to the east of town. They even have a school room, but they only ever read the Bible. I have only seen her family in parts: identical red-headed toddlers racing around the grounds of the Rendezvous, a mother with an infant hoisted to her hip, an awkward and gangly preteen glancing around with shifty eyes before nabbing a honey cake off someone’s stand and darting away. Besides Annabelle, we rarely interact with the commune. When I stand up straight I look at her again, and I notice for the first time a slight bulge to her belly, a smooth curve. I stare at it for too long, confusion working a fog into my brain.

“I'm pregnant,” she confirms, “isn't it a miracle?”

“I'm sorry?” My thoughts feel like mud, thick and untenable. I'm pretty sure Annabelle is actually younger than me.

“Are you going to help me down?” she asks. I reach up and she takes my hand delicately, stepping heavily off the table. She looks around distastefully, but Dog is keeping her distance. Annabelle places her hands on her round stomach, smiling broadly at me.

“Um,” I stutter. “How did that happen?”

“Will,” she says patiently, “Don't tell me you don't know how bab -”

“I mean, like,” I stammer some more. I don't talk much, and it usually takes a bit to get back into practice whenever I meet her. “How old even are you?”

Annabelle frowns, offended. “I'm old enough,” she retorts. “I've been menstruating for years.” Then she looks confused - why did she share that information? “Father says we are mandated by the Lord to produce as many human babies as possible. He is pleased that I am getting started so young. He wants me to have a dozen more!”

My stomach clenches tighter. “Congratulations, I guess.”

Normally, when I run into Annabelle, we hang out together for a couple hours before she has to run back home. She tells me about her life in the commune: the regimented scheduling, chores and mandated group worship, her chaotic siblings who seem determined to kill themselves in ever more creative ways, the arguments spilling out from the chamber of elders. But today, she leaves nearly as soon as we arrive, and I find it difficult to believe it was only Dog making her uncomfortable. Something small and inextricable has changed between us; or she has changed, and I am stagnating.

When I have replaced my old books and found new ones to read, I find Grim resting in the large print section. He leans against a shelf, his eyes closed, a hand on his chest. Dog waddles up to him, climbing into his lap and licking his face all over when he doesn't acknowledge her; but he is grinning, not dead at all.

“Dogs,” he says finally, “I'd forgotten what they're like.” I reach out to help him stand. I am several inches taller than him, but then again, so are most people. His usual stack of books is conspicuously absent.

“Can't see the words anymore,” he shrugs, trudging out towards the door. “Where'd your friend go?” He must have heard her shriek, but missed her exit.

“She had to go home,” I say dully. I add, “She's pregnant.”

Grim gives me a sharp look. “Seriously? She's, like, twelve.”

“Fifteen, I think.”

“That's horrific,” he says. “It's not yours?” The question feels like an accusation, but it slaps me out of my fog of confusion and, weirdly, self-pity.

I snort. “I'm pretty sure I'm gay,” I confess, “not that I know any real guys to test that theory on.” It feels good to admit it out loud - Grim's stories are making me feel bold. Mom doesn't like it when he talks to me like this. She says he is corrupting my innocence.

She does not know about the pornography.

He grins and slaps a hand on my back. “There's always next Rendezvous,” he suggests optimistically.

Before

I never really came out as trans to Isaac, but he was the one who figured out I was ace. He sent it to me in a text: “I think ur ace,” as in U-dash-R. He didn't mean awesome, he had to clarify, but asexual. Like an amoeba, but not.

“I'll look into that,” I replied.

An entire sexual identity, based on not having sex! There were dozens of us!

My sexual disinterest stood out in sharp contrast to his promiscuity. Before he learned the term, he would try to set me up on dates, hinting at girls or boys he thought were cute but weren't into him or his lifestyle, trying to figure out what I was into. I tried a couple times, but if I didn't awkwardly ruin the date by discussing politics, the other person did by spilling their soul out over coffee.

Isaac was getting increasingly pushy about it, and I was getting increasingly frustrated about it. We argued a lot, and I insulted him too much. No, mine were hardly the worst words he'd heard about himself; if my generation sounds terribly sexually enlightened, it’s only because I am. We were still calling each other sluts and whores then, faggots and dykes. Your generation probably would too, if they could call each other anything. Pssh.

“Stop trying to make me be like you,” I said, “I'm not like you. I don't need to fuck whoever's willing just to fill a hole -” and I'm lucky Isaac stopped me there to make an innuendo, because the rest of what I was going to say was it's because his parents didn't love him. What a jerk I could be! They weren't my words; I’d heard them from a cashier at the local grocery store about her sister.

“I don't want you to be like me,” he said, “I just don't like seeing you alone.”

“I'm not alone. I've got you.” I don't mean to sound pathetic - it's just hard to stay friends with people when you know all the worst things about them from the start. Isaac wasn't any different, except his worst things weren't too bad. I even kind of liked him more for some of them. I had other friends, casually, just not many, and they were all outcasts.

He gave me such a sad look, like I was a mangy puppy. “Do you want to go out with me?” He wasn't asking, not really.

“Nope.” In truth, we went out a lot; whenever he wasn't off hooking up with someone else. We went to movies on Friday evenings, coffee or ice cream after school when he didn't have theater or debate. I didn't know what it meant, but I didn't need anything more from him.

I didn't know the guilt he felt, torn between me and everyone else. He couldn't confess it to me - he didn't know it himself.

Another time, Isaac asked me if I masturbate. “What the fuck?” I answered, “No.” We were sitting on my bed again. We spent an awful lot of time in bed together for two platonic friends.

Isaac laughed at me! “Everyone does, you don't have to be embarrassed.”

“Well, I don't.”

“You've never had an orgasm before?”

“I never said that,” I spat. “Why are you asking me this?”

He gave me a curious look. “I don't know,” he said. There was a long silence, then he suggested, “Maybe you're just doing it wrong.” I hit him with my pillow. “Come on,” he added, “how can you know you don't like something if you never try it?”

“I don't have to taste shit to know I don't want to,” was my eloquent response.

Isaac gave me another look, a cross between bemused and offended, and said, “I mean -”

“Gross,” I interrupted. “I don't want to hear it.” Because I already had - the first time he tried anal, and several times since then - and I really didn't want to go hear it again.

Well. Neither do you. The real difference between Isaac and everyone else is: he could still look me in the eye after telling me his darkest secrets. He wasn't so ashamed that he felt the need to run away and hide. Which put him in the same space as the Elkhead Butcher, but don't read too much into that.

I eventually did let Isaac kiss me, but only once, after we both realized we felt something more for each other than just friends. It wasn't terrible even, at least not until he introduced a tongue, which felt like a slug wiggling around in my mouth. He quickly realized, “You're not into this, like, at all, are you?”

“I'm really not,” I said, “I'm sorry.” He pulled away and stared at me, hazel eyes all wide and sad, and I looked away towards the wall, my hands, my bedspread which was covered in cartoon fish like I was still a child.

He said, “But I love you.” He sounded sincere, like he wanted to say it rather than feeling a compulsion to.

It surprised the hell out of me. I said, “I don't even know what love is.”

His sadness turned to pity. “Sure you do,” he said. “It's that feeling you get every time I walk into a room and you're, like, so glad to see me it's almost a relief.”

I didn't answer, because he was right and I didn't want to admit it. Because I did love Isaac, more than anything in the whole world. I wanted to spend every waking hour with him. I wanted to buy a house and plant a garden and grow old together - but I didn't want to fuck him. So what was even the point?

Now

It is late afternoon when we leave the library, and because Grim is old and slow we will stay in town overnight and walk back to the cabin in the morning. My favorite place to squat is an old motel, with dozens of rooms on each of three floors and some even still have beds and sheets. The lobby holds an empty pool, chipped cement covered in spray paint graffiti and a thick layer of dirt and leaves, dragged in by wind and animals.

I sit outside under an orange and pink sunset, a .22 airgun over my lap, waiting for a shot at one of the chickens that runs wild through town. They are the relatives of the chickens we keep at the cabin for eggs and meat, and if our supply runs low Grim and I set traps around here for some new ones. Dog sticks her nose into a hole then jumps back, whimpering and rubbing her nose with her paws. She is hungry but too small, I think, to hunt for herself. Despite Grim’s declaration that the mother died from rabies, it was clear that she had been killed by something much larger and scarier than a hybrid. I shudder to think what that could be. Wolves were extirpated from most of the country, over a century before Grim was even born, by settlers who wanted the land for their cattle. We assume that reintroduction efforts failed, along with the bears and mountain lions and most other animals, in a catastrophic ecological collapse driven by climate change, habitat loss, and nuclear radiation.

But really, who’s keeping track anymore? Me, but I'm just one guy in a cabin somewhere. Rabbits, birds, mice, bugs. I try to identify the tiny sweat bees that visit the wildflowers outside, but I cannot bring myself to kill them, so I do not have the details described by Mom’s field guides as necessary to differentiate between species. Are they even relevant anymore? It has been decades since they were printed, and radiation damages DNA. Are they even the same species anymore?

I kill a chicken in one shot and process it as Grim builds a fire underneath the carport in front of the motel. Defeathered, feet off, cut open; I reach my hand into the still warm internal cavity and pull out the guts, dropping the giblets on the ground for Dog. She inhales them greedily and later demands some of my share, cooked with spices and carrots grown in Mom’s garden.

“I was a vegetarian, once,” Grim mutters as he gnaws on a drumstick, watching Dog chew on a scaly yellow chicken foot. “But I eat better now than I ever did before.” He has always done the cooking - Mom doesn't have the patience for it.

Before

It wasn't fair of me to love Isaac, to accept his love with no intention of giving myself wholly to him in the way society expected. Sex was everywhere. We were inundated: television and movies and music and books. Advertisements shoved it in your face to sell everything from perfume to cereal. Algorithms intelligently seeded your feed with softcore porn, just to keep you scrolling. Kids, including Issac, were making out in the hallways at school. Kids, including him, hooking up behind the football bleachers.

Their solution? They ended sex education, banned books that talked about consent, and made it harder for kids to purchase condoms and birth control.

Brilliant! Teen pregnancy rates skyrocketed.

Given his proclivities, it was inevitable that Isaac would knock someone up. I was so mad at him! Both times, but at least when your mother was conceived he was an adult. Pssh. Not for long. Soon he was a spray of ash in the atmosphere.

The first time was the summer before our senior year of high school. Isaac had the audacity to ask me to ride with them several hours out of state so she could get an abortion. I couldn't even drive! By the time I was old enough for my license, I couldn't pass the eye exam.

“You want me to sit in a car for, like, twenty straight hours,” I started.

“Twelve, and we'll probably have to get a hotel room,” he interrupted. “Maybe for a couple nights.”

“A hotel room! With you and your girlfriend -”

He interrupted again, this time his voice terse. “Not my girlfriend.”

“Your pregnant not-girlfriend -”

“Please, Liam,” he begged, and even still my name on his lips made my stomach flutter. “I need you to come with. Things are,” he hesitated, “awkward between us.”

Pssh. “That's what happens when you knock someone up.”

“I can't do this alone,” he pleaded. So I went along with them. What a fucking idiot!

Now

I sleep fitfully in the overplush motel bed. Annabelle’s taut pregnant belly looms over me, merging with the gory sight of the dead hybrid dog, and I wake up with the echoes of agonized screams filling my head. I wake up gasping and coated in a thin film of sweat; I am not accustomed to nightmares.

I am also hard when I wake up, and feeling bad about it and the circumstances only makes it worse. The room is pitch dark around me, no stars even bleeding through the heavily curtained window, and I am completely alone - Grim is sleeping on a different floor entirely. Not the best choice for security, but I won't complain about the privacy. I reach down and touch myself, slowly at first as I consider the magazines hidden in my rucksack. Not worth the match or candle, I decide, and I stroke faster, picturing an anonymous, toned butt, hard pecs and abs. Someone else’s hand, his lips, his tongue on my dick. I imagine it is someone else’s dick, someone else's cum spilling out onto my bare stomach.

A shiver of shame as I wipe it off with a motel washcloth - in an unknown state of cleanliness - and it sticks to the sparse hairs scattered around. I am not actually alone, I remember too late, and I waste the match to check on Dog, who is still sleeping near the cracked open door, paws twitching. I toss the washcloth into the dry sink for no one to clean up, ever, and crawl back into bed for another strange, fitful sleep.

Mom hates me because she had to give birth to me, alone except for Grim, on the floor of the cabin. She described the pain to me in brutal detail the last time we tried to celebrate my birthday, which was when I turned nine.

Perhaps there is something to Grim’s curse.

In the morning, we share the remainder of the chicken and a corn flatbread packed from home. Grim asks if anything woke me up during the night and I freeze.

“I had a weird dream,” I say, “It woke me up.”

He shakes his head. “A light! Did you see the light outside?”

What light? Grim can't even see the stars. “My window was blocked.”

“Unnaturally bright, traveling through the darkness at an unnatural speed?” I shake my head again, and despite our solitude he lowers his voice conspiratorially. “It was a motorcycle,” he whispers, "I'd swear by it.”

Before

Our road trip to get Maya Stephanopoulos an abortion was an excruciatingly long three day affair, and I am comfortable despite the circumstances with saying that she was an absolute bitch the entire time, because she remained an absolute bitch for the rest of high school, too. I tried to be sympathetic, because who wants a third wheel tagging along to an abortion? Who wants to be a third wheel tagging along to an abortion?

With Isaac right there, it seemed, she wouldn't confess whatever was eating her up inside; she waited until we were relatively alone, which was apparently the line inside the gas station to buy snacks.

“I thought this would bring us closer together,” Maya whispered mournfully.

That felt weird. “The, uh, road trip?” I asked, confused.

“The baby!” she exclaimed, and I cringed at the outburst.

“Wait,” I asked, “You don't want to do this?”

“Of course I do,” she hissed. “Isaac made it pretty clear how he felt about me.” I was starting to feel pretty ill about things - had he coerced her into this? Why was I here, and how was he paying for all this, anyway? An abortion wasn't cheap, plus food and gas and two nights at a hotel. I paid for our snacks with cash he had handed me from a large stack in his wallet. As we left the gas station, Maya continued, “He won't get back with me, so what's the point?”

Driving through the Texas desert was already mind-numbing. Driving it in awkward silence punctuated by Maya’s complaints, her crappy music playing, stopping every forty-five minutes so she could pee, committing what the state considered a felony akin to murder?

Well. There are no words to describe the tension.

Also: Isaac was saying nothing at all, staring resolutely at the road, white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel the whole time, even after we managed to make it across the border into New Mexico without running into one of the rumored traffic stops.

It at least helped Maya to relax; she started feeling comfortable to start insulting me. “Everyone thinks you're so weird. You're too short to be a guy, and you have tits. You're like a weird little gnome. You know there's this rumor about you and that guy, the Elk Butcher or whatever? Did you guys ever sleep together? Are you a serial killer too?”

I spent much of the day trying to identify the heaps of roadkill on the side of the highway. Tons of armadillos, coyotes, raccoons, cats. Once, though, I swear I saw a monkey. But what do I know? I was already going blind by then.

Now

As we pass by Dog’s dead mother on the way home, Grim makes us stop so he can look at it closer; as close a look as someone with holes in his retina can get, anyway. I stay back with the puppy crying in my arms. We both want to leave. The stench of decay is overwhelming even from a distance, and I think there might be something to be said for losing one’s sense of smell. He huffs and trudges away. “I'm not a forensicist,” he grumbles.

I have never ridden in a vehicle. The fastest I have ever moved was on a metal sled down a snowy hill when I was ten. A bump in the snow sent me sprawling, and I split my chin open on some ice - this one mild enough that Mom only had to glue it shut with a sharply scented clear gel. I scratch the scar on my chin, surrounded by a scruffy patch of adolescent facial hair. I am not proficient at shaving it; I had to figure it out myself with soap and a safety razor.

I have never even seen a running vehicle, on the roads or otherwise. Gasoline is a distant memory, and the lithium batteries they packed into electric vehicles in Grim's day have an unfortunate tendency to explode. Even Annabelle's commune lacks an automobile, though they don't need it with a herd of horses. They do have solar panels for electricity to power their wells, lights, an old DVD player for the community’s Friday night movies. She describes these things as though they are the height of luxury, but she also describes the fear she feels at all times that they might lose them. When she was little, her community lost its last stove and nearly lost its collective mind before they figured out how to cook over a fire. When their well pumps fail, their only alternative will be a tiny bucket and a lot of rope.

