Anna decided to leave school when all their classes went online. She’d met a guy, over the summer, who’d invited her out to the country. He had some sort of organic farm and Anna thought it would be nicer there than in lock down. Kylie helped her haul her mini fridge out to the curb. She bagged up her dresses and heels and dropped them in the free bin downstairs. Then, Kylie walked with her out to the far end of the parking lot where Anna’s car sat alone. They pulled down their masks and the air was wet and thick with spring. In the flooded cattails near the softball field, peepers pulsed and when the wind came it was just a little bit warm.
“You should come,” Anna said. She rolled the driver’s side window down and programmed an address into her phone. The directions began repeating quietly.
Kylie shook her head. “I’ve got to finish the semester.”
“You’d be safer.”
“I’m fine, it’ll be ok. I’ll come visit after finals.”
Anna smiled. “Promise?”
“Promise.”
She started the car, and the voice of the mapping app talked loud through the speakers. As Anna pulled back, she waved through the open window. Then Kylie heard music come on and she watched the taillights head up the hill by the quad, then vanish into the big pines along the avenue. That night, from her half-empty room, she watched a group of masked locals scoop the mini fridge into the back of their truck. They pulled up the street and stopped at the next pile of giveaways outside another dorm.
For the next six weeks, Kylie left her room only once a day for a two-mile run around the reservoir. On Saturdays, she hauled her laundry to the washroom at the assigned time. The cafeteria staff delivered meals, setting the tray on the floor, they’d knock, and then move on. Her parents sent heavy boxes of snacks. Chips, candy, energy drinks. She watched every season of Gilmore Girls, then started at the beginning of Grey’s Anatomy again. She rearranged the room so that her computer backdrop was a wall strung with photos and fairy lights. When classes met, most of the other students’ screens were black.
Her parents called in and took her on a video tour of their quarantine hotel room. In the background, her brother practiced violin while her sister took voice lessons over the computer. Her father was still sick but doing better. At first, she and Anna texted as often as they usually did, ten or twenty times a day, but then her messages slowed down. The reception was bad, Anna said, and then electricity was limited. Finally, phone use was restricted to once a week. On Sundays, Kylie would receive a long string of messages. There was a huge garden, a draft horse, and chickens who lay rainbow-colored eggs. She sent a selfie once and her face was flushed with freckles as it had been when she was a little girl. She’d been hiding the freckles with foundation since middle school, and it was a secret joy of Kylie’s to watch the freckles appear each night when she wiped herself clean with makeup remover. Kylie took a picture of herself by the wall with the fairy lights and sent it off. Anna didn’t reply for six days.
A week before the official end of classes, Kylie had already completed all her online exams. The college wasn’t saying anything about next year, but the rumor was that campus would be closed for at least a semester, maybe two. The weather was warm, and Kylie slept with the windows open now, although there were mixed reports about the safety of keeping windows open. At night, from town, there were fireworks.
She was one of a hundred students who remained on campus. One girl down the hall had taken all her sleeping pills and been rushed out by medics. Another made porn videos for her followers and was richer, as she said on IG, than she ever imagined. Kylie tried, as she had always tried, to keep on schedule, and to look ahead. It was the best way to stay focused. Med school, then residency, then fellowship. A white coat and a private office. Her face on an ID badge and the name ‘Dr. Connors’. Dr. Connors had an apartment along the harbor and a cottage on the Cape. Her dogs were trained well enough to jog beside her without a leash. Dr. Connors was Kylie, but Kylie wasn’t her quite yet and so Kylie could admire her from the distance that separated the present from the future.
The college sent out an email at the end of the month announcing their plans to close the campus for the fall semester. Lab courses were canceled but would be held in the spring when, they hoped, the college would be in-person again. Kylie stared at the text. All the courses she’d signed up for in the fall were labs, the only requirements left before graduation. She called her parents. Come join us, her mother said. You’ll have to wait two weeks in another room and then we can all be together. The house upstate is open, if you want it, her father messaged from his isolation room in the hospital, but from what I heard the town is boarded up and you can’t get grocery delivery all the way out there.
Kylie texted Anna, “can I come visit?” and three days later, on a Sunday, Anna replied, in all caps, “YES!” She dropped a geo pin and sent a packing list. Yoga mat, hiking shoes, work clothes, sleeping bag, everything had to fit in a backpack. Kylie told her parents she was going with Anna and as always, this was enough, she said it was just a visit, although she hadn’t decided what she’d do next. In the dorm room, Kylie took down the fairy lights, put the polaroids of her and Anna back into their friendship album, rolled her sheets and pillows into trash bags, boxed up her clothing, and carried everything down to her car. She hadn’t driven it since there was snow on the ground and trash had blown up against it and settled behind the tires, masks, rubber gloves, and potato chip bags. She loaded her belongings into the backseat then returned to her room. She swept and sanitized and then dropped the key into a box outside of Res Life. She didn’t see anyone out on campus. The lawn in front of admissions was busy with robins.
When she turned on the car, the air smelled like before. Fast-food, Chapstick, caramel iced coffees. But after a few cycles of the fan, the smell was gone. Kylie plugged in her phone and entered the address that Anna had shared. The place was three hours north and west, across the river and up into the mountains. After leaving the quiet of campus she found the town busier than she expected, cars parked in long lines in drive-thrus and fast-food joints. She stared at families out in yards, kids jumping through sprinklers, people walking their dogs, weeding gardens, a girl laying in the sun, maskless, working on her tan. But downtown, most of the businesses were closed and the streets were empty. She pulled onto the expressway and headed north.
