By Kristin Berkey-Abbott

Even though he knows that every gun is fully loaded, he checks the rifle before he goes to the barn to saddle the horse. He rides the perimeter of his property, keeping an eye open for any creature who has scaled the fences. In this part of the country, he knows he can’t count on the authorities to keep his family safe or his property secure.

When he first moved to this arid land, he tried to grow corn, like his father did, like generations before his father. Year after year, he spent enormous sums on water, only to end up with stunted stalks and stubbles of cobs. Now he’s glad that he can’t grow tall crops: fewer places for people to hide.

He counts the goats to make sure they’ve all survived the night. His grandfather had a vast herd of cattle because his father had been a cowboy who drove the herd from Texas to Montana. His great-grandfather could keep track of each cow; his grandfather could only give a good estimate. But he knows every goat. He wonders if he should add some lambs to the land. Once, he could have made a decent living selling sheep, but now he suspects it would cost too much to ship the lamb to distant cities to be eaten during Muslim holidays and Easter.

Would his family enjoy a lamb dinner? He could persuade potatoes to grow in this arid landscape. His mouth waters at the memory of a dinner in a fine steakhouse, jacket potatoes and a huge hunk of beef. Those days will likely not return. Perhaps he should not tempt his family’s palate to finer things.

A shadow at the edge of his vision: a rabbit or a vagrant? How long since he has seen a rabbit in this part of the country? Should he shoot in the general direction, to scare whatever’s there? He weighs the cost of the bullet, the time cleaning the gun, and decides to leave the shadows be.

In the open field, he lets the horse run at full gallop. He will never again experience the thrill of his small plane, the joy of a boat zooming across the sea, and even a bicycle seems ridiculous, although he remembers the heat of muscles pumping a bike down an empty street bringing him a happiness. Once he felt the oneness with machines that he now feels with his horse.

***

I am the smudge of smoke, the trees of a continent destroyed so that a new generation of agrarian farmers could move west. I am the pianos abandoned in the early miles of the Oregon Trail, and later, the finer furniture, and later still, all the possessions of any weight at all. I am the bones of a hungry people moving north, desperate for water, finding only stone.

***

She fills the water jugs and puts a few extra in the truck for good measure. It’s a long drive across a harsh interior, one that she takes once a month to resupply the ranch.

Once, she carried food and even more water. Once, she saw more refugees from the civil wars raging to the south. Once, she saw more immigrants, always illegal, always moving toward the possibility of better jobs.

Sometimes she gave them rides. At other times, they scattered when she got out of the truck, and she’d leave the water for them to retrieve later.

Now, she sees no humans, but old habits die hard, and she always carries extra. She remembers the time she found a family in the barn. She knew enough Spanish to invite them to breakfast. She gave them an extra bottle of sunscreen and some water purification tablets to take with them. She has always wondered what happened to them.

To make that voyage with a baby on your back: she simply cannot imagine the forces that must have conspired to make a mother fling herself across borders and through unforgiving landscapes. She thinks of Herod and the babies of Bethlehem; she thinks of modern dictators who cannot die soon enough.

She feels rooted to this land, although smarter people have seen the writing on the wall, or more literally, the drying of the rivers and the rain abandoning this desert land, its mistress. She sometimes wonders if she should have joined them in their flight to verdant agricultural zones. But this ranch, bought by her great-grandmother, is her only family inheritance and if she wanted to trade it for money, she wouldn’t get very much.

At least here, the land is her own, and she can usually supply all the electricity she needs through the wind that whips through the turbines. At least here, she has room for the huge sculptures that she creates for her clients who can afford to add to their collections. At least here, she can keep chickens alive and a patch of vegetables growing year-round. Her grandmother always said, “Well, we won’t starve.” It’s a thinness of a family legacy, but it’s what she has.

Occasionally, in the coolness of the dusk, she lets herself think about who will come after her. She’s already let the far outbuildings crumble back into dust. She knows that it won’t take long after her death for the land to reclaim her ranch. In older times, she’d have created a trust, or she’d have left this land to someone with a vision—an arts colony, perhaps, or a place of denial where people could come to work off months or years of wretched excess.

