Get off my ass! I didn’t kill her. The goddamned cancer did. Quit acting like it’s my fault.
Sadie whipped the pickup in a U-turn, going into the ditches, and then backed it up. Ryan got out and unfolded the tow hitch on the harvester, signaling Sadie to back up farther with his hands. She stopped, the tow ball directly under the hitch—naturally, since she’d done it countless times. Ryan clamped the hitch to the truck, and they took off for home with the leaden clouds above whirling about. Rain began pelting the truck halfway there.
Ryan sprang from the truck and opened the door to the Quonset shed, and he was soaked by the time Sadie joined him to sprint to the front door.
As they reached the door, Ryan looked up. “Goddamn,” he said, barely audible over the clatter of the rain on ground, trees, metal and wood.
“What—oh, no,” Sadie said as she beheld the rotating wall clouds to the southwest which meant only one thing—a tornado was coming. “Get inside,” she said, opening the door and pushing Ryan through.
They both shivered in their soaked clothes as they entered the foyer. Sadie began stripping first, and Ryan followed suit. She threw the garments into a laundry basket in the kitchen, and then sat at the computer station. Ryan returned bearing dry robes and towels.
“Nothing we can do now but wait,” he said.
“NOAA radar says it’s going to go through here in thirty-five minutes.”
Ryan looked at the multicolored blotches on the screen. One bright red spot was marked POSSIBLE FUNNEL CLOUD SIGHTED. He couldn’t tell how close it was to their fields. “It only takes thirty minutes to wipe out a year’s work,” he muttered.
“Stop being so damned gloomy,” Sadie told him. “At least we’re safe down here. And when you get right to it, that’s all that matters.” She looked up at him with her pale blue eyes, and he realized she was right.
“Give me an outside view.”
“Ryan, for God’s sake, there’s nothing—”
“Do it.” Sadie tapped commands into the keyboard, and a view from a small videocamera mounted on the barn flashed on the screen. The lens was flecked with raindrops, but they could see trees bent in the wind and debris flying past. The horizon blended with the slate sky. The camera panned, then stopped.
“Damn,” Sadie whispered. To the southwest a dark finger dipped from the clouds.
“It’s over by Mike Hoffman’s place,” Ryan said.
“Moving this way, though.”
“Can we get a drone up?”
“Forget it.” She began typing and mousing, and another screen came up. “KTTV has high-altitude drones with infrared cameras and radar tracking it.”
Ryan went to the front door, opened it halfway, and peered out. “Rain’s quit.”
“Yeah. Looks like this is an F2. We’ve been through worse. Remember three years ago?” An F5 had torn through the western part of the county, wiping out Colston, a small town of maybe fifty people and a grain elevator, finishing what drought and warming had begun.
KTTV also had storm chasers out, and Sadie had their transmissions on the second screen. Ryan had always thought these people should be committed to a mental hospital. Anyone living in Tornado Alley tried to avoid tornadoes, not drive toward them.
The funnel cloud touched down, throwing up dirt and grass and wheat—someone else’s for now. Sadie had the sound down, so they weren’t treated to the various expletives and excited babbling from the storm chasers.
They watched as the funnel raced across the fields, tracking it moving northeast. It reached the edge of an area outlined in green—the border of their holdings. Ryan moaned as it began tracking across the northern part of their fields.
“Easy, babe,” she said. “It’s not going to hit much. It’s only a hundred or so yards wide. And we’re insured.” The storm moved along a line, grazing the northern end of their fields, finally exiting and moving on to wreak havoc on others.
“Guess we better survey the damage,” she said. They dressed, and Ryan drove them west and north to the storm’s footprint. The Jeep kicked up mud and gravel, and the fields had turned to gumbo under the downpour. No harvest for a couple of days, then.
A football field-wide swath had been blown through the amber waves. Ryan stood there quietly, somberly looking at the damage.
“Not much damage,” Sadie said. “Those transgenic stalks were supposed to take more punishment. I guess they lived up to the hype.” She squinted, and then pointed to the field. “It’s not all bad.” She smiled. Ryan looked to where she was pointing. A crumpled heap of metal lay in the middle of the field. It was black, and they could see wheels poking out of the wheat, still spinning.