She and Anna had been planning this summer for a long time. They’d book a cottage on the beach, they’d get tattoos, little ones, and learn how to make pasta from Anna’s grandmother when she flew in from Florence. Everything seemed impossible now, and silly, and Anna’s grandmother had died in the first wave. At a gas station, over the state line, Kylie put on her mask at the pump. Inside, the attendant stared at her behind a wall of plexiglass. There were no other customers.
The sun was just starting to set when the mapping app told her to pull off onto a seasonal road. It wove past abandoned farms, and double-wide trailers roofed with tarps. A few miles in, the map said to turn right. There was nothing there, just a parking area, but Kylie parked and double-checked the address. This was it. You have arrived, her phone told her, twice, before she closed the app. There were two other cars in the lot. Neither of them was Anna’s. She’d promised to meet her when she arrived but there was no one in sight. Kylie got out and stood in the heat. She could hear nothing human at all, just birds and bugs and a kind of pulse from the warmth of the sun. It reminded her of summer camp, when she and Anna had been sent on a spirit quest and been confined for two days to a little tent about a half mile from their cabin. At first the silence had scared them, but by the second day they’d sat in the dappled light and journaled, quietly, braiding and then re-braiding each other’s hair until their counselor trekked in to bring them back.
Anna had said that she found something that day, a vision, but Anna had always been the one to feel things deeply. Last year she’d become a Christian for a few months when she was dating a guy who played guitar in a church band. Before Anna left that spring, they’d been sharing their dreams each morning, trying to understand what they meant.
Kylie went around to the side of the car and pulled up her pack. She tested its weight against her shoulders and set it on the hood. The sun was closing over the ridgeline to the west. She checked her phone again. Nothing. But then she heard footsteps sliding down the rocky trail and Anna yelling her name. She came out of the wood shadow smiling, arms open, and Kylie rushed to her. They rocked back and forth, laughing, and then pulled back to look at each other. Anna was wearing a worn cotton dress and had wrapped her hair in a low bun at her neck. Freckles swam over her cheeks and nose. She smelled like sweat and Kylie noticed tufts of hair under her armpits and dirt caked into her knees.
“You can take that off,” Anna said, “we don’t cover ourselves here.”
Kylie folded her mask into her pocket. “You look so healthy!”
“I feel like I’m really myself for the first time ever. Here, let me help you carry stuff.”
Kylie swung her pack over her shoulder and lifted a box of food out of the trunk.
“Oh,” Anna said, frowning, “we won’t need all that junk.”
“I brought the Reese’s you like,” Kylie said, “and the raspberry seltzers we had left over from the party last fall.”
Anna clicked her tongue, “we don’t eat any of that here. Just keep it in your car. Todd can donate it to the food shelf later.”
Kylie shut the car door and handed Anna her yoga mat. Anna looked up at the setting sun. “We’ve got to hurry to get to the pick-up spot before dark, come on,” she started back up the path.
“How far are we from the farm? I didn’t see any houses or anything,” Kylie asked, following her up into the trees. Anna’s white dress seemed to glow.
“It’s about a mile on foot, then Rowan will take us the rest of the way in the farm truck. It runs on grease,” she added, “from fast-food places. Rowan and Todd pick up barrels of it every few weeks.”
“Gross,” Kylie said.
“Yeah, gross that people eat that stuff. But you know what, the truck smells like French fries. I swear, you’ll see!” She was moving quicker now, stepping over boulders and roots. “Almost there,” she promised. Kylie thought that the scene was like something Anna would find in one of her dreams, a white figure leading through the dark forest, and she almost said something, but her friend was out ahead, slipping through the brush into an opening in the trees and vanishing, quickly, into the last of the daylight.
Kylie followed her into a meadow where an old red pick-up truck rested, caked with rust. A man was leaning on the tailgate, smoking a joint, and each time he inhaled a little red flame glowed and she could see his face. He was a little older, and cute, she thought, in a crunchy kind of way, with long curls rolling out from under a baseball hat.
“Kylie, this is Rowan,” Anna said as she tossed the yoga mat in the bed of the truck. She climbed in after it. “He’s our mechanic.”
“I prefer ‘builder,’” he said, offering Kylie’s his hand. His palms were big and rough. “Welcome to the end of the earth.” Anna giggled. Rowan helped Kylie lift her bag into the truck and then shut the tailgate behind them. “Hold on, ladies,” he called from the cab, “it’s going to be a bumpy ride.”
Anna shuffled closer to Kylie. “I’m so glad you’re here!”
The truck began to rattle forward.
“I have a secret I’ve been waiting to tell you,” Anna whispered as they made their way up what looked like an abandoned logging road. Rowan yelled “duck” as pine branches took swipes at them as they passed.
In the half-light, Anna pulled up next to her.
“What?” Kylie whispered.
“I’m pregnant,” Anna said, smiling.
The truck crashed over something hard in the road and she felt her bones shake. Up ahead there was smoke and light seeping out from the trees. The truck, she thought, did smell like French fries. She didn’t know what else to say.
