Subscription

It struck Pearl as peculiar, how purposefully the boy seemed to have come to a stop in front of her home. How, without so much as a glance in her direction he had dismounted his bicycle, leaned it mindfully against the pickets, opened the gate and let himself into her yard.

A blonde boy, he carried over his shoulder a large canvas bag, ink grayed, with the word TIMES printed where it bellied, bold enough that Pearl did not need her eyeglasses to read.

    Coming up the walk, the boy removed from the bag what looked by the heft of its roll to be a Sunday newspaper, which he offered to Pearl at the foot of the stair.

     His eyes were the bursting blue of cornflowers and Pearl leaned forward in her rocker as much to better see them as to make out what the boy was saying.

It’s free, was what she thought she had heard and so asked the boy, ‘Free?’

‘Yes, maim,’ he replied, and one, two, three, up the stairs he came, placing the rolled newspaper into Pearl’s outstretched and unsteady hands.

‘Just this once,’ the boy said. ‘You see if you like it. And if you do, then you can subscribe.’

Pearl looked away from the boy’s cornflower eyes. She studied the newspaper. Felt its heft. ‘I didn’t think ...’ she began.

Hadn’t her daughter told her that newspapers were a thing of the past. That everything was online now and if she wanted to read the News, she would need to get a computer.

But Pearl didn't want a computer. She didn’t want to read the news either. Any part of the paper for that matter. That was Harold’s joy, and Harold was gone. Pearl only wanted to hear the regular morning thump of it on the porch, to witness on occasion the backhanded toss from the street, the paper’s slow arch and spin, the nearness of it to the doormat.

She smelled the ink now, the warmed canvas of the boy’s carrying bag. She wanted to subscribe. ‘Let me get my coin purse,’ she said, and made to rise.

The boy offered his hand, ‘Don't worry about that now, ’ he said, helping her to her feet. 

Peculiar, she thought, how strong he is, and looking over his shoulder, Pearl could no longer see the bicycle, propped beside the gate.

Quick Sketch of a Tall Reader

Charlie had often heard that shorter humans live longer than taller humans do. Something about the addition work required of the heart to get the blood to those more distant extremities. 

Being six foot five, this sometimes worried Charlie and he would have to remind himself of family members who had lived well into their nineties at heights that, while not freakish, would not be considered normal. 

He was a thin kind of tall, with large hands and large feet, large ears and a hawkish nose that seemed bent on removing his eyeglasses whenever he put them on to read, which Charlie did often.
    He had always been a big reader. His mother used to say that it was words that had made him grow so tall, as Charlie ate no more than she absolutely required, only read and read and read. Even at the dinner table. He would fork in his peas, his roast beef or mashed potatoes, never taking his eyes off the book beside his plate. Read, methodically chew and every third sentence, push his eyeglasses back up into place.  

                                                                                                        

A Tidbit About Walks and Flowers and Signs of Pie

Head down, watching his boots appear and disappear, the puffs of dust in their dropping, Carl had not seen the little road and was startled by its sudden presence, as if it had been a snake he had come upon walking and not merely a jog to the west. 

The road was half again as small as the road he walked, converging at a fair angle to make a tight wedge in which clouds of elderflower hung in a thick of thistle and daylilies, a sort of sunset, Carl mused, of lavender and orange fire. Planted in with the growth there was a sign, a whitewashed clapboard on which black letters had been carefully executed to indicate that fresh eggs and seasonal pies could be found up the little road in less than one mile’s time. 

Carl had no need for eggs at the moment, but had never turned down an invitation of any sort for pie, and curious as to what might be seasonal, veered from his northward course, west in the direction the  well-painted sign had so meticulously suggested.

Journal Sketch

Susie Patterson did not look through the window. She couldn’t. The glass was what she believed they called frosted, so all that could be seen through it was a softened bluish light and an occasional patch of shadow passing. 