Her parents believed that they could survive anything if they just hoarded enough resources in advance. Now they have a dozen children and counting, all rapidly eating through all the food that was meant to last decades.

And Annabelle is pregnant, too. My stomach twists uncomfortably at the thought once again.

I wonder about her attachment to electricity, her love of its minor conveniences of light and entertainment that Grim would almost certainly call drivel. In the cabin we have only ever had a wood stove for cooking and heat. The space is small enough, the fire big enough to keep it toasty warm even when it is cold enough outside to freeze your spit. In the summer it gets too hot to cook, except at night, and we spend the days lazily chewing on berries and wild roots that grow near the creek. Mom has dozens of reference books on edible plants, mushrooms, even insects, but she doesn't need them anymore. She knows more than they do, now.

For most of our food we have the greenhouse and gardens that we can irrigate during droughts with a mechanical well pump that pulls up water from over 300 feet underground. The same pump provides water for cooking and drinking and washing; it is always frigid cold. We have a flock of chickens that roam mostly wild, digging up our plants and pecking at grasshoppers that do even more damage. Sometimes they abandon the coop and I have to track down their eggs, tucked away beneath a thorny bush or in the crevice of some exposed roots. We have a cellar to store food for winter: fruits both canned and dried, vegetables, corn, sorghum, dried or smoked meats. Mostly chicken and fish; sometimes rabbit. I've never seen a living deer before.

But the real treasure of the cabin, I suppose, is the apiary located some distance behind it; the jars of thick, sweet honey it produces each year are worth just about anything anyone at the Rendezvous has to offer. Mom’s honey bees are her pride and joy; the most important thing she has ever done. She spends all her free time in the apiary with them, claiming no need for gloves or smoke, breathing and moving in tune with the swarms.

“They're invasive, you know,” Grim scowls. Mom says, so are we. She says her honey bees might very well be the last ones on Earth.

I'm deathly allergic to bee stings, so if Mom’s the only thing keeping them alive, the line will die with her.

Before

By the time your mother got pregnant, abortion wasn't an option. Planned Parenthoods had been closed for decades, the pills had long expired. I do not say this to hurt you; but parenthood was no more a part of Kate's plan than it was my own, back in the day.

It was never a part of Maya's plan, either, at least not in high school; it was just something to hold over Isaac's head for a while.

What a cliche! I didn't want to believe that of her, but I really didn't want to believe the other possibility: my sneaking suspicions about Isaac's motives. It felt like he was hiding something, which was extremely unusual, but I didn't get a chance to confront him until we got to the hotel in Albuquerque. He got two rooms, and Maya took the one with the king bed, slamming and locking the door between them. Good riddance!

I immediately turned on Isaac, pushing him half-heartedly, but he stumbled heavily onto one of the beds. “What the fuck, man?” I demanded. “What is going on?”

He sighed. He was sighing a lot that day, instead of using words. “We’re in Albuquerque,” he started, and I threw a pillow at him. He was shrinking on the bed, and I felt like I was towering over him. The change in perspective was disorienting.

“Why am I here, Izzy?”

He didn't react to the old nickname, from when we were kids. “I'm sorry,” he said flatly.

“You could've sat silently in a car for fifteen hours just fine without me.” The drive had been much longer than advertised, largely because Maya insisted on stopping practically every exit.

“I told you, I'm not comfortable with her.”

My eyes narrowed. “Why?”

He shook his head and didn't answer. This was unheard of, for me; I was accustomed to people telling me far more than I ever wanted to know. I've never known someone else to keep a secret.

Especially not Isaac.

“Are you making her do this?” I accused.

He snorted, the first thing resembling emotion he'd shown all day. “Maya doesn't want to be a teen mom any more than you do,” he said, and I let the misgendering slide.

“What, did she threaten you?” It didn't occur to me that she could actually hurt him. Pssh. What a jerk I could be! He shook his head again and got up to take a shower, and only as he brushed past me did I realize he was crying. I grabbed his arm. “What aren't you telling me, Isaac?”

He leaned his forehead against the wall instead of looking at me. “I know you want to blame me for all this,” he said, “but it wasn't my fault. I didn't want to do it in the first place.”

I squeezed his arm involuntarily as I tried to process that. “She raped you?” I asked, and he flinched.

“It wasn't like that,” he said. But it was: they didn't have a condom, so Isaac didn't want to have sex, and despite his protestations they did anyway. Did Maya hold him down, did he try to push her off? I'll never know. It's not my place to interrogate someone on their trauma. There are limits, apparently, to my confessional superpower.

We stayed up too late that night, watching late night HBO and eating takeout on separate beds like two good bros do. Around midnight, there was commotion outside, the locked door handle jiggling, a thump and a curse. Maya was trying to get into our room. I was surprised to hear her; we hadn't noticed her leave the room next door.

“Oh, my, god,” she said when I opened it, “Finally. I forgot which room was mine!” She was yelling loud enough to wake the entire floor. Isaac was asleep, or pretending to be asleep, in the room behind me.

“Next door,” I said wearily. Then, “Other one,” when she went the wrong way.

“But I already tried that one,” she whined, pouting. She was trashed, I mean drunk off her gourd. She stumbled over to the door and inserted a card, scoffing when the light flashed red. “See!”

“Um,” I suggested, “Maybe it's not working because that's your fake ID?”

Now

“You don't understand half the things I'm saying, do you, Bug?” Grim asks, amused.

I shrug - I read a lot, and I'm surrounded by the remnants of modern life, even if it is no longer functional. The motel we stayed at had card keys, not that any of them work anymore. The closest thing I've had to junk food is French fries, from potatoes we grow ourselves, but I get the idea. I know what an ID is, short for identification, so a fake one is self-explanatory. But -

“What's HBO?” I ask.

He grins. “Softcore porn,” he giggles, “I watched it for the plot.”

I blush. There are articles in my magazines, which is how I know I'm gay and what it means to be raped, but they're not my primary focus.

Before

I made sure Maya got back into her room then crept back to my bed. Isaac was only pretending to be asleep, because as soon as I got back he whispered, “Liam?”

“Yeah?”

He didn't know how to ask for what he wanted, not since we kissed and he told me he loved me and we decided we would both do well to push those feelings aside and get over it, whatever it was. Even after telling me everything, ever: every fleeting desire that has ever crossed his head, every intrusive thought and secret malevolence. Some things are just buried too deep. Instead, he asked, “Do you like being a guy?”

I blinked. It had been three years and we never really discussed it. “Yeah. I mean, it feels right, I guess.” It wasn't great, not yet - the binder was invented originally just to torture people - but it was a lot better than before.

“Do you like being ace?”

“What kind of question is that? Do you like being bi?”

“Yeah,” he said, laughing, “I love it. I could do without the homophobia, but...” He trailed off, looking at me expectantly.

“I, um,” I stammered. I was stalling. “It’s lonely,” I finally admitted.

Isaac smirked. He really was beautiful. “You like being alone.”

That wasn't entirely true; I just wasn't comfortable around people. There's a difference, I promise. I tried to smile. “I like being around you.” He kept staring, so I added, “There's this expectation about sex in any relationship that isn't, like, strictly platonic. Would you voluntarily enter into a sexless marriage?”

He considered it. “I don't know if I ever want to get married. Could you love someone who was dallying on the side?”

My stomach dropped. “That would be weird, wouldn't it?” I asked instead of answering.

Ha!

He exhaled and changed the subject. “I didn't just drag you up here to sit in a hotel for two days,” he said. “I mean, you can if you want to. But Maya’s going to go tour UNM after her appointment tomorrow, so I thought we could go to a museum or something.”

“Sounds good,” I said. He was rambling, because he was exhausted - driving for fifteen hours through a desert will do that to you. It was Maya's car, but she never offered to take the wheel. The reason we were in Albuquerque for so long was, there was a mandatory 24-hour waiting period between consultation and procedure, even for just the pills. This in a state with some of the most liberal abortion policies in the country at the time. “How can you afford all this?” I finally asked.

Isaac groaned. “This is, like, every paycheck I've ever earned,” he explained. “I got a fucking grant for the thing itself.” He didn't normally curse, not like my sailor mouth, and it sounded bitter.

“They make grants for abortions?”

“Yep. And thank God for that. I hear babies are even more expensive.”

Now

We have a boatload of cash, and we are always finding more tucked away in abandoned storage boxes. The green paper bills are absolutely worthless - they don't even burn that well. The metal coins are mostly worthless, but we could theoretically melt them down for copper, I think.

At the Rendezvous we trade in goods; the values of which are all relative. A jar of honey can trade for almost anything - flour, oats, meat, animals. Shelf stable food, decades old, that is more preservative than it is actual food. Trinkets and memories from the past. One family scavenges and repairs electronics, little things that can run on tiny solar panels. I had a handheld game for a few years, black pixels moving around a grey screen. It didn't grab my attention in the way Grim describes technology consuming his entire generation. For that, he says, I would need the internet: a vast, complicated web of social interactions spanning across the globe. With a click, he could talk to someone on the other side of the planet, instantly, a thousand times over.

The thought is overwhelming. I have to recover just from talking to Annabelle.

I am still struggling to recover from that today. Mom's visceral description of childbirth rings through my head and I want to cry.

“Do you know about the father?” Grim asks pointedly. I shake my head. “That whole cult is fucked,” he mutters. “Think about it. Either he's twelve, or your mom's age.” The revelation is disconcerting.

Breathe. When trees respirate, they open tiny holes in the leaves called stomata to release oxygen, water vapor, and tiny particles - spores, bacteria, vapors - which float through the atmosphere to become the seeds for clouds to condense around. When settlers came through and cut down the pines and sagebrush and mowed the native tallgrasses to replace them with hay, they disrupted the water cycle, reducing the amount of rainfall on the land. Deep roots no longer held on to the soil, absorbing water for a slow release back into the air, which was getting hotter and hungrier for moisture. The entire landscape was altered by erosion and landslides, and the river almost disappeared entirely. Bison were hunted to extinction almost immediately; deer and elk nearly followed. If not for the game traders at the Rendezvous, I would believe they were gone too. Wolves and bears were driven to extinction by bounty hunters. Cars helped cut back on the rest.

“Roadkill,” Grim calls it. “I haven't seen it in years.” He suspects that Dog's mom was hit by the motorcycle he almost certainly could not have seen last night. A stranger, or someone local? The little town is two hundred miles away from the nearest city in either direction, but there are, presumably, other little towns, cut off from each other by mountains. Communication - internet, mail, even radio - was all cut off when the nukes fell. Annabelle’s commune has a radio, but they haven't even turned it on in years.

So here we are, alone and forgotten. Why would anyone bother to ride a motorcycle all the way out here?

Before

Growing up queer in small-town Texas - even with a mother as accepting as mine - was a bit like walking around with an enormous target on your back. Even if some people were okay, the rare rainbow pride flag allowed to fly, the hatred and vitriol spewing from the rest polluted the entire atmosphere. The only reason I wasn't harassed for being trans was misogyny. People thought of me as a misguided tomboy; no one was complaining about trans men in men’s sports. It was the men in dresses who were the real enemies.

Albuquerque was different. It wasn't, like, the gayest place in America, but it held none of the open toxicity we'd grown accustomed to in our hometown. Isaac was the first to remark on it - “it's like I can breathe!” - but I suspect that was partially due to the fact that Maya was at her appointment and in a little over 24 hours this would all be over. He openly flirted with the barista whose name tag pronounced “they/them” and who told me all about a rash they were worried about. Fortunately, when he got their number he gave me a sheepish look, like he couldn't help himself, then threw it away. Like he realized maybe hooking up with a stranger while on a road trip to get an abortion wasn't exactly appropriate.

Pssh. Neither was bringing along your friend. Or the fact that it was one of the best days of my life so far. We walked around museum exhibits and shopping centers together, without the oppressive weight of politics and current events, and it felt like this could be a normal life.

Ha! The modern world was always an illusion. Didn't we ignore the countless men, women, even children living on the streets and begging for coins, for food, for work? Didn't everyone? And even they had cell phones full of lithium and cobalt mined by child slaves in Africa. I ate ice cream that bragged about being 74% slave-free! It was expensive!

We arrived back at the hotel in time to take Maya for dinner. I was under strict orders to behave myself. “She's in a difficult place right now.” Pssh. She hooked up with the waiter!

Now

We stop about half an hour away from the cabin, ostensibly so I can catch some fish but mostly so Grim can catch his breath. His breathing, his coughing, his wheezing, has been getting steadily worse. It is another one of those things we do not talk about.

I wade out into the river barefoot, my pants rolled up to my knees. My clothing is all hand sewn. There is a peculiar overabundance of clothes in the end days - even the department store in town has not been cleared out, primarily because the articles from Grim’s time are flimsy and useless for anything. Shoes, however, he was wisely quick to stock up on before they disappeared forever. My feet, it seems, may never stop growing.

Dog bounces around at the edge of the narrow river, pawing at the water and whining. She is afraid to follow me, and when she sees that I am not coming back she lumbers back to curl up in Grim’s lap. For all his protestations, he seems awfully fond of her. I guess we'll both get rabies.

The water runs icy past my legs, silty mud squishing between my toes, concealing sharp rocks and tangled roots that feel like monsters when they wrap around my ankles. Tiny bugs hover above the surface as if waiting to be eaten. With a worm on a hook, it is a waiting game. Eventually, I will catch enough to make Mom happy, or at least less upset at the introduction of a new mouth to feed. But this takes time, and patience. When Grim gets bored, he struggles to his feet and wanders around the riverside in search of blackberries.

The fish I catch, smallmouth bass, are invasive; like the honeybee, feral chickens, and blackberries, they were introduced by settlers and quickly outcompeted everyone else, reducing a rich biodiversity to a handful of greedy species.

Well. They're edible, aren't they?

Before

That night we slept together. We slept! Maya was pregnant and hooking up with the waiter in the adjoining room. As soon as we got back to our room, Isaac deflated like a balloon. He was dealing with the consequences of being raped while being in denial that he had actually been raped. He was getting a migraine; he slumped into his bed and pressed a pillow over his eyes. I walked to the nearby convenience store for some Excedrin and coffee, because caffeine always helped.

So many stores we had back then! Box stores, shopping malls, convenience stores, gas stations, drug stores, liquor stores, grocery stores, dollar stores, bookstores, comic stores, gift shops. Our entire lives revolved around buying things! We didn't even have to go outside - I ordered dinner to be delivered to our hotel room from my phone. I could buy anything I wanted from my phone!

He was in the shower when I got back, so hot that steam was curling under the doorway. Supposedly a scalding shower helps - too bad your mother doesn't have the option. I knocked softly on the door. “Hey, I got drugs.”

He came out a moment later, scraggly hotel towel wrapped around his waist. It was dark, unfortunately - I hadn't seen him in such a state of undress since we were kids.

Yes, I could still appreciate beauty without wanting to bone it.

“Sorry,” he said, “I forgot clothes.”

The painkillers were starting to kick in by the time the food arrived and he was mostly okay by the time we were finished with it. The miracle of modern medicine! Now your mother has to chew on roots.

We were sitting on his bed, and I was reading on my phone about the latest unprecedented storm over Appalachia, landslides and flash flooding and at least forty-seven dead.

“Hey, Liam?” Isaac said, “No offense, but things are kind of shitty as they are. Can we not bring in other people's problems too?”

“Oh, uh, sure,” I said, shutting off the screen. “Sorry.” I didn't really consider climate disasters other people's problems, but I could see his point of view, I guess.

Here I was, wrong again! Making climate change my problem did nothing to stop its inexorable flow. Blowing up the pipelines did nothing! Everything meant nothing once the nukes were dropped.

The ensuing silence was filled by the sound of rhythmic thumping from next door. I snickered, but Isaac made a strangled sound then collapsed backwards onto the bed, groaning. I put my hand on his leg, feeling awkward, but he grabbed it and held it there, squeezing my fingers.

“Would the TV be better or worse, do you think?” I asked.