People filtered out of tents and cabins to greet the truck. Anna introduced them all one by one but Kylie couldn’t keep them all straight. She noticed that everyone was tanned and friendly and dirty like Anna. There was a central fire in the yard and one of the guys she’d just met started playing guitar. The two women that Anna introduced as cooks had spread a big table with bread and vegetables, and everyone passed down the food line, filling their plates. A man came out of one of the cabins and Anna ran to hug him. He was so handsome that Kylie stuttered when she introduced herself and Anna winked, grinning. This was Todd, she said, the guy she’d met last summer. Todd went through the food line with everyone else and then stood up on a log to give a quick speech, welcoming Kylie to the compound. The group cheered and then everyone sat down on stumps or settled cross-legged on the ground and began to eat. The bread was warm from the oven and Kylie couldn’t stop herself from devouring it in a few bites. Anna smiled and nodded her head. Yes, this was how good it was, always.
Later, after they’d scraped their plates into the compost, Anna showed her the latrine and the path to the washroom and then took her to a single-room cabin where a futon was made up on the floor. The walls were honey-colored in the light from their headlamps. She and Anna took a selfie and Kylie tried to post it but there wasn’t enough service. Anna hugged her and promised to meet her in the morning. She slipped into the night and Kylie realized she hadn’t said anything to her about her secret. She texted ‘I guess this is a good thing?’ but there was no response. She changed into sweats, set her pack against the wall, and rolled her sleeping bag out on the futon. As she was taking off her headlamp, Todd opened the cabin door, just a crack, like her father used to do at bedtime.
“If you need anything,” he whispered, “I’m right across the way. Welcome to the end of the earth. We’re glad you’re here.” He closed the door and she realized that it was the name of this place, not just some kind of saying. This was The End of the Earth.
Anna was lying next to her on the futon when Kylie woke. It had been months since she’d been so close to another person and at first, she thought she should pull back, but it was Anna, and they’d spent how many nights like this?
“Todd told me I should let you sleep,” Anna said.
Kylie drew herself up and looked out at the room. It was rougher in daylight, the boards didn’t fit together right so there were large gaps, some so big that she could see through to the outside where people moved about in the yard. There were no electrical outlets, no lightbulbs. Besides the futon there was no other furniture in the one room cabin. The floor was dirt. It smelled like sawdust and mud.
“We built this,” Anna said, seeing her survey the room. “I carried boards and handed them up to the carpenters.”
“They let you build something?” Kylie teased.
“We all help around here,” Anna said. “I’m not a builder though, I work in the garden.”
“Are you going to switch majors when you get back to school?”
Anna hugged her knees to her chest. “Ky, I don’t think they’ll be a school to go back to.”
It wasn’t that this was a new idea, there were rumors on campus that the school would simply fold and go under, and everywhere people were talking about change, or worse. But Kylie assumed that this was all talk and that no one, no one she knew at least, would really believe it. She’d been telling herself that it was just a matter of waiting it out, that the wave would pass, and things would be normal. Some kids had freaked out, but she hadn’t worried much, or given any thought to what might happen if the college closed for good, if there weren’t lab classes and M-CATs and applications. She still didn’t believe it really, but it felt different to hear it from Anna.
“Yesterday,” Kylie began, quietly, “you said…”
“I know! Yeah, I am. It’s been 2 months since my last period.”
“And you’re happy? You’re cool with this?”
Anna grinned, “Yes, we’re both excited, Todd and me.”
“Do your parents know?”
“I haven’t had a chance to text them for a while,” Anna said.
They sat with their legs out on the futon and their backs against the rough-hewn pine boards. Sap was still oozing, sticky and golden from the whirled eyes of wood knots. Outside:chickens, laughter, creaking, a woman singing. A bell rang close by.
“Breakfast.” Anna said. “Come on, I have the day off to show you around.” She grabbed Kylie’s hand and pulled her up. Kylie noticed that there were crescents of dirt under her fingernails. Out in the yard the day was already warm. People came down from the tents along the edge of the lawn and gathered in the open kitchen. They saddled onto benches and passed plates of eggs and roasted summer squash down the line. Instead of coffee, there was herbal tea, but the mint was so vibrant and sharp that Kylie didn’t miss the caffeine. Little groups were talking about the day’s plans, one girl was journaling furiously, and Todd sat at the head of the table, quietly watching. He looked at the sun, rising over the barn’s roof, and just like that, everyone pushed back from the table. Anna showed her how to scrub her plate and cup down in a bucket of cold water and then she took her by the hand and led her out into the yard.
As groups of people broke off and began to work, Anna started her tour. There was something exciting and promising in the air which reminded Kylie of the start of the semester. The compound was newly built, except for the barn which had been propped up and resurrected after many years of abandonment. There was a long open cook shed, a bathhouse, two other cabins, and a ring of tents, each with chairs, or logs, or hammocks at their doors. There were no cars except for the rusted old truck. A generator loomed behind one of the cabins. They wove their way around the buildings. Finally, Anna took her into the barn, where a draft horse mouthed the soft wood of his stall. Kylie reached up and scratched his nose and the animal turned his big, strange eyes to them.
“This is Woody,” Anna said. “Al works him on the farm, but I call him Phillipe, like the horse from The Beauty and the Beast.” The horse blinked its long, white eyelashes and lowered his head to the girls so they could pet his forehead.
