Helen Phillips - Some Possible Solutions

I have never tasted anything like this milk. It is better than beer, better than margarine, better than orange juice. Maebh says it comes from cows that were probably milked this morning, or maybe last night. This milk has never been powdered; there are no soybeans involved. Between the two of us we drink half a gallon. We rip hunks off the loaf of bread and dip them into the preserves. The plum and gooseberry are too rich for my taste, but I am fond of the pear. Maebh does not like pears, so I get it all. I shove bread deep into the jar to reach the last bit. When I look up, I see that she is watching me.

“I didn’t know you were fun,” she says.

* * *

There are manybedrooms at The Farm. It seems I ought to stay in one of the outlying buildings, where the family’s servants have historically slept. But the farmer’s wife prepared two bedrooms side by side in Main House. I do not know if Maebh’s parents requested this arrangement, or if the farmer’s wife decided on her own, but we shall go along with it because everywhere else is covered in pollen. The farmer’s wife made the beds with white wool blankets, and put jugs of daisies on the bureaus, and spread rag rugs on the floors. All of this makes Maebh gasp with delight. If I ever expressed myself in gasps, I am sure I would gasp too.

“Night-night,” Maebh says, lolling against the doorjamb for an instant before slipping into her dark bedroom.

“Good night,” I say, before retiring into mine.

We had no proper dinner, but are still overfull with bread and milk. It is uncannily easy to fall asleep.

* * *

It is barelylight when Maebh wakes me, stomping her foot outside my door. I understand more than ever why Maebh’s parents believe she is a prime target for these odd disappearances, even though she is nearly eighteen and thus almost out of danger, on the verge of donning her hood and trousers. It is always the wildest girls, the most vigorous and lean, those who enjoy stretching on the roofs of the skyscrapers, those who behave as though they are immune to the dangers.

I get out of bed and start to put on my hood and trousers, my fingers stumbling over the buttons and snaps. Maebh stomps her foot a second time, a third. When I finally emerge, Maebh grabs my hand. We have never before touched. I am aware of this. Maebh is not. Her blinding yellow sundress. She leads me down the stairs and out into the grass, which is wet.

“Did it rain last night?” I say, unable to control the thrill in my voice. It has been so long since there was rain in the city. I was only a child then.

“No,” she says. “That’s dew. It happens every night in the countryside. You hardly know anything, do you?”

She really is a little bitch but it is not her fault.

When we get to the stream she slips out of her sundress. I avoid looking at her body. This is just my job. I will stand here to make sure she does not drown. Not that I could help her if she did, since I have never swum, nor taken a bath. In any case.

“You too!” she commands, up to her ankles in water so cold she cannot breathe.

It takes me much longer to undress than it took Maebh. There are so many buttons and snaps on my trousers, and my hood is tightly laced. She has gotten in all the way by the time I join her. The frigid water on my shins makes me feel as though I have drunk ten cups of coffee. Yet somehow I am not frightened. Maebh’s curly blond hair has become brown and straight now that it is wet. This makes her appear more solemn, which I appreciate.

“Get in all the way,” Maebh instructs.

“No,” I say, “thank you.”

“I command you to get in all the way,” she says.

I try to maintain my impassive face, straight mouth and neutral eyes, but it is not easy. An unpleasant sensation swells inside me at the sight of her mouth, left open after she spoke the word “way,” her lower lip hanging down, her jaw loose in the casual manner of those accustomed to power.

“Just kidding!” she yelps, plunging her head underwater. She clings to handfuls of pebbles in the streambed and lets the water wash over her. She wriggles in the current. She splashes and surfaces. I am careful to keep my eyes off her body. It is not hard to imagine, after all: narrow hips and thighs, hard dark nipples and a rib cage like old architecture.

“I can look at you but you can’t look at me!” Maebh says.

I cannot tell if I am more startled by her jubilant rudeness or by the conviction that she has perceived my thoughts. I feel her staring, and long for my hood and trousers.

“God,” she says, “you’re so smooth everywhere.”

Maebh’s parents thought it wisest to send a person of unspecified gender along to keep an eye on their daughter. It is widely believed that we are asexual.

* * *

Our days arecharacterized by bees, by sunlight, by pollen, by water, by overripe fruit, by Maebh teaching me things she assumes someone eight years older ought to know. That’s just a spiderweb! Mud won’t make your toenails rot. Outside the city the temperature can vary more than twenty degrees. Hear the frogs?

The farmer and his wife are frightened of people from the city, and leave provisions in the earliest hours of the morning while we are still asleep. We wake to find milk and yogurt and cheese and nuts and bread and preserves and honey on the heavy wooden table in the kitchen.

Sometimes Maebh goes hours without looking directly at me; other times she stares at me so intently that I feel as though her eyes are penetrating through to the inside.

The Farm is two hundred acres. A barbed wire fence encircles all its overgrown orchards and neglected fields. I hold in my palm animals I have only ever seen on a computer screen. Ladybugs are the most charming example, but also snails, daddy longlegs, dung beetles.

I do not live in the state of terror I anticipated when Maebh’s parents proposed that, for a sum equivalent to five years’ wages in my position as head window-washer of their skyscraper, I accompany their daughter out of the city, beyond the dome, to the ancestral farm where, in a different era, their grandparents lived the good honest life of the earth.

It is possible — in fact, it is impossible not — to forget about the dangerous times in which we live.

Meanwhile, the disappearances continue in the city, and are occurring ever more frequently. Maebh’s parents command us to stay in the countryside and to enjoy The Farm. They thank me profusely, and apologize for the fact that this is lasting longer than expected.

Eventually, I — even I, who have always been careful of the days, who have kept a weekly calendar, who have measured out the hours with three clocks in a one-room apartment on the lowest level of an unclean skyscraper — lose track of time. I ask myself, is today the 11th? 15th? the 17th? the 22nd? the 29th? grateful that I do not know.

We suck on blades of grass. We let our feet harden and get muddy. We find strawberries growing in glens. We notice ornate tapestries of moss and lichen on the rocks at the westernmost edge of the property. We see the clouds puffing themselves up into creatures that fill half the sky. We lie on the porch watching the bees weave through the late afternoon. Only rarely do they sting us, and when they do we do not mind. Some days I am more of a boy and some days I am more of a girl. We hardly talk, and then sometimes we do.

“I should’ve been born in a different time,” Maebh says, grinding a blade of grass between her molars, reclining on the hot wooden floorboards of the porch, her breasts flattening beneath her sundress as she stretches her arms above her head.

This is how Maebh is, I know that now. She frequently says this kind of thing. The kind of thing that is full of longing. She is thoughtful, nostalgic, and melancholy, all the traits I have valued most in my twenty-five years. She is not flippant (though every morning at the stream she sprays me with frigid droplets from her hair and grins when I wince) nor foolish (though whenever she starts dancing to the music inside her head I wonder if she has filled too much of her brain with those shows teenage girls watch) nor spoiled (though she does get angry whenever she is hungry), nor immature, nor unkind, nor any of the things I anticipated.