In a Handful of Dust

“At first, I was lucky enough to be in a city. When they turned water lines off in the outlying areas, we still had access. For a price.”

“I grew up in Entargo,” Lucy volunteered. “I didn’t know water came from anywhere other than the sink. So why did you leave the city?”

Joss shrugged. “Circumstances beyond my control, mostly. What about you? Why did you leave?”

“Well, my mom—my real mom, not Lynn—was pregnant. Again.” Lucy saw Lynn’s head shaking at the level of sharing, but Joss didn’t even blink.

“Ah, two kids?” she said. “Family regulations got you kicked out?”

“Yup. They made us leave, and my dad was killed.” Lucy found the words from her past flowing, offering a distraction to which she gladly succumbed. Sharing an old hurt, long scarred over, was easier than the pains of the present. “I was lucky though. I found Lynn, and she’s been with me ever since. So what about your people?” Lucy asked. “Family?”

“No…” Joss trailed off, watching her feet for a few seconds before answering. “Just a bunch of strangers trying to keep each other safe on the road. I’ve got no place to go. I’m waiting for it to find me. What about you two?”

“California,” Lynn said, as if daring Joss to talk her out of it.

“Good thing you love walking.”

They camped off the road behind a barn with a rotted-out roof, the bare slats home to hundreds of swallows. Joss and Lucy talked Lynn into allowing a fire, and Joss produced a can of soup. She also had a bottle of wine.

“No,” Lynn waved her off with a word, but Joss kept the proffered bottle pointing toward her.

“I wasn’t kidding earlier when I said you might need to relax some.”

“You two have some, and I’ll take first watch,” Lucy said, aware that Lynn hadn’t slept well the night before. Lynn reluctantly accepted the bottle and took quiet sips while Lucy pumped Joss for more information.

“So people seriously paid you to teach them yoga?”

“What you have to understand is people then had things you don’t.”

“Like more than two pairs of underwear?”

“Well, yes,” Joss said, “but I mean they had things like the promise of safety, the knowledge that food could be had cheaply and at any time, and water at the turn of a faucet. Having all that makes it possible to use your time in other pursuits. You could want things.”

Lucy’s heart skipped a beat at Joss’s words. Wanting something more sounded wonderful, but it seemed like a distant possibility in the ruggedness of their world. “And some people wanted to learn yoga back then?”

“Definitely. But you could do other things too: take piano lessons, read a book, play a sport. There’s a ton of things your generation knows nothing about.”

“Yeah, sorry,” Lynn said. “She’s too busy gathering water and wood to practice her breathing.”

“In some ways, it’s a shame,” Joss answered, and Lynn buried her response in the mouth of the wine bottle. “Most people these days, it takes all their time just to make sure they live. Before, we threw ourselves into actually living.”

“Like having fun?”

“More than that. Sometimes it almost made me stark crazy, the pressure of having all those choices. I could’ve been a lawyer, doctor, bus driver, violinist—hell, even an astronaut. When I was a kid, we talked all the time about what we wanted to be when we grew up.”

Lynn wiped her sleeve across her mouth. “I’m happy I grew up at all.”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Joss countered. “Used to be we were raised on dreams. Now we tell the kids they’re lucky to be alive. In that way, I do miss the city. There were more options there. You were exposed to more things.”

“The city, huh?” Lynn said, glancing up from the bottle of wine. “It exposed a lot of people to cholera.”

“Sickness happens out in the country too. You’re running from it, after all.”

“Maybe,” Lynn granted. “But people weren’t meant to live that way, inside of boxes stacked on top of each other.”

“What were you expecting Entargo to be like?” Lucy asked, curious as to what Lynn’s vision had been.

Lynn shook her head, gaze lost in the dying embers of the fire. “I don’t know. But when I saw it, all I could think of was the lump your grandma cut out of old Mr. Adams, you remember?”

Lucy nodded. It was hard to forget the cancerous mass one of their neighbors had reluctantly revealed to Vera, a black tumor that had bulged from the back of his knee.

“It was like that, for me,” Lynn continued. “An unnatural growth cropping up somewhere it had no business, in the middle of fields and forest, with straight cement roots no amount of cutting will ever get out of the dirt.” Her eyes lingered unfocused on the flames. When she spoke again, it was with the tone of voice Lucy knew meant she was using words not her own, quoting a poet long dead from a book of her mother’s that lay mildewing miles behind them.