“Better,” he grumbled. “Definitely better.” He sat up and moved over on his bed, pulling me to sit next to him. I found some nonsensical movie with commercials - drivel! - and mostly paid attention to the ways we were touching. Our fingers interlaced, his thumb rubbing against my knuckles, our arms pressed together. I leaned my head against his shoulder, then he pulled me into an embrace that filled my stomach with a warm buzz.

Who would have thought? That physical contact, affection, cuddling, even sleeping together could be enjoyable when they don't inevitably lead to sex. And to learn that from Isaac of all people!

Forgive me. As much as I hated him, I really did love that man.

Now

Mom is out back with her bees when we arrive home, so she misses the arrival of Dog. I pass the fish off to Grim to prepare for dinner, then climb into the loft to unpack my bag. Dog whines at the base of the step ladder; perhaps she will be able to climb it eventually, but for now she is just too small. The loft is broken into two sections overlooking the open floor plan below. I sleep on the left, Mom on the right, while Grim takes the couch next to the fireplace below. It has a low, sloping roof that I have to crouch under to fit. There is enough space for a mattress, which hides the magazines, and a nightstand, on which I stack my new books next to the beeswax candle I use for reading. The only window up here, a small circular one on the south wall, is permanently blocked from light.

I lay back on the mattress, but it is too stuffy. It is almost always too warm in the loft, made hotter by the cooking fire below and the heavy smoky smell of frying fish. I roll out of bed and stumble down the steep wooden steps, barely landing on my feet at the bottom. Dog attacks my legs and I kneel down to pet her.

“Let me be the one to take credit for the puppy,” Grim offers, and I agree. Mom is much less likely to yell at him. She is, as predicted, displeased about the arrival of a new mouth to feed, but she is much more easily won over than I had anticipated.

“I have to admit, she is pretty cute,” she says. “I can't believe you named her Dog.” We are standing outside in the pink glow of a sunset, watching the puppy, happily full of fried fish, romp clumsily around the dirt and patches of grass that make up our yard. In town, the once neatly manicured Kentucky bluegrass lawns have thoroughly overgrown. Some even have weeds poking through the foundations of houses, but we keep the grass immediately surrounding the cabin cut short as a last-ditch effort at wildfire mitigation.

It's not like we've got firefighters anymore.

Before

It was finally over.

It was finally over and we were on our way home. Maya had her pills. For all the trouble they made her go through - blood tests, counseling, a vaginal ultrasound, waiting period - it was one pill at the clinic, then two chalky pills that would dissolve under her tongue when she got home. Ideally, the effects wouldn't kick in until then.

It was on the way home - into the state, not out! - that we hit a traffic stop. It was late, already dark, and a cop shined an enormous, blinding light into each of our faces in turn.

“Senior road trip, boys?” he sneered. Then, upon finding Maya in the back seat, he said, “What's this?”

There was no excuse to pull us over, but they did anyway. There was no excuse to search the car, but they did anyway. He made us stand in the darkness on the side of the road, handing the spotlight over to his partner to watch over us. Maya was pale and starting to look hunched, like she was about to get hit by the hardest cramps of her life.

The cop quickly found a pack of maxipads, and in his mind, his suspicions were confirmed. “Was this a medical road trip, fellas?” he demanded, waving the pink plastic packaging around so several of the pads dropped onto the sandy ground. Isaac was trembling next to me and Maya looked faint.

“They're mine,” I said abruptly. It was a crapshot, but possibly a way out, and if the cop searched the car any deeper he might find the bottle of Excedrin that also contained a couple decidedly not aspirin pills.

“Excuse me?” The cop looked me up and down, frowning. He was middle aged, straw grey hair and a bushy mustache, a yellow tinge to the whites of his eyes, and his accent sounded like a caricature of a Texan. His silent partner with the spotlight was Hispanic.

“I need them, if you don't mind,” I said, “I'm on my period.” Mustache glared at me until I offered my school ID, which had my deadname on it.

“Allison Waters,” he read, peering from the little card back to my face. “Sure don't look like an Allie.” I shrugged. Being trans in Texas was almost a bad a sin as being liberal. “What were y'all doin’ in New Mexico, then?” he asked skeptically.

“Campus tour,” Isaac said, finally stepping in. “UNM.”

“Oh yeah?” the cop asked, “State schools not good enough for you?”

“Always nice to have a back-up,” he responded, teeth gritted. “Gunning for A and M myself.” Another gamble, but it turned out to be the right choice. He let us go - a fucking miracle!

Now

Dog grows rapidly over the short summer, stubby legs stretching out so she is no longer so round, but her paws still too disproportionately huge so she stumbles often as she runs around. She harasses the chickens and chews up a precious library book and eats whatever she can find off the ground. Grim is her favorite person; at night she stretches out on the couch alongside him to sleep. She barks and paws at him when he is overcome by a coughing fit that sends him to his knees.

Summer is our busiest season, for all the things we have to do to ensure our continued survival. Planting, watering, tending to crops that were not meant to grow here, so never have the right amount of sun or water. By late summer, our creek is nearly dried up, little more than a damp sand bed cutting through the hills. Bushes and shrubs dry out, crispy leaves curling against the heat, and I have to hike through the early morning, leaving at sunrise, to reach the still trickling river below. Grim increasingly stays behind, forever trying and failing to catch his breath.

“He's dying, Will,” my mom says, her hand on my shoulder like a lead weight. “I don't know how to prepare you for that.”

Instead of hiking, we sit outside in the shade of our cabin, watching Dog chase the chickens. She catches one and stands there, one enormous paw resting on its back, and looks to us for approval.

“Pssh, leave it,” Grim growls, tossing a handful of gravel harmlessly in her direction. Dog steps back and the chicken scrambles away, squawking.

Breathe. During the industrial revolution we burned our fossil fuels raw, coal ash spewing into the clouds with no concern over its consequences for the people below. Air pollution caused asthma, miscarriages, infant mortality, lung cancer. It caused acid rain and global climate change. It coated buildings and trees in a thick black film, and the white peppered moth lost its ability to camouflage, stark white wings on soot. The species rapidly evolved into a dark melanistic form, a change which then had to be reversed upon the introduction of scrubbers to smoke stacks.

But the scrubbers didn't stop the climate change. It didn't stop the cancer deaths.

Before

You might be wondering, where were all the parents in all this? Pssh. My mom was at work. Isaac's parents smoked meth. If only he'd gone down their path! It had a great side effect of reducing motivation, shunting dreams to the side in favor of your next fix.

Ha! They were terrible people. His father liked to wait at the bus stop outside the middle school to watch little girls. His mother slept with her dealer for a discount. They spent every cent they could find on drugs. Why even bother having a child? Whenever social services took him away, they would beg and scream and cry for him back. It was a fucking tragedy.

By senior year, he had joined enough extracurricular activities to guarantee he'd never have to go home after school, and he worked part-time on top of it all. Then, when his day finally ended and there was nothing else he could pack into it, he would sneak in through my window and crash on my bed instead of his own.

My mother never noticed! She was working nights.

I wasn't completely neglected. I had a therapist and teachers who were “concerned for me” and a school counselor who was there “if I ever needed to talk.” Too bad they only ever did the talking. My therapist once spent an entire session just making jokes about her dead baby, then breaking down sobbing. “It's been years!” she cried, “I hated being a mom! Why can't I get over it?”

Maya, for the record, was just fine after that adventure. She dropped out of college to marry rich. I lost track of her after that, for obvious reasons.

Anyway, I had enough people pushing me along that I managed to graduate from high school near the bottom of the class. The only reason I even attended my own graduation was because Isaac was giving a speech; even with brain damage, he still managed to graduate valedictorian.

Tells you a lot about the Texas education system, doesn't it?

Things were inevitably going to change after that summer: Isaac was going to university - in Colorado! - and I was not. “I want you to come with me, Liam.” Ha! Isaac had a full-ride scholarship. My grades would have set the admissions counselor laughing.

I was never very social, and the handful of kids I could consider friends were also leaving for college. Without Isaac, I really did fall into a pit of despair, one I would never really climb out of.

Now

When we manage to keep the plants alive long enough to make it to harvest, we can all breathe easier; at least until the labor of harvesting, washing, peeling, cutting, canning, milling, baking starts in earnest. Another year of surplus, if only just: our grain bags stuffed tight, our cellar packed, jars lined up on shelves in a rainbow of color. The fireplace runs hot as we cook down berries and honey for jam, boil water for canning, bake hard breads and chewy cakes that will last longer than eggs in storage.The cabin is oppressively stuffy, but Mom does not complain even as she sits in front of the inferno and tends to all the crackling, bubbling, simmering pots. She fills a stack of smaller jars with warm amber honey and makes soap out of beeswax and wood ash. She is preparing for the Rendezvous.

Before

I realize I have done a lot to tell you about how I loved Isaac, but not why. Oh, yes, he was a sex god, but that was never the reason for my attachment to him. And yes, I had known him forever and my mother saved him from his drug-addled parents, but that is hardly a reason to fall in love with anyone.

The real reason, the stupid, plain and simple reason that I loved Isaac, was because he loved me back, and I don't know why he bothered with that. He was beautiful and I was a troll. He was a genius and I failed art class. He got nothing from me, he hated my negativity and cynicism, and he was bored senseless by my favorite activity of sitting inside on the computer. What did he want from me? I was already arthritic and going blind, and I wasn't even legally an adult yet.

But he was the only person I could talk to about the things I was reading about: genocides, plural, in the Middle East, in Africa, in eastern Asia; the growing threat of world war; increasingly unprecedented climate disasters killing hundreds, thousands, millions of people. If I tried to bring it up with anyone but him, their eyes would glaze over; they would pull out their phones to watch TikTok memes. Even when Hurricane Benedict swept through and destroyed entire suburbs, the standard response was to hit “Like” and scroll on.

Am I losing you?

This is why I fell so deep into the internet: everyone was anonymous, and everyone overshared. It wasn't my curse, it was our curse. Strangers would post vivid descriptions of medical symptoms - sometimes with pictures! - asking for advice. Grandparents would write public comments on a grandkid’s posts, remembering fondly the time they screamed so hard they shit their pants at the zoo. Break-ups, arguments, embarrassing accidents and misunderstandings were all aired out like dirty laundry. Anyone could read it!

Also, on the internet, I wasn't the only person who was ace. Like I said, there were dozens of us! People who understood what it was like in a world constantly inundated with sex, where every interaction is sexually charged regardless of its actual purpose. My friends were sad, touch-starved kids who learned the hard way that any display of affection had an expectation laced behind it.

Isaac had the audacity to be jealous of some of those friends. A guy who treated me like a pet to cuddle with in between screwing anyone willing.

It was the other people who were like me that he hated the most: those who saw the writing on the wall and wanted to do something, anything, to stop it. Terrorists and extremists, each of us; and here I was, crippled by inaction. Having no real way out of this epic man-made disaster, all I could do was complain on the internet and relapse into depression. Isaac didn't realize what was happening until I almost killed myself, quite by accident - my second involuntary institutionalization, but not my last.

I wasn't going to tell him; I think it was mother who colluded with him behind my back, again. For a while, I just didn't talk to him at all, and I let him believe it was because I was radicalizing, falling in with the wrong crowd. Isaac thought all we were doing was inhibiting progress. He believed there wasn't a single problem that couldn't be solved using human ingenuity, even when human ingenuity was what got us there in the first place. Technology had dragged us into this mess, and he was determined that technology would pull us out.

Ha! We were both wrong. There was nothing either of us could do to stop the things that had been set in motion decades before either of us were even born. All the climate action in the world meant nothing when the nukes fell. We should have been working to build, not take down; he should have focused on improvement, not advancement.

Hindsight, they say, is 20/20. Rich, coming from my eyes.

Now

I see the mythical motorcycle light for myself the night before the Rendezvous. It is as Grim described: unnaturally bright, moving at unnatural speed along the distant landscape, disappearing and reappearing behind ink-black hills, traveling along the highway into town. It is nighttime and the Milky Way shines above, a glimmering spectacle of stars and stellar dust. We are all stardust, here; the atoms that make up our bodies, our food, the air, the trees, the Earth itself were forged by stars, scattered through the infinite void of space by a violent death. When a star dies, the energy is enough to fuse atoms together into heavier chunks: metals like iron and cobalt, nickel, copper, zinc. The same things found in an old cell phone.

When an animal dies, its cells immediately begin to break down, aided by the bacteria that, up until then, had been beneficial. Symbiosis: a close, long-term relationship between members of two different species. The microbiome in our guts helps digest our food, unlocking key nutrients, and fights off malevolent invaders, but only when we are alive. Dead, we begin to digest ourselves. Gasses build and the body bloats. Insects swarm to feed on the oozing fluids, the putrefying flesh. Eventually it will all dry out and return to dust.

There was someone driving that motorcycle; a stranger? The thought eats away at my dreams, and I am ill-rested in the morning when it is time to leave for town. I am anxious for many reasons: the strange light, the Rendezvous, the prospect of seeing Annabelle again. Has she had her baby already? She left in such a hurry, the last time I saw her, I didn't think to ask how long she had to go.

We are limited in what we can take with us by what we can pack into a small, rugged wagon, pulled alternately by me and Mom. Dog races back and forth between new and interesting things to sniff while Grim hobbles slowly behind us, hacking and coughing.

“I do wish he could keep it down,” Mom mutters, “His wheezing kept me up all night.” She snatches the wagon handle from me and trudges up ahead, away from us. Her curse, I realize, is that she can never keep a secret for herself around us.

Before

A few months after my ‘suicide attempt,’ which was actually, truly, honestly just an accident, Isaac convinced me to move up to Colorado with him, into a crappy basement apartment with one room and almost non-existent water pressure in the shower. I was working odd jobs - dog walking, landscaping, house cleaning - the demand for which was rapidly declining with the rise of the gig economy. I was trying to save up for top surgery, and I didn't want to waste it all on rent.

“I've got rent covered,” he assured me, “I just need you here.” Isaac had a steady supply of sexual partners but none of them provided the emotional support and intimacy of his favorite puppy! Pssh. I am being cruel.

Isaac could afford it because he was a genius; particularly in technology, engineering, robotics, machine learning. He was a rising star in whatever was popular and well-funded at the time, and clever enough to adapt before anyone else had even noticed the tides were changing. He was employed by a drone startup before he even finished college.

Exploration drones! I would have slapped him if he was funded directly by the war machine. Not that there was any getting away from it, indirectly. All technological advancements looped back to the military in some way or another.

The real reason Isaac wanted me living with him was: he was worried about me. We wouldn't see each other for months at a time, and then when we finally met up it was like he had grown and I was somehow shrinking. He thought I was still depressed. Pssh. He didn't even know about the hospitalization! Okay, so I stopped talking to therapists, or anyone at all, really. Okay, so I relapsed a bit and still considered suicide a lot and had accidentally cut so deep I couldn't stop the bleeding, once. In my defense, the world was overpopulated, then.

Well, there were a lot more queer people in Boulder, Colorado. A lot more environmentalists, a lot more activists. Isaac thought it was a sign of progress when I finally enrolled at the university; he didn't know it was only because I was falling under the wing of one of the most infamous radical climate scientists of the century.

Dr. Kruger would eventually blow himself up, and so would Isaac.

Now

Mom is buzzing with an angry tension by the time we catch up with her at the Rendezvous, setting up our table for trade. She glares across the field at Annabelle's family, nestled comfortably between the tables of others in their commune, then back at Grim.

“That girl is pregnant,” she hisses, “Did you know?”

“I never saw her,” he answers truthfully.

Mom whirls on me. “She's your friend, did you know?”

Friend is a bit of a stretch, I think. My head jerks almost involuntarily in a nod.

Mom turns back to Grim. “She's younger than I was! You didn't think to -”

“It's none of our business, Katie,” he says flatly.

“She could die!”

“Her mom has popped out at a dozen now without a problem -”

“And probably a dozen more that she lost!” Mom interrupts. “Or are you so addled -”

Grim interrupts again. “That cult made it clear they don't want my help. Even if I could travel that much.”

