by Nick Wolven

* * * *

After stints in publishing, e-commerce, and secondary education, Nick Wolven currently works for Barnard College Library. In his spare time he takes random night classes and joins rock-n-roll bands. His second story for Asimov’s takes a look at the fall of Western civilization—and ponders what our greatest loss will be.

At six-thirty in the morning, when the black-throated warblers had begun to sing in the rhododendrons and the light in the windows had gone from gray to yellow, Angie woke the children and assembled them on the screened-in porch. It was a cool day, a breeze was blowing, and the screens, just beginning to separate at the corners from their frames, were slashed with swaths of moisture from a shower of early-morning rain. The children stood in a row on the wet nylon carpeting, fidgeting with excitement even as they yawned and rubbed the sleep-sand from their eyes. Today, according to the old calendar, spotty with mildew, that hung in the kitchen beside the dormant refrigerator, was the second Wednesday of the month—a special day, a critical day, a ritualistic day. Today they were going to town.

“All right,” Angie said, bending down to straighten the collar of Emily’s jacket. “Remember what I told you last night? When we get to town, Tom’s in charge. He’s going to pull the wagon, and he’s going to do the shopping. Emily, you’re going to look after Maya. And Maya, you’re going to behave. Right?”

“Yes!” Maya brayed, her fists behind her back. She had learned to speak only six months ago and shot her words out as though blowing a trumpet.

Emily fidgeted as Angie adjusted her jacket. “Where are you going?” she asked, for the hundredth time in twenty-four hours.

Angie bit her lip and ran her hands down her sides, smoothing the creases of her sundress. “I told you, Emily. I’ve got a special errand to run.”

“What special errand?” Emily demanded.

“It’s a surprise.”

“What kind of surprise?”

Angie closed her eyes and pinched the palm of her left hand, as she always did when Emily got on her nerves. Tom came to her rescue.

“Shut up, Emily. Angie knows what she’s doing.” He nodded at Angie like a miniature soldier, painfully mature in his grimy golf shirt and threadbare jeans.

“That’s right,” Angie said. “You don’t want to spoil it.” At the word spoil a sob rose in her throat. She swallowed it hastily, releasing Emily’s collar. “Come on, let’s get the shoes.”

* * * *

They retrieved the shoes from the moldy hall closet: leather boots for Angie, sneakers for Tom and Emily, a special pair of Mom’s running shoes stuffed with extra socks for Maya. Down the steps to the flagstone path, down the driveway to the road, along the road to the highway. Angie hung back and studied her family. They were scrawny, bug-bitten, their shoes were already wearing out, but today, invigorated by the trip to town, they looked almost as they had before the Crisis. They had the beautiful haughtiness of healthy children—that conviction of entitlement to a happy life.

By the two big oak trees and the path to the blueberry patch, they passed Mom’s grave. Emily wanted to pick Black-Eyed Susans and spread them around the wood marker, but Angie hurried them past. Already, the familiar thoughts assailed her. You’re not like Mom. You don’t have what it takes. And the excuses: Things are different now. The world is wrecked. Being a mother is a lot harder than it used to be.

Early that morning before waking the children she had taken a full bath and washed her hair. The sheer waste of it made her stomach knot, but afterward her blonde hair fell in feathery masses that softened the severity of her starved cheeks. Thank god she was only twenty-two. In the master bedroom, Mom’s makeup case sat, undisturbed for a year, in the top dresser drawer. When she took it out, the brass clasp released a dense smell of wooden confinement, the aroma of relics and holy artifacts. The tubes and containers, lined in front of the mirror, shone with a prognosticative aspect like beads and polished bones.

A whine intruded on her thoughts. “Angie?”

“Yes, Emily?”

“Why are you all dressed up?” Emily bumped her leg as they walked.

Angie rolled her eyes. “I told you, Emily, it’s a surprise. Stop fussing.” But there was only one proven method to get Emily to stop fussing. “Why don’t we play the Remember Game?”

Emily bounced in circles, nearly falling. “Yes! Yes!”

“How much can you remember about Mom, today?”