“Were they inside?” she asked.
Ryan craned his neck, narrowed his eyes. “Nope. Over there, by the Miller’s shelterbelt.” Two tiny figures dressed in black and khaki were trudging along the road, no doubt griping about being marooned in the middle of nowhere, shaken about their close encounter with nature in its rawest form. “I don’t mind losing a few bushels if it’s for a good cause.”
The storm was passing, the clouds were breaking up. The anvil-shaped cumulonimbus clouds and the base clouds were scudding to the northeast. He looked toward the west, toward the stand of cedar and cottonwood that he knew so well.
It was flattened.
Ryan drove the Jeep slowly toward the wreckage, and stopped alongside it. The trees had been snapped like toothpicks. And the house—the house was a tumble of wooden debris collapsed into the basement. He climbed out of the Jeep, and silently gazed at the ruins.
No voices.
“You know,” Sadie said, “we’re not going to have much to do the next day or so. Harvester’ll sink in the mud. So will the center pivots.” She moved closer to him, put her arms around his neck.
“Might be able to work on the barn, get that wiring replaced.”
“You could,” she said, smiling. “I was thinking more about tonight.”
“Anything in particular?”
“I thought maybe,” she said, unbuttoning his shirt, “we could see about—expanding.”
Ryan caressed her back. “I think it’s about time.”
***
Like much of Sam S. Kepfield’s fiction, “Amber Waves” draws upon the author’s decades-long residence in his home state of Kansas. Sam was raised in Western Kansas, attended Kansas State University and the University of Nebraska, and currently resides in Hutchinson. He is the author of two books and numerous short stories.
Grow, Give, Repeat
by Gregory Scheckler
Alex fidgeted on the porch next to her robotic doll, Miss Lasagna, who was her oldest friend.
“How much longer?” said Alex.
Dusty and fray-haired, her robot checked online shipping records. “They should arrive within the hour. Is the coop ready?”
“It’s not too wet.” Alex took a deep breath of farm-fresh Wisconsin air. “I smell geosmin and 2-methylisoborneol. They indicate eukaryotes and prokaryotes whose biosynthesis created volatile organic compounds. Did you get that?”
“Correct,” said the doll. “The smell of rain is caused by many microorganisms.”
“But do you know what this means?”
“At only eleven years old you have mastered biochemistry?”
Alex reached down off the porch, and rolled mud in her fingers. “The dirt is ready. Maybe this season our chicks won’t all die.”
Last season had been terrible. Mildew infected the beans and blight ate the tomatoes. And one night she forgot to put the chicks into their coop just before lightning shattered the dark and a thunderstorm flooded the low ground. The next morning, she found the chicks drowned, huddled together into a small mass of feathers. Ever since witnessing their limp wings, Alex had grown a permanent scowl. Her family couldn’t afford more chicks. They scrounged all winter, and like most homes, their pantry harbored too little food. The bitterness and hunger resolved her heart, pushing her to avoid more mistak
es.
“Is the coop warm enough?” said Miss Lasagna.
Alex ran to the chicken house, which she’d helped remodel. She scuffed her overalls on its solar siding, the cheap kind from Barnard’s Hardware downtown. The coop’s pipes and barrels absorbed the sun’s warmth. One side housed a handful of old chickens, and the other side was empty, waiting. Beneath a small awning, a weatherproofed computing console revealed a suitable temperature. Behind the coop they had wildflowers for butterflies and bees, and a small garden of beans, spinach, tomatoes, potatoes, and more beans, and a fat pile of compost that fed into the coop. She checked beneath the coop for the nutrient cycles from crushed insects that had been trapped into secondary composting bins and then into slow, rotating drums that smashed them into a useful protein shake. Shoved by solar-powered micropumps, the shake piped onto a drying rack where it evaporated into tiny pellets to feed the chicks. Their small home-farm’s compost cycles and flowers became the insects’ food which became new waste cycles and then the chickens’ feed, and clean water, and ultimately the chickens themselves, and their eggs. The land’s terroir infused her family’s home-farm chickens through their fragrant shared history: long ago mile-thick glaciers scrubbed limestone into tiny flecks of dirt, creating the smell and texture of their world. Alex said, “It’s ready. We’re really just made of water and fancy dirt patterns.”