Through the barn and out into the sun again. Warmth lovely on her bare arms, Anna talking in her excited monologue. They walked over a grassy hill to the gardens. The place was green and overflowing with vines and stalks and it seemed to Kylie that there were no rows or plots but rather a great sea of plants, reaching from one side of the clearing to the other. Beyond the garden, a large field marked with more orderly mounds. There, Anna dug into the little hills of dirt and showed Kylie the pearl-sized potatoes growing underground. Past the field there was another, smaller garden of marijuana, and then a tumble of berry plants against the forest’s edge. Wild strawberries grew along the hedge row, and they stooped to pick them as they went along. The fruit stained their lips and fingers.
“Remember when we thought this was lipstick?” Anna said, pursing her lips. Kylie rubbed a berry over hers and they giggled.
From the shade of the tree line, Anna described all the members of the group to Kylie. There was Annie and her girlfriend, Cat, who worked in the kitchen. They were the girls with the dirty aprons. There was Al, the farm leader, with a mess of black hair and faded denim overalls. As they were talking, he led the horse up, harnessed to some ancient implement with blades like waves, and behind him came the farm crew, Hazel, Pete, and Madison.
Although they were already gone up to the woodlot, Anna explained that Rowan led Matt and Connor on the building team, and today they were up in the woods cutting trees. Todd, she said, was drawing up plans for the root cellar that would go in the barn. All morning, they walked the fields together and eventually looped back to the yard. When Anna was done talking, Kylie took over. She told her about the quiet on campus, about the schedule of delivered meals and laundry days, about canceled classes. They swung their legs over the edge of a big boulder, silent for a moment.
Then Anna leaned in close and told Kylie that she was in love, and they laughed. Anna told her the story of the place, all in a rush like gossip. That Todd, Al, and Rowan had been in school together, studying sustainability, that Annie was Al’s sister, she’d been working in an organic bakery in the city, everyone one else were students, just like them, except for Connor, who had graduated two years ago and had been leading wilderness trips for teens with drug problems. The land had been in Al and Annie’s family, and Rowan, Todd, and Al had been able to pool together what they had to buy it cheap. Everyone was selling off, the town was already half gone and when Rowan and Todd went in to collect veggie oil and pick up supplies, they said there were hardly any businesses left. Windows were broken. People were burning their homes for the insurance money. People were ripping parts out of parked cars. Kylie told her about the empty roads, and the gas station with no other customers.
“I’m glad,” Anna said, “that I only get to check my phone once a week.”
That night, after dinner around the long table and a cold shower of harvested rainwater, Kylie sat in the dark of the cabin and listened as everyone went back to their tents and the chickens settled and night sounds rose from the forest.
The next morning Anna had to work, so Kylie followed her to the garden after breakfast. Al showed her how to hoe around baby squash plants and after a few awkward strokes, the tool seemed to fuse to her hand and the motion became easy. All day the crew talked and sang and at dusk Kylie felt strong and tired in a good way. At the end of the week, Todd offered her a place on the garden crew and she said yes. There was a round of clapping at the dinner table. That evening, she texted her family that she’d be staying the summer, working on the farm. Anna helped her find a flat spot to pitch her tent on a slight rise near the barn. From there, she could see the big cabin where Anna and Todd lived and the rest of the compound too, green, and busy, and beyond that, the forest encircling it all.
Every morning, except for rest day once a week, she woke, shared breakfast at one of the long tables, washed up in the bathhouse beside everyone else, sprinkled sawdust over her waste in the latrine, and met Al at the barn for the day’s instructions. He assigned jobs and tools and led the crew out, sometimes stopping to show her something, sometimes continuing, quietly, with Phillipe to cultivate the potatoes or prune the pot plants on his own.
Each day was the same. First, the farm crew harvested the day’s fruit, summer squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, pulled up carrots and blood red beets, cut leaves of lettuce and kale, wet heads of cabbage, sweet onions and bunches of herbs, and carried them down to Annie in the kitchen. Then they hiked back up to the garden to weed, or plant, or trellis. Some days they sang songs or played Never Have I Ever. Some days the rain or heat was all-consuming and they worked in silence. It was a kind of trance. A focus like studying hard, and Kylie found that she could fall into it easily.
Once a week, on rest day, Rowan would beat the generator to life, pulling the start cord, then kicking with his steel-toed boots until the converter was juiced and they could charge their phones. When she’d agreed to stay and work on the garden crew, Kylie had given her phone to Todd, and he kept it with everyone else’s in an old ammo box in his cabin. On rest day, he’d bring them out and those who wanted could use them until sunset. After waiting for the phone to take a charge, Kylie walked up to the tree line where there was better reception and for the first few weeks she texted her family for hours, scrolled through her feeds, and read the headlines. But a month or so later she found that she wasn’t interested in the posts anymore, or the news, and only texted her family to say that she was ok and then returned the phone to the ammo box. Some of the crew had stopped using their phones all together. Anna, Kylie noticed, was one of them. She had been at the compound for three months and Anna was starting to show.
It began to rain the morning that Rowan and Todd left to go into town for supplies. The rain kept up and the farm crew stopped work early. Some people went back to their tents, but Kylie stayed with Anna in the cooking hall, helping cut carrots and squash for the evening meal. When the old pick-up truck pulled up in the mud, they were the first ones to hear what had happened.
