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is fast asleep behind shuttered husks of darkness. I “bor-row” a horse from a neighboring yard and ride down empty streets under an overcast sky.
    I head out today because every few weeks I get the urge. When my father was alive, we’d venture out together. The shame was mu-tual because we’d never speak, wouldn’t even look each other in the eye. We went far, past the city borders, to the Vast Lands of Uncertain End. That’s a mouthful, and most people simply cal it the Vast.
    26 ANDREW FUKUDA
    It’s an endless stretch of desert plains. Nobody knows how far it goes or what lies beyond it.
    Because I live in the outer suburbs, far from the tal offi ce build-ings of the Financial District and farther yet from the center of the metropolis where towering governmental skyscrapers clutter the landscape, it doesn’t take long before the city is wel behind me.
    The city boundary is vague: there’s no wal to demarcate the beginning of the Vast. It arrives indiscernibly. Scattered homes give way to dilapidated poultry farms, which in turn cede to crumbling shacks long ago abandoned. Eventualy, it’s just the spread of empty land. The Vast. There’s nothing out there. No place to fl ee.
    Only the cruelest of elements, the three Ds: desert, desolation, and death.
    There’s no escape for us out here, my father would say, no sanctuary, no hope, no life for us at all. Don’t ever come out here thinking there’s escape to be had.
    I don’t dilydaly out here but head north. About an hour out, an isolated mound of soft green fuzz sits there in the middle of the Vast, an aberrational oddity discovered years ago by my parents.
    And what I need is in the green fuzz. By the time my feet hit the soft grass, I’m sprinting toward a glade of trees. I reach for a red fruit hanging off a branch. I tear it off, shut my eyes, and sink my teeth through the skin. The fruit crunches in my mouth, watery and sweet, my jaws working up and down, up and down. When my father and I ate the fruit, we’d eat with our backs to each other.
    We were ashamed, even as we chewed, bite after bite, juice running down our chins, unable to stop.
    After my fourth fruit, I force myself to slow down. I pluck away at the different offerings of fruit, tossing them into a bag. I pause for a minute, gazing up at the sky. High above me, a large bird glides across the sky, its wings oddly rectangular. It circles around me, its form strangely unchanging, then heads east, disappearing into the THE HUNT 27
    distance. I pick a few more fruit, then head over to our favorite spot, a large tree whose leaves spread lush and high. My father and I always sat under this tree, munching fruit, back against the and I always sat under this tree, munching fruit, back against the trunk, the city in the far distance, darkened and fl at. Like a dirty puddle.
    Years ago, we would explore the green fuzz for signs of others like us. Signs like rutted cores of discarded fruit, trampled grass, snapped branches. But we almost never found anything. Our kind was careful not to leave any giveaway signs. Even so, I’d occasionaly fi nd that unavoidable and clearest of signs: less fruit on trees.
    That meant others had been there as wel, plucking and eating. But I never saw any of them.
    Once, between bites, I asked my father, “Why don’t we ever see other hepers here?”
    He stopped chewing, half turned his head toward me. “Don’t use that word.”
    “What word? Heper? What’s wrong with—”
    “Don’t use that word,” he said sternly. “I don’t want to hear that word coming out of you ever again.”
    I was young; tears rushed to my eyes. He turned fuly toward me, his large eyes swalowing me whole. I tilted my head back to keep the tears from rimming out. Only after my tears dried did he turn his eyes away. He gazed afar at the horizon until the rocks stopped eyes away. He gazed afar at the horizon until the rocks stopped churning inside him.
    “Human,” he fi naly said, his