Here is no water but only rock / Rock and no water and the sandy road / The road winding above among the mountains / Which are mountains of rock without water / If there were water we should stop and drink
Yesterday Evie found a bobcat in the woods. She emerged from the cluster of birches, found me, and tugged my hand down an old logging road. There the bobcat was. It was smaller than I thought, barely larger than a housecat. There were raw sores over its coat, and dried blood caked around its mouth. Its skin was fraying over bones like an old quilt. I fixed my gaze on the ground below it. Evie started crying before I could, her small frame shuddering. You would think it wouldn’t disturb her, death. Because she was born into it. But she was still so afraid and cried like you did when Luna died. Remember you wouldn’t come out of your bedroom, not even when I slipped sweets under the door.
We left Boston today. The kids like when we pass through cities. They are safer than you might think. Mostly empty, scattered with other families who won’t do us harm. As we walk, the kids pause to admire the fancy apartment buildings, even though they’re collapsed or gutted. They pretend to be doormen, hailing cabs for tenants. I am ashamed because I don’t let them linger for long.
I am leaving this letter with Sam, on Adams Street, even though they tell me you don’t come for letters anymore.
I think we are in an old lumber yard. There’s a shed that must have housed planks of wood. Only a few remain, mostly rotted and overgrown. But when I shave away the plant growth, I can make out the ink stamp: “Doug Fir,” something like S-GRN, and the sawmill’s logo. Any saws or machinery have long since been taken, but we found canvas tents in the shed. I do most of the cooking inside and we sleep outside in the tents.
Last night, after I put the kids to sleep, a violet dusk settled over everything. And everything was very still. I was sitting outside the tent, nudging the small fire with a stick. I don’t remember what I was thinking of when I heard Evie unzip the tent and inch towards me. She sat right next to me. Her round eyes and pale hair, like yours, shone in the firelight. Her gaze climbed from the fire to the sky. She is different from the other kids in this way. They are desperate to know about this earth, about the past, about television and baseball games and orchestras and lunchboxes. But Evie is concerned with the sky. She often asks me about things we didn’t even know before. She asks me why there is such absolute blackness above, when there are so many stars. She asks me if we are alone in this universe.
Tomorrow we move south. The marshes still frighten me, but the transmissions say they are clean again.
We went ice skating today. Well, we couldn’t find proper skates, but the kids would take running starts, then slide across the frozen pond. Hannah was timid as she stepped onto the ice. But Liam and Evie clasped each other’s hands and spun round, shrieking with delight. Evie’s legs are strong and longer than Hannah’s even, who we think is two years older. Would you have liked her to be a dancer?
Right below their feet is so much water. I wonder at how quickly I’ve forgotten what water once was. How it tore through cities and villages alike. Remember when we rode our bikes to the reservoir upstate. We had promised to return with water for Dad. From the distance, I saw the valves and pumps siphoning the water out of the reservoir. Like a body in a hospital bed hooked up to tubes and catheters and IV drips. They opened the gated spillways and it rushed out, back into the earth. They were right to drain it, of course, we had dirtied it ourselves. But still, I remember the swarms of people with their canteens trying to scale the embankment. Or when they clawed at the sodden earth. I couldn’t bear it so I hid my face in your chest.
I don’t know if you are here, were here to see it all grow back. Do you know how it began with the algae, quietly rekindling life in water. How people farm again and raise cattle. I thrill at the sight of a black bear stalking the woods again. I’ve heard in Maine there is a theater company that performs for those who will watch. It is uncanny, though. Much quieter than before. I think because there are fewer birds in the sky. The schoolhouses stand empty. There are the rotting corpses left in bedrooms. Evie is uncanny as well – she is like you, but not quite.
Evie is gone. She wasn’t in the tent in the morning. Crawled away from us, down some passage into the woods. Maybe her knees buckled and collapsed onto the dusty soil. Hannah and Liam laid hyacinths in her wake. When I wake at night, I think she knew she didn’t belong to anyone. If you were here. I wonder if you could have coaxed her out of her hiding place, gathered her up into your arms. But then again, none of us belong to anything anymore. Maybe she found the beach, and maybe she drowned.
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, / Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell / And the profit and loss. / A current under sea / Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell / He passed the stages of his age and youth / Entering the whirlpool.
Scarlett Huntington takes the Nassau Weekly to an epistolary future — inviting us to wade in for a bit, before it trickles down and flows out toward some indiscernible horizon.