Now she can’t imagine how she’d find a lawyer or pay for the service if she could find one. Do they still have lawyers in big cities? Do big cities still exist?

***

I am the colors of the desert, the sand, the bleached rocks, a distant peak covered in snow. Once I was the floor of the sea, but now I lie exposed. Deep below my surface, you’ll find a huge reservoir of water, but you cannot access it. My fierceness frightens, so people make up stories about gyres and energy sources and the twelve vortexes. But do not be fooled. I will suck you dry in hours, only your bones left behind as a mute witness.

***

She looks through the pack that someone has left behind. Few stores remain open in this burned-out neighborhood, but she keeps the money she finds in a wallet. She digs into the depths of the pack and finds a pair of socks, which will be more valuable than the money. She can wear them or trade them for something that she needs.

At the bottom of the pack, she finds some Nutriment Bars, still sealed in their wrappers. She never liked them, back when she had more choices, but now she’s grateful for their promise of a complete meal in just a few bites.

And then, her fingers close around an apple. She smells it. She runs her fingers across its spotted surface. Her stomach rumbles.

She remembers those Halloweens and the children who appeared at the door dressed in costumes that made no sense to her recent immigrant self. How they would have turned up their noses at the idea of fruit instead of candy. Their parents would have thrown the apple away, the fear of razor blades or poison trumping the ancient rule not to waste food.

She nibbles the apple. She remembers the crisp apples of her first autumn in a northern land. This shrunken fruit, with its mealy flesh, is a pale shadow of those apples. And she remembers weeping in an orchard that first autumn, because she did not want apples. She wanted something that would taste like her distant home.

She cannot believe she used to have tropical fruits that grew on trees outside her house, the same tropical fruits for which grocery stores once charged a small fortune. Once, she spent close to an entire paycheck just to taste the mangoes and the papaya, fruits considered exotic here.

That was back when she had a steady paycheck, when she could spend part of her money on a taste of home. She thought there would always be children to tend, toilets to clean. She knew that she could do other tasks with her woman’s body if she grew exceedingly desperate.

Those tales of easy money and an endless supply of jobs, those were the stories that wooed her here. She knew she wouldn’t have legal status. She knew she wouldn’t understand much of the language. She thought she could survive and send money home.

She thought it would be just for a little while. She’d look after the white children of wealthy women in this northern city. They’d work for their money, and she’d work for hers, and she’d send most of her paycheck back to help her family.

She knew she wouldn’t see her children, but she thought she’d be home in a year or two. She would sublimate her maternal yearnings into the care of a stranger’s children.

She inspects a shoe that she finds lying in the gutter. One hole on the top, which she can patch. If the sole had been breached, she’d have chucked the shoe behind her. Where is the other shoe? She doesn’t want to look too deeply, for fear of finding a severed foot. What use is one shoe without the other? She leaves the shoe in the shadows.

She didn’t anticipate getting stranded on this distant shore. She wouldn’t have had the abstract thought to understand fuel shortages and oil embargos and the computer networks that keep an infrastructure running. She would have understood sickness, some modern contagion that swept through a city, but she wouldn’t have foreseen the damage it could do.

Her southern island history serves her well in these times. She understands how to cope with a flickering electrical grid, how to scavenge, how to make a way in a world she doesn’t understand.

She wants to lie down in a subway tunnel and will herself to die. But as long as she can convince herself that her children might be alive somewhere, and against all odds, they might find each other, she trudges through another day.

***

I am the dirty, distant city that has destroyed many a plan before I met yours. I am the seducer who sings that you will be the one, the exception, the success that makes the others follow. Go ahead: chase your visions. You’ll be walking in canyons of concrete and steel, weeping your tears of misery, and I won’t even notice. I’ll devour your dreams for dinner and suck on your hopes for dessert.

~~~

After earning a Ph.D. in English, Kristin Berkey-Abbott has published a wide variety of individual short stories and poems, along with three larger collections: Whistling Past the Graveyard (Pudding House Publications), I Stand Here Shredding Documents, and Life in the Holocene Extinction (both published by Finishing Line Press). She has spent decades in higher ed, as a teacher and an administrator. She continues to teach college level English classes, both in person at Spartanburg Methodist College and online at Broward College.