Кори Доктороу - Make Shift - Dispatches from the Post-Pandemic Future

He picked up the glass shakily, but didn’t drink from it. Erin made sure to slurp hers noisily, and this seemed to clue him in that he should do the same.

“What,” he croaked, “the fuck.”

“The neighborhood kids don’t really like me,” Erin said. “Well. I take that back. Some of them don’t like me. Mostly their parents don’t like me, I think, for a lot of reasons. One of them is that I put little disposable masks on my scarecrows.”

She made the universal gesture for masking up.

“That’s just a visual reminder, though. Of my politics. Of how I’m different. How this farm is different.”

He frowned. “What’s so different about it? Aside from the fact that it happens to be situated on prime land for educating young people.”

His voice was still hollow, but he was coming back to himself a little. That was good.

“Because, we still farm for the ration card program.” Erin gestured at the vintage wartime propaganda poster hanging on one wall. It read PATRIOTIC CANADIANS WILL NOT HOARD FOOD and it depicted a couple hiding their sacks of flour from a constable outside.

“We still blockchain every part of our process to guarantee we know where potential contamination and outbreaks happen, and give our vendors chain of custody. E. coli? Listeria? Salmonella? An outbreak among the workers? With the ledgers we know exactly where it happened. End-to-end, full transparency. We started doing that because it was a requirement of the ration program. Anyone participating had to meet the food security regulations. But we still do it. That’s why my buyers are loyal. My product is guaranteed. But everyone else in this area…”

She drew a circle in the air. “Everyone else in this area, the moment the ration exchange switched to a voluntary program, they quit so they could try selling at higher prices and get by with fewer regulations. But I still get subsidized labor and equipment, and as a participant I’m still legally allowed to sell my excess at lower prices, so everyone comes to me first. Meanwhile they started growing these designer American grains with their own goddamn end user license agreement, and those designer grains couldn’t handle our winters, and, well…” She shrugged. “You know the Salem witch trials were actually about real estate? The accused had properties everyone else wanted. All the finger-pointing about devil worship was really just a roundabout way toward asset forfeiture.”

She watched him watching Ruthie sweep the air with her smudging braid. “I did not know that.”

“It’s true. You can look it up.” She wrestled open the tin of chocolates. “Eat something.”

“I can’t.” He shook his head. “I don’t eat refined—”

“Don’t be an asshole. Eat the fucking candy.”

Meekly, he picked out a single candy and began twisting it open. “I could be diabetic, you know.”

“If you were diabetic you wouldn’t be eating breakfast sandwiches at Tweed’s.”

He snorted. Then he popped the chocolate in his mouth. It was like watching someone hit a reset button on him. He went fully still for a moment, then relaxed utterly, while a groan issued from behind his closed lips.

“I forgot,” he said, finally. “I forgot how good these were.”

“Sucralose is Satan’s sweetener,” Erin said.

He laughed, short and sharp, like he didn’t really mean to. And then he reached for another. Erin reached for her own.

“So that’s it, huh?”

“That’s the long and the short of it,” Erin answered. “I’m still a part of the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security’s rationing program, and my neighbours don’t like it. I sell product at lower prices than they do, and I pay less for parts and labor than they do, and my demand is more predictable than theirs, and apparently that pisses them off. Of course what really pisses them off, deep down, is that I’m helping the government give handouts , or whatever, and it burns them up that some refugee kids from Yemen might, like, actually get to enjoy some French toast made from my grain.”

Carruthers drained his drink. “Don’t hold back. Tell me how you really feel.”

Erin gave him a very halfhearted version of the finger and sipped more of her drink. “This program is the closest thing Canada has ever had to food stamps, or SNAP or EBT or whatever it’s called, and it’s been good for my bottom line. Did you know that Canada raised half of England’s grain during the Second World War? There’s absolutely no excuse for us not to feed our own people. It’s total and complete bullshit that we never had something like this before, and I for one am not going to abandon it just because the crisis is allegedly over.”

Carruthers remained uncharacteristically silent and she caught herself missing the friction. Ranting was easier than processing. Anger was easier than vulnerability. Not that she felt any particular need to justify her decisions, but explaining them in detail filled the silence that would otherwise be filled with the realization that yes, they’d attacked her farm, just like last year and the year before, and that they were growing bolder with each passing autumn.

“I was a card holder, once,” he said, as though there had been no break in the conversation. “In university. The ration card, I mean. The points. I mean I know everyone technically has one, they technically have a number for everybody, but I was a regular user. For a while it seemed like the only way to get groceries in Toronto, because of the railway blockades and the tariffs and the meatpacking shutdown. It was the only guaranteed system. Unless you had a good relationship with the guy at your corner store.”

Erin drained what was left of her drink and stood to make her way to the kitchen. “And I’m guessing you didn’t have one of those?”

“Well, no.” He stood to follow her. She reached into the freezer and brought out the bottle, plus a tray of ice. Then she moved into the dining room and found the carnival glass pitcher that matched the tumblers on her grandmother’s sideboard. When she turned around Carruthers was in the threshold between the kitchen and dining room, filling the door so effectively that she couldn’t weave around him.

“Everything here seems so delicate,” he said, out of nowhere. “All this glass. The plates on the rail up there. The lace on the table. It’s all so… breakable. Everything in here. It just seems really tiny and fragile.”

Erin craned her neck back to look him in the face. “What are you trying to say?”

“Nothing,” he said, swallowing, and he moved aside to let her through. Erin snapped the ice tray and poured ice cubes halfway into the pitcher, then wedged the bottle of gin inside. “Where are the others?”

“Dio and Ruthie?” Erin listened carefully. She heard the sound of the shower running. “Probably blowing off steam.”

Carruthers went red to the roots of his hair. “Oh.”

“Everyone decompresses differently.” She carried the gin and the club soda into the living room, set them on the tray, and started pouring. “Do you still want to call the police?”

He watched her pouring and held up two fingers when she’d poured enough for him. “Yeah. I should look at the truck, first. Check the tires, like you said. It’s a company car; it has front and rear cameras. They might have caught something. A face, a plate number. Worth a look, anyway.”

Erin hadn’t thought of this as a possibility. But it was one of the advantages, if there could be such a thing, of having been attacked in the afternoon. There was enough light for a camera to pick up something. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s a good idea.”

Carruthers fussed with his device. Erin suspected he was downloading the footage from the car. “Have you ever pressed charges?” he asked.