Mom's eyes narrow and her voice lowers. “You wouldn't have to travel if -”

She is interrupted by the arrival of a motorcycle. It is sleek black, electric and eerily silent as it approaches the Rendezvous field - aren't vehicles always described as roaring in books? - but the reaction of the early gatherers is palpable. Wonder, awe, desire, and fear murmurate through the crowds until the motorcycle finally comes to a stop. The rider waves generically and dismounts, removes a heavy-looking helmet to reveal a black bandana over dreadlocks and a lazy grin. “Can I park here?” he calls out loudly.

On the other side of the field, the air of wonder and intrigue instantly cools and condenses into one of distrust.

This stranger's skin is even darker than my mom's.

Before

Before blowing himself up in a terrorist attack, Dr. Kruger’s most violent acts of extremism included such crimes as vandalism, blocking traffic, and publishing research on climate change. The other stuff he just directed others to do, sad fools like me. It was hopelessness and desperation that drove him to destroy himself and the developing pipeline. No one was hurt - no one except for Dr. Kruger, of course. And, I suppose, the work-study with whom he was having an affair. That was the last confession he ever gave me; the truth didn't become public until after he was splattered all over the rocks and trees in a forest in British Columbia.

He was trying to stop a pipeline that would never be completed. Not for his actions, but because the world ended a few years later. Ha! The best laid plans of mice and men led awry by nuclear bombs.

Dr. Kruger helped me get into college, despite my bad grades in high school, and funded it through his lab. I got a stipend! For a couple years I did grunt work for his research that took me all around the world: drilling ice cores, measuring fault lines, monitoring seismographs placed near unstable ice flows. I could do it in my sleep - with coke-bottle glasses and growing holes in my retina, I did pretty well, I think. I was even a decent student, at least in the science classes, once homework stopped being the driving force of my grades.

The cramped apartment we shared meant Isaac never brought home one of his partners, at least not to fuck, as long as I wasn't on a research vessel in the middle of the Arctic Ocean. Eventually he narrowed it down to a handful of casual friends-with-benefits, ostensibly to reduce the chances of contracting an STD, but I think he'd gone through just a few too many casual hook-ups gone wrong. I almost left him, early on, after he described in far too much detail the anal fissure he had received the night before, from a guy who insisted there was enough lube on the condom.

“Why are you telling me this?” I grumbled.

“I tell you everything,” he said. He at least looked chagrined.

“Did you ever stop to consider maybe I don't need to know everything?”

He stared at me uncomprehendingly. “But I tell you everything.”

I rolled my eyes and went to bed. I had complained to Isaac thousands of times throughout the years about this oversharing curse that haunted me. He had even witnessed it in action several times, always remarking, “That was weird!” afterwards. But never could I make him recognize that he might be part of the problem.

For the most part, though, I loved living with Isaac. I loved relaxing in the evenings together, doing the dishes together, grocery shopping together. Strangers would stop to tell us we were a cute couple, and he would grin and wrap an arm around me, plant a kiss on the top of my head. “I love him so much,” he would tell strangers. About me!

Then he would spend the night at someone else's house, in someone else's bed.

It worked for us. Really.

Now

I am alone at our table when the stranger finally makes his way here. He had started on the other side of the field, with the uncomfortable stares and stiff lips - a mistake, but he couldn't have known. I scramble to my feet as he approaches; he is younger than I expected, and attractive. His eyes are the color of golden honey, glowing in the sun like the jars stacked out in front of me. His skin is darker than I have ever seen, with an even darker smattering of freckles over his nose. I have to stop myself from staring at his lips, which look full and soft.

“‘Sup,” he says. “My name's Jax.” He holds out his hand and I take it awkwardly; I have not had much opportunity to perfect my handshake. He squeezes gently, his skin warm and dry, and lingers, looking at me expectantly.

“Oh,” I stammer, “uh, William.” My face feels warm, and I hope it is not obvious.

“William,” he repeats smoothly, “a classic.” He picks up a jar of honey and holds it up to the sun. “Is this real honey, William?”

“Yep.”

His smile sends a shiver through me. “I've never met anyone with bees.”

“They're my mom's,” I admit, feeling foolish.

“Rumor back home was, they're extinct,” he says. He gently places the jar back down on the table. “Do you do free samples?”

I hesitate. “Well, uh,” I stammer some more, “technically everything has to be a trade.” I feel foolish as soon as I say it.

The stranger - Jax - grins, then reaches into his pocket. I hold my hand out, and he presses something small and circular into my palm, his skin brushing against mine for a few seconds longer than necessary.

I think.

I glance down - it is a metal bottle cap, blue and red, ridges around the edge that dig into my palm like teeth when I squeeze my fingers around it. I look back up, and he's staring intently at me. “Enough for a sample?”

I hand him a jar. “It's yours.” I tell myself we have plenty. He dips a finger into the jar and sucks the sweet honey off it, and I have to glance away. I try to be subtle in concealing my growing erection.

“Amazing,” he declares, “your mother is a saint.” I make a sound resembling a chuckle; at least the comment took care of my boner. He continues, “You have no idea how happy I am to see a friendly face around here. I was getting worried. They don't seem to like me over there.” He glances behind himself for a moment, then returns to fix his eyes on mine. “I can't imagine why.”

There is a certain look to the members of Annabelle’s commune; the darkest skin tone is a light tan. There is a reason we are not made welcome on their side of town. They avoid my mom altogether, and my association with Annabelle is frowned upon. They conduct most of their business with Grim, who is decidedly white.

I ask, “Where are you from?”

“California. I'm traveling the country doing research. I have this theory that there are communities like this all over, isolated and tucked away and cooperatively thriving.”

“Have you found many yet?” I ask, intrigued.

Jax’s face falls, and my stomach flips. “Three,” he says, “counting mine.”

Dog’s yapping announces her and Grim’s return, and his face springs back to joviality. “Who's this?” he asks, kneeling down to pet her.

“Dog,” I start, but Grim interrupts me.

“You killed her mom,” he accuses, “earlier this summer.”

Jax nods, saddened once again. “It was so dark. I was moving too fast to stop or swerve out of the way. I didn't know she had any puppies.”

“Shouldn't be driving at night,” Grim scolds.

“Would you believe me if I said it was safer than driving during the day?” He only ever runs into bandits or hijackers during the day, he explains. At night he can spot their fires from miles away and avoid them.

His logic seems flawed. “But we can see you, too,” I protest, “I saw your light last night.

Jax shrugs. “I could turn off the headlight. Less likely to hit a coyote, though.”

The Rendezvous is starting to get busy, families crowding around the various tables, the air filling with chatter. Grim settles down in my chair, wheezing. “Why don't you show your friend around?” he suggests.

Before

The first time I got arrested, it wasn't my fault.

Actually, I would argue that none of the times I got arrested were my fault, or at least necessary - I never hurt anyone. Property is theft and all that.

But this time in particular, it was a peaceful protest. Against police brutality, of all things! Scuffles happened, and I got pepper-sprayed, beaten, and arrested by a uniformed thug.

They dropped the charges! It was a wrongful arrest. But that didn't stop Isaac from getting pissed about having to bail me out. “Getting yourself beat up isn't going to change anything.”

“You think I somehow earned this?” My nose and collarbone were both broken by the cop who dragged me into the fray, despite trying to get away from the burning, seering tear gas. “Would you prefer I sit back and allow my rights to be violated on top of everyone else's?” I sneered. “If you'd like I could offer to polish their boots, too.” Before he could answer condescendingly, I continued: I was terrified the entire time. It fucking hurt. I'd lost my glasses after the tear gas exploded, and had to endure the beating and arrest and jail cell unable to see anything more than a few inches in front of my face. I had to bend down, hands cuffed behind me and nose pressed against the countertop, to read the paperwork they gave me. At least then Isaac’s tone softened; at least then he stopped scolding me for being a victim of police brutality.

He had too much to lose: he was about to graduate, with a kushy job lined up afterwards, online graduate school to keep him advancing steadily through the ranks of... whatever tech was popular at the time. Isaac got into space travel by idolizing one of the most disgusting capitalist pigs in the country, a man who started rich and got richer by stealing other people's inventions and ignoring environmental protection regulations. This pig assured us that technology would save us all! His technology, specifically.

I'm sorry. I should not speak so poorly of pigs. The animals were actually pretty smart.

I managed to talk Isaac out of the second part, - even when he'd been offered an internship for That Company, he turned it down - but I never could convince him that technology was the problem, not the solution. Or that space travel was a waste of resources and greenhouse gas emissions. Or that the rich only ever had their own self interests in mind and he should never, ever trust them.

Ha! Fat lot of good their Wall Street stocks do them now.

Now

There are a couple dozen families besides Annabelle’s commune who attend the annual gathering. Everyone who can travel comes out for the multi-day event, because very few people have everything they need. We can grow fruits and vegetables, corn and sorghum, chickens and eggs, but for flour or oats we trade with the commune. I can hunt wild birds and rabbits, but if we want red meat, we get it here. One couple spends the year tracking down the fabled herds of deer; another family raises goats. A jar of honey gets us enough milk to make a year’s worth of soap, jerky to last the winter, or a thick, warm, hand-woven blanket.

“This is kind of like the market back home,” Jax observes, “except we do it every week.” There were more survivors where he lived, enough to justify councils and elections, safety patrols, even a school.

Next to him, I feel like a caveman.

“Couple years ago, people just started showing up,” he says. “One family traveled for, like, a thousand miles because they heard about us.” Jax realized there must be tons of survivors, fractured and scattered throughout the country. He wants to find them, but the country is a lot bigger than he ever expected. It's like searching for a needle in hay.

He shows me his motorcycle, which he calls his bike and his baby, charging as it sits soaking up the sun. It is smaller than I expected. He explains how he “Frankensteined” parts together from a dozen abandoned bikes to build his baby.

“The hard part,” he says, laughing, “was not blowing myself up with the batteries.” He asks if I want a ride, eyes glittering gold.

Breathe. The average resting heart rate, at least when they wrote Mom’s medical manual, is between 60 and 100 bears per minute. It slows when you are sleeping, speeds up when you are aroused. Exercising, I mean, or sick, or scared or angry. Or aroused. Adrenaline makes the heart speed up, your vessels expand to increase oxygenation. It makes you quicker, stronger, braver, but only temporarily.

I am saved from having to answer by sounds of an argument, spilling out from the crowded field. I hear Dog’s yaps and my mother's yells.

Before

I was kicked out of university after my third arrest, this time for participating in an encampment on campus in protest of some genocide happening across the globe. Do I sound insensitive? Everyone's dead now.

I was kicked out of school, but I kept in touch with Dr. Kruger, and I started attending classes at a community college - first EMT training, then nursing. They were things I could still do with limited vision; as long as I could read, I thought, I could tend to a wound. I felt a need to be prepared for something I couldn't quite convince anyone else was happening. Weren't things already pretty terrible by then? Weren't they guaranteed to get worse? Trans people had become the latest bogeymen; there were actual bounties starting back in Texas. We were injecting ourselves with the blood of virgin children! We were pedophiles, all of us, and even worse, committing sports fraud. Also enemies: brown people, immigrants, leftists, and single women. Wildlife populations were plummeting, starting with insects and amphibians, then birds and large mammals. The supply chain was weakening. Hurricanes were crushing cities, tornadoes popping up in places they'd never been seen before, heat waves killing thousands every week. After COVID there was the bird flu, then another pig flu, then a hemorrhagic fever that turned people into zombies, bleeding from the eyes. Seriously!

A world war was brewing, children were dying of starvation, and Isaac paid for top surgery for me out of pocket with his first year bonus. He moved us into a bigger, nicer apartment with two bedrooms; one for cuddling, one for fucking. His career was advancing, his life grandiose. At work he was developing an algorithm to... well, to be honest, he'd lose me pretty quickly after that. Because data centers were taking over our power grid, sucking up our water to build ever bigger and better models and find increasingly subversive ways to feed the pockets of investors. The amount of data that tech companies had on us was obscene - Big Brother level privacy invasion - and we had invited them in with smiles and waves.

Isaac went to work; he shopped online and ordered takeout; he used an app to find gay hook-ups. He knew all the problems lurking behind the curtains even better than I did, but the short term benefits outweighed the detriments. Pssh. Technology addict or Luddite, we all end up the same in the end.

Now

A crowd has formed around them as my mom yells at the leader of Annabelle’s commune. I am vaguely aware of Jax a few steps behind me as I race across the field towards them. Dog intercepts me, but I ignore her, not slowing down until Grim shouts, “Bug!” He is gasping heavily with the effort of catching up. “Let me handle this.”

I chew on my lip, watching him press through the crowd, until Jax places a hand on my arm and I jump. “Bug?” he asks, amused.

“It's a nickname.” The shouting has eased but the crowd remains, murmuring, and I crane my neck to try to see what is happening beyond.

“It's cute,” he says, sending a jolt of pleasure through me. “Is that your gramps?”

I take a moment to parse the word. “I guess. He adopted my mom, Before. I call him Grim.”

“Seems fitting.”

“You have no idea.” The crowd is beginning to disperse; the commune leader, a man I only know as Robert, stalks away with a handful of his followers. The rest of the crowd divides back into their small, disparate family groups. Any other time of the year, the commune seems huge and commanding, but at Rendezvous it becomes clear that it's the rest of us Rugged Individualists who make up the majority here.

Mom stomps up, clearly vexed, Grim panting some distance behind her. “What's going on?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “Who are you?” This is directed towards Jax.

“Jax,” he says, holding out his hand. Mom stares at it warily. “You must be the beekeeper.” She relaxes slightly and takes his hand, briefly, then pulls away.

“Make sure you stay away from those tables, Jax,” she warns, gesturing towards where Annabelle sits looking heavy and miserable.

He nods, face serious. “Understood.”

Grim asks me to keep an eye on Dog. “He's agreed to let me examine Annabelle,” he explains. He turns towards the tables then hesitates, eyes dancing around the crowded space.

“You want help?” I offer.

“Nope.” He turns towards Jax, asks, “Are you enjoying our little mountain Rendezvous?”

Jax’s smile is broad, teeth flashing white. “Loving it,” he says, eyes boring into mine.

Before

After nursing school I apprenticed with a midwife. It was my mother who was directing me down this path - I certainly didn't have the foresight to know that childbirth would be the greatest threat to women in the end times. She was still in Texas, dealing with a decaying healthcare system where she endured all the plagues. Isaac's mom had overdosed and his dad was in prison.

A strange shift was happening: people were dying young. Our friends were dropping off around us from the flu, or overdose, or violence, or suicide. No one wanted to talk about it as a whole, but they did when it affected them personally. A woman next to me on the bus whose best friend was murdered by her husband lamented not intervening sooner. The cashier who scanned my groceries talked about his twin brother’s suicide, the fifth in their school that year. A woman at my clinic regretted not getting an abortion, because she knew her daughter had no future. Confessions stopped being about cheating on loved ones and shoplifting, dreams of leaving this life for a better one. They were all about regret, fear, and hopelessness.

Isaac happily funded my career as a student. He was swimming in cash from his new job in machine learning and studying rocket science on the side. He was going to use the models to build an artificial intelligence to help him design better rockets! He didn't realize that all the models did was tell him what they thought he wanted to hear.

I felt gross, buying anything I needed without question while my peers were begging for money online for their next meal. I gave so much of it away but it was never enough. It was a fraction of the wealth hoarded by the fucking Pigs who profited off Isaac's work.

Could I have done more to build up mutual aid while I still had the chance, before everything fell apart? Probably, but it definitely wouldn't have made a difference in the end.

Isaac was rather less happy about funding my other activities, the ones directed by Dr. Kruger. Kruger didn't need me for science, but for getting the message out there: we were all screwed, if we didn't stop burning fossil fuels yesterday. Climate protests involved disrupting the system to draw attention to it - stopping traffic on the freeway or vandalizing billboards and construction sites. I chained myself to a fence in a failed effort to stop a data center from being built on protected wetlands. I threw red paint on the grounds of a weapons manufacturer. Pssh. We were demanding change to a system that profited off the status quo. None of these little actions got me in a ton of trouble (or made any difference in the flow of capital), but they started to add up. It would only be a matter of time before I was put on a list.

Now

“Don't take this the wrong way,” Jax says as we walk past the tables stacked with goods for the second time, “But do you all even know how to read out here?”

“Excuse me?” I laugh incredulously.

“I mean, it's cool, I get it,” he tries to backtrack, “It's just weird that no one has any books for sale.”