Susie leaned against the door anyway, looking at the single pane of frosted glass, and through a haze of medications, guessed by the speed in which the darker patches moved by, which might be doctors, patients, nurses or visitors. 

This was not Susie Patterson’s first visit to this wing of the hospital. The Mental Wing, a coworker, Diane Billings had called it once. Diane’s father had been brought here, when his mind could no longer restrain the urges of his body and he was found one too many times walking the town square, naked but for his shoes, socks and oddly enough garters, held in place by his still impressive calve muscles.

Susie’s first visit—that’s what they called these trips, ‘visits’, although she had little say in her coming—her first visit had been when she was fourteen. Her mother had brought her, telling the doctors only that Susie had been extremely agitated lately, that she was having difficulty sleeping. Asking if maybe they could, ‘give her a little something’. 

In truth, her mother had found Susie several nights, sound asleep. Only not in her bedroom. Susie had been found in the back yard, curled into a sort of burrow she had dug out in the lawn, near to the tool shed, with her bare hands. 

Journal Sketch

The Sugar Maple his father planted for his mother, years ago, had been cut down, and without its mass out front as a landmark, Charlie Parker nearly drove by his old family home. Even now, parked at the curb across the street, he did not recognize the place and repeated the address in full, several times in his head, matching it to that of the now, stone-clad mailbox at the end of the drive.   

The Maple’s stump had been removed, the yard leveled where the earth once rose to the tree’s heavily knuckled roots, the scar seeded and healed over a slightly darker green than the rest of the lawn’s grass. 

1241Primrose Lane, Charlie found himself repeating against the doubt that lingered in his head. 

If Charlie Parker understood one thing about himself, it was that he knew he was capable of convincing himself that a thing was true, even though it was not. Once, as a boy, he had convinced himself that he had been born on Christmas Day, had argued the point with his best friend until his friend settled the issue by calling his mother. 

‘September twenty-fifth, Charlie,’ his mother had said. 

    Charlie saw the address repeated on the front porch, the numbers descending from a white coach lamp there. He had helped install that lamp, handing up screwdrivers, needle-nose pliers, wire nuts, black electrical tape, to his father, three steps above him on a paint spattered wooden ladder. 

He remembered thinking, when he and his father had finished and stood beneath the shade of the now-removed Maple, admiring the lamp, that when his friends saw its cut glass and diamond-shaped elegance, they would wish his father was their father. He remembered, too, how the light, left on at times after he had gone to bed, shone a soft amber at the frame of his curtained windows, and how he would fall asleep those nights with thoughts of cars, slowing as they passed to approve of the lamp, the drivers in a whisper saying how the Parkers must be doing all right.        

Sketch of Weeping Crabapple

With the swarms of buttercups, peach blossoms and hawthorn, vibrant, he would forget each spring the quieted beauty of the weeping crab until she bloomed in her bustles at the head of the drive, hunter and dusty rose, stunning, the glance from beneath the tilt of her parasol.

Sketch of William and a Fern

Poured into a thimble, William’s knowledge of plant life would fill so very little of the thumb cap, it could be placed onto the back of an anxious mule and carried over the roughest of terrains without a single droplet lost to spillage, such would be the headroom. 

     All flowers, William classified by their shape, as a sort of Daisy, Lilly or Rose, depending on which the blossom most closely resembled. Evergreen or deciduous, trees were simply trees. Whatever crept was ivy and whatever sprung from pasture or lawn was grass, be it clover or Timothy. 

     It was a deliberate thing, William’s lack of plant knowledge. Oh, he would have liked to spout off in Latin the names of each and every bit of flora he encountered. He would also like to be able to verbally show his appreciation for a good wine as well, and point out by name even the more minor constellations. But according to William, there was only so much time in the day and space in one’s head. He had to work for a living. ‘Let’s see how much a botanist knows about the transmission of a ’76 MG,’ he would say to himself when the discussion arose, which it quite frequently did. 

