way the people seemed to dwindle year after year, the old ones falling into the earth, the young ones just not there the next day, as if plucked away. The decay of the houses moving across the villages and cities. Windows broken, then boarded. The lawns tangling with twisting young maples, black walnut, until the main roads were just strips of dying buildings, rusting bridges, sidewalks breaking apart. He loved it all so much. How would it ever come back? He would say these things, get that far, then try to tell you what had been lost, what he had seen himself. Then he’d just shake his head, put his hand over his eyes instead. It was the same thing for us as for them. Just much faster for us. For us, even less time.
We do not know what is on the other side of the storm. We cannot get around it, and the few who have tried to go over it say it never seems to end. We have heard that it came in from the Pacific like a tsunami, that it ate the coast. It crashed into the Rockies and crested them, then charged across the plains, tearing up towns and crops, roads and telephone lines. Pulling us all off the land, us and all we had built there. All the people who could not run, did not want to, we have not heard from since the storm passed over them. No letters, no signals, no photographs. No messages crackling across the wires. A veil is falling across the country, one long shattering shriek at its edge, and behind it, nothing but darkness and silence.
Though perhaps you are not silent. Maybe you can see things that I cannot, see them with utter clarity. Maybe you walked up to the storm and passed through it, because you were not as afraid as we were. Did you leave us behind, then, or take us with you? Or were we on the other side when you got there, lost and waiting?
* * *
WHEN WE ALL LEARNED what was coming, there were reports of desertions, from the army, from the resistance. Soldiers just disappearing into the woods. Others found outside their camps with entrance wounds in the back of their heads, caught trying to leave by an officer the war had gotten the better of. A small string of suicides. A town somewhere upriver had, in a few days, lost all its citizens. In Harrisburg, the occupying army drove a van armed with loudspeakers through the tight downtown blocks around the state capital. Do not listen to the news today. It is full of lies. The sky over the city was enough like it had always been that they could say that and get away with it.
Sunny Jim and Reverend Bauxite rowed north, past the high-water marks on Rockville Bridge, up through the rapids at Marysville, to a herd of islands on a ten-thousand-year drift across the river’s width. One of the islands’ rocky spits had split in two with the effort, and Sunny Jim and Reverend Bauxite followed the channel up its course through a crevasse of dense vines, animals hooting in the shadows. For a few minutes, they were the only people left in the world. It was just them and the yellow boat, the water beneath. The trees closing around them. Roots walking into the water. Branches above their heads taking away the sky. Then the channel opened and the trees pulled back around an island smaller than a house, a single linden, gnarled and gigantic, hanging by its roots over the rippling water. A man with a rifle crouched in the tree’s crook, the barrel following them as they entered. Two people stood in the gravel on the inside of the channel’s curve. One of them Grendel Jones. Reverend Bauxite and Sunny Jim had seen her less than a month ago when the shells were falling, her hand on a radio, sending orders across the wires. She had caught their eyes and smiled, just once. Thought they were going to win. Now she was hobbling on a cane, scraggly hair tied back. Five parallel scratches striping her face from cheek to forehead. Her face rubbed in it. Your town and everything you loved. Let go of it all now before it hurts too much.
“Is it true?” Sunny Jim said.