Rowan and Todd rushed in, out of the rain, their faces grim in the half light. The fast-food place was abandoned. A handwritten sign on the door. The grocery store was closed too, cleaned out, all the shelves empty. They’d had to drive fifty miles to the next town and the guys at the burger place didn’t trust them, so they had to try another. They were running on fumes then, but the last restaurant let them take their oil and they’d been able to find some of what they needed in a chain store. The lights, Rowan said, had been dimmed. On the way back they hadn’t seen another car on the road, Todd said. It was spooky. They’d brought back flour, rice, and lentils but they couldn’t find the other things Annie had asked for. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway, Todd said. All the prices were jacked up and they had to spend every dollar they had.
Al came out of the barn to help them unload and they spoke quietly to each other, murmuring under the thrum of the rain.
That week, the rain didn’t let up. Mold flushed around the base of the lettuce heads and baby squash rotted on the vine. The tomatoes developed brown spots. It was cold at night and no matter how many times she rang them out, her clothes were always damp in the morning. After the fifth day of rain, Madison didn’t report to the barn for work, and on the sixth, neither did Pete. The building team got into a fight over how to bail out the root cellar hole and no one saw Connor or Matt until rest day, and even then, they wouldn’t look at each other. That morning, Kylie found a red leaf in the mud on her way to the latrine and knew that summer was ending.
When Rowan tried to power up the generator, the thing rattled but wouldn’t turn over. He took it apart and peered into the flooded engine. Rain had gotten in and ruined it. He tried one thing, then the next. Everyone stood around him in a circle, waiting, and with each try he became more frustrated. He kicked at it and beat it with a heavy wrench. People turned away and went back to their tents. Rowan was swearing and sweating. When he finally knocked the generator over, it bled dark water into the mud and he kept kicking it, his face red with rage. He kicked and kicked until there was mud everywhere and then he turned around and went back to his shed without saying a word.
Kylie looked down at her phone and tried to power it up, but it stayed black. When Todd came around with the box, there was nothing to do but give it back.
That night, Todd, Rowan, and Al built a big fire in the yard. The rain had stopped but the air was still cold and wet, and it took them a while to get the flames started. The wood smoked and sputtered but then it caught and cast heat and they all gathered close. E,ven the people who’d been up in their tents came down and Annie brought out bread and maple butter and Kylie stood close to the fire, feeling her clothes dry on her skin. She put her arm around Anna, and they sat together, watching the flames shapeshift.
Todd stepped forward and put his hands on his hips. Al and Rowan rose from their seats and stood beside him.
“We’ve been talking,” Todd began in his sweet, singsong voice, “and we have an ask of everyone. Now, more than ever, it’s important to be mindful.”
“Grounded in place,” Al added.
“I’m glad you all didn’t have to see what Rowan and I did when we went to town. It’s happening. It’s really happening.” He paused. The fire purred. “But we’re all here now, that’s what matters. We’re healthy, we’re really alive, we’re building something.”
Someone clapped but Kylie couldn’t make out who.
“I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, so this isn’t just about the generator. You know how I feel about cell phones. I can’t tell you how much better I feel having given mine up. The groundedness. The lack of distraction. We’ve all made a commitment to this place, to ourselves, to be present.”
“I won’t be able to get the generator back up and running,” Rowan said.
“And even if he could, we don’t know how much longer we’ll be able to get veggie oil. If we have to drive further and further each time…” Todd trailed off. “What I’m asking you tonight shouldn’t feel like a big deal. Your family is here, your life is here. So, let’s commit to that.”
A cheer, someone clapping.
“No more phones,” Todd said. “I want us to be phone-free from now on. And not just because of the machine, but because we don’t want to be distracted. We need, more than ever, with winter approaching, to be fully present.” He walked back to his seat and returned with the ammunition box full of phones. “I’m going to bury this tomorrow morning. If you want your phone, you can get it now.” He opened it and set it on the ground.
No one moved. Todd stood behind the box for a long while until he closed it up and walked out into the dark. In the morning, Anna said he came back with dirty hands and knees. He wouldn’t even tell her where they were buried.
That week, Al had them start harvesting the storage crops. The work was heavy and even with Phillipe pulling the wagon back to the barn, Kylie’s back and arms ached when she curled in her tent at night. The mornings were cold and damp. When the sun finally broke, there was only a few hours of warmth, and the night came up cold again. The work crew hauled wood all day and stalked it high around the cook house. Al holed up in the barn under strings of drying onions, garlic, and weed. A kind of quiet pressed down on them and there were no more songs or games in the fields. One frosty morning, Madison was gone, her tent packed up neatly, her hammock cut from the trees. No one said anything about it until dinner when Todd paused them all before the meal to offer a prayer of safekeeping.
“Let’s all hope,” he said, “that she makes it.” They all stared at their plates and nodded.
They were lifting baskets of winter squash into the barn when Anna cried out, dropped her basket, and folded over. Squash tumbled and split. Kylie rushed to her and saw blood running down her legs. The baby had names now, Todd came up with new ones each day. The crew seemed frozen. Al took a few steps back. No one seemed to want to move. It was midafternoon and the sky was soft and gray as a mouse.
“I’ve got you,” Kylie said, propping Anna up. She walked with her back to the cabin. In the barn, Al and Pete bent to collect the squash that had fallen.
In the cabin, Kylie lay Anna down and wiped her face with a towel. It didn’t hurt, she said, but the blood, what about the blood? Kylie pulled up the sheets. There wasn’t much, but it was still bright and fresh on her legs. Anna pressed her hands frantically to her belly, looking for a heartbeat. When she found it, she settled, and they both grew quiet. Anna grabbed Kylie’s hand and placed it on the spot. The little heartbeat steadily.