“We have a library.”

“For real?” I nod. “Like an actual check-out-books library?”

His skepticism confuses me. “It's kind of based on the honor system, but sure.” I offer to take him, but we would have to walk; it's a couple miles from the old fairgrounds where we hold the Rendezvous, “and I don't think Dog can ride a bike.” I am delighted when he chuckles.

“I can't believe you named a dog, Dog,” he says cheerfully.

“You and my mom, both.”

“Do you think your mom would let me see her bees?”

“Maybe.” She would probably be thrilled to share them with someone else, since I turned out such a disappointment. But I don't want to talk about her. “We live kind of far away.”

“Not by bike, I bet.” He asks if there's anything else I could show him and follows me through a short patch of woods to the river. It is a wide, shallow patch of running water, lined with autumn-brown trees and bedded with smooth, colorful pebbles.

“It's not exactly thrilling, but I like this river,” I say. The rush of water drowns out the noise of the Rendezvous behind us but not the birds singing above. Dog, bolder now that her legs are longer, bounces around the bank, flinging mud into the air.

“I can see why,” Jax says. He steps closer so he is standing next to me, our shoulders brushing. “You ever go swimming?”

It isn't deep enough for swimming. I don't know if there's anywhere around deep enough for swimming. I can read, but I can't swim.

“That's a shame,” Jax says, sounding genuinely disappointed, and it is hard not to take that personally.

“We can't all grow up next to the ocean.”

“Who said I lived near the ocean?” he protests, “California is a big state.”

“You did though, didn't you?”

His face breaks out into a wide grin. “Of course I did. Like, 95% of human civilization was built on the coast.”

“That sounds made up.”

“Only because I made it up,” he says, pushing me lightly. “The real number’s probably higher.”

“What's it like?”

“The ocean?” I nod, and he points up. “It's like that. Vast and unknowable.” The sky overhead is a clear, brilliant blue. When I look back down, Jax is staring at me. “When a storm is coming, it's the same color as your eyes. They’re absolutely beautiful,” he says.

The only other person to comment on my eyes was Annabelle, years ago, who called them “weird” with my skin tone, as if I didn't deserve such a feature. In truth, I don't see them much - the cabin doesn't have a mirror. “Oh, um, thanks,” I say, feeling awkward. A silence stretches between us as I try to formulate a more profound response. His smile falters, just a twitch before he recovers and steps back. Dog takes her chance to step between us and shakes her fur, showering us both in a spray of river water and mud.

“Ugh,” Jax groans, ducking away, but he is laughing. “I was gonna say, ‘she's so well trained for a coyote,’ but I've changed my mind.”

“Sorry.”

He shakes his head, kneeling down to pet Dog, mud and all. “She's a good girl,” he coos as she licks his face.

“Did you have dogs at home?”

“Yeah, but they were all guard dogs. None of them liked to play.” His neighbors kept goats, he explains, and his family has chickens. His little sisters like to chase them. He has three younger sisters and an older brother, and the crowding of their house was one of the reasons he left. “They were glad to see me go, believe me.” His best friend helped him find all the parts he needed for the bike. Jax’s eyes glint when he talks about his family, but he falls quiet when he mentions his friend. “We had a big fight before I left,” he explains.

I don't have anything to say. I don't have the life experience to relate to anything he tells me. “How did you find out about the Rendezvous?” I ask instead.

“One of the redheads,” he hesitates, “the, um, pregnant one?” It is a question.

“Annabelle,” I confirm, and he freezes for half a second before recovering.

“She's not quite like the rest of them, is she?” He doesn't wait for an answer, but continues to describe their encounter earlier that summer: she had discovered him squatting in a house in town, his bike charging in the cracked and overgrown driveway outside. She surprised him; he had assumed the town was empty. “She told me about this gathering at the end of the summer, and I promised I would be back.”

I wonder if this was the same day we met at the library, and a shiver runs through me.

“You alright?” Jax is watching me curiously. He is sitting on a relatively dry patch of grass, and I suddenly feel like I am towering over him.

“What?” I ask, confused. “Yeah. Why?”

He shrugs. “I'm having trouble getting a read on you.”

“Sorry.”

His eyes narrow. “Do you want to go back?”

“Not really,” I admit. “Do you?”

Jax smiles again, relaxing. “Nope.”

I sit down next to him, close enough that our arms brush, an electric charge tingling from the contact. I close my eyes for a second, praying to myself for a moment that I haven't massively misjudged something, before leaning in and kissing him.

He pulls back, a surprised look on his face.

Fuck.

Before

I introduced Isaac to your grandmother. What a fucking mistake! I'm sorry, but it was.

Eliana Jackson. She was my friend, too, which is how the lines got so blurred so quickly. She was cool with our “situation,” at least until she started spending the night. Pssh.

They started hooking up just before I got sent to the loony bin, and she was pregnant by the time I got out over a year later.

Do you think Isaac abandoned me entirely while I was in there? That's absolutely what I thought. They arrested me for vandalism after I threw some red paint-filled balloons at a bank. I spent a night in a jail cell, then they shuffled me into the insane asylum. They held onto me for being trans, for the old scars that layered over my chest. No judges or lawyers necessary! They accused me of terrorism and plotting to overthrow the government. They called me a radical, an extremist, a communist. Of course I was a communist! The alternative was not redistributing billions of ill-gotten dollars to the people who had actually earned it. I was a victim of an effort to quash rebellion, to denounce and silence detractors.

And it worked! I said nothing about climate change the entire time I was there. I said nothing at all the entire time I was there! You think an oversharing curse is bad in the real world? Imaging having to listen to the deepest, darkest confessions of the criminally insane. Murderers who just wanted to see how their victims’ innards work. Rapists and pedophiles who regret nothing but the chances they didn't take. Suicidal people, cutters, burners, shit-eaters, eating disorders, obsessive disorders, psychopathy. They all talked to me about everything. The doctors and nurses were even worse!

For several months I was so heavily medicated I could barely move. My thoughts flowed like sludge through my skull. I kept fighting back, so they kept doping me. But time went on and I was still there, driven mad by the confessions of crazy people, and Isaac had apparently given up on me entirely. When I finally gave in, they stopped sedating me so much; that was my reward. The months continued to drag on, and I thought maybe I would die there in that hospital. Definitely after one patient confessed his deepest desire now was to kill me, specifically. What did I ever do to him?

The conditions in that hospital were abysmal. It was a prison where the wardens were allowed to administer drugs. I slept on a thin pad on the floor; I didn't earn a blanket until nearly six months in. My cell was a wire cage, one of a dozen in the room they stacked us in, drafty and leaky and damp. They took away my glasses as punishment. The guards were underpaid and only there to get out the aggression they had tucked away somewhere inside. I was raped once, by a guard, and almost raped a dozen more times by other inmates. I almost gave up; I was certain that Isaac had. I started hoarding pills, trading everything I had with the other inmates for whatever sticky bitter chalk they had cheeked away. If I was going to die in there, it was going to be on my own terms.

Now

Jax’s surprised face breaks out into a wide smile, and my heart restarts. “Oh thank God,” he says, “I was beginning to think I was the only one.” He wraps a hand around my head and pulls me in for more. He tastes like honey; his lips part, just as soft as I expected with a scratch of stubble, and his tongue darts out tentatively to meet my own. I think involuntarily of Grim's description of a slug, but that's not right at all. I don't want to be thinking about Grim but he is calling my name, “Oi, Bug!” from somewhere distantly behind us.

I pull away reluctantly and “Buuug!” rings through the trees.

Jax smirks, says, “Time to go, Bug.” He is quick to his feet and reaches down to help me up, clinging to my arm for a moment longer than necessary. “Do you have to hide this?” he asks. I shake my head but he pulls away regardless. “I did,” he confides, voice low. “I'm on the run from an arranged marriage.”

“Bug?” Grim barks sharply behind me. Dog races to greet him, but I think we are too far away for him to see, still, so I lean in and plant a quick kiss before we turn to leave.

“Is Annabelle okay?” I ask when we arrive at where Grim is crouched, hugging Dog, who is stoic and still but losing patience.

“She's okay,” he replies cautiously, voice muffled by fur. “She's probably got another month to go.” He looks up and spots Jax, and his face changes subtly, closing up. “Are you staying for the bonfire?” he asks.

“A bonfire? Absolutely!” His eyes twinkle, but I shiver internally.

I can tolerate a small fire, contained in a stove. I can even sit around a small campfire, preferably on gravel or pavement far away from any vegetation. The bonfire is an enormous conflagration in the center of the grassy field that hosts our Rendezvous; it is an accident waiting to happen. At least three times in years past it has sparked flames in the surrounding wilderness, once almost uncontrollably. Wildfires are an important player in the ecological web of life. Fires clear out old, dried out vegetation and fertilize the soil with its ash. Some pinecones won't open without exposure to the temperatures brought on only by flames. This was before the average temperature of wildfires climbed to temperatures previously unheard of, fed by too much vegetation, drought, and extreme heat.

Breathe. Combustion is a rapid oxidation reaction between fuel and oxygen, fed by the heat it produces, to produce products like carbon dioxide and water. It is not too dissimilar from your own metabolism. Wood - primarily composed of cellulose - oxidizes readily in temperatures of around 500°C; since it is not purely cellulose, the smoke it produces contains pollutants such as ozone, carbon monoxide, sulfur and nitrogen dioxide, and fine particulates that can work their way deep into the tissues of your lungs, into your cells where they can damage your very DNA.

“You alright?” Jax asks. I tear my gaze away from the flames to watch their reflection dancing in his eyes. Night has swallowed the world except for the field and the inferno at its center and Jax’s hand pressed firmly against my lower back. I want to go talk to Annabelle, but she is surrounded by family and neighbors standing stiffly as though they are guards. Are they protecting her, or holding her? My mother is tense and angry, and Grim has closed up entirely. After a coughing fit from the smoke, he spits red into the flames, sizzling when it hits the glowing coals.

I have not responded in too long, but Jax is still watching me. I shake my head. “Do you want to go somewhere less -,” he hesitates, “crowded?” He leads me away from the flames, into the darkness surrounding them.

Before

It took Isaac ten months to find me. They told me I had a visitor and took me to an open, airy room I'd never been in before, with large plush couches and the smell of coffee. They had taken away my glasses for hoarding food - a brownie I was going to trade for sleeping pills. I looked around the room, unable to make out anything at all. Then I heard his voice: “Liam.”

I was wrapped up in his arms before I could  process what was happening, my body stiff because it had been almost a year since I'd seen anything resembling a friendly face. If he could sense my reticence, it just made him squeeze tighter.

The orderly said, “That's enough,” and Isaac let go immediately, and I felt abandoned once again. A tight, sticky feeling was building in my chest as he led me over to a couch to sit down. I was still medicated - something new in the rotation - and it dulled every emotion and sensation. I felt like this could probably all just be a hallucination.

“What happened to your glasses?” he asked, and before I could answer the orderly explained that I had broken them and they needed to special order new ones. I tried to clear my thoughts enough to protest, but Isaac was already moving on. “I've been looking for you for months, Liam.” There was a quaver to his voice. Then: “What did you do?”

What did I do? to be wrongfully imprisoned in a mental hospital with no chance to leave, or communicate outside at all, drugged and starved and locked inside 24/7. I couldn't muster the energy to open my mouth to protest.

“I got you a lawyer,” he promised, “We’ll figure this out.” His lawyer believed me more than he did about my innocence, which dealt a blow to my already diminished self esteem. I was traumatized from my experience, even after I was discovered and the conditions of my imprisonment were improved, and Issac’s lack of faith in me killed me. Was it so hard to believe that a government that had taken over the media, the internet, social networks, that was spying on everyone through their phones might wrongfully imprisoned someone?

It was another three long months before they would finally release me with all charges dropped and a clean bill of mental health, but there was no erasing the trauma, no returning over year of my life that I lost. Within a week, I had gotten back in touch with Dr. Kruger; within a month, I was a part of an underground movement responsible for billions of dollars in damage to developing fossil fuel infrastructure across the country.

That's okay - the fossils fuels did trillions of dollars in infrastructure damage every year. The nukes did a bazillion in less than one day!

Now

Jax takes my hand as we cross into the patch of trees behind my mom’s table, now nearly empty of honey or jam, and we sit together against a wide cottonwood trunk, its bark rough against my back. We are quiet for a moment, listening to the distant gathering.

“Are you crying?” Jax’s voice comes from the void next to me; my eyes still have not adjusted to the dark, the ghosts of flames still dancing on my retina. I think of Grim again, the holes that have finally successfully taken over his vision, and a shudder runs through me again. I wipe my free hand over my face, damp with tears. The other is held gently in Jax’s.

“Yeah,” I admit. “My, uh, Grim is dying. And he won't talk to me about it.”

His hand tightens, squeezing my fingers. “Oh, shit,” he says, “I'm so sorry.”

I lean my head back against the rough bark. “It's ok. I'm ok.” I sniff dramatically to contradict myself.

“I never knew my grandparents,” he says, “They all lived in the city.” His parents were in college when the nukes fell. I tell him my mom was only nine. Jax is quiet; he can do the math as well as I can. I reluctantly pull my hand away from his and use my shirt to dry off my face. I'm not entirely sure what his intentions were in following me into the darkness, but I'm sure it wasn't to listen to me cry.

Despite the warmth of the day, the night air has rapidly chilled, and I feel Jax shiver next to me. “Cold? I ask.

“Yeah. Isn't it, like, September?”

“The Rendezvous usually coincides with the first frost.”

“Frost?!” He shivers again, loudly and dramatically.

“Do you want to go back to the bonfire?”

“Do you?”

I shake my head, a barely visible gesture. “Let me go get a blanket,” I offer, standing. We have two tents set up behind our table, and I am surprised to find Grim has already retired to one of them, curled up with Dog against the cold. The bonfire is still raging and will be for hours longer. I am quiet as I steal away two blankets, or at least quieter than Grim's rasping breaths.

I make my way back through the darkness to Jax, who is hugging his knees to his chest. “It's September!” he complains again as I toss him one of the blankets. They are wool, thin and scratchy but warm up surprisingly quickly. I wrap mine around my shoulders before sitting down next to him.

“What are you going to do this winter?” I ask. He clearly isn't going to survive it around here.

“I guess I should travel south,” he says, laughing.

“Doesn't it get cold in California?”

“Not this cold,” he shivers, “and only in, like, February.” The last time it snowed, he says, he was just a kid, and it wasn't even enough for a snowball fight.

“We’ll probably be completely buried by February,” I predict. Our winters fall in two categories: bitter cold and dry, or less cold and wet. “You might not believe me, but this is pretty warm,” I explain. Jax groans and shudders dramatically again.

“I've heard Texas is, like, permanently on fire now,” he says, “maybe I'll go there.” Rumors. I am reminded that he is the first stranger to cross our town in over a decade. I ask about the other community he found, and he describes a small, extremely religious town in Utah. “They were super nice though, not like, uh...” he trails off, not wanting to offend.

“Grim calls that whole group a cult,” I offer. “He used to, like, midwife for them I guess?”

“Midwife?”

“Like, delivering babies,” I explain.

“Yeah, no, I get it,” he says, “I was just surprised. He doesn't seem the type.”

“He's complicated,” I shrug. “Anyway, something happened when I was, like, eight, and he stopped going.” The Rendezvous that year was tense, and Annabelle informed me she wasn't allowed to talk to me anymore - not that that was going to stop her.

“Annabelle,” he repeats. “My, uh, fiancee? What do you call victims of an arranged marriage that neither of them want?” I shrug, and he continues, “Her name is Annabelle. It's kind of weird.” Annie doesn't want to marry him any more than he does, he assures me. They had both been blindsided by the announcement. “It was so, like, random? We barely even knew each other. I mean, we interacted at school, I guess. But I think there's an actual dowry involved.” His older brother got hitched the old fashion way: by knocking up the girl next door.

I shift uncomfortably with the topic of pregnancy, my unease over Annabelle’s situation like a weight on my chest; Mom's anger and Grim’s solemnity are not helping. Perhaps sensing my discomfort, Jax stops talking and leans against my shoulder. His dreads are a peculiar texture against my cheek, rope-like but surprisingly soft, and I want to touch them, weave my fingers through them, but it's too cold. A chill runs through me and I shiver, just slightly, but he notices and sits up.