“A lot!” Emily began her usual litany, a strange mix of sentimental fabulation and surprisingly acute observations. “She was pretty. And the boys liked her. And she was smart. And she never wore nail polish, and she always had a hangnail.” Tom offered periodic corrections. “She did wear nail polish once. For a date.” Maya interrupted now and then to assert loudly, “I remember Mom!” A true ritual: everyone had a part to play. It began to seem that Mom had died not a year ago, but decades in the past, and that her death itself had been not an ugly accident but a touching achievement like the completion of a painting. It was wonderful how the gathered details drove her further and further into the distance, as though the catalyzing memories were a propellant fueling her trip to some remote cheerful place.

If it hadn’t been for the Remember Game, Angie didn’t know how she would have kept the family going. But this time she interrupted the routine.

“Emily, that’s great. Awesome. But hey guys, how about something else this time? How much do you remember about Dad?”

Emily abruptly fell silent.

“Come on,” Angie coaxed. “You can remember something. It was only two years ago.”

“Dad was dumb,” Emily said.

“When Mom divorced him,” Tom said, “he just went away. He didn’t even try to see us.”

“But you must remember something about him, right?” Angie looked eagerly from one scowling face to another. “Right? Weren’t there some nice things about him?”

“No,” Emily said.

“Dad was pretty lame,” Tom agreed. “All he did was work. He was a pretty crappy cook, too.”

“I don’t remember Dad,” Emily said. “I remember Mom.” And then, realizing she had been deceived: “Angie! I want the surprise.”

“Later,” Angie said, struggling to conceal her disappointment. “For the last time, Emily, I’ll show you later.”

* * * *

They reached Buckley just before noon. It had never been a big town, and now its core, a plaza of granite bricks, bordered by brick stores and tenements, was surrounded by rings of derelict buildings: crooked two-story houses like witches’ cottages shedding ribbons of vinyl siding and surrounded by moats of crushed glass. No bombs had fallen in this woodsy corner of Connecticut; there had been no riots, no pogroms, no purges. But with the prop of civilization removed, life had declined quickly through attrition. Many people had moved to the coast.

Today the plaza was choked with activity. By the old clapboard hotel, men in plaid shirts unloaded big trailer trucks from Torrington. The goods they passed down ended up at wooden stalls and tables, each with its mob of shouting figures and raised fists. Angie lined the children up by the municipal parking lot, where bicycles clustered like massacred insects among horses who urinated torrentially into the tangle of wheels.

“Here’s a shopping list. Maya, your job is to ride in the wagon and make sure nothing falls over. Emily, you’re responsible for inspecting the supplies. Tom, you’re in charge. If anything happens, if anyone makes you uncomfortable, go to Bill’s Grocery. I’ll meet you there later.”

“And bring the surprise?” Emily squealed.

Angie looked over her shoulder at the bustle of the market, the sweating masses of humanity, the brawny men in plaid shirts heaving sacks of produce on their strong shoulders.

“Yes,” she said with a wince. “And bring the surprise.”

* * * *

Toskie’s had once been a local coffee shop, a quiet place to read in the afternoons or have a conversation over pretentious jazz played live by college kids. Now it was a taphouse that did heavy business on market days in moonshine and fried potatoes. Angie forced her way through knots of men who had managed to stay fat even in these lean times, holding her breath against body odor and boozy exhalations, wriggling to escape sly fingers and damp palms. She pressed her stomach to the aluminum counter behind which the barmaid bustled and panted. “Is Derrick in?”

“To the back!”

In the kitchen a battery-powered radio shrieked old love songs over the tuneless carillon of ringing crockery. Derrick stood with his arms in soapy water, his jet hair slick with steam. Angie’s stomach clenched painfully, but there was no turning back: he had already seen her.

“Angela!” Derrick always used her full name. It was one reason she had turned down his advances so many times in the past—a petty reason, of course, but things had been different in high school. The habit, along with his tucked-in button shirts, his loafers, his slicked-back hair, his membership in the Future Business Leaders of America club, had been fatal symptoms of uptightness. How could anyone have fun with a boyfriend so polite? Angie grimaced recalling the way she had thought back then. She liked to imagine she had always been the same, even while the world went to pieces around her.

“You in town for the market? Where are the kids?” Derrick greeted her in his customary way, gripping her arm gently at the elbow—a gesture both unpleasantly intimate and unnervingly devoid of affection. “I bet Maya’s been picking up a lot of new words. How’s Tom doing?”

She lifted her eyes to his square, handsome face. “The kids are fine. They’re doing some shopping by themselves today.”

