Tag Archives: aftermath

Field Notes

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Being a record of certain phenomena found in the environs of the Lost Quarter.

Parting Ways

In those days the ways back to the Quarter had changed. Roads torn up, diverted or fallen into general disrepair. The usual approaches no longer worked. In places they followed old road allowances, overgrown and washed out, barely a trail. It took hours to come to a usable road, hours where someone might chance upon them with questions of why they were there. Few were the friendly faces. 

He returned after the war to this changed landscape. Everything felt unfamiliar. Fields abandoned to dust and weeds that he had never known could grow so tall. Even the houses and yards he passed were different than he remembered. Smaller somehow and he immediately noticed all the signs where entropy and decay were creeping in. Had they always been there? The sky was grey and hazy, smoke from some distant fires, which felt familiar in all the wrong ways. 

They greeted him with hugs and tears, an explosion of joy that soon ebbed. His mother kept up a steady stream of chatter, news of people he’d forgotten or didn’t know, anything to ward off the awkwardness they all were aware lurked just below the surface. His father seemed at ease, but that was just his way. His sister was oddly quiet, watching him intently as though she didn’t recognize him. Maybe she didn’t. What are we going to do with you, her expression said.  

She took him outside after dinner and showed him around the yard, pointing out all that had changed. Much had. He didn’t want to say he would have preferred to be alone. The barn they had played in as children had been pulled down, replaced with a new set of corrals. They’d put a shed up on the west end of the yard to provide shelter for calving season and there was a whole series of new pens and lanes stretching down to the alkali slough where they used to leave the deadstock for the coyotes. 

She explained all they’d done, making clear the ideas had been hers, and the improvements that had resulted. He said little in response, which she took as a challenge. The world didn’t stand still while you were gone. No, it hadn’t, he agreed. He couldn’t put into words what he was feeling, how the image of the place he had carried with him through all those terrible days was vanished. Maybe it had never been. 

They always wanted you to take it over, she said. Especially now. But I was the one who wanted to be here. You always wanted to go. 

Had he? It was hard to remember the person who had ventured out. At some point there had been a parting of ways with whoever that was and what had come back was someone else. There were no words to explain that either, so he didn’t and they returned to the house.   

Notes on the Grippe

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Being an accounting of the recent and continuing plague and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown. 

Day Two Thousand Two Hundred Six

Over two thousand days since the Dread Lord made his appearance in these parts. I started writing these notes in those early days in an attempt to impose some order in a world where it felt like there was none. We clung to anything that looked like solid ground, any routine that might restore meaning. What strikes me now, looking back at those early missives, is how frantic they feel. I was reaching for anything to put into words, a duck paddling madly, while above the surface it leaves a gentle wake. 

The days before the Dread Lord’s arrival were filled with portents of doom. It was like watching a wave cresting toward you from far out at sea. Knowing it will soon reach land, but having no sense of when or how badly it will engulf you. We went about our days, knowing it would happen, that it was inevitable, but with no idea of what that might mean. I recall going to a travel clinic in preparation for a trip we had planned. This would have been January. The travel nurse told me then we would not be going and I thought she was being ridiculous. The Dread Lord would come, yes, but it would be manageable. Our lives would not be upended. It seemed impossible. 

My memory of those first few months after is still so vivid. These parts were spared the worst of the Dread Lord’s power and the days were quiet and peaceful. I recall we spent our time talking about leaving for other dominions, starting life anew. Later we realized that restlessness was a response to what we were enduring. Lives apart from friends and family, unable to do so many of the things we loved. Lives interrupted with no timeline for when we might restart. 

The months that followed have vanished into a kind of blur. Things were opening up and then they were closed. Hospitals in crisis. You can only gather outdoors. You are allowed fifty percent capacity, but everyone should wear masks as they move about. Rinse and repeat. After we received our inoculations I felt a strange sort of relief. It was not over, but the end was in sight, and matters were now under our control. And yet, within weeks the hospitals were under threat again because others declined to do their part.  

It was false spring after false spring. You think the winter is over. The days are warmer, the ground is bare. It is only a matter of time before the grass begins to turn green. And then the snow returns and you are waiting again, while protesters march by crying out against the tyranny of inoculation.  

Waiting is what I remember the most. It was all waiting. An interlude. People don’t think or speak of that time now, everybody happy to get back to their lives and not dwell on what was lost. Except for those who protested so vociferously. They now govern us and have set about getting their revenge on those who they feel wronged them. We shall all do what they tell us so that they never have anyone tell them what to do again. Sacrifice for a cause, doing good for each other, these are foreign concepts to them. They are in it only for themselves and will do whatever it takes to get it and they assume the rest of us are the same.  

Strange to live in a time where the events that most define us, and will continue to echo through the remainder of our days, are the ones we refuse to dwell on. Their absence in our memories grows larger each day, shadowing everything.