“Ha!” he says, “I knew it. You're cold too.”

“Well, yeah, it's freezing,” I admit. “I never said otherwise.”

“The fire is probably warm,” he suggests, looking past me at the orange glow.

“Probably.” I pull myself to my feet then reach out to help Jax up, mostly for the excuse to touch him. Standing, we are nearly the same height, and his lips find mine easily in the darkness.

Before

“I need to talk to you about something.” Those are the worst words you can hear from a loved one, or someone you once loved before your capacity to feel any emotion at all was ripped from you by forced imprisonment and mind melting drugs.

Sorry.

I left Isaac the day he told me Eliana was pregnant. He knew I would, which is why he put off telling me for as long as he could, but that knowledge didn't stop him from begging me to stay. He had this idea that we could all work it out, three of us and a baby. Pssh. I had always been clear on my opinions towards children. I had jumped through a million hoops to ensure I was permanently sterile in my twenties. With emissions still high and temperatures still increasing, there was a good chance that we'd be living on a scorched Earth by the time that baby was an adult.

I was wrong about that. Thank the nukes!

I left Isaac to go live in an apartment over Dr. Kruger’s garage that he typically rented out to students. He had a wife and three kids. Ha! They had no idea he was a terrorist. Or a cheater.

It would be two years before I would talk to Isaac again, and I would find him even more broken than me.

Now

We cling to each other even as we exit the cover of the trees, the stars overhead beaming down on us brighter than the glow of the bonfire. My lips feel swollen and tender, my skin still tingling from the rough sandpaper feel of his stubble as we made out for what felt like forever. We pass by the tents and Jax shakes his head in wonder, whispering, “I can't believe you guys sleep outside in this.”

“Tents aren't outside,” I object. “Where were you planning on spending the night?”

“Um, a house?” He says it like a question. “There's, like, a thousand around here.” I don't have an answer; the idea never occurred to me. Grim and I stay in the motel when we don't feel like camping, or occasionally the library. But during Rendezvous, everyone stays at the campgrounds in tents or wagons, even the ones who live close by. One family has an old RV trailer that they make a sad old horse drag around. There are feasts and music and games and competitions for three days, then everyone packs up and dissipates.

I find my mom in the middle of a cluster of other adults whom I only recognize vaguely, chatting casually about the recent summer heat waves that nearly killed our entire garden. I give her a hug, which she accepts stiffly. “Grim never hugged me,” she once complained, “Literally. Never.” Now I make a point to do so every chance I get. She sips something warm and astringent from a mug: cider, homegrown and homebrewed, probably spiked extra with some of Grim’s rotgut. The cider is kept warm in an enormous kettle over a much smaller fire than the one blazing next to us.

“It's bring-your-own-mug,” I explain to Jax, and he digs a dented metal cup coated in a chipped blue enamel out of his deceptively small backpack. Mine is ceramic and bright pink. I stand just close enough to the bonfire to feel its tantalizing warmth and drink deeply, the alcohol burning despite its allegedly weak content. Jax is watching me, grinning unabashedly when I catch him. Thawing out has the side effect of reigniting the arousal I was too cold for earlier, and I am grateful for the blanket wrapped around my shoulders like a cloak. I can't stop thinking about his lips on mine, his fingers freezing against the skin of my back.

“Did you, um, have a house in mind?” I ask.

He takes a second to answer, probably trying to figure out what I was talking about. “Whatever's closest, probably.”

“I have a suggestion, if you're interested.”

Jax’s eyes sparkle. “Can we take my bike?”

I track down my mom again. “I'm going for a ride on Jax’s bike,” I say, head buzzing.

“Now?” Her eyes are hazel, flickering in the firelight, relaxed in the atmosphere of the Rendezvous. I nod. “Well that's just about the dumbest idea you've ever had,” she says. “You're going to crack your head open.” She waves me off and takes another deep drink from her mug.

Jax takes it “slow” but I am tense the entire ride to our destination, our path lit only by a tiny spot of light in front of us. He makes me wear his helmet and tells me to wrap my arms around his waist. “Trust me,” he says, and my grip tightens as we lean into a turn. I direct him to a house at the edge of town that was built into a hill like a hobbit home. According to Grim, it was a vacation rental; no one ever lived in it for more than a couple days at a time.

“No way, this is wicked!” Jax says as we approach the wide, circular door that still mostly fits in the frame. “It's just like the Hobbit!” I feel a warm rush at the shared reference. He pulls out an electric lantern and looks around the sparse, single room as I build a fire in the tiny fireplace that fills the space with a warm glow and slowly cuts through the chill. “So what, is this where you take all the guys you hook up with?”

I try to laugh. “Sure, all none of them.”

“Do you like girls too, or just guys?”

“Just guys.”

“So you're a virgin?”

The question makes me blush. “Mhm.”

Jax winks. “Me too. Actually, you're only, like, the second guy I've ever kissed.” I refrain from remarking that he was my first. “My first attempt didn't go very well. Turns out I'm really bad at telling when someone wants me to kiss them. He had some choice words about my ‘sexual immorality.’”

“We don't have to,” I say. “Hook-up, or whatever, I mean.” It wasn't entirely the reason I brought him here, just most of it.

“But you want to?” he asks, and I nod. He crosses the room and sits in front of me, leaning in to kiss, to wrap his arms around me, to push me gently to the floor. He grinds against me, our bulges pressed together, hand working its way first up my shirt, then down my pants. He grips me tentatively, rubbing circles with his thumb over the head already wet with precum. I'm going to finish entirely too soon so I sit up and gently pull away. “You okay?” he asks, concerned.

“Mhm,” I say, hooking my fingers under the waistband of his pants. He lays back and I pull them down, exposing his cock. I shift so I can take him in my mouth, stroking him as I lick and rub my lips all over the head. He tastes salty and a little bit sour; his pubes smell musky and warm. Then I suck, pulling him in deeper until he is tickling my throat and my gag reflex threatens to revolt. I move slowly, rhythmically up and down, shallower this time.

“Oh, fuck,” Jax moans. “I'm going to cum.” Then he does, in an explosion of hot, salty fluid - too much for me to swallow, so I have to spit out onto the dirt covered floor. “Fuck,” he gasps again, and for a second I worry I've done something wrong; but then he sits up and kisses me, tongue probing deep into my mouth, and pushes me down so he can suck on my dick, too.

If everything in the old world was about sex, I can kind of see why.

Before

If I do not talk about Eliana much, it is because although I considered her a friend, our paths only crossed for a few months, all told. We met at a protest against plans to drill part of a national forest - one of the last in the country still untouched - for natural gas. Despite the danger posed by the authorities looming over us, these types of protests - encampments - had the general atmosphere of a Rendezvous, or some sort of socialist utopia. There was a food tent with a massive buffet that everyone contributed to; counseling and social support; medical care and mutual aid.

Eliana had come to the movement via Hurricane Xavier several years earlier which finally managed to wash away the southern edge of Louisiana, including her hometown of New Orleans. She could only watch in horror - from a dorm room hundreds of miles away - as her childhood home was ripped off its foundations, live on YouNews. Her parents were never found.

Eliana studied ecology; she was particularly passionate about bees, and she was watching their demise real-time. What heartbreak! I really liked her. I thought, with our powers combined, maybe we could radicalize Isaac, at least enough to talk him out of the nonsense he was starting to talk about a Moon colony. Instead she started sleeping with him. Of course she did! Eliana was at least as beautiful as Isaac, with warm brown skin and corkscrew coils that bounced mesmerizingly around her face.

Two months after I introduced them, I was locked up. Almost two years after their baby was born, she was shot by the police while pushing the toddler to the park in a stroller. The firing officer’s excuse was: a person matching her description was wanted for shoplifting. The actual suspect was a man a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier than she was. These things happened a lot.

I saw Eliana’s face in the newspaper, and I tracked down Isaac. He was living in a neat mass-produced house made of twigs and plastic in the suburbs. The yard was neatly trimmed but scattered with balls, toys, a tiny pink tricycle. The domesticity of it all made me want to cry.

“Go away, Liam,” Isaac said, “I can't fucking deal with you right now.” I stayed put, standing on his porch as he glared at me through a closed storm door. It had been almost three years. “You're going to ruin everything.” The shrill sound of a crying toddler broke through the tension, and I almost turned to leave. Luckily I didn't, because Isaac broke down, visibly slumping and opening the door for me. I followed him inside, and met little Katie for the first time. She was a serious toddler: pudgy faced with Isaac’s wide hazel eyes and a crown of wild, springy black hair. She was crying non-stop since her mother died; she hadn't slept in days.

“Do you want me to try?” I asked.

He threw up his hands then collapsed on the couch. “Sure,” he said, laughing bitterly. “Whatever.” He directed me to the girl’s room, second to the left upstairs.

Katie was two, substantially bigger than the newborns I had any experience with, but not substantially different. She was exhausted and devastated; everything she thought she knew was ripped from her in front of her eyes. She rested her head on my shoulder as I carried her to her room and walked back and forth in front of her crib until her sobs quieted to hiccups, her eyes blinked sleepily closed. I laid her down in the crib, resting my hand on her chest for a moment to make sure she stayed asleep. I didn't want to face Isaac so I lingered a while longer, looking around the room. So much stuff: toys, furniture, books, clothing, jungle animal curtains and matching wall prints. A canvas print of the three of them curled together, eyes alight with love. I wondered how Isaac learned how to be a dad; he certainly never had anything like this growing up.

He was on his laptop when I went back down the stairs, drinking something amber-colored from a Mickey Mouse glass. He saw me and drained the glass, pouring himself more out of a half empty bottle. He ignored me as I sat down across from him, jaw tense, typing quickly and loudly.

“Are you working?” I asked.

“Yep.” He drained the glass again, squeezing his eyes closed as he swallowed. It had been a week since Eliana died.

“And you're doing this now,” I said, gesturing to the glass as he refilled it.

“Yep.” Typing, typing, typing.

“Izzy,” I started, not sure what I was supposed to say.

“How long are you planning on staying?” he asked.

I wasn't even sure he was going to let me stay when I got here. “As long as you need me.”

“Guest room is across from Kate's.” He said nothing else for the rest of the night.

Now

I wake up disoriented in a strange place, and I have to take a moment to remember where I am and why. The rising sun creeps through the far window, splashing on the wall over the fireplace which still glows warm. Jax is sleeping on his back a few feet away from me, blankets tangled up between us. I feel creepy watching him sleep, and I need to pee, so I roll to my feet and try to quietly sneak outside, ducking around the back to piss into a bush. The air is icy cold and the sunrise red and foreboding. I probably should not have stayed out all night, I realize too late, and I wonder if Grim is worried.

Jax is awake when I return, sitting up and digging through his backpack. He pulls out a metal water bottle and, watching him drink, I realize I'm parched. “Water?” he asks, waving the bottle at me. “It's clean.”

I walk over and take it gratefully. My tongue feels fuzzy and thick, my eyes sandy. We are awkward in the daylight, exposed, boundaries blurred. I hand the bottle back and he offers a sleepy smile.

“You always wake up this early?” he asks.

“I don't usually stay up that late,” I admit, yawning.

This makes him laugh. “You're cute,” he says. I blush, and he chuckles again. “Do I need to take you back?” he asks. I nod. He stands and stretches, his shirt riding up to reveal a strip of brown skin. “Just let me go take a leak,” he says. I fold up the blankets as he goes outside then meet him by the bike. “You wanna drive?” he asks. I shake my head and he frowns. Placing his hand on my cheek, he says, “I had fun last night.”

I smile. “Me too.” His face relaxes, and he pulls me in for a kiss.

It is still early for the Rendezvous gatherers when we get back, but breakfast is being made, the rich scent of eggs, frying meats, bread and jam-soaked pancakes filling the air. Jax heads straight for the buffet tent, but I go find Grim first. He is sitting at our table, lazily tossing a stick for Dog to fetch.

“You're alive,” he remarks mildly. “Your mother was convinced you'd be splattered on the side of the road.”

“I'm sure she'll be disappointed to see me,” I mutter tiredly.

He shakes his head, grimacing. “Where were you?”

“I showed Jax that old hobbit house. We, uh, fell asleep.”

He grunts. “Did you have fun?”

“Mhm.” I grit my teeth to keep from accidentally revealing anything.

“Do you feel safe around him?”

His serious tone makes me pause. “Yeah, of course.” Across the field, well out of sight for Grim, Jax is helping my mom with her contribution to the Rendezvous feast: sweet honey oat cakes, freshly grilled over a fire.

“Good.” Standing, groaning and coughing, he says, “Do yourself a favor. Remember that storage unit a couple years ago, where we found the aspirin?” I nod. “There was lube in the same box. No idea if that shit goes bad.”

I groan and drop my forehead heavily on the table, resting there for a moment while Grim walks away. Dog trots closely next to him, pressed against his leg so he doesn't stumble or run into anything. I get up to follow him, but something clinging to the grass nearby catches my eye: a praying mantis, pale tan and about the length of my pinky finger. My breath hitches - I have never seen a real one before. I quickly dig my notepad and pencil out of the disorganized pile of stuff remaining in our wagon. I sit next to the grass, pencil in hand, and start to sketch. The mantis is sluggish in the morning chill, stretching out to soak in the morning rays. Large, round compound eyes top a triangular head which pivots on a long, slender body. Wings like narrow leaves, neatly folded up against its abdomen. Six legs: two pairs spindly and wiry, one like arms, lined with ridges like teeth and primed to strike.

I am filling in the distinct black spot on the inside of its arm when Jax appears. I am too engrossed to notice him right away, and instead of interrupting he sits down nearby, watching curiously. When I have finished the drawing, I date it and note the location before closing the notepad. When I look towards Jax again he grins. “Make a new friend?” he asks.

“Yeah, um, a mantis,” I mumble. “I haven't seen one before.”

“He's cute,” he says. “I didn't know you were an artist. Actually, I realized I've been blathering on about my life and I know almost nothing about you.” I shrug. “You don't talk much.”

“I don't have much to say,” I respond dully. I stand up and stretch, my back stiff from sitting hunched over the sketch. “My life is pretty boring.”

Jax leans back on his hands, squinting up at me. “Somehow I doubt that,” he says. He reaches up, and I notice he is carrying a stack of oatcakes. “Have you tried these?” he asks. “They are delectable.”

“They're actually the only thing my mom knows how to cook.” I take the top two cakes, sticky sweet with honey, feeling awkward as I stand over him. “Grim had to teach me ‘cause she was so bad.”

“See - you can cook? Fascinating.” He scrambles to his feet and takes a bite out of the remaining oatcake. “Honey,” he mumbles, mouth full, “is nature's miracle.” He asks if I have ever had an orange, but citrus doesn't grow here; it requires too much water, and our growing season is way too short. “That's tragic. You have to come to the coast one day and I will shower you in oranges.”

I snort. “I'd like to. Travel, I mean.” I hadn't really considered it a possibility, before seeing Jax’s bike. Hearing about other people, all the possibilities for other places.

“You should. If you find a bike I'll help you fix it up.” His promise fills my chest with something warm and fluttery. “Your mum won't be happy though. She was relieved to see your brains weren't splattered all over the road.”

“I keep hearing that,” I scoff. Jax gives me a curious look; it came out more bitterly than I intended. The oatcakes only awakened my hunger and the crowd is growing at the buffet. I toss my notepad onto the table. “You up for second breakfast?” I ask.

His smile crinkles around golden eyes. “Always.”

Before

Isaac’s life had almost been destroyed by all the bullshit I got myself wrapped up in - his words - but ours actually were destroyed by his, so look who won in the end.

Ha!

For a month after Eliana died, Isaac didn't talk to me at all except to tell me about Katie: her schedule, her food preferences, her favorite park. For several months longer he would only talk to me when he had been drinking. He would talk about his relationship with Eliana, which was still open but fracturing already when she died. He talked about the cop who shot her in front of Katie, who he feared would never, ever be the same again. Mostly, though, he would talk about how much he hated me.