“That’s good. Teach them some independence. That’s important, these days.”

Independence. It was one of Derrick’s watchwords. In the old days it had meant Republican values, small business and welfare reform and meritocracy. Now it meant skinning deer at the age of eight and salvaging cars.

She ran her fingers through her hair, already limp from the steam. “How’ve you been, Derry? Still thinking of rebuilding the school?”

“No, that plan’s on hold. It was moving along for a while. I had a majority of the council behind it, but a couple of things came up...” He ran on about his jobs, his plans, while she studied his tall body, slim from cutting wood, his confident eyes, his broad shoulders, carefully adding these observations to a vision she had formed over weeks within herself. Only when he said, “Well, it’s great to see you, but I better get back to work,” did she muster the strength to quaver, “Derry?”

He had already turned away, but at the urgency in her voice he faced her squarely. They looked at each other awkwardly through the steam. She pressed on, dismayed to find that her teeth were chattering. “Derry, do you ever think about high school?”

“Not too much. No time for it.”

“But you remember what it was like?”

“Sure. At least, I suppose I do.”

“You remember Katie’s Fourth of July barbecue? Junior year?” She pushed the words out so quickly she ran low on breath. “That walk we took afterward?”

He looked away. The steamy air swirled between them, misting his features. Memories coalesced out of the vapor like visions in a crystal ball: throngs of young faces drunk on Smirnoff Ice, bottles and crushed ice in a blue recycling bin, paper lanterns strung on a clothesline, vinyl-sided bi-levels ringing a cul-de-sac like the megaliths of a henge. She had gotten drunk for the first time that night, and time had grown wonderfully liquid. All the cramped insecurities of her past rinsed away, happiness washed back upon her from a glorious future, and Derrick was standing next to her under the Chinese lanterns talking about Venezuela and the cost of oil. He had always been politically aware.

Then the conversation changed, Venezuela dropped away, and he was talking about her hair, her smile, the bracelet she had inherited from her grandmother. He touched her shoulder and they left the party and walked around the cul-de-sac while he filled the night with words. Under a streetlight she put a stop to his talk, pressed herself against him and turned up her face. She could tell he was disturbed by her boldness but she needed to stop the flow of words; there were too many words between them already, words complicated things ... The kiss lasted a long time and its energy drew his fingers into her hair, so that afterward she remembered not the feel of his lips but sweet shivers that arced like the arms of a tiara across her scalp.

She heard herself whispering about private places, a bedroom in Katie’s house, locking the door.

Then he was pushing her back. And the torrent of words had started up again, fluent, practiced, horribly reasonable. Derrick was disappointed in her. He knew what kind of a girl she was, and she was a marrying kind of girl. He had picked her out a long time ago; he knew just how things would be. The words arranged themselves around her like bricks: the prom, college, two children—a cell of words from which she had to escape at all costs.

Steam curled between them, obscuring a past that, in this world, was as irrelevant as a fantasy. Derrick turned from her and sunk his arms to the elbows in soapy water.

“I remember that night. Sure.”

“Do you ever still think about that?” She stepped forward. “All that stuff we talked about?”

He nodded and said through tight lips, “You weren’t ready for a relationship.” The words had a dead sound, as though he had repeated them to himself so many times that the meaning had worn off like paint.

“I wasn’t. Then. I mean, we were in high school.” She took a deep breath. “Do you ever still feel those things? Like you told me?”

Even before he faced her she saw pain in his face, at the corner of his eye and in the tightening of his jaw. He took hold of her shoulders without drying his hands, and the warm water soaked through her dress and trickled down the backs of her arms. With relief and terror she let herself fall into the vision she had crafted, that delicate potentiality in her soul. Derrick was kind and even-tempered. He knew how to fish and hunt. Above all, he was fit, dependable. He could teach Tom how to hunt and maintain a rifle. He would be patient with Emily. She dared, finally, to picture the image that made her vision complete: his strong, safe body holding Maya in its arms. Relief intensified to a pain that stung her eyes.

“I’m getting married,” he said.

If he were not holding her, she would have fallen. His fingers bit her arms.

“My dad set it up.” The sentences fell on her as methodically as hammer blows. “She’s a good girl. She’s from Torrington, her family runs the trucking station there. They’re nice people. We’re making a deal with them, to get supplies up from the harbor.” With soft consideration that made her want to beat his chest, strike his face, he explained in a rush, “Those kinds of connections could be really good for the town. We could make this place a trading hub, Angela. It’s a ... a smart match.”