     William was a mechanic. Vehicles were what he knew, were what the space in his brain was reserved for. Perhaps when he retired he’d be able to carry with him a plants-at-a glance book, know-your-stars, your wine. Until then, everything was a sort of Daisy a Lilly or a Rose; a Port or Sherry, the Big Dipper. And William, for the more part, was good with that. 

     What he was not so ‘good’ with, were the papers referring to him as a mechanic and amateur plant enthusiasts, after his discovery of a fern thought to have been extinct since before the dinosaurs roamed. It wasn’t true. And while William was fine with being ignorant of some things, a deliberate lie, he was not.

  

‘The Parkinson’s brain,’ the woman on the radio explained, ‘wants to make everything smaller and slower and more quiet,’ which was so very odd, he thought, because so did he.

Where I Found Rachel Joyce

Fruit trees stud the long, narrow yard in a sort of zigzag pattern, goal stabs of some long forgotten game, nourished by the rot of mallets, wickets and wooden balls, left in hast for cake and ice cream, branched now and rooted.

She sits beneath a young and budding plumb, drawn to herself as if the day were chilled and her limbs a shawl, hair gathered like a careless June wind in combs of tortoise shell.   

‘He did not want to die,’ she says of her late father, turning her gaze then down and away to where a clutch of plump hens, white and golden and speckled grey, rake and prattle over their findings. 

‘And we did not want him to die, as well.’ 

   

He would be a buzzard, if made to choose from the birds. Flight to them seemed such a lazy task, relished, as if their mass on the ground made them forget of their ability, and each time they caught the warm upward drafts, tipping and circling into near oblivion, was the first, a marvel of joy. 

On Cold Fingers and the Death of Jay

Despite gloves, in the woodshed the cold found its way to his fingertips, the pain flaring like the dull blow of a hammer to each. 

     There was dry beneath the green, seasoned, and he hurried to dig for it at the back of the shed where the rick was lowest, wishing again that he hadn’t buried the better burning wood last fall beneath the new. 

     Mindful of the rise he had created picking through this way, the towered end of a rick nearly his own height, held upright, surely, by a single split he could remove at any time and bring the whole of it down on him, he remembered Old Jay, as he often did when the chance of death by suffocation arose. 

     He cupped his gloved hands, exhaled moist warmth from his lungs into the hole of the pocket they made, flexed his fingers. 

     Jay had always stood at the back of the little church his parents took him to as a child. He couldn’t sit. Jay's skeleton had grown faster than his skin, his father once told him, when he had asked why Jay would never come join them in the pews.
     Inside, the bones of Jay’s spine had been crushed in their struggle against the unyielding, ungrowing, tissue that bound them. In lieu of bones, beneath his suit jacket, Jay wore a brace of steel ribs attached to a steel backbone cinched and held into position by black leather straps, stainless and polished buckles.
     If he were to take the brace off, his father had told him, Jay would collapse, something like an accordion. The air would be forced from his lungs and unable to fill them again, Jay would soon die. 

     Jay did suffocate to death. Nothing to do with his brace, however. Too proud to take money from the State, Jay worked the brick plant down by the river, a custodian of sorts. 

     Several times, as a boy, his father had driven him by the plant. He'd always marveled at the enormous hive-like brick dome, in which, he was told, was kept dry a mountain of red clay dust, waiting to be transformed by water and fire into building materials.
     It was this mountain that fell upon Jay. Collapsed. And despite his armor, his brace, drove the wind from his lungs, and like the hand of God, squeezed the life from Jay's wrongly-grown and permanently upright body. 

     Having filled the wheelbarrow with wood, he blew again into the cup of his hands. He closed back the shed’s doors, took up the work-polished handles and turned the barrow toward the house. His fingers ached and in his walking, he heard the collapse of the precarious rick in the shed behind him, saw Jay again at the rear of the church, standing safely as the promises of God poured down, mountainous, around him.

