Notes

What he wanted was a notepad. The smallish type, often given away by businesses. Something on which he could jot down his grocery list, a couple things to pick up at the hardware store. 

     There’d been several in the kitchen junk drawer, and he had looked there, but he must have used them, because they weren’t there now. 

     Had he made that many lists? he wondered. That many trips to town? How many sheets were on one of those pads? He pictured the years of his life, passing, not like pages being torn from a calendar, but as lists for bread and eggs, for three-inch screws and a dozen two-by-fours. He wondered of the things he could calculate, had he saved all of those lists, kept them in a box of some sort. Hours and days, gallons of gasoline, pounds of chicken and greens. 

     When there were no notepads, he would sometimes write his lists on the blank squares of the envelopes that his bills came in, or on unused swatches of the statement itself. But it was late in the month. The bills had been paid, the refuse used as tinder. 

     There was his writing pad, but he never tore paper from that. Never. 

     He’d have to go upstairs, get a sheet of typing paper from his desk. 

     Upstairs, it had occurred to him that if he got several sheets, he could quarter them, and although the paper would be loose, not quite as nice as an actual pad, it would suffice until he came across some more giveaways. 

     Downstairs, folding a sheet in half, he remembered how his father had taught him that he could cut paper without scissors. How he had marveled at his father performing this feat. The folding. The ironing of the crease with his thumbnail. 

     Had he not moistened it with his tongue as well? 

     And then the gentle parting of the two halves. The release of those fibrous edges as if by air. 

     At that moment, his father had been a god. 

     He had been the son of a god. Bequeathed a knowledge equivalent to that of fire. He would survive with this. Mystify. 

     Of course, he would find out later that no one was impressed by this newfound knowledge. That it was a thing well known and he was late in its learning. But that moment. When it was new. And the magic pure ... 

     On the first of the quartered sheets he wrote not a list, but simply, REMEMBER, folded the note down into quarters again, and then from his pocket, drew out his wallet and there, tucked the note away, in hopes that he would do just that ... remember.  

The Great Pumpkin

It’s almost funny. Everyone worried about the bees. And here it’s the pumpkins that are going to get us. 

   The 2021 Blight struck one hundred percent of the World’s living pumpkin vines. All of them. Wiped out. Dead. Withered. The pumpkins deflating so fast they couldn’t be gathered from the fields. 

   There were some Mennonite growers, real Orthodox backwoods no-power-having types, who managed to get a few to market before the blight reached their farms. But you’d have thought those pumpkins were solid gold, for what they were asking for them. I guess, in hindsight, they were. 

   Spores they say. Some shit that mutated in Asia. Travels through the soil. Crazy fast. There was no stopping it. Boom. The pumpkins were gone. 

   We were stunned, more so than panicked. I mean, it was a little like waking up to the News telling you that there weren’t any more rocks. An odd thing to get your head around. They’re pumpkins. Yeah, you care, but not much. Not really. 

   Sure, there was some speculation as to how sad Fall would be without them, Halloween, Thanksgiving. #lonelyporch #missingthepumpkins #carvingnotcarving, but we bought up the plastic and plaster replacements, and pumpkin pie filling isn’t even made from real pumpkins. So we were covered. We moved on. They’d have the spores cleared up in no time, breed some resistant pumpkins, a little genetic modifying, something, and next year we’d be scooping the guts from those big orange guys again, stuffing them with candles to stave off the spooks and mark with light our homes as treat ready and waiting. 

   But we were wrong. So wrong. And so slow to make the connection between our own growing death rate and the loss of those taciturn and mostly ocherous fruits.