“Fat lot of good your little protests did,” he spat, referring to the ones against police brutality that inevitably ended with police instigated violence. He was blaming me for Eliana’s death. He hated me for leaving, for getting all wrapped up in my “eco-bullshit” in the first place. He blamed me for my imprisonment, he blamed my imprisonment for our falling apart. He nearly lost his job over my alleged crimes and had to fight to get the security clearances he needed because of his association with me. He was questioned several times after my disappearance - not because I was missing, but because I was a suspect.

I sat there and took it. Partly I felt like I deserved it: I had abandoned Isaac for a lost cause. I had accomplished nothing over the years except destruction. Dr. Kruger was blowing himself up and leaving behind a family and a pregnant affair. But also because I wanted to let him hate me; it was better than apathy.

I guess beratement is the asexual equivalent of masochism.

Now

The second day of the Rendezvous is always my least favorite: the Games, an amalgamation of track and field competitions and a rodeo. The rodeo is okay, because I only have to watch; I'm too old to wrangle goats or chase the pig around the muddy pit. We don't have horses - Mom considers even a waste of resources - but several other families do, and they put on a show prancing around weathered orange cones and jumping over sticks.

But for the foot races, throwing around logs and heavy stones, and wrestling matches, I was always expected to participate. As the oldest kid in the area - the oldest boy by half a decade - I hated towering over my peers in competitions I was massively overpowered for. I only enjoy the shooting competition, which I win every year, even against the adults.

Now that I am solidly in the throes of adolescence, I am free to sit out the games. Annabelle, too, is permitted to abstain. She sits some distance away, looking uncomfortable in the growing afternoon heat. She climbs slowly to her feet and waddles away to the shade of their campsite, belly protruding.

“Don't stare,” Grim scolds from next to me. He is laying on the grass, eyes closed, arms folded behind his head.

“It's weird though,” I say, and he grunts. “Isn't it?”

Jax sits down heavily on my other side, his sudden appearance a surprise; he had until recently been deep in conversation with my mom, who is now walking away in the opposite direction, towards our own tents. “What was that about?” I ask.

“She has a headache?” He says it like a question. “We were talking about rumored towns all around.”

“Oh.” It is always surprising to witness my mom having normal conversations with people she doesn't hate.

“She also said I better be decent to you, and if I hurt you she'll cut my brake lines.”

Grim snorts and Jax covers his mouth, embarrassed. “I thought he was asleep,” he mouths, and I laugh. We sit quietly for a moment watching a kid on a reddish brown pony race circles around old oil barrels. He places a tentative hand on my leg, and I think about last night for the thousandth time today. “So, I, um,” he starts, soundly oddly hesitant. “I was hoping you'd take me to see the library today.”

I practically jump at the chance - the library is my favorite place - but feel torn, leaving Grim there, alone except for Dog. At least until he mutters, so low that only I can hear, “Don't forget the lube.”

I am getting used to the speed of the bike but when I remark on it Jax only laughs at me. “We're barely moving, man,” he shouts, and I squeeze my arms around him as he twists the handlebar into an acceleration that makes my stomach flip flop. I try to grip the narrow seat with my knees but I still slide forward when we come to a rapid stop in the library’s overgrown parking lot, my crotch pressing into his lower back.

“Stop, Bug,” he says, but his tone is playful. “You're making me hard.”

Sex is probably the last thing on his mind when we enter the library, his eyes wide and scanning the towering shelves full of books. “Holy shit,” he says, turning in slow circles, arms extended, as he walks into the central space. “Holy fuck.” He stops his spinning to state at me, face filled with delight. “This is amazing!”

“You've seriously never been in a library?”

“My town’s burned down decades ago,” he explains. “Arson, obviously.” Books were precious currency at his Market, almost like the honey, and he could go months re-reading the same novel. “This is, like, gluttonous.”

“Well, help yourself, I guess.”

Jax starts down the first aisle, picking out books at random and reading the backs slowly before returning them to the shelves. Then he spots an author he recognizes. “No way!” he shouts, pulling down three small paperbacks: Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Trilogy. “I loved this guy. I only ever got to read the second one though.”

“You know there's five of them?” He gives me a skeptical look then glances up and retrieves the other two books. I read the series when I was eight; I was in love with the idea of hitchhiking off this planet. It must be genetic, I muse to myself. I watch as he walks the books to the front counter where he has left his backpack.

“Is that all you're going to get?” I ask.

“Are you kidding?” he asks. “This will last me a year!” He stacks the books on the countertop, then cranes his neck to see the boxes of magazines tucked away behind it.

“What's all that?” he asks.

“Oh, um,” I start laughing uncomfortably. “Grim and I found a boatload of porn in a storage unit a couple miles away and he thought it belonged here. It's, uh, surprisingly popular.”

Jax smirks and peers back at the boxes behind him. “Anything gay?” he asks.

“Some,” I say, giving myself away.

His smile widens, then falters as he looks around the space again. “This place is kind of overwhelming.”

“Do you want to leave?” He shakes his head. “Do you want to sit down?” There are a dozen plush chairs and a handful of couches scattered around the library, in various states of disrepair. I lead him to one I'm relatively certain isn't infested with mice. It's wide enough for two and I sit down tentatively next to him.

“I can't stop thinking about last night,” Jax says.

I exhale a breath I wasn't aware I was holding, relaxing somewhat. “Me too,” I admit.

Then he sighs, and I tense up again. “I'm leaving,” he says, “after this Festival, or whatever you call it.”

“Rendezvous,” I correct him. Then, “I know.” I did know that, at least subconsciously, but I had not wanted to think about it.

He twists so he is facing me, eyes scanning my face. “I'll come back though,” he promises. “If you want me to.”

“Of course I do.” I don't want to think about it. I reach for him, pulling him over as we kiss so he is straddled on my lap, his boner pressed into my abs, his butt grinding against me through our clothes.

This is the position we are in when Annabelle arrives unexpectedly at the library some time later.

Before

Isaac never had sex again. How bizarre! I suppose he was busy, but it was certainly not for lack of opportunity. Who wouldn't want to sleep with an astronaut?

Well. Astronaut in training. He never actually made it to space.

Ha!

However he got from being a nerdy little computer programmer to training to go to actual space will forever remain a mystery to me, but his success pinned on the little artificial intelligence he created, which he called B.U.G. What that stood for will forever be a mystery, too.

B.U.G. filled the void that I had left behind - a slightly nihilistic, asexual emotional support animal and sounding board - with an added bonus of being infinitely smarter than I was. Pssh. Everytime it answered a question, it used a glass of water, just poured it straight down on the sand in front of drought starved children.

I digress.

Isaac was gone for weeks at a time in training, leaving little Katie with me. It was easy in the city; I could outsource all the child-rearing jobs. I took her to a therapist, still in diapers and already traumatized by the world. I took her to toddler gym classes and swimming lessons and reading time at the library. She started daycare at three. Money was no object; Isaac was officially rich, the kind I once said we should eat.

How was I so quick to abandon my ethics and live like the bourgeoisie? Everything was falling apart; even Isaac was acknowledging it, when he was slumped over a glass of whiskey. So much was hinging on his personal rocketship, developed in part by B.U.G., and the promise it carried for a future of cheap and easy space travel. He was contracted with a company bigger than the country Lithuania that was in the process of designing and developing a lunar colony, and his small rockets would be key to transporting and inhabiting it within a decade. Several countries, friend and foe, were watching his progress.

The stress ate Isaac alive. B.U.G. was not helping, no matter how much he tried to insist on its intelligence. It wasn't a replacement for me, or Eliana, or the countless others he used to sleep with. He was drinking nearly constantly when he was home, slowly melting into the couch while Katie tried to play with him, turning on the television so she would leave him alone.

Pssh. Drivel!

I said nothing; I did nothing. I was a glorified babysitter, worth less than the software he programmed to replace me.

When he was arrested for a DUI, I was almost relieved. Pssh. He almost killed someone! I hoped he would be disqualified from his travels; let someone else take that rocket up. I didn't expect the government to bail him out; but too much was riding on the success of his mission to let him fail.

Now

I can understand that Annabelle might be upset about me making out with someone at the public library, a space she treats as nearly sacred, but I don't expect her to be quite so vitriolic about it. The words she repeats clearly come from Robert, her cult leader and priest. A droning sound fills my head, like Mom’s bees have found me, and my stomach squirms uncomfortably as she quietly berates me.

Breathe. Same-sex behavior was observed in over a thousand animal species back when people were still observing animals. The whiptail lizard, if there are any left, is a species of all females. Despite reproducing asexually through parthenogenesis, they have to simulate sex with others to trigger ovulation. Male fruit bats would perform fellatio on each other while hanging upside down from a cave. The bonobo, a smaller relative of the chimp, used sex - gay or straight - as a greeting, as currency, for comfort. Dolphins, lions, goats, penguins, ducks, elephants, even insects have been known to exhibit homosexual behavior.

Most of those are extinct now. My chest is tight and I can't hear Annabelle, but I can feel Jax pulling urgently on my arm. I follow him out of the library, Annabelle’s icy glare burning after me. I'm breathing heavily, my legs shaky and weak and the air feels thin like I have just climbed a mountain. I stumble along behind Jax to a clutch of trees lining a dried up creek bed behind the library. The effort of inhaling makes me gag. I crouch in the dust and retch, but nothing comes up.

“Breathe,” Jax says, rubbing my back. “Just breathe, man.” In, and out, in and out. I time my breathing with the movement of his hand, up and down my spine.

I spit onto the dirt. “Fuck,” I say.

“I'm so sorry.” Jax's voice is sincere, but I shake my head. Annabelle's words surprised me, they hurt, but mostly I feel foolish for my reaction; my body's reaction to a non-existent threat. Because Annabelle is the least threatening thing out there, wider than she is tall with a baby inside her. “It's not easy, finding out how they really feel about you,” he continues.

I shake my head again and straighten back to standing, feeling dizzy with a headrush. “Can we go for a walk?” I ask.

“Sure.” We walk along the dried out creek, and Jax describes being discovered by his brother with his fingers up his butt when he was twelve. He was shoved around a bit, given a fat lip and a lecture. “Keep that shit up and you'll turn out a fag,” he repeats, voice artificially gruff. Then he says, “Why am I telling you this? It was like the most embarrassing day of my life.”

“I have no idea,” I reply. “Do you still like putting your fingers up your butt?”

He blinks as though the question surprised him. “Yeah,” he grins suggestively. “Do you?”

“Never tried it,” I admit.

“You should definitely try it sometime.”

“Okay.” I grasp his hand, weaving my fingers with his, and we continue walking.

Before

Isaac moved us to a cabin when Katie was almost five - not our current cabin, but a larger one on the other side of town. It was no longer safe in the cities; riots were breaking out every day, people were getting shot while shopping for groceries, at school, driving home. It was better for everyone, even though I hated it, the confinement of it. In the city, I could ride the bus or train, however poorly public transportation was decaying. There was no leaving the cabin for me, no driving into town when he was away, which was most of the time, unless I begged a ride from the neighbors. Katie took the bus to school; Isaac had groceries and everything else we needed delivered.

During this time, everyone was low-key preparing for a war they knew was coming. Some people just hoarded toilet paper. Others, like the Johnsons, were hoarding decades worth of non-perishables, medications, solar generators and batteries. They were a young couple who had moved to the area for the same reasons we did, but that was where our similarities ended. They weren't terrible people; that only really came after they joined that cult. At first, they were perfectly cordial neighbors. Joseph was in finances - whatever that meant - and Rebecca dreamed of being his traditional wife. But they were waiting to try for their first, she confided in me one of the rare times we spoke, until after the government collapsed. They didn't want it interfering with their parental rights.

It took over a decade, but Rebecca sure got her wish! Dozens of little babies, each named alphabetically; at least the ones who survived. Annabelle, Bethany, Clarissa, Devon, Ethan, Francine... I lost track after a while.

Now

Jax’s bike, his baby, is gone when we return to the library.

“Fuck!” he shouts. “Goddamn motherf-”

I duck inside the library; Annabelle is absent. Jax is still cursing when I get back outside, his vocabulary at least as expansive as Grim’s. He throws his backpack across the lot and a jar flies out as it skitters against the pavement, smashing into a puddle of sticky goo. “Shit,” he says, eyes flashing towards me. His anger, his hopelessness makes my stomach hurt. I fight every instinct to run away but I can't bring myself to approach him so I just stand there watching him. He rubs his hands over his face, muffling his voice as he mutters, “I'm sorry.”

“I'm not sure what the appropriate reaction to losing your baby would be,” I say evenly, too quiet for the distance between us, but he laughs bitterly as if he heard me.

“Will you help me find it?” he asks.

“Yeah, of course.” I sound a lot more optimistic than I feel. The landscape is vast and hilly and barren.

The walk back to the Rendezvous is long and tense. Jax’s vivid anger transforms into a cool seething, tinged with the secret fear that he could be trapped here forever. He seems repulsed by the town, by me. I have to beg him not to confront Annabelle's family as soon as we get to the Rendezvous. It is noon, and the Games are paused for more feasting - another reason to hate them. Exercising between feasts is miserable.

I track down Grim by first spotting Dog’s joyful prancing back and forth from our table; he sits behind it, looking tired, throwing the stick whenever Dog fetches it. “Have you seen your mother?” he asks as soon as he sees me.

“Annabelle stole Jax’s bike,” I say instead of answering.

“Annabelle?” An amused look briefly crosses his face. Then he sighs. “What has Katie done?”

Jax is not amused, and neither is the family on the other side of the field, which has apparently only just noticed their eldest’s absence. A commotion, little kids with matching red hair running around shouting her name.

“Jax, you need to get out of here,” Grim says, urgently, but it's too late. Robert, leader of the commune, is storming his way over to us, steel-blue eyes fixed murderously on Jax.

“Where is she?” he barks as soon as he is close enough.

“I don't -” Jax starts.

Robert strides over to him and grabs his arm, shakes him roughly. “Don't give me that. Where is she?!” His voice is controlled and commanding, and Jax’s attempts at pulling away are futile. This is a man accustomed to being in charge. Dog is jumping around, yapping; Grim is on his feet, shuffling towards them; people are turning, watching, confused expressions on their faces. My head is filling with a rushing sound and I feel frozen, the air around me a solid mass.

“Leave him alone, Bob,” Grim says. He sounds almost flippant.

“Annabelle is missing,” he spits, clutching tighter at Jax’s arm.

“He doesn't even know who she is.” Grim comes up to well under Robert’s chin, but that doesn't stop him from standing up to the cult leader and looking him straight in the eye. “Annabelle ran away.”

He scoffs. “Some stranger like this,” he shakes Jax's arm again, who protests, “shows up and my wife goes missing and you think the two events aren't related?”

His wife?

I don't have a chance to process this. “Stranger like what, exactly?” Grim is asking, and for once Robert falters, his eyes flicking around the others who are standing around, watching. “Not a good look for you, Bobby.”

He shoves Jax away and Grim catches him before he stumbles to the ground. “Can you vouch for him?” Robert sneers. “Do you know where he's been all day?”

Grim shrugs. “I can't,” he says, “but my grandson can.”

I can feel myself trembling under a dozen or more pairs of eyes. “We were at the library,” I mumble. I stop myself from mentioning the stolen bike, and instead say simply, "He's been with me all day.”

Robert's eyes drill into me, staring me down for a moment longer. He turns to spit on the ground next to Jax’s feet. “This isn't over,” he warns, then he stomps back towards his camp.

The revelers disperse again, a few of them tsking and shaking their heads. One of the hunters a few tables down, a grizzled old man with the face of a bear, sets his hatchet back onto his table. Our family might be a bit antisocial, but Robert and his cult are not well respected at all by anyone not already a member. Particularly, I would assume, after the revelation that he is married to a fifteen year old.

My stomach twists, bile bitter in my throat.

Grim breaks the tense silence. “Are you okay?”

“Fine,” Jax replies tersely, stomping towards the clutch of trees in the other direction. My eyes follow him but I am still glued to the spot. Dog chases after him instead.

“Bug.” I jerk; Grim’s voice startles me. “I need you to find out if your mother left a note.”

I shake my head. “I need to-.”

He interrupts me. “You need to let him cool off a bit. Go find out if your mother left a note.” His voice is thin, gritty, and when he gets back to his chair he collapses into it, coughing into a dark, red-stainded handkerchief.