   

The Sweetest Little Thing

He did not doubt that the cigarette had some sway in his seeing the little dog as a tumor, some sort of cancer, growing from the man’s arm. 

Its enormous, black and weepy eyes, bulging from the rolls of its overfed blonde body, the snarl of its pink and opened mouth. Not much of a leap, with the cigarette trailing smoke so near to its head.

Midway up the parking aisle, grocery list in hand, he had heard the dog, yapping. As always, he slowed to scan the car-filled lot, thinking he’d find a perked ear face pressed against nose printed glass, warning barks escaping like frightened birds through windows left cracked for ventilation. 

Instead, he found the dog leaning, paws and all, out of the opened driver’s side window of a vehicle approaching almost immediately behind him. 

The vehicle was that sort of grey-blue sedan that one immediately recognizes as ‘American Made’, if not by the fact that you cannot recall its being manufactured, then simply by its four doors and mass. The kind of vehicle that will slow shark about a parking lot for hours, propelled by the most minimal use of its dull witted muscle, searching for that nearest spot, that next opened handicap space in which to come to rest, motor idling thickly as one passenger stays behind, waiting for the other's return, a prescription filled.

The driver’s arm was cocked out of the sedan’s opened window, and in the crook of it, lay the dog, semi-contained and barking angrily with no apparent intent or direction. Holding between his fingers a newly lit cigarette, the driver had somehow managed to bring the smoking hand around the fat little dog so that the cigarette hung now beside the yapping dog’s left ear.

It looked like an open wound, the seep of its eyes, wet black stains beneath its blue glossed eyes, the grey-pink flesh of its snarled gums. The driver, the passenger, oblivious to the dog, searched for an opened place to park. 

‘How adorable,’ he heard the voice of some passerby say, two girls who had spotted the cancerous dog. 

‘Just the sweetest little thing.’
   
     The sweetest little thing. 

'Sorry Annie'

At times the lush green, the waterfalls, the black volcanic soil would find its way into his mind. Someone would say, ‘We just got back from Hawaii,’ as if they had driven into town for groceries, and he would think it possible again, almost necessary, that he go to visit the Islands.
    But then his mind would slowly populate the lush green, the volcanic cliffs from whose fractured edges water spouted crystalline, rainbows hung in the mist of its decent. Pale and newly burned Midwesterners, his parents, the sound of their honest fascination somehow cutting through the roar of the water’s leap, persistent as the dim clatter of some newly loosened item in an otherwise silent car ride.
     He would envision in terror the flight, calculate costs, feel the fine crush of coral in everything that he ate, every towel with which he dried, smell that sick-sweet smell of ocean, sun block and bug spray, and always the eyes of locals in passing, filled with distrust, unwant.
     It was nice, he’d admit that, those first few moments when he imagined dipping backpack laden into the density of some semi-rain forest, snakeless, Mount Kila something or other in the offset, poking its dormant head up out of leaves as large as car hoods. A hop skip and a jump, his father said once, of the trip over. Close your eyes and you’ll be there in no time. His father had gone to Pearl Harbor, showed him pictures of the Arizona in her ocean grave. He’d forgotten about that. God, the ghosts. The place had to be swarming with them. Swarming. 