Again the words built up around her, hard and reasonable as a fortress. She shoved him thoughtlessly, twisting like a fox in a trap.

“Angela!”

The sound of her name died on the air behind her as she ran from the kitchen, three syllables over-articulated and alien, as automatic and empty as a word in a prayer.

* * * *

Angie sat under a birch tree on a hill outside town, holding her bottle of soda tightly to keep her hands from shaking. From here, seen through stalks of milkweed and milling gnats, the bustle of the market, the gray bulk of the hospital, the strand of gray smoke rising from the chimney of Toskie’s taphouse, were small tokens of humanity in a field of ruins and leaves. Their smallness made them seem invulnerable, somehow, remote and safe from the world like stars.

She gripped her soda bottle tightly, consoled by its smooth artificiality, the optimistic label with its manicured design. Cases of the stuff came from warehouses scattered around the state. The soda was inevitably flat but had become one of life’s chief luxuries, not least through its association with the giddy consumption of the past. Derrick was right, trade was vital, and for trade you needed strong alliances among communities. His marriage had been a good choice.

But when she sipped her soda those practical reflections dissolved. The sweet taste was like a distillation of another world, her mother’s world. What would her mother say about Derrick’s choice? About the world that had forced his choice? At thirty-six, Angie’s mother had been an active, outdoorsy woman bouncing around the country as a programmer and consultant, wandering in and out of marriages as freely as she changed jobs. When a job bored her, she quit and got a new one. When a relationship went sour, she found a new lover. Even after the Crisis, she had maintained her cavalier attitude. It was an adventure, like a power outage on a grand scale, and it brought out her best quality. Not pragmatism, not dynamism, as the people who worked with and married her might have guessed, but an uncompromising, almost ruthless confidence. She had retained the glory of a child, a conviction that the world owed her joy. Her chief emotion, consequently, had been a kind of exultant rage. Rage at the husbands who disappointed her, rage at the jobs that bored her, rage at the purchases and vacations and—yes—the children that failed to instantiate her primal dreams. Rage at the Crisis and, finally, at the rotting porch steps that gave way beneath her and the infected wounds that ended her life.

She would never have understood Angie’s errand. Or rather, she would have embraced the errand, but not the motive behind it. She had never sensed the menace that kept Angie awake every night, the nameless danger that brooded in the wood around the house. At all times, while chopping wood or cooking or doing wash, Angie had an eye on that forest, spare New England forest laced with old farmers’ walls that rustled with the moltings of paper birches and hung crooked oak branches over the wire fence ringing the yard. Something terrible would come from that forest one day, as surely as winter came over the mountain in December; she knew it. It would come for Maya and Emily, perhaps for Tom, and she would be powerless to turn it back.

She took the makeup case out of her shoulder bag and checked her hair in the mirrored lid of a rouge container. She would never be as beautiful as her mother. She lacked the requisite self-absorption, the ferocity and lust to which self-absorption gave rise. At least she had youth on her side. She snapped shut the case, capped her soda, dispersed the gnats with a wave, and marched down the hill through the milkweed to town.

* * * *

The men in plaid shirts were now loading the tractor trailers, heaving boxes up from the vendors’ carts. As they worked they sang foul-mouthed chants in which a gathered crowd sometimes joined. A crowd mostly of women, Angie noticed with unease. She took up a position at the periphery and studied the rhythmic swinging and flexing of the young male limbs, the sinews that fluttered in the forearms like silent arpeggios, the sweat that shone in the soft, cupped spaces between cheekbones and eyes. Their hands were so sure, their faces so confident. But something uncertain and dangerous manifested in the grinding of their jaws, in the severe shadows beneath the flexed biceps of those who had rolled up their sleeves. Not a threat, precisely, but an unrealized force, as when an animal pauses, twitching, between retreat and attack.

A shiver ran down her spine, and it was only when it had passed that she realized consciously what her body had already detected. One of the men was watching her. He looked to be the youngest, with a thick neck and hair so black and slick it seemed painted on. He said a word to one of his friends and hopped from the truck. Before she knew what was happening, he stood facing her.

“Hey there. You looking to buy something?”

