Sitting here with all the stuff whizzing through my head, watching a bird out the window pecking the dirt around the compost as another hazy sun day is turning to dusk into what we called Meltdown orange. Who knows where the fires are, but the kid told me earlier that it could be anywhere west of us.

  The fuzzy news last night said that the military is issuing something called CROAKS, no shit, to wear around your neck to keep in touch with local disasters and emergencies in your location and finding people near you within a radius of ten miles. Well, that leaves me and the boy and his sister. There was something else but the tv crapped out so maybe tonight. But, this is another step out of the dark! This is them, whoever, caring, reaching out, hopefully another step like the food drops, in I can only come up with, sanity.

  Popcorn came with the drop so tonight God willing, the tv comes in and like the old days with Bobby, I’ll eat it and watch the destruction. It hurts to remember us on the futon, watching the Earth burn and flood and the damn politicians saying it was a one off. The flooding, drought, areas of this country becoming uninhabitable, the insurance industry only for the zillionairs and the damn politicians still saying it was a cyclic thing while helping themselves. Lick this you dumb fucks! Sorry, I'll try not to swear too much, at least here.

  It’s hard to pretend I don’t know what’s happening out there as I write this but at the same time, I must continue what I believe helps me cope with the crazy and growing list of mysteries that now include me. And what helps me cope is thinking it was just a story he was writing for me that he never got to finish. Worrying about tasting dirt and spitting it out and all the other crazy stuff looks silly now but why all the strange behavior? If it was just a story, was he just goofing on me to make me laugh when he finally gave it to me? Oh, ha, ha, remember when..

  But I believe that Bobby left behind clues on what really happened to him, maybe not intentionally but about something else that was happening and as I collected all those single word pages, I just knew that if I connected them somehow, I would know. They were important to him like he was trying to hold onto them and make sense of them. I’m starting to, you know, read between the lines, almost his mind, as I go through the stuff. Those single words have become my precious keys to the mystery. That thought was a surprise, but the kid said, an epiphany or something that changes everything. Like suddenly having new eyes.

  So those single words he scribbled down, wasting a sheet of paper, I tacked onto the kitchen wall next to the table that looks out at the garden, barn and burned out woods behind. I decided to start with freddie, the name of the kid. Here’s the questions I wrote down.

  1 what about freddie

  2 how long has he lived there ( an elderly couple lived there up until at least a year ago)

  3 does he really have a little sister/ who lives with him/does he really live there

  4 if he claimed the house, where did he come from and where did the elderly couple go

  5 and where does his electricity come from/ ours is provided by SAT Link because Bobby was in the army for a year before they called off war (and I thought maybe that’s where the drops came from but if Freddie is getting them, then who)

  6 how did Freddie have anything to do with Bobby

  7 ask Freddie questions the next time you garden with him!

  8 Keep notes on what he says/ there might be clues there too

  The elderly woman neighbor came over twice, once with an apple pie she’d made with their apples to welcome us in and the other time to ask if we had any extra barrels we weren’t using. She asked Bobby if she could have a few of the Butternut squashes hanging on the fence and Bobby gave her four.

  I’ve never been a paranoid person even during Meltdown. Most of our old friends never really believed the shit scientists were saying and posting in the lib rags but I understood that we had lit the fuse and refused to do anything drastic to stop it. That’s one thing that I liked about Bobby. He could act like a dumb dick but he was intelligent enough to see through all of the lies and deception. Eyes wide open was our motto or meme.

  Fires raging through the Smokies, months of drought and a dry well, groups of homeless people walking by, carrying their shit, or pulling full wagons. Instead of The Grapes of Wrath, we called it Mother Natures Wrath. It wasn’t just the climate and weather that turned killer but other things that were adding up. We always talked of having at least one child but that ended up just being a pipe dream. Friends who lived close were either burned our or left with one urging us to go with them. We talked some but decided to stay put because this was our living the dream, come hell or high water.

  Here's the next dated page of October 31st.

  ‘I’ve had to change things around because of what is happening to me. I’m not sure yet exactly what that it is but because of the black outs, the dreams, the intense, almost total absorption into nature, I’m losing hold on my humanity, as if that’s a bad thing. The only way I can verbally explain it is that it’s like those Greek sirens luring sailors to the rocks and their destruction except it’s an awesome good thing, I think or hope most. When I disappear for walks after gardening, I go to the woods and lie down and cry and same at nights. What’s left of Nature has opened up to me and speaks clearly knowing that I am or was the species that is truly the one off, the one that tore the vey fabric of her tissue of her skin, poisoned her breath and shit in her living water network, circulating now in ways that harm and not grow. As the days go on, I rather be near a tree or spread out over a creek letting her blood purify my human. Writing is getting harder to do like a morbid dense thing that isn’t me anymore. The good thing, I think, is that whatever this is it doesn’t erase my human memories and allows me at will to be the same Bobby without the upgrade, like a mask for times to hide in plain sight in front of Jen.’

  When he went out at night for those so called long walks I first got up and watched if he went to the road. He did so I grabbed a seat and stared out the window until he came back, which he did after ten minutes, going to the barn next. He was there for thirty minutes and then came to bed. Women can fake things with their men if there’s need but he knew that I’d been up because he asked if everything was alright instead of getting in and spooning up to me. He whispered like an afterthought into my ear, that he liked a little lifting after the walk.

  That set off alarms that made me stop for the time being to let him be, whatever that was. Most of the time, he seemed like Bobby but with a little edge.

  Dreams recently have become longer about things that happened when I was little, weird stuff that I’d forgotten about. I’ve doubled the scoops I take for workouts so maybe that’s the reason or just too much of too much. Maybe its reading all the things he wrote for the story. Maybe its stress. Maybe, I'm....nope! The next writing from Bobby is close to ten days past the last. Now I’m thinking its not just the single word pages are clues but they’re inside these long hand written pages.

  ‘Dreams aren’t dreams anymore, they’re recollections from stored memory from a place that’s opened up. And not mine. They’re not bad or scary but actually beautiful. The one that’s been going for a week now, every night picking up where the last one left off, is the bridge memory. Looking at it from land is awesome! Huge expanses of swinging bridge connected to enormous wooden pylons hundreds of feet above the lushest exotic landscape I’ve ever seen anywhere. Flowers grow up through it reaching amazing heights with intense shaped brilliant colored flutes with orange and purple tongues that curl whenever giant hummingbirds the color of a hallucinogenic rainbow whir hovering, dipping their long curled beaks into them. And the scent rising from below is nothing like anything I’ve ever known, so intoxicating with thousands of scents combined that trigger longing and desire of that what was lost to us to our peril.’

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.