On Grass

He woke up obsessed with grass. Perhaps not an obsession, but rather a thought bobbing in the distance, that he would see and then not see when it sank behind the roll of his morning routine. He saw it again when he sat down to the quiet of his Journal. Grass, he wrote. And the word had seemed oddly green on the page. He saw himself a boy, low in the thick of a lawn grown high between weekend cuttings, parting the blades and searching for beetles and the continued march of ants having left the sidewalk. The shoots are pale where they enter the earth, moist and littered with an odd fuzz of something like bits of string. It makes him think of ferns, the floor of a forest, and he imagines the ants he has yet to find, how they see the grass, like the towering redwood trees he has seen in magazines, beside which even automobiles appear themselves like ants. And beneath the stars, he sees the redwood trees like ants and wonders what beyond that is larger still. He scratches at the earth. His nails fill with the black of it. Would grass grow there, he wonders, and green fire bursts from his fingertips. He lays on his back, closes his eyes. He itches. The sun is better than any blanket he can remember, and he has known many wonderful blankets. The grass grows taller in the space between his arms and body, between the V of his legs, alongside his ears. Taller and taller until he is lost like a coin in its height, a penknife. At his back, roots grow, pale and searching for purchase. He is dirt, pierced by blades of grass, like a man dropped onto a bed of nails. And then, it is Saturday. He hears the whir of the mower. Sees his father’s long strides and in the air, smells all that is summer and what is best of a boy. 

The Breathing of Wood

It was as if a master stonemason had packed the wood into the shed, each pie-shaped split seated into a near perfectly corresponding V, chinked with tinder wherever the slightest gap remained. The old man doubted he could wedge the blade of his penknife into the neatly ricked seams. 

     “She’s got to breathe a little, son,” he said to the boy of the pile, though in the still of his thinking he felt the well of pride, knowing that it was his own blood’s doing, a generation leaped, that had given the boy this keen eye. “Be ten years drying, racked up that pretty.” 

Bedside Manner

When the day came that he was lying in bed, wasting away toward death, what Albert Carlson, the famed writer of short stories, did not want to see was that the Caregiver assigned to aid in his crossing over to the other side lacked three of the four standard limbs given to most humans at birth.

     A teaser on the radio for an upcoming program had informed Albert that just such a man was in existence. A man who not only lacked three limbs, but had been somehow inspired by his amputations to pursue a career in hospice care. From the teaser Albert had also gathered that it had been an accident that left the man—whose name was entirely too Asiatic for Albert to remember—lacking all but the single appendage. Which appendage the teaser had not specified.

     Albert had immediately imagined the Asian man, bedside, in an array of different configurations. One arm, no legs. One leg, no arms. With hooks for hands. At eye level, wheelchair bound. 

      

     He assumed also that the man’s heart was in a good place. It would have to be. Possibly his accident had brought him near enough to death that he felt now qualified to comfort others at that door, had the credentials to give them a glimpse of what lay in wait on the other side. 

     Good for him, Albert thought, but found it a bit presumptive of the Asian triple amputee. He hoped that they would at least consult him before bringing such a man into his dying room. Not the Asian part. Albert had no issues with that. The missing limbs. There should be a waiver of some sort. Notification. 

     Of course, he might change his opinion between now and then, but at the moment it struck him that such a man would only complicate the matter of letting go. He will have finally come to terms with all of the question he would have to leave unanswered, the stories he would have to leave unwritten and in would hop this Asian man on his one leg and stir the pot anew. 

     He’d need someone entirely banal.    

     No. That wouldn’t even work, would it? He was already imagining the story there, the questions piling up. He’d have to die alone. 

     Albert Carlson placed his favorite pen and the last of his writing paper into the fire and went into his bedroom to die. 

     Perhaps it would be just as well, Albert thought, the one legged Asian man. 

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. 

'Jack Bender', Interstate Short

“What I’d like to know is,” the man named Brooks asked, leaning forward in his chair to adjust the wood of the fire around which they had gathered for the evening, “Where does the man shit?”

There was never a shortage of opinions around the evening fire. Especially when the days take had been good, which it had, and the alcohol was strong, which it was, so it was clear to Brooks from the silence that came from the other eight, that none of them had considered this. 

Brooks’ eyes narrowed. He let four cars pass overhead, chunk ka chunk, chunk ka chunk, as they crossed the seam that bound Trinity Lane and the Bypass, before he spoke again. 

“I’m not sure that he even does shit,” Brooks said, and leaned back, looking upward to find a star, any star, in the washed out night sky. He missed the dark. Good, deep dark. Disorienting dark. 