“What? No.” She still felt as if she were watching him from a distance, though he stood closer to her than was normal or polite, smiling and wiping his forehead with his sleeve. He was not as tall as he had seemed standing on the trailer, but his neck and shoulders were monstrous with muscle. He nodded over his shoulder at the crowd.

“Only the wholesale guys are supposed to buy direct from us. But sometimes we make exceptions. If we take a liking to someone.”

When his eye ran down her she felt as though her summer dress had disappeared. Speech had become a sticky substance, difficult to shape. “And have you taken a liking to me?”

He grinned, showing even, nicotine-stained teeth. “You want to take a walk? Hold on, let me tell the boys.” He put a hand on her back as he turned and waved at his friends.

The man—his name was Rick—talked steadily as they walked through town, so that once she had told him her name she had no more need or opportunity to speak. It always seemed to be this way with men: they did all their talking right off the bat, and the more time you spent with them the less they had to say.

Rick was originally from Hartford. He had run track there, before the Crisis, but now his knees were bad from too much heavy lifting. (As he said this, he swung his arms so that the muscles rolled beneath his shirt.) He liked working on the trucks. You got to see a lot of people, and it felt good, with everything going to hell, to be on the road, nomadic, in the condition to which all people would eventually decline. Rick thought it was only a matter of time until civilization collapsed entirely. He made the declaration with cheerful arrogance, as though knowing they were all doomed made him more powerful than the average person.

He steered her through the throng with light taps on her back. His presence served as a kind of shield. The groping hands that usually harassed her were absent, and she felt a sense of security faintly magical in its consistency. He seems like a good person, she told herself repeatedly, he’s young, he’s strong. But when he smiled at her, her face refused to smile back.

They passed out of the market and into a quiet area of town where each polygon of the cracked sidewalk had its own tiny fence of weeds. Vestiges of glass in the frames of townhouse windows glistened in the afternoon light like unshed tears. Rick’s hand tensed against her back. “Well, this is an unfriendly looking area.” He smiled as he said it—the unfriendliness was clearly of no consequence to him; he was only worried on her behalf. “You know a place where we could sit down and talk? Out of the open?”

“There’s Toskie’s.”

“That nasty bar? We won’t even get a seat. Look, here’s an old house. I bet this is all right.”

He led her through a chain fence overgrown with rose bushes, across an overgrown lawn. With a kind of self-conscious nonchalance he forced open a broken window. She followed his lead inertly, instinctually sure that if she did not give in to his will at every point, she must abandon the affair entirely. As he helped her through the window, Rick slashed his hand on a thorn and cursed dramatically. It was an odd moment, faintly portentous—it seemed to her he had cut his hand on purpose.

In a dusty livingroom they sat on a swaybacked sofa among scattered items too heavy or useless to have attracted looters: a moldering hooked rug, a toy Hess truck, a flood of curling photographs spilled across the floor.

“God, it must get depressing around here.” Rick spread his arms on the back of the couch. “Up in the boonies, with everyone dying off. You have anyone to talk to?”

She knew it was too soon to mention the children. An instinct she was ashamed to discover in herself told her how these sorts of encounters proceeded. “No. No one.”

“That’s terrible. I mean that’s just wrong. What do you do?”

“I get by.”

“You deserve more than that.”

He turned to face her, putting his hand to the couch, and winced—the cut from the thornbush. She reached instinctively for his hand. The moment she touched him, he drew her smoothly into his arms. The pungency of his sweat invaded her, a terrible, painful odor that seemed to have lain flat against his body until that moment, waiting to ambush her like a set of quills.

“Angie ... poor Angie.” His hand petted her hair. He did not seem to mind the wound in his palm, now. He took her head between his palms and kissed her. The meaty roughness of his lips made her turn her head away, and she found herself gazing past his sweaty cheek out the window.

“What? What?” She gasped and leapt away from him, her feet slipping on the carpet of torn photographs. Disoriented, she looked down with a strange fixation at the images that slid under her feet—a sagging birthday cake, cypresses in Italy, a dog held still for the camera by a knot of children’s arms. Her gaze went back to the window and she released a long moan of anger and despair.

“Angie, what’s up?” Rick hopped off the couch, simultaneously reaching for her and turning to follow her gaze. Two men in plaid shirts—his friends from the truck—were crossing the street.