“Anna,” Kylie said, “I’m going to go for help.”
“Where?”
The heartbeat against her palm. Kylie’s hair was oily. It had become too cold to shower and all she could bring herself to do each morning was wipe her face with a towel. Anna’s dress was slick with wear. Her sweater unraveling.
“I’m going,” she said. “I don’t care what Todd says.”
Anna raised herself up onto her elbows and reached for Kylie, but she pulled back. Anna called from the bed, but Kylie shut the door of the cabin behind her and stepped out into the yard where snow was beginning to fall. Kylie stopped and looked up at the whirl of it, the sky flattened to a silver sheen. It was light and would melt off by dusk but there was something sharp in the smell of it that made her shiver. She stuck her hands in her pockets and hiked back up to her tent. The whole way across the compound she felt like someone was watching her, although no one looked her way and there was nothing but the steady split of wood and the heavy footfalls of Phillipe, pulling the wagon back up to the garden for more squash.
In her tent, the air was so cold she could see her breath suspended. She zipped up the heaviest jacket she’d brought and stuffed her hands into a pair of leather work gloves. She dug through the outer pockets of her hiking backpack until she found her car keys and wallet. She put both in her sports bra where the keys sat cold against the bones of her chest then, looking down at the dark bodies in the field, the snow settling on the cabin roofs, she slipped behind her tent and into the woods where she took a perimeter trail around the compound until she was on the logging road that led down to the trailhead. She didn’t know why she felt like she needed to hide, but there was something odd in the silence, a kind of weight that had grown since the shift in the seasons, since Madison left, and the generator died, and although she didn’t want to think about it, she was afraid.
She caught the road out in the woods and began to run. The faster she moved the more her fear grew until she was looking behind her, and her pulse was roaring in her ears. The brush along the road was thicker than she remembered it and the further she went the more it seemed as if she was going in the wrong direction. By truck, it had felt shorter but now the track unfurled into the same dark tangle of pine and brambles and through the trees, there was no opening or the distant sound of traffic. She began to sprint. Every few steps she’d catch a toe on the frozen mud and nearly twist an ankle before catching herself. Once she came down on her hands and knees but was back up again quickly.
One, two, maybe three miles, but then an opening, a clearing. Milkweed pods burst open, seed heads snapped and burrs and thorns everywhere, the grass long and dead. She stopped and rested with her hands on her knees. She searched the wood line for the trail. Where had she and Anna come from in the spring? Her breathing slowed and she tried to listen for cars. Which way was the main road? But there was no sound except the snow falling softly.
She walked until she found it, barely visible through a tangle of blackberries. The path was thin, and she lost it several times, tripping over roots and rocks until at the top of the hill she looked down and saw the road stretched white and flat, and she began to run again. Down the slope and into the parking lot, slipping the last stretch until she was standing in the open. Out across the road, a collapsed barn rested, filling with snow. There were no tire tracks. The cars that had been next to hers were gone.
She waited, watching the road. A car would come, a plow, a woman walking her dog, surely, something. But the snow only settled into the folds of her jacket and a kind of echo roared in her ears, the silence somehow becoming loud. She dusted snow from the door before opening it. The car was a mess, just as she’d left it. The box of food was gone from the backseat. She told herself that she’d go to town, find a phone, call 911, and there’d be an ER nearby or a Minute Clinic. She put her foot on the gas and turned the key in the ignition, but nothing happened. No spark or turnover, nothing. She tried again. Silence. She twisted hard, kicked the gas, and shook the wheel, but still, the car wouldn’t start. She began to cry.
Kylie sat with her hands on the wheel and felt the cold coming in through her gloves. The car was dead. She slammed the door shut and stood in the parking lot, tears cold on her cheeks. She’d have to walk. Someone would come by, and she’d ask for a ride, they’d have a cell phone, and medics would be helping Anna out by sunset. She thought of the delicious warmth in the hospital room and how she’d fall asleep in a plush chair next to Anna’s bed. Kylie locked the car and stepped towards the road.
“There’s nothing out there,” a voice called from behind.
She spun around and there was Rowan, hands in his pockets.
“Everything’s closed.”
She was shaking. “Anna needs help.”
Rowan shrugged. “She’ll be fine. She’s already better.”
“She needs a doctor.”
“There’s nothing out there Kylie.”
She looked down the road. No headlights, no tires through the snow. Night was beginning to fall. She thought she saw something in the distance, but it was just snow in her eyes. When she blinked it was gone.
“Come on, I’ll drive you back,” Rowan said.
She didn’t move.
“Let’s go, it’s getting dark.”
Kylie turned and walked towards him. She looked over her shoulder one last time.
“Come on, Anna needs you.” He reached for her and pulled her up over the bank. She followed his back up the trail without saying a word. In the truck she tucked her knees up to her chest and stared out the window as the woods blurred into dusk. Branches scraped and screamed against the metal. Rowan cleared his throat but didn’t speak.
“Am I in trouble?” Kylie asked as they pulled off the road and the white of the yard opened before them.
“No, everyone is free to do as they please, right?”
“Right,” she said.
No one came to greet them. She could see bodies around the cookfire and smoke coming from the stove in Anna and Todd’s cabin. Rowan parked the truck in the shed and they sat as the smell of French fries faded.