“Oh come on Brooks,” one of the eight finally said, “everybody’s gotta shit.”

It was Packy. 

Packy was the oldest of the bunch, allegedly, a tiny man, who always broke first when the conversation grew tense. 

“I’m not so sure about that, Pack,” Brooks replied, and again, the eight grew silent, each studying deeply the image they cherished most of the man they believed to be named, Jack Bender 

   Christ was homeless. 

There’s a quiet belief among those who live without an address attached to their name, in tents and cardboard boxes, or beneath an overpass, as with the eight, that the Savior, should he return as promised, will do so, not in a blaze of triumphal glory, but as one of them. 

One eye was always open. Searching for signs. Legends were quick to rise. 

Jack Bender was the latest of these Legends, and the nearest to proving what so many of those who lived life on the streets had for so very long believed.

He arrived the winter before last, near to its end. 

A bedroll was all that he was seen to be carrying at the time, and water in a slim jug at his side, which wasn’t entirely odd, and so ignored for the more part. But when Jack Bender settled in beneath the Seventh Street overpass, his camp, somehow, in the course of that first night, became furnished with a stove, night stand, clock, chair and a table, in which a plate and cutlery for two could be stored. 

As the weeks passed, Jack Bender came and went, ate and slept, just like anyone. But Jack Bender generated none of the refuse one associates with the activities of being alive. Nothing accumulated. No paper, no plastic, no shit. His camp was immaculate. All of the eight had visited, purposely leaving their empties to see what would become of the brown-bagged bottles, pissing in the brush of the embankment as near as they dared to Jack's camp. But not even on the hottest, most humid days of summer could even a hint of urine be smelled, and the trash they had left, they swore, vanished the minute they turned their backs on Jack Bender. 

Even Packy found it hard to argue further with Brooks on the matter. Perhaps Brooks was right. The man didn’t shit.

“I’m not saying he’s Christ,” Brooks said eventually, the fire crackling. “I just don’t think Jack Bender is entirely human,” and pitched into the pile growing alongside the camp, the bottle for which he had begged the day and now emptied.

Chips

The sandwich shop where Hank often got his lunch was set up in that sort of self-serve manner that left one holding his bag of chips and drink as he waited for the main course of his meal to be prepared. 

     At one time it had been a find, tucked into a neighborhood that required some part, if not all of your vehicle, as recompense for parking. But the undesirables had been driven out of the ‘hood’, as they say, by adventuresome homosexuals—god bless them—which paved the way for young business types—god damn their snobbery—and more often than not, Hank found himself to be the oldest patron in the shop, by what he guessed to be a good thirty years. 

   He enjoyed observing as he held his chips and unsweetened tea. Hipsters, techies, blue print shuffling contractors, musicians, suits who no longer wore suits, undeterminables. 

   While not one of those Armageddon, survivalist types, Hank did put a fair amount of stock in a human’s ability to accomplish the basic tasks of procuring food, potable water, and possibly creating fire from something other than a match or cigarette lighter, should, as some say, ‘the shit hit the fan’. 

     Not a single person he had seen in the shop had struck him as being able to last more than a month should the kale and kombucha cease being delivered to their doorstep. 

     For a time, Hank told himself to be more optimistic, to have a little faith in this future Generation. 

     But then he noticed the chips.   

    They would eat them before their sandwich arrived. Anyone under thirty. Plop down in a booth, or mount a stool at the live-edge bar, open the bag and one by one, eat until they were gone, the sandwich for which they had been intended to accompany yet to be made. 

     Perhaps they could have survived without their farm-to-table entrees and craft small-batch brews. But to eat your chips before your sandwich arrives. There was no hope for such a Generation. Of that, Hank was certain. 

     Doomed, Hank thought, his chicken salad on toast ready now at the counter, and not even a sip taken prematurely from his tea in the waiting. You are all doomed.