Before

Before Robert Whitehall was a cult leader, he was a pastor at one of the dozen Christian churches in town. He gained some infamy running a number of unsuccessful campaigns to ban books from the school and trans people from public spaces entirely. Ours was a traditionally conservative town, generally unaffected by the violent rhetoric of the cities and ignorant of politics except for how it immediately affected their own needs. For the most part, the world had already ended for them. The supply chain was increasingly unable or unwilling to extend out this far, the infrastructure was crumbling, and funds to fix anything were non-existent. It was as though they had been abandoned.

In short, people didn't have time for that nonsense, one way or another, and Bobby Whitehall's campaigns all fizzled out before they started. But the goal of the weak is not to convince everyone to his side, but enough people to keep him feeling powerful, and he was at least rich enough to buy his followers. When people started leaving the town in droves - in hopes of something better, some promise that urban life would never fulfill - he started buying up their houses and offering them to his congregation, cheap. He couldn't ban books in town, but he could create his own little town where he controlled access to everything from books to food to medical supplies. The keys to success: desperation, isolation, censorship and misinformation.

Very shortly after the Johnsons joined that church, their attitudes towards us turned icy cold. Of course they did! From the outside we looked like a gay, vaguely interracial couple with an adopted black child. A burning rainbow flag - not even our own - showed up in our yard one morning. Bags full of gravel and white supremacy propaganda showed up on our neighbors driveways. Young Katie’s friends at school started telling her they weren't allowed to play with her. People started to glare - not everyone, but enough for the whole town to start to feel hostile.

“You can't let hate win,” Isaac would say, infuriatingly calmly. Or else: “Just tell them I'm your employer.” I would never use that last one, even though it was technically the most true, even though he never paid me; he just gave me a credit card. At times, it even felt like he was my captor - where was I going to go? How? It's not like I was going to leave Katie alone, either; no matter how much she hated me.

Am I painting Isaac in an unfairly poor light again? I have no idea what he was like; he was never home, and when he was, he was talking to B.U.G. He was on a mission, and nothing would get in his way.

Now

I find Mom's note tucked in my sketchbook, scrawled on paper she had ripped from it: “taking Annabelle for med care. X. tell your friend I'm sorry.”

Jax reads the words with an incredulous expression on his face. “Your mum stole my bike,” he says slowly, not looking at me, “to take a pregnant fifteen year old on a road trip to get medical care from some imaginary facility that could be anywhere in the country?”

“That's what it looks like,” I reply weakly. I suppress the thought of Mom and Annabelle and Annabelle’s belly all crammed on the bike together, because now is not the time to laugh.

“And now I'm stuck here indefinitely,” he continues, “in the middle of fucking -.” He stops abruptly, then shouts, a gutteral “Ugh!” He kicks at a pile of leaves and Dog jumps, yelps, and scurries away despite being miles away from the kick. His face falls. “Hey, no,” he starts, and he drops to his knees to pet her, her tail thumping and swishing against dry grass. “You're a good girl, I'm sorry.” He buries his face in her fur and I turn to leave, feeling suddenly awkward. “Wait, Will,” he says, standing, and my stomach drops. Jax crosses the distance between us in a few long strides and grabs my wrist, gripping tight enough to threaten pain without actually hurting. “Why didn't you say anything about my stolen bike?” he demands.

I hesitate, trying to pull my wrist away, but he holds tight, and now it hurts. “I thought, if Annabelle ran away, she would need the head start.”

“Did you know they were planning this?”

I shake my head and when I pull away he lets me. I leave without saying anything, walking deeper into the trees because I don't want Grim to see me crying, either. Dog is following me, loudly shuffling through the leaves, sticking her long, narrow snout in everything. She looks more like a feral creature and less like a helpless puppy every day, her adult teeth growing in long and sharp white. It is only careful training that keeps her from sinking those teeth into a helpless chicken back home.

I find a clutch of fall flowers, sprays of yellow and purple and white, next to the cool rush of the river, and sit down. My chest is tight, my stomach hurts, my breathing erratic. I need to breathe. Throughout the 3.5 billion year history of life on Earth, it has had to adapt to a wide range of atmospheres, influenced by geological forces and the by-products of life itself. When the first cyanobacteria began converting carbon dioxide into oxygen, using the sun itself as an energy source, they introduced mass amounts of chaotic free radicals into the once relatively stable atmosphere over a relatively short period of time. The reactive free oxygen was toxic to nearly all forms of life at the time, causing one of the great mass extinctions of history but creating room for and mutating new forms of life. It altered the chemistry of Earth’s crust, turning iron into rust and producing many of the minerals essential for more complex life to function. It oxidized methane - a greenhouse gas - resulting in massive global cooling. It changed the chemistry of nearly every system on Earth.

“Those cyanobacteria must have thought they were real innovators!” I can almost hear Grim say.

A light buzzing disrupts my thoughts; I spot what I think is a honey bee, bouncing between purple asters to my left. I tense up, my mom’s voice echoing through my head scolding me to relax. We are far out of foraging range for even the most tenacious of Mom’s hives, so this must be a wild bee. Honey bees are generalists, capable of concentrating the nectar and pollen from nearly any flower into something edible and nutritious. When they were introduced to North America, they quickly outcompeted the native bees, greedily hoarding all available resources in the form of sweet, golden honey.

So innovative!

As I look closer, however, I notice this bee is not a honey bee at all. Its coloring is wrong - pale grey and black with iridescent green eyes - and the bottom of its fluffy abdomen is coated with yellow grains of pollen. It is a leafcutter bee, a solitary bee that makes nests out of empty tubes and cavities and lines them with leaves. I have never seen one before, and I regret not having my sketching supplies with me.

I wonder briefly if I am allergic to leafcutter bee venom, too.

Before

For want of someone to talk to who wasn't a child, I started to hitch a ride on Katie’s school bus into town once or twice a week. It was an hour long ride for her, and we would stand outside on the corner of the road in the cold winter, before the sun had even crept over the horizon, and hope that none of the oversized trucks speeding through the dirt roads of that low-density rural neighborhood would slam into us in the dark. I would go to a coffee shop, the library on the one day a week it was open, or wander around the closed and decaying street that made up a “downtown.”

The only commerce, the only employment left was with the national corporations and franchises - that big box store, those fast food restaurants - and nobody was happy working there. I learned that, if I wasn't afraid to voice my opinion, suddenly no one else, either. I learned that everyone kind of shared the same opinions, even if they didn't know it: they hated their bosses, they hated the ultra wealthy who owned them, they hated the fact that televisions were cheaper than food and they were drowning in cheap, mass-produced everything. They hated Robert Whitehall and his privacy invading politics, his book bans and vitriol. They hated feeling helpless and hopeless and out of control.

What could I do? I couldn't feed everyone, but I could guide them to the realization that they can feed themselves. I could inspire them to take chances and talk them through their fears of failure and economic devastation; encourage them to unite and work together. I could host them in my kitchen with coffee and jam cakes while they mourned the downfall of society, then help them find a way to build up a life of subsistence and self-reliance even as I failed to accomplish any such actions myself.

What I gained, which Robert could never have - no matter how godly his converts saw him as - was an actual community built on respect and social well-being. The federal government would have called my discussions radicalization: by that point a crime on par with my eco-terrorist tendencies of years past. If it had the time or resources to concern itself with my activities in small town Colorado, that is; but everything was falling apart for them, too.

Now

When I can breathe without sobbing, I return to our table at the Rendezvous grounds. Jax is taking the last few remaining jars of honey and jam from in front of an indifferent looking Grim.

“I'm taking these as payment for my bike,” he grumbles as he carefully stacks them into a straw bag he must have also taken from us.

“What are you going to do with them?” I ask, but he pushes past me without answering.

Through the rest of the afternoon I watch as Jax treks back and forth between the various tables, staunchly avoiding the commune’s, as he slowly trades up the jars for steadily more valuable goods: trinkets, toys, blankets, coats, food, electronics. Finally, empty handed, he trudges back to our table.

“Can I borrow your wagon?” he asks, deflated.

“Sure,” I say, gesturing towards it. I have just emptied it completely so we can repack our camping gear and everything we have traded for over the past day. Although a note from Annabelle, tucked neatly amongst her things, has exonerated us from her disappearance, we have decided without discussing it to leave the Rendezvous early.

Jax hesitates, so I ask, “Do you want help?”

“Yes.”

I follow him out to where he has stacked an enormous pile of grain bags, stuffed full of oats and corn. I quietly help him load the bags into the straining wagon and pull it haltingly across the trampled field to a family that raises horses. A young boy named Adam stands stoically with an intimidatingly tall, sleek black horse, already saddled, as his dad counts the bags and shakes Jax’s hand.

“I broke ‘im myself,” the boy announces proudly as he hands the reins over.

“Does he have a name?” Jax asks.

Adam shrugs. “I call ‘im Blackie,” he says casually, and Jax winces.

I keep a few feet away from the horse as we walk away from the grounds, the silence looming between us. “Do you even know how to ride?” I ask finally.

“I do, actually,” Jax retorts. “Do you?” I shake my head. “You should learn,” he says, casually stepping into the stirrup and pulling himself up. Sitting on the horse’s back, he towers over me. “I'm going south. If I don't run into your mum, I'll come back in the spring for my bike.”

“South?” I repeat, feeling slow.

“Santa Fe. There are these rumors,” he shrugs, “I think it's where your mom is headed.”

“Good luck, I guess.”

“Take care, Bug.” Without waiting for a response, Jax pulls at the reins and kicks at the horse’s round sides, and they are gone, clopping evenly down the road.

Before

That house burned down the summer before Isaac died, and we moved out to our little cabin in the middle of nowhere at my insistence. I was scared! Robert Whitehall had convinced his followers to commit arson to get rid of me. He had put a kid's life in danger!

Katie already hated me for existing, but moving her even further away from her school and friends was unconscionable. She screamed at me, berated me with her dad’s words, even tried to beat me with tiny, flimsy fists. I tried patience, love, apathy, ignoring her. It wasn't until after the nukes fell that we would resolve our differences. “Look, kid,” I would say, the sky above glowing a sickly yellow from radioactive ash. “Here we are. You can't survive without me, and pretty soon I'm not going to be able to survive without you. We have to work together.”

Little Katie - elementary school dropout - spent the best years of her life researching how to grow food in an increasingly hostile environment, how to build fires for heat or for cooking, how to make jellies and jams and fruit preserves, how to dig and build an outhouse when our septic system failed. She built the beehives and caught the honey bees herself from wild swarms, just to satisfy a sweet tooth. We had the supplies prepared by Isaac’s last minute rush of uncertainty and paranoia; an omen if I never recognized one. Pssh. We had supplies traded to us by local families for my services as a nurse and midwife. But by the time she was an adult, Kate was single-handedly keeping house and farm well enough for all three of us to be fat and happy.

If that's not love, I don't know what is.

Now

There is already snow glistening on the ground - albeit only a thin layer - by the time Mom makes it home, riding tall on a sleek, black horse named Thomas. She is alone, Annabelle and her baby both safely tucked away in an underground sanctuary beneath the inhospitable super desert that was once Santa Fe, New Mexico.

“And we're all just supposed to believe you, that she's fine?” I demand. I am angry - I am pissed - I am so livid, I can't see straight. Grim is pale and weak on the couch, the effort of his joy at Mom’s return sending him into a thick, bloody hacking fit.

She produces a real, actual photograph, blurry and washed-out, of an exhausted looking red-headed Annabelle with a wrinkly, red-faced baby in her arms. “She named him Joseph,” Mom says, shrugging.

On the back, Annabelle has written a short note in tiny, neat block print.

“Will, Thank you for your assistance in getting me and my baby to safety. I will always pray for you. - Anne”

I turn the photograph around and stare at it, my mind buzzing with the novelty of it. “Where'd you get the camera?” I ask.

“It's the hospital’s. They let me take two pictures, one for her parents too.”

“Hospital?”

“Well, something like it. Real doctor and nurses, but supplies are pretty limited.” Annabelle was too young to support a healthy pregnancy; she'd nearly bled to death even there.

“How did you know about it?”

There have been rumors for years, she tells me, as though it is obvious, but it isn't, not to me. Until I met Jax, I thought maybe we were the only survivors. I hand the picture to Grim, who squints at it, unseeing, before waving it back at me. The baby’s grey-blue eyes stare through me unnervingly.

“That's your half brother,” my mom remarks casually, and I hate her for it. I am not surprised, however, that the man who married a fifteen year would also have raped my mother at around the same age.

“Katie,” Grim murmurs childingly. He is dying, and Mom abandoned me to deal with it alone.

“I have something else for you,” she says, handing me a neatly folded yellow note. “The horse is yours. You should go while you have the chance.” Her voice turns grave as she tries not to look at Grim. I scoff and climb up to the loft to read the note. Jax’s handwriting is thin and spidery, and I have to squint under the dim lamplight and the tears blurring my vision.

Before

I got only a few short months of Isaac's love back in the end, but they were the sweetest months of my life. He finally forgave me - and I finally forgave him - during a blizzard that locked us together in the cabin for nearly two straight weeks. By the end of it Katie was practically buzzing through the walls. At least we still had a bathroom back then, and not just the outhouse.

It was an actual, physical fight that got us back together. Isaac had been drinking and was planning on driving to the airport through a whiteout blizzard by himself. After nearly killing someone during his first DUI - a fucking idiot! I wouldn't let him, had to wrestle the keys from him in the end. He gave me a bloody nose and I kicked him in the balls and chucked the keys out into the snow. He almost gave himself frostbite looking for them, then came inside and passed out for twelve hours. By the time he awoke, there was four feet of snow on the ground and I had placed the spare keys on the hook. I should have kept him there forever!

While we had plenty of food and firewood for the long storm, he had none of the alcohol he had grown accustomed to coursing through his blood when he had to endure my presence. Self-medication, it turned out, for the feelings my presence was constantly stirring in him. Not hatred at all, but love: that fickle emotion always disguising itself as other things. Hatred or disgust, fear or loathing, sadness or yearning.

“You broke my heart, Liam,” he said. “You just up and threw away everything he had together.” I always did whatever I wanted without regard for the consequences. I have always had him to bail me out. But the second he slipped up, I was out the door.

I was selfish, but in my defense, so was he. He never really listened to what I was doing; he’d never even asked about my experience at the hospital. He was aghast by my descriptions of the abuses I endured - I never even told him about the night with the security guard - and ashamed by his ignorance. He apologized to me for the first time in years, and like a fucking doormat I accepted his apology.

Thank goodness for that! Isaac blew himself up the following spring. His last words to me were, “Love you, Liam. I'll see you and Katie on the other side.”

All of humanity’s hopes and dreams exploded in front of us. The United States blamed Russia, who blamed China, who blamed North Korea, who inexplicably took credit for it all.

Then the nukes fell, and none of it mattered anymore.

Future

“Don't worry about me, Bug,” Grim tells me before I leave. “There's gonna be a blizzard soon, and I'm gonna go for a walk.” His body will slowly slow down as its core temperature drops, sacrificing fingers and toes in a desperate attempt to keep his organs warm, until even that isn't enough. Rather than choking to death on his own blood, he will lay down and fall asleep buried in a coffin of snow.

And I'm not supposed to worry.

“I'll be fine,” Mom says, “I actually look forward to being alone.” She kisses me on the forehead, then says, “Be good, Will.”

We - Thomas, Dog, and me - make it far enough south that the blizzard is a distant dream; forests bleed away to grasslands bleed away to desert, where winter nights are frigid cold but during the day the sun beats a blazing fire on the land. At night I roast rabbit over a campfire and I read the yellow note again and again and again.

“Bug - I hate how we left things, and for that I'm sorry. I shouldn't have blamed you for what happened. You have no idea how glad I am I ran into your mom - here’s hoping she doesn’t cut my brake lines.

I'm headed to this mythical underground Santa Fe for the winter. Maybe I'll see you there. Thomas is a great horse. You'll have no trouble learning how to ride on him.

I can hear you say it now: ‘I can't believe you named a horse Thomas.’ Ha!

XO Jax”

Also by Liz Boysha

Apis

Queen of the Bees

Wild Things

Roach

Where There's Smoke

Unloveables

So Here We Are

Watch for more at Liz Boysha’s site.