“Oh, you dumb assholes...” Rick put a hand on her shoulder. “Hey, I’m sorry. They must have followed us here.”

“You waved to them,” she said breathlessly. “You signaled them.”

“Now, why would you think that?”

“Yo, Rick!” one of the men called. “You warming her up!”

Rick’s face sagged. “Come on,” he pleaded to Angie, taking her hand. “You’ve been all alone, here, all this time ... It’ll be fun.”

She scanned the room frantically, searching for weapons. But it was hopeless—three strong men! A cold part of her brain strategized: if she fought, it would only make them angry. If she surrendered, they might be gentle, might even reward her somehow. Rick seemed so hopeful, so pathetic. And what choice did she have?

But one thought flashed in her mind brighter than all others. Rape was incidental, pain was incidental. But to be handicapped for months ... to be ill, possibly bedridden ... to require the attentions of a doctor, to compensate the doctor ... to have, finally, another mouth to feed, another ego to placate, another voice that would scream for her in the night ... a dread stronger and more calculating than the frenzied terror that anticipates pain—dread, it seemed, of helplessness itself—quickened her nerves.

Rick advanced slowly, corralling her into a corner. Her face heated with rage, but not rage toward Rick: rage toward the unfairness that had set him there, the injustice of his calm approach, the single bright possibility that illumined her mind with foreboding. When he seized her wrist, the rage erupted as a scream.

“Hey, hey.” He spoke petulantly as though to a child. “Stop that.”

His friends had climbed through the window. “Yo, shut her up, man!”

“I’m trying!” Rick ran his fingers down her cheek. “Come on, Angie. Jesus. It’ll be all right. Why are you doing this?” She jerked away, screaming again, not in panic but with calm steady power, and scooped the toy truck from the floor. The weight of it in her hand thrilled her with the knightly glory of defying an inevitable fate. She lusted for the sight of Rick’s face battered and flayed—not for the violence of the image but for the wounded disbelief that would soften his eyes, the childish incredulity he would evince when an event deemed impossible came to pass.

“Angie,” he begged, raising a big sad fist. “Don’t. Please.”

She drew back her arm, prepared to swing the truck, but a voice—a male voice—called from the street.

“Everything all right in there?”

Rick’s companions scurried away, rapid and silent as scavengers chased from a kill. She heard their boots pounding on the wood steps of the back porch, the jangle of a chain fence shaken by their vaulting bodies. Rick lingered, gazing at her with the precise expression of hurt amazement she had hoped to see. He took a step forward, his extended hand cupped like a beggar’s. She said nothing, offered him nothing. In a moment, he too was gone.

She sank onto the couch as the voice called again. “Hello? Hello?” A face appeared in the window, old, flaccid, puffy about the mouth as though with held breath—Bill Carver, the grocer. She began to cry.

“Oh, hey,” Bill Carver said, and essayed the difficult chore of climbing into the room. Even as she wept, she went to the window and helped him. His knobby fingers curled stiffly and uncertainly, like an infant’s, in her palm. She tugged with both hands, tears trickling unchecked down her cheeks. “Oh, what am I doing,” Bill Carver sighed, “I’m a fool.” He disappeared around the house, and a door banged. Presently he entered the room.

Poor bow-legged, pot-bellied, puff-cheeked old Bill Carver. The sight of him had always aroused in her a pity bordering on distaste. But he had the voice, the malevoice—that absurd primitive charm for setting cowards to flight.

“What’s happening here?” he said, and she leaned against him, sobbing, while his gnarled hand patted her back. “Saw some trucker boys come this way,” he explained. “Couple guys promised me a deal and I thought they were skipping out. They try to hurt you? Is that it?” Her nod set him off on a chivalrous tirade: more manly words piling around her, stern and enclosing. While he ranted he stroked her back. She noticed that his hand was shaking. He was trying to console them both with his righteous words, as though righteousness were equivalent to strength. He didn’t realize that her sobs were not of fear, but of frustration.

