"Hey. Bigwig." Ezra is right next to me. I've nodded off again. Lost more time. "You have to let it go. Got it?"
AUGUST 2012.
A woman has passed out in the checkout lane. The things in her wire basket are strewn all over the floor: tins of government food covered with white labels full of black words, a tall bottle of hairspray like my mother's, a pouch of beef jerky, and, peeking out from between her thighs, a jar of green olives. While everyone else checks for a pulse, I worry about what's going to happen when she's taken to the hospital. Then after, when she doesn't come home.
"Mommy," I say. But my mother is watching the woman and doesn't hear.
Two other customers put down their wire baskets and adjust their masks with jerky fingers. They split the woman up, one arm and one leg each, and carry her to an office in the back where she'll be given some juice and the officials will be called.
We aren't to worry, the Store Manager assures us.
Happens all the time.
When it's our turn to upend our basket onto the black conveyor belt, my mother asks the checkout girl
why
it happens all the time.
"Them announcements." The girl points to the latest yellow note with a covered hand. Her name is Lindsay. She lives on the spread of land across from my grandparents' farm. Doesn't seem too worried about the box of latex gloves now posted at every checkout. They make me nervous. Remind me of visits to the doctor. Of shots.
We follow Lindsay's finger to the racks that used to be full of magazines showing pouty-mouthed women. They've been gone for a while now, just like the blue metal boxes out on the sidewalk that used to yawn when fed a quarter, spit up a copy of the daily news. Now there's nothing left to read. Just these bright yellow pieces of paper delivered by men in blue suits.
Today's message is briefer than usual. Mostly numbers. A five followed by a long series of others.
"How many dead to date," Lindsay explains, looking down at me with her empty blue eyes. They're spectacular above the white paper mask everyone's supposed to wear over their mouths. Cerulean. "How you doin', sport?"
My mother collects her bag and walks me roughly through the automatic front doors. Misplaced rage. She thinks I'm clueless about what's happening and that the checkout girl let the cat out of the bag, even though, for months, things have been changing. The television has been losing its stations. We used to have ninety-nine and now there's just one--channel 4. The only thing channel 4 shows anymore is news that turns my parents pale. It makes them drink more. Huddle around the kitchen counter and whisper. A woman with gold hair tells us,
Everything's fine. Don't risk your lives with so many questions. Go get your shots. Do what you're told. Blah-blah-blah.
My parents won't keep it on. Call it gibberish.
It's not just the television. My favorite brands of cereal and soda have been disappearing, too. Kindergarten. Play dates. The yellow bus that used to pick me up at the end of my grandparents' drive a few months after we left the city. Belly laughs. Pats on the back.
See ya'll later
s,
Good to see you again
s.
Good to
anything. The Pandemic isn't here yet and most people have already died, their important parts anyway. My mother thinks I'm too young to understand this. In some ways, I understand better than she does. What's happening. What's already been allowed.
There's an old fire burning in the middle of the square.
It's been there for weeks. My mother is so angry, she walks us back to the car the wrong way round. Through the gray smoke that smells like must and makes me cough. Past other men in blue uniforms posted one at each corner.
One, two, three, four
. All of them with guns.
I look past them into the red and orange center of the fire, my heart racing. I've been told not to look. On any other day my mother would have put a hand over my eyes. Or picked me up and forced my head into her shoulder. But today she's forgotten and I'm free to see what it is they're burning. I prepare myself as my head begins to turn. It could be anything. Puppies with their eyes gouged out. Kittens with legs like four blackened sticks.
What if they're burning people?
The idea almost stops me, but there's something even more awful and exciting about that.
Ahead of me, my mother is rounding the last corner. We're almost back to the car. Quickly, I turn my head. Feel the heat of the fire on my cheeks.
Nothing exciting
. No dead kittens or people. Just a set of sloping red hills come up from layers of black ash. No bones or teeth or feet or paws sticking out. Just books. Words I can't read shining through the hills' flaming tops. Most of the pages are gone or going quickly. Plastic covers are dissolving. The hardback ones have held out the longest and cut the fire into seesaw angles.
When my mother turns around to hoist me into my child's seat, she catches me looking and frowns.
"Do you want to know why they're burning those books?"
I nod yes because she wants to tell me. I sit quietly as she buckles me in.
"Because the government thinks there's the possibility this flu might be passed through the oil in our skin." My mother's voice is low, like it gets just before she starts to cry.
She sits back on her heels and looks down at the sidewalk between her feet. "It's nothing you need to worry about, okay?"
"Okay."
I put my hand on hers. We link fingers.
The man in the blue suit nearest glances over. My mother feels him watching and stands up. She kisses me on the forehead and shuts my car door. Starts driving back to my grandparents' farm. I know what will happen when we get there.
She'll pull my father aside and tell him about the whole thing. She'll say Lindsay mentioned the Pandemic in front of me. And all those people dying. She'll tell my dad I've seen them burning books. My father will tell my mother,
She's a smart kid. She's been dreaming about it, hasn't she? Must have leaked into her head somehow.
He's not going to march over to Lindsay's house and tell off her parents. Besides which,
We've got bigger fish to fry, don't we? Damned right we do
. My mother will end the conversation with the same thing she always says. She thought things would be different out here in the country with Grandma and Grandpa. But it's not. And she misses our home.
My father's right. I have been dreaming about it.
The dream starts like this. I'm outside on the front lawn with my mother and father and grandparents playing a game of Wiffle ball. Above their heads, a big tan cloud is hanging low in the sky. Nobody sees it but me. It crawls quickly onto the corner of the farm. Moves toward us like a wide brown mouth. Before we can move, the cloud of earth explodes into a million tiny pieces that fly around and between us, pulling my hand from my mother's and hers from my father's. Reducing my grandparents into kneeling sculptures of sand. The air is thick and I can't breathe, or see my family, or my hand before my face. Then, as suddenly as it came, it's gone. Any left-behind sand drops to the earth and I see my family come up out of the fresh brown hills. The horror of it never fades.
