She drifts through the house, running her fingers along the walls, feeling the pebbled texture of the fresh paint, a bright yellow that will eventually strain their eyes and be covered with something softer, but for now…a statement.
The kitchen radio is on. So is the dining room radio and the living room radio and the bathroom radio, each playing a different broadcast. The effect is chaotic but exciting, like conversation noise at a party. The one in the kitchen is playing music, so she turns it up while she digs in the fridge. There’s something special about this music. It’s not an ancient recording of long-dead musicians—it’s live. It’s raw and messy, full of gleeful mistakes, and between songs the musicians are talking to each other.
She emerges from the fridge with an apple and some cheese from the neighbor’s sheep, tucks the portable radio under her arm, and takes her picnic to the back yard. Usually she’d invite her friends to join her, but she feels a need to be alone. Something about the music. The hue of the light outside. A faint whisper from somewhere in her head.
Silvery clouds roil above her, and the bristly yellow grass seems to reach toward them, begging for something to drink. The wet summer gave way to a dry autumn. The arid air makes her lips flaky, but it’s cool and crisp and electric.
“I love the new air,” she says to the air. “It’s like taking a bath in fizzy water. Can you feel it, Dad?”
She sets the radio in the grass and sits cross-legged in front of the marker.
“No one knows what’s different. They’re still trying to figure it out. But I bet you know, don’t you? I hope you can feel it too.”
No one knew Abram Kelvin well enough to guess what he’d want for his grave. What he would have wanted is no grave at all, believing he neither needed nor deserved a memorial. But as he often failed to realize while alive, the threads of his life were tied to many others, and they believed differently. So his daughter chose his marker: a small plank of lumber from the ruins of a nearby house, unpainted, unvarnished, soon to become earth. For his epitaph: just his name. The rest will be kept in the minds of the living, until they too become earth and surrender their stories to the Library.
“It’s like your drawings,” Sprout says, addressing her father’s grave though she knows he’s not in it, just a place to rest her eyes. “Remember when you showed me those drawings from when you were little? They were so ugly! You sucked at drawing, Dad!” She laughs and takes a bite of the apple, wild grown, unbelievably juicy and sweet. “But the ones from later were a little better ’cause you were more grown up. And if you didn’t quit, you probably would’ve gotten really good and drawn something really pretty. So it’s like that, you know?”
The clouds are shifting fast. Bright spots appear and sunlight bursts through, warming Sprout’s face with a golden glow. “Except the world’s not gonna quit,” she says, dribbling apple juice onto her chin. “’Cause we’re not gonna let it.”
She stuffs some cheese in with the apple. The combined flavor is strange, but she resists the impulse to spit it out, and as she continues to chew, her puckered lips ease into a smile of pleasure. Another discovery. Every day a new amazement. She opens her mouth to start talking about food, then closes it and cocks her head. She clicks off the radio and listens.
A distant whisper, like leaves rustling in a mile-high tree. She looks up. She listens. Her smile widens, revealing new teeth growing into the gaps.
“I know you did, Dad,” she says through a mouthful of apple and cheese. “And I know you still do.”
Ella Desconsado watches from upstairs as Sprout chats with her father. Ella is glad she undertook the trek from her bed to the window. She stumbled a few times, wracked by fits of coughing; she wasn’t sure she would make it, but knowing what she knew about this day, she felt a need to see what she saw. Now she turns around, takes a deep breath, and begins the return journey.
She wishes Julie were here to scold her for straining herself. When she woke up this morning filled with certainty, she almost asked the girl to stay. But Ella has never been one to make a scene over herself. She never liked big birthday parties. Her wedding was simple and intimate. Life is full of milestones and markers, transitions and rites of passage, so why should this one be any fussier than those?
She falls back into bed with a deep sigh and clicks on her radio. It takes some force to move the dial away from Fed FM, but once it’s free of the sediment, it glides easily. Most of the stations are still personal pleas, signal flares for lost loved ones—we’re alive, come find us, we’ll be waiting—but a few public programs have started to appear. Ella pauses on a man talking about agriculture. Then a woman describing a new town founded by Nearlies. Then a conversation in Spanish about blasting down the border wall. Finally she settles on her favorite show.
“Hello question-marked world, this is Huntress Tomsen with the Unknown Almanac, broadcasting today from South Cascadia, specifically Post, specifically the belly of Barbara, my studio on wheels. Before I serve delicious news and ripe updates I want to introduce you to the…to my friend, Julie. Julie Cabernet, one of Post’s new civic organizers, and also my friend.”
“Hi, Huntress. Hi, everyone.”
Ella smiles. Her lungs tighten and her breaths grows shallower. Spots appear in her vision. She allows her eyes to close and it feels like releasing a heavy weight. It’s comforting to realize she’ll never have to lift it again.
“What is a civic organizer?” Huntress asks. “What do you do? Your father was an Army general and the city’s commanding officer, are you his successor? Do you lead Security and govern the city? Radio isn’t supposed to have ‘dead air’ so please say things now.”
Julie laughs. “No, I’m not the general. It’s not like that anymore. What I do is…”
Ella feels the darkness behind her eyes deepening, from a dim field of colorful static to a softer, quieter black. She sees Julie the small child, tasting wine for the first time in that roach-infested Brooklyn apartment. She sees Julie the wounded girl without a mother, full of rage but unsure where to aim it, grasping blindly for answers. And she sees Julie the woman—this woman on the radio, this organizer, this leader, calmly explaining how a new world might work.
Ella is overwhelmed. She can’t comprehend the privilege she’s been given, to have seen the things she’s seen, known the people she’s known.
Do you see her, Lawrence? she says into that deepening darkness. Do you see our Julie?
She hears three tiny voices laughing downstairs.
Do you see all our kids?
The room fades. Her body fades. She can breathe freely now, and she takes thirsty gulps of that cool, soft nothing.
Did you ever imagine we’d have a family so big?
She sees light at the edges of the darkness. A warm orange glow like a reading lamp. She must be back in her home, because she’s surrounded by bookshelves. She must be sitting across from her husband with a mug of mint tea, both of them lost in their books yet still alert to each other’s presence. A firm awareness that they’re not alone.
“Lawrence?” Ella says without looking up.
“Yes, Ella,” part of us answers. “I’m here.”
Ella smiles.