“Stop!” she cried, “I can’t—just stop, stop!” She sank to the couch, pulling him with her, and at last it was her turn to speak. Into Bill Carver’s stunned silence she poured a litany composed over months of introspection, an account of loose teeth and torn clothes and snot, of rain spraying through broken windows, of Tom telling her the head had come off the ax again, and why couldn’t he fix it himself, for once?—of Emily’s fits and Maya’s fussy stomach, of the thoughts that could never be spoken and that consequently overflowed, filling her bedroom at home with doubt and rage like a choking miasma, with anxiety so omnipresent that she often spoke to herself without realizing it. At last she came to a question that seemed to sum up all the injustices. How had Mom done it, it had always been so easy for her, daycare and therapy and support groups and a new man every year—and so confident, always confident, that it would always be like this, that no evil thing waited in the forest to advance when you let your guard down and take the children away...

“What,” Bill said vaguely, “what’s that now? Something coming? For the children?”

His baffled, scratchy voice recalled her to the present. She fell silent, realizing he could not see them as she could, those attendant threatening figures lurking on the horizon. And yet in her mind they appeared so clearly, prowling the distance like trolls, looting, raping, torturing stray dogs and cats: hunched, strong figures that grouped under defunct streetlights in abandoned towns, smoking and drinking, or skipped through the forest with wild cries, calling each other mocking names. A pack of teenage boys, shirtless, lupine in the moonlight, had run across the lawn one night, laughing over some savage game, and each day when the sun went down she pictured those boys returning to storm the house. In fact she pictured them, or creatures like them, propagating through the world like vermin, gathering force in the wrecked remains of the country like a wildfire in a forest that had for too long been protected.

“I thought I could find a good one.” The words leaked from her, unwilled. But they were out now, teasing Bill Carver’s curiosity. He questioned her and she tried to explain, divulging scattered reflections that aggregated haphazardly, like papier maché, around a vision she had labored to form. A vision of the one thing that seemed to promise her a happy future: a reliable male silhouette that might loom in the doorway, a deep voice that might boom across the lawn, a sort of scarecrow that could be propped at need on the porch to keep marauders at bay.

“I see,” Bill Carver said slowly. “Yes, I see. Yes, it does get lonely.”

Clearly he did not see, because loneliness was not the problem. He would never see, and yet, as she studied him with eyes sore from tears, a sort of understanding developed.

“It’s not for me,” Angie said. “It’s for the kids.”

He nodded and said again, “Yes. It does get lonely, doesn’t it?”

She forced thoughts upon herself, assembling them in her mind as she had once assembled geometry proofs in high school. Bill’s wife had died ages ago, well before the Crisis. He had no children. He was getting old, he wasn’t strong, he was missing several teeth and had a wart beside his left eye. But he owned a store and had connections to the trade routes, and he wasn’t so old as to be a burden on others. Above all, he was trustworthy.

“If you ever need anything...” he was saying, “Some rare goods ... maybe a place to stay while you’re in town...”

As though examining a fruit before picking it, she reached out and touched the lobe of his ear, lifting it slightly on her finger. His skin, in this small place, was soft and smooth as a child’s.

“Oh,” Bill said feebly. “Oh, Angie...” At the small provocation of her touch his deep voice lost all its power and authority. His clumsy fingers, lifted to her shoulder, burrowed into the folds of her dress. With horror she saw tears on his cheeks. The nausea that rose in her at the sight lifted into her consciousness a surmise more appalling than any that had occurred to her that day: it was as though half the world stared at her through those weak, weeping eyes.

“Angie,” Bill stammered, “You know, I could be good to you. If you’d let me. You’d never have to worry. Why, I’d ... When I knew your mother, years ago, I used to see you coming to the store ... but I never thought, never in a million years ... oh, if you’d only let me, you know you wouldn’t even have to...” He swallowed the end of the sentence and said in its place, “You have no idea what it would mean to me.”

When she drew away, he shuddered as though she had pulled a vital organ from his body. “Angie!” he cried at her retreat, not in protest or appeal but as a simple expression of pain. She stood and gazed down at him impassively. None of the strange male charm remained in his voice; it was thin and strained as an infant’s. His watering eyes mooned up at her like a dog’s. How had she thought she could wake every morning to those insatiable eyes, to their pitiful gratitude?

Bill soon recollected himself. His gnarled hands fell to his potbelly and nursed each other there with clumsy caresses. “What am I saying? I’m sorry. But if you do need anything, please, Angie, anything at all...”

She forced herself to smile, to offer her hand, to support him as they passed through the house and down the sagging porch steps.

* * * *

Angie put the children to bed early that night. She had given them lollipops by way of the promised “surprise.” Only Tom had seemed disappointed.