“Hungry?” he asked.
She shook her head. He stepped out and turned away from her, slipping past the partition that separated his living quarters from the garage. She shut the truck door quietly and shuffled out into the yard. Anna and Todd were eating with the others, his arm around her shoulder, there were voices, and someone laughed. Anna was smiling. Kylie watched her eat bread out of Todd’s hand. She turned away and walked up to her tent. She tried to think about Anna but the word “cold” kept battering around in her head and by dawn, she was worried about her toes, her fingers, and her lips were shivering.
The next morning, the sun came up bright and hot. Water dripped everywhere and the snow melted off quickly. Kylie trekked down to the kitchen with the sun on her face. Her clothing was still cold, and her fingers couldn’t feel anything but there was a certain joy in the sudden, exuberant light and she felt again the same kind of hope that she’d had in the summer when they’d sung in the garden together, a feeling that they were doing something good.
They were all there, gathered around the table. Cold faces, dirty hands. The smell of mint rising from teacups and fresh bread crackling on the cutting block. No one looked at her as she came in and she took her seat, next to Anna and Annie filled her tin cup with steaming mint tea. Anna turned and smiled.
“I’m ok,” she whispered.
Todd stood up and stepped to the head of the table. Rowan and Al stood too and made their way around to Todd. They crossed their arms. Rowan looked down at his boots.
“Last night we got a taste of what our first winter will be like here at The End of the Earth. With the change in weather, we’ve got to do what we can to stay comfortable. Rowan and Al and I have been talking and we think it’s best if everyone sleeps in a cabin this winter. We’ll have to share but we think everyone will be happier. Rowan has volunteered stoves for each of them. He’ll get those ready today and the building crew will split enough wood for everyone. We think it would be best if those who are in tents pack up their stuff this morning and move into their assigned cabins before nightfall. I know it’s warm now but with clear skies it could get real cold tonight. Annie, Al, and Cat will take in Hazel and Pete. Connor, and Matt can have the guest cabin. Kylie can share Rowan’s quarters. That way, no one is alone. Does that work for everyone?”
“It’s not gendered,” Al added. “Hazel will be working in the kitchen this winter with Annie and Cat, so we’ve broken folks up by work group.”
“And Kylie needs to be close to Anna to help when the baby comes,” Todd said.
Rowan kicked at the dirt.
“Sound good?” Todd asked. “Let’s see a raise of hands. Everyone in favor of the new living arrangements?” He thrust his hand up. Al and Rowan did the same. Everyone raised a hand or arm around the table and Todd nodded. “Great, it’s agreed then. Let’s eat. We’ve got a lot of work to do to get ready.”
Over the next few days, the work crew hauled split wood and stocked up each cabin with a tall wall of logs. Hazel went to work in the kitchen, helping Annie and Cat pickle the last of the zucchini and carrots. Anna cleaned onions and garlic in the barn, and Al, Pete, and Kylie began to dig beets and turnips. Rowan built three stoves out of old metal barrels and lengths of piping he’d found in the barn’s loft and set them up in the corners of the cabins. In the shed, he set a row of boxes between his stuff and Kylie’s and at night the little fire in the stove was cheerful and warm at her feet. He didn’t say anything to her but it was nice to be around another person, somehow just having him there made it not so cold.
During work hours, Kylie tried to remember the anatomy of the female body, pulling up study guides in her head. She re-watched birth scenes. She recalled every episode of Grey’s Anatomy that featured a birth, then she worked her way through Private Practice. There were so many things that could go wrong. Twists and tears and breaches, blue babies, dead babies, dead mothers. At night she dreamed of a Barbie that she and Annahad played with as kids. You could open her pale pink belly on a plastic hinge and inside there was a little baby doll curled up like a cat. But once the baby was out it was rigid and featureless, and the Barbie was still round and empty. Her arms didn’t bend enough to even hold the infant. Kylie often woke up feeling like she knew something, but the knowledge would leave her as soon as her eyes opened and all day she’d work to get it back for Anna’s sake.
The trouble started late in October, the night after the Hunter’s Moon. Coyotes had begun to come close, and she could hear Phillipe pacing in his stall as they yipped and screamed in the dark. No one had slept well and at breakfast, they were all tired and quiet. After the meal, Rowan and Todd loaded empty fuel barrels into the back of the truck. They were going out one last time Todd said, in search of veggie oil. They might be able to scavenge supplies. Annie gave them a list. Kylie asked Rowan for gauze and surgical gloves. He nodded, grim and quiet as usual. Sometimes at night she wanted to talk but he fell asleep so quickly that she never got a word in. Either that, or he was pretending to sleep. She couldn’t tell.
Matt and Connor went to the woodpile, the kitchen crew stoked the fire in the stove, and everyone else trekked up to the garden to begin digging storage potatoes. Al led Phillipe, who pulled a wagon full of buckets and shovels. Out in the field they stopped and Al handed out the shovels and buckets and showed them again how to loosen the soil with the blade, then scoop around in the hole. But the first plant Kylie and Anna pulled yielded just a few tiny potatoes. In the other row, Pete and Al found nothing under their first plant. Al grabbed the shovel and dug up more. Pete dug and dug but wasn’t finding any in his row. The potatoes Anna dropped in the bucket were no bigger than grapes. Al came back and looked through what they’d harvested. He scraped up more dirt and dug deeper. There, in the bottom of one of the holes he found a rotting cache of potatoes, slimy translucent goo that smelled so bad that Kylie almost threw up when he scooped them and threw them on the row.