Holes have been bored into their bodies, starting at the top of their skulls. Their features and joints have been smashed flat by what looks like a head-to-toe bandage pulled too tight.
Cheeks, noses, foreheads, chins, all the parts of them I recognized are gone. These tube people have no eyes, just holes where they should be, no tongues in their open mouths, not even teeth. When they tip down their heads, I can see straight through to the sandy ground. But they can still move. They are still alive.
These tube people walk around like they don't know where they are. They bump into me on their way to somewhere else. Don't know me. But I don't know them either. They've become empty, hungry monsters with so many places needing to be filled, I worry they might try to eat me. Pick me up and stuff me whole into their toothless mouths. I try to run but the hard ground has become soft with sand. Behind me, they have their arms stuck out, feeling for my small body, which won't be enough for even one of them.
It feels like I'm the only one unchanged by the storm, but I have no mirror. No way to see if there's a hole in my head, too.
Almost every night for the last few months, I've had this dream. Some nights, I find my mother at the side of my bed wrapping a cool towel around my neck, hurrying to get a bowl under my mouth. She never asks me any questions and I understand why. I can see it in her eyes and in the colors swirling around her. The purplish blue cloud she usually wears like a poncho, the one only I can see, has changed colors. It's now sickly brown, spiked with lines of vibrant, terrified red. She doesn't ask me about my dreams because she's having them herself. Calls me an acorn fallen not so far from the tree.
Our car is barreling down the country road way too fast. It makes the car vibrate like we're on a ride at the county fair.
"Mom?" I ask.
"Yeah, honey?"
I'm thinking about the woman from the grocery store. About her soft knees on display, the jar of olives buried halfway up her privates. "Is that woman going to be okay?"
"Yes, honey."
"Will they take her to the doctor?"
My mother finds me with her rearview mirror. "I'm sure they will."
"Someone's going to have to go to her house."
"Why?"
It's a sore subject between us, me knowing things I'm not supposed to, though I've heard Grandma talk. Know my mother did the same things, too. "Just somebody needs to go out there."
"
Why,
honey?"
I look out at the fields where I won't see her furrowed brow. "Somebody needs to feed her cat."
My mother doesn't ask how I know the woman has a cat. She tips back the rearview mirror so I can no longer see her and quietly drives us home.
Two weeks later, we're out on the front lawn playing Wiffle ball when a long white truck comes tearing up the drive.
There is a cutoff age, the man tells us.
Four
. I'm two years older than that but don't look it. Could pass for four. My mother says this is a blessing. And the Confederation has lost my records or they'd have known about my special abilities, too. Another blessing.
I know things I'm not supposed to. Mostly through colors people wear around them like their own personal clouds. Each color tells me something different. Bright pink can mean love. Yellow can mean happiness. Blue most times means a person is some kind of teacher--not the kind standing in front of a chalkboard who passes out books and homework, but the kind who makes you feel better just by talking to you. No one's ever just one color, but this doesn't make it any harder. All I have to do is look at them and I know the insides of their hearts. I used to like it until the Pandemic came along and everyone got scared.
When people are upset, their clouds get dark and can take up a whole room. All the time now, mostly down at the square, I see big blobs of dark color where people should be. Outside Mr. Caldwell's pharmacy, in front of the tavern, in the grocery store where we saw the woman fall, the one with the starving cat. Wherever the bright yellow notices are posted. Sometimes, these red-black clouds turn a light moldy brown while their owners are standing in our little town square, looking up at our new flag. This one is all blue with a big white splotch in the center that's supposed to be the new shape of our country. The man standing here in Grandma's kitchen is wearing a suit of the same blue color. Just-after-the-sun-goes-all-the-way-down blue. The color of the sky after all the light is gone.
My mother pulls me behind her and pushes me down with the palm of her hand. I'm skinny and have the wide eyes of youth, but I'm not short. I'm quick but don't have a child's desire to ask too many questions.
Stoic,
my mother calls it. A good way for a child to have been born these days.
Atop this man's blue suit is a cloak made of ugly purple mist shot through with pulsing bits of red. It tells me he's giddy with his new authority. High on it. This official with his shock of white-blond hair has been told to take what he wants. What he wants right now is my mother. It's in the red parts all around him, like a hundred eyes blinking.
There are more men like him out in the yard, standing around the van where my grandparents and father have already been taken.
"Mommy." I take her hand. Try to pull her away. She won't come, is pretending to listen.
I am here for . . . I have been sent here by . . . I am planning to
. . . This man is all about his mission. He's become the same as the men stationed around the square, marching and barking orders through large white tubes. They all have a single stripe on each sleeve and a red handkerchief tied around one arm. Have all become their new suits.
"You're Abigail Sarah Adams, is that correct?" The man's curious blue eyes are fixed on my mother's dress. At the place it tore when they removed my father.
"Yes, sir." My mother is using a foreign tone.
Careful,
she'd whispered when the other men took away my grandparents. This new voice is soft and quick. All tone and no words.
He could hurt us, baby
. I hold stock-still, bending in such a way that my calves cramp.
The man is holding a small black machine with a window on its top. He taps a pen with no ink against its surface while asking her questions.
"And she's . . . ?"
"Harper Abigail Adams."
"And she's
four
?"
"Yes, sir."
"What's her birthday?" The man shuts his mouth as if his questions are over.
"September the thirteenth, 2008," my mother answers without pause. So quick and even, I wonder if I've had it wrong all this time.