With Maya tucked in, with Tom reading by candlelight, with the doors of the bedrooms shut, Angie tiptoed into Mom’s room, opened the nightstand, and took out the steel box that contained the gun. It was a small weapon, intended for home defense. There were no bullets. She carried it to the screened porch and sat in the dark in her wicker chair, sinking slowly into the drowsy semi-alertness that served her these days as sleep. Her thoughts recursed with a regularity almost relaxing over familiar concerns as her eyes monitored the shaggy border of the forest.

Shame: that was what she felt. Shame, above all. What would her mother say? Had Angie actually considered moving the children into Bill Carver’s store, linking herself to that body lapsing day by day into a second infancy? Yet even now a part of her regretted her decision, the promptness with which she had thrown away the blessing of that charmed deep voice. And this of course was what her mother would have despised most: any hint of regret.

But it went beyond that. Her shame was not private; it was part of a collective experience. A historical moment had passed unrecognized. In retrospect it was frightening how quickly the change had come, like a drawn bow reverting to form. It was only when she reflected in hindsight on the years of the Crisis that she recognized contingent steps in a great development. Overnight, it seemed, the streets had grown raucous with violent men. They had abandoned themselves to savagery almost before the bombs had done their work, as though the war were merely an excuse, a license to indulge latent primitivism. Almost as quickly, every woman Angie knew had seized one man for her own, latching herself to a set of broad shoulders, a deep voice, as hastily and with as much instinctive pragmatism as she might have tied a house key to her wrist. As a girl Angie had been disgusted, like her mother, by the weak desperation of these women, by what she regarded as their acts of cowardice. It was only later that she came to see their desperation as a greater betrayal than weakness or cowardice—more sympathetic, perhaps, but harder to forgive.

Was this all it amounted to, then—her mother’s world? A short golden age: one, perhaps two generations, of a beautiful faith in progress? Or perhaps it had only been a game that people played for a time, and the illusion of progress was merely a myth that appeared in retrospect. Perhaps that was true of all golden ages.

A scene recurred to her from shortly after the Crisis. Dad had left, Maya was not yet born. They still had the car, and Angie’s mother had taken her and Tom and Emily on a trip to Hartford to see if a cousin was still alive. The car broke down on a back road, and Angie’s mother instinctively reached into her coat pocket and took out her defunct cell phone. After staring a moment at the dead screen, she laughed suddenly and hurled the phone into the forest. It was a characteristic and lovely gesture in its giddy reproach of the past. It lodged in Angie’s mind as the moment the world truly changed. It was as though the whole family had suddenly been set free of an unrealistic assumption. The particular detail that seized her imagination every night and made her sick with regret was the tone of her mother’s laugh: so bold, so unrestrained, like providence reduced to a sound.

A noise drew her attention to the forest. Her hand crept over the gun in her lap. Even without bullets, it had its use—as a bright, familiar emblem, like a small hard piece of the law.

Another sound, a rustle. Something was moving at the edge of the yard. She rose and went to the screen. Her eye picked out a dark shape browsing beneath the trees.

A bear? They had multiplied since the Crisis by feeding on garbage—black bears, easily startled; a shout usually frightened them away. Clouds shifted and the moonlight shone brighter. As the scene gained clarity her mind grew clear as well, so that when she recognized the form at the edge of the yard she was calm, strengthened by a morbid conviction. An echo of her mother’s laugh rolled through her mind, releasing her from illusion and refining her spirit into a will to violence. In the cold access of moonlight, she admitted finally that the Crisis, with all its bombast and overtones of apocalypse, had chiefly been a means to an end. She understood now the freedom it had granted her, a soldier’s freedom to hate with abandon. She found herself thinking, You’ve done it at last.

The darkness of the forest birthed a shadow that loped across the lawn. She tightened her fingers on the empty gun, not in fear or anticipation but merely in a kind of recognition. She was surprised to find herself, at this realization of her nightmares, filled with contentment, a patience dangerous as the practical gaze of a wolf.

The shadow paused. She lifted her weapon. The gun caught the moonlight so that her movement cast a flash of silver on the screen, a fleeting spark like something small, precious, and unnecessary cast away. She gave her mind up to an irrational, indomitable confidence. Her weapon might be moribund, but the hand that held it was a woman’s, calm and terrible.