“Fuck,” Al said.
“What is it?” Pete asked.
“I think its fucking blight.” He grabbed Anna’s bucket and sorted through the small potatoes, holding each up to the sun. “God damn!” He shouted, throwing a little grape-sized potato on the ground. “It’s everywhere!”
“What?” Anna asked, examining a potato.
“These little spots, they’ll spread in storage and this thing will be mush in no time.” He spilled out her bucket. “They’ve all got it,” he said quietly.
Kylie, Pete, and Anna were quiet. The thump of the ax fell steadily from the woodshed. Al took a series of deep breaths, closed his eyes, and seemed to whisper something to himself. He exhaled and stood up. “It’s going be okay. We have lots of varieties, some of them will be resistant. Some of them will be fine.”
Anna and Kylie looked at each other. Pete gathered up his bucket and followed Al out to the middle of the field. Kylie picked up her shovel and helped Anna stand. They started digging another row and kept going until the whole field had been turned over. By dusk, when the truck returned, most of their buckets were still empty. Only one variety seemed to have resisted the blight and they’d dug only a few bushels from it. The rest was either rotten or speckled with soft black spots. Even the field, Al muttered, was ruined. Infected. No potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, or eggplant. The whole place would have to be abandoned.
Phillipe pulled the wagon back to the barn and Kylie and Pete unloaded the few full bushels they’d managed to scrounge. Al unharnessed Phillipe and disappeared into the darkness of the barn where Kylie could hear him pacing back and forth, over the uneven floorboards. He was breathing deep again, trying to calm down. Kylie closed the buckets and wiped the dirt off her shovel blade. She helped Anna walk slowly down to the truck, where Todd was lifting out the barrels with Rowan. They lifted them easily. It was clear that they were empty. Annie came out of the kitchen asking about supplies and the crew who had been stacking wood stopped work and wandered over in the failing light.
Connor kept his ax on his shoulder.
“I’m sorry guys,” Todd said, showing his empty hands. “We didn’t find anything open.”
“Shut down for as far as we could go on the gas we had left,” Rowan muttered.
“We did get some flour, Annie, and canned goods, what was left in the general store.” Todd pulled back a tarp and there were shopping bags with bright yellow smiley faces and inside food labels and brand names and neat white boxes of sugar.
Rowan lifted the bags out and handed them to the people waiting around the truck. The bag Kylie got was heavy with cans. Annie and Cat were already headed back to the kitchen with the first load of supplies when Al came running out of the barn. His boots were loud on the frozen ground.
“You sold it all! You fucking sold it all!” He was red and screaming and came right up to Todd’s face. “You motherfucker, we agreed we’d only sell enough to buy food!”
“Al, please,” Todd began, stepping back, but as soon as he moved, Al was up close to him again.
“No, I’m not going to shut up this time. I didn’t grow that stuff so you could cash in. It was for us – our food, our weed.”
Kylie was still holding her bag. The others had stopped and were watching, still and breathless and the light left the day and the nearly full moon rose over the edge of the world.
“Al, come on, let’s council inside,” Todd was up against the truck now and Rowan was shifting from foot to foot, but he didn’t do anything, just shuffled, and stared like everyone else.
“Fuck you, this isn’t what I signed up for. This wasn’t supposed to be a capitalist enterprise! The potatoes are fucked, you know, fucked! But I guess it’s good that you have all that money now. Now we can all go to Walmart and load up on Hamburger Helper.”
“Dude, there isn’t a Walmart anymore,” Connor said, shifting his ax on his shoulder.
Al stared at him and then shook his head. “This wasn’t what I signed up for. Rowan, man, I know you feel the same way too. Too bad you’re a fucking pussy. Too bad for all you idiots!” He slammed Todd once against the side of the truck and then stalked away, back up the muddy path to the barn.
It was quiet. The cold came in sharp. Kylie held tight to the plastic bag.
“Who’d you sell it to?” Pete asked.
Behind her, Kylie heard Annie touch Cat gently on the shoulder and the two women walked back to the kitchen, side by side.
Todd dusted off his jacket and took Anna by the hand. “I think we all need to hit pause for a while. I’m calling a moment of silence until morning. Ok? Let’s just sit in silence, alright?”
“Sit in silence,” Kylie heard Matt muttered.
“Like a fucking yoga class,” Connor whispered.
“What about the potatoes?” Pete asked her, but she didn’t say anything.
At dinner no one spoke. Al didn’t come down from the barn and afterwards, Annie walked a bowl and a cup up to him. She didn’t return for a long time.
That night Rowan loaded the stove with more logs than usual, and the shack was warm. Kylie sat on her side of the boxes, and he sat on his.
“Kylie,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what?” she whispered.
He crawled into his sleeping bag and turned his back to her and went still. […]
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Megan is the author of three books. A collection of essays, The Coolest Monsters; a memoir, Farm Girl; and the essay collection, Twenty Square Feet of Skin, published by Mad Creek Books from Ohio State Press as part of their 21st Century Essay Series. In addition, she has won numerous national awards including a Pushcart Prize. Her work has been listed in The Best American Essays of 2019. Recent publications included pieces in The Threepenny Review, Hotel Amerika, The Florida Review, and Creative Nonfiction Magazine.