Michael Bunker - WICK

In this world, like the last, they found imagination to be a powerful thing. It was a form of training for them to look at a thing and study it, determining what it was, and what it could be in the future.

They sorted these items and prioritized them. Veronica directed them to find, organize, and lay out tools and materials, and she would teach and entertain them while they worked.

Clive and Red Beard were less than open in sharing any future plans, and she didn’t know how long they’d need to stay—to live and prosper—at the farm, so she ran the salvage and re-purposing department like they might be there for the long haul.

“After 9/11,” Veronica had told the boys, “I heard some author on NPR or somewhere discussing the skills people need for survival in the end times. The ability to scrounge was at the top of the list.”

Stephen had caught her looking at him, and he’d smiled the smile of a son who knows all of his mom’s lectures. They’d developed a shorthand way of communicating that rarely required words. He knew then what was coming next.

“Stephen, what do we do?” It was a quiz question. She was testing him.

Stephen had looked at Calvin, and then told his friend what she meant for him to say. “Don’t look at what it is. Look at what it can be.”

“That’s right.” Veronica had said.

“Re-purposing is a talent that can be learned. I’m glad to be a scrounger, but in truth all single mothers, artists, and botanists are scroungers. I just happen to be an artist/botanist/single mom, so that means I’m the best expert there is!” She’d flung her hand outward toward the field, and Calvin had followed her gesture with his eyes…

And farmers, he’d thought. Farmers have to be excellent scroungers. That’s why there are all of these out-buildings full of stuff.

Veronica then told Calvin how she and Stephen used to always search for castaway objects for art projects, or materials for homework assignments, or broken down (but free) furniture that might be fixed up, or neglected plants that could be nursed back to life. “The key is to think about what the thing might do, or become, or adapt to be. An old can might become a small cook stove. A piece of rubber might help you make a slingshot for hunting. Think about the various things you might carry with you in a backpack. Think about things that might have value if you need to cook, to defend yourself, or to use them for barter. Look for value in terms of how it can enhance your life going forward.”

Veronica had rambled on like this, as mothers will, for a while. Stephen eventually had cut his eyes towards Calvin and pulled his finger across his throat, as if to say that he would slice his own throat rather than hear another word. It was all in mock fun. Veronica smiled at this, but paused only long enough to begin again. “And so you need to look for materials that are durable and flexible and serve as tools or anything that can be used to increase comfort…” Blah blah blah.

Stephen hung out his tongue and cocked his head to the side. He held his hand over his head like a pivot and mock swung his head on a rope, as though he would rather take a hanging. Calvin grinned and they all laughed.

Now, Veronica stood alone, drinking her coffee. She thought about all of that . She considered that day, the week itself, the trip out of Brooklyn, their newfound home, and the weird duo of Clive and Red Beard, the gracious hosts who had made their farm so welcoming and available. And, the coffee this morning—she thought about that, too. She took a sip, feeling the grit in her teeth. She remembered the broadcast of NPR like it was yesterday. She remembered her son at her feet. She thought about how she once sat and made lists on such mornings of things to do that day. She thought about how Stephen and Calvin told her last night, before they went to bed, that they were going to go on a new scrounging expedition today. “We want to go around the perimeter of the farm,” Stephen had said. They’d completed cataloging all of items found in the barn and thought they might find something useful on the far field, adjacent to the next farm over.

Veronica thought of all these things on this morning, how it all had the feeling of normalcy, and how if things could just stay the same, maybe everything would turn out alright.

There had been, for most of the week, a preternatural stillness—the kind of stillness that knew ancient stirrings. Not the absence of sirens or the silence of screams; not the sudden awareness of the quiet after closing a door; but a silence that one might feel when standing out under the stars, staring up into the night sky. Such a quiet is not entirely divorced from noise, of course, and this is perhaps especially true in farm country. The silence waxes and wanes with the light in the sky, the pull of the moon. Even the stirring of the livestock is motivated by those gravitational pulls, their motions and life cycles waxing and waning with the moon. The wobbling of the planet against the moon and the sun; all of it works in harmony on some nights.

There had been several such nights recently, disturbed only by the movement of vehicles. She thought of those moments of stillness, when all the forces come into alignment, when the air is just the right temperature, when even the pigs cease their nervous motion, and the farm becomes, briefly, utterly quiet, as if quiet is a state of being and not merely a description of a condition—as if nature has entered her holy moment and taken a vow of silence.

This was such a moment. Veronica sat and held her gritty cup of coffee and looked out over the farm. It was winter, and though it was morning, it was also still night, and quiet.

Veronica imagined the farm by day, in spring. She painted the pale grey canvas of the predawn moment with the vividness of her artist’s eye. She imagined the rows of corn or cabbage, their striated patterns across the thick green bands of verdure. She imagined the fields beyond it. Her mind considered the fertile land and the crops that exist in imaginative possibility. She thought of other fields, other cups of coffee, and she wondered whether her friend Clay was sitting on his porch in Ithaca, drinking coffee. She thought of her folks back in Trinidad. She listened out across the quiet of the air and she heard the quiet, but only for an instant—a butterfly’s wings on the air.

Then, the rooster began to ruffle his feathers. The light in the sky began again.

The sky was the color of an almost purple. It was the hour of dawn. Clive and Red Beard let the screen door slam as they walked out the door, and it made a sharp crack across the silence of the cool air of the farm complex. The fireball in the sky that heats our planet, and threatens it always with its ever-present violence, had just begun, with the faintest tremors of the slightest waves of light, to push across the lightening atmosphere. It was as inevitable as the tide, really, the light.

The eastern sky began to glow, and the light slowly crept into the outer reaches of the gaseous firmaments, and it crept in and invaded even the night. The earth, Veronica thought, was moving out of its own shadow.

This is a day, she thought, of import. She could not say why she thought that.

It was as if the death and destruction taking place in the distance, out beyond the boundaries of the farm, and beyond that the county, and beyond that the country, rising up like smoke into the stratosphere and filling the middle horizon, was just a part of the magical reality of now. It was as if all of that —the smoke and the dust particles hanging there, filling the sky with a rich purple hue, well… it was all beautiful. Maybe, none of that, the thing outside the fence line, had occurred after all. Maybe it had never happened. It was as if the farm was in Clive’s Amazon forest somewhere, or in one of those ancient tribal locations where news of the world’s end had been slow to reach, or where it wouldn’t have mattered if it had reached there.