J. Curtis - Calexit - The Anthology

But her parents were careful not to give her access to things from which she could obtain knowledge for which she did not yet have the wisdom nor demonstrated the reasoning. Remember Jack and Roger from Lord of the Flies? Imagine them with Wireless connectivity, Mom’s credit card, and free shipping. There are no laws that will prevent what a mind unbound by honor, ethics or the value of others can destroy when their own worth is predicated on unlimited attention and no accountability. And certainly, there are no laws which will sway the actions of a mind caught by madness, who act not with the rational thought of the outcome, but as a man, out of his mind with a gangrene poisoned hand, thirsts for an ax that with its downward stroke will somehow make him whole.

When such evil, by it driven by mental defect, jihad, or ego strikes, it does so at the very lie of safety that are the laws that control behavior, that control our tools, our very actions, for evil knows no such laws. When they strike, there is little left but the invoked ghosts of ones we can never avenge and the media-heralded name of one who should be unnamed, forgotten, buried in an unmarked grave in burnt, damned ground. Then comes the cry that yet another law above and beyond the ones they already broke by their actions.

She gently pats the small firearm in her pocket. It’s illegal, one of the many things, it seems, that’s called illegal here in Cali anymore. Breaking the law is not in her blood, but without it, her blood could be spilled.

From the beginning of time, there have been laws; there have been tools that can be used as weapons, including firearms. There has been good and evil. There have been two distinct and competing impulses that exist among humans, one, the instinct to live by the law, to act peacefully except in matters of self-defense, to follow moral commands for the good of the group; and the other, the instinct to gratify one’s immediate desires without adherence to any such law or moral code, using violence, not as a means of protection, but to simply to obtain supremacy over others or force one’s will on someone without defense.

How did that all change, she thinks, to where we are in a world where everyone expects something for free, laws and the Constitution are whims, and those in power do anything they can to stay there, even if it means blood continues to flow in the street? How did we get to a point where greed and self-entitlement broke this once proud land away from our country, which she STILL believes is HER country, with a savage force that would put any earthquake to shame?

She steps outside to lock the gate. It’s only one additional thing between the forest and her door, but she sleeps better knowing it is locked, not fear of the four-legged creatures but of the two-legged ones. When she first moved here she replaced the pin tumblers on her gate, grooming station and supply shed with magnetic and combination to make them less easy to “lock-bump” and break in.

A hundred yards away, there is a moonlit lane between pine trees and stone. There in the shadows, only steps away, a long shadow shifts. She stops, sensing movement, sensing darkness within the dark, in the woods past her clothesline. Her hand moves to her firearm, poised to use it if needed. It is only a fox, easing back through the trees; a shadow, a form that slides like light through a picket fence, slanting sideways, and then disappears under cover. Her hand eases away from her weapon, but she backs away, towards the candlelight, towards home and sleep.

She walks quietly back towards the house. She goes a different time each day, knowing that predators rely on patterns. There in the distance, a couple of coyotes, trotting along the edge of the meadow, through snow that clutched at their empty bellies, heads cocked, eyes forward, using instinct, tooth and sinew to find that one small morsel there breathing under the snow, trying to hide for its life, a small shivering rabbit, wishing as desperately not to be eaten alive as the coyote desperately wishes to consume. The coyote stops to look at her in the stark moonlight, with what looks to be a smile on his face, not one of welcome but of mockery; the smile of a predator. He watches as she moves on down the road towards her door, round in the chamber, ready if needed.

She walks back towards the house when from the edge of the woods comes motion and sound, a blurred commotion, a high pitched, soft pleading scream that breaks the lie of safety. She looks towards the trees and sees something darting quickly, a dark shape, too small to be human, too quick for her to catch a good glimpse. There, in the ditch, a small white form, a jagged tear in its furry throat, rabbity legs twitching in the remembrance of life.

As she bolts the door behind her for the night, the abandon and innocent glee that was childhood remain forever lodged in her mind, just as do those lessons, even the painful ones. She puts her hands up to her nose and smells the faint, clean scent of soap, something so plain and simple, much like what once stood for truth. Today, she is no longer trusted with either a weapon or a voice but the Calis can’t take her honorable heart. What guides her to maintain that honor is not a law, it is not the dictate of a ruling body, and it is bound to her by the honor of the past and the examples of her upbringing.

She moves into the house, ears listening to anything unusual, eyes looking for anything out of order, a habit that is not fear but caution, locking the door behind her, prepared and aware. Outside, the snow blankets the ground with a soft innocence, hiding more than the ground but the very risks of the wild that play out in the night, beyond her sight.

She looks outside one last time to make sure she is alone, the evening air cooling her blood, the field empty and quiet, except for the steady sound of a small wounded animal, a ceaseless and unemphatic cry into the wind.

Winter is firmly here, so far mild, for which she and her wood supply are grateful, should the power go out permanently. She thanks the Lord every day for having the presence of mind when she bought the place to install a wood stove and store a couple of years’ worth of wood in the shed behind the house that wasn’t being used. It is an easy walk with a wheelbarrow there and back, and she had built a crude fence on each side of the path, so if she had to fetch more wood in the middle of the night, she had a little something between her and any animals that might be roaming her property as well as a blockage to someone wanting to “help themselves” to her firewood. If the power goes out, she’ll just run the stove at night, sleeping during the day so that the smoke is not seen from a distance. She hoped it would last her a while.

Still, she plans to use no more than she needs to, climbing the ladder into the open storage loft she has in her bedroom area, the warmer air rising and keeping that spot more comfortable than her own bed right now. Taxi the horse used to spend winters down at her boyfriends, and she prays he doesn’t freeze out in his stall this winter, even with some extra insulation intended for a future enclosed porch that she carefully installed around his stall.

She figured she would go out one last time to see if she could harvest a small whitetail, something small enough that she could get it hauled out on the horse, but providing 40 or so pounds of meat that she could store in one of the outer buildings that were freezing, now that the bears would be in hibernation. She still has enough fuel for her camp stove and if there was a day with enough sun the solar oven might still work. She’d actually made a pie in it to celebrate surviving her first three months on her own.

She wasn’t too keen on leaving tracks so she waited until it was still cold but the light snow had melted. Although she had always lived here year-round, the summer dwellers made their way back to the cities with the first snowfall, so this time of year she rarely ran across someone on the higher elevation trails. Still, she always carried a firearm, for she knew that you never alone in the wilderness, in spite of a solitary step. Several people have told her they have seen, while hunting, a large shadow, merging along the edge of vision. They would raise up their arms to appear bigger and shout LOUDLY just in case, and the shadows blend and disappeared. Bear? Bobcat? Who knows?