“No,” said Miss Lasagna, “I’m made of plastic, metal and little lightning bolts.”
“Let’s be friends anyway.”
“Yes, please.” Miss Lasagna’s left eye loosened. She rotated her head toward the road. Crunching gravel beneath bicycle tires. Chuckles Lancy, Alex’s only friend besides Miss Lasagna, rode his beat-up bike down Howler’s Lane and up the driveway. He skidded to a halt, and nearly tipped over his bike’s rusty trailer-cage full of toy animals that his father had given him. People around town whispered that his father had ditched and run. And he had. But every holiday he sent Chuckles animal dolls, which Chuckles loved and took everywhere and called the ‘best overcompensation ever.’
Alex scowled, but unlike other kids, Chuckles never seemed to think Alex was stern and unhappy. Maybe Chuckles believed her frown meant she was thinking through problems. He said, “Are they here yet?”
Before Alex could respond, a postal drone buzzed across the field. It clunked to a stop. Its lift-arm set a wide box on the porch. Chirps sang from the package’s air holes. A strange, unnatural noise also grew: three wee whistles whose tone went on a bit too long.
***
Alex freed two dozen chicks from the box: Amber Whites, Barred Rocks, and Golden Bantams. Their feathers fuzzed against her fingers, and made Chuckles giggle. Mom set out seed, and bug pellets, and wilted spinach.
Chuckles pointed to a side of the box secured by foam cushioning, where he found three gelatinous cubes that pinched their tiny mouths and wobbled their nipple-like wing buds. He said, “You do have Blockies!”
The Blockies squeaked another long shrill note, warning that they required attention. Alex called up the Blockie’s guidebook, skimming over their directions. She placed the planimals onto shelving along the top of the coop. She clamped wires onto their wing buds, linking them to the console and solar panels. She pushed thin feeding tubes into their mouths, connecting to the wet feed of processed insects. Chuckles squirmed when she slipped waste hoses into their cloaca. The Blockies’ hybridized plant cells, infused with heme and modified proteins, built viable and fatty muscle-like tissues. Funny cubes of unthinking plant meats, the planimals twitched inside their cubby holes, flexed by well-timed jittering of electricity and warmed by orange lamps. At the end of their guidebook, a brightly colored webpage from Blockie Technologies said the ‘Grand Prize for Most Efficient Home Farming’ included five free Blockies per year for life, plus enough funding to build a new sustainable home-farm ecosystem. Alex registered their Blockies. Winning could solve their food problems forever.
Mom’s bracelet buzzed, and she glanced at it. “Chuckles, your Mom’s messaged. Time to head home.”
He said, “But what are all of their names? Toy animals and real animals always have to have names.”
Alex’s Mom said, “Time to go. You know how your Mom is…”
“All right.” Chuckles jumped up onto his beat-up bicycle. “Come by for Space Survivor: Mars later?”
“Once I finish my schoolwork,” said Alex. Chuckles took care to ride on the side of Howler’s Lane. Alex crept over to the chicks and held a grayish-brown one. “Well, I think you’re Beebee, and that’s your sister Skeezy.”
Mom placed a hand on Alex’s head and said, “These are farm animals not pets. We might not get to keep them anyway. You know the local politics. Do try not to name them.”
“Oh, you say that every year. But why? Chuckles’ toys all have names. And Miss Lasagna has a name and she’s not even alive.”
“And what’s my response to this issue every year?”
Alex scowled, and ran her fingers over the turf beneath the chicks’ feet. “You always say, ‘Miss Lasagna isn’t going to end up on our dinner table this winter.’”
“Please don’t eat me,” said Miss Lasagna.
Alex hugged the doll. “Silly-head, we don’t eat robots.”
Mom crossed her arms. “The chicks and the Blockies aren’t pets. Let’s not have a repeat of last year.” Mom marched back to the porch. As soon as she was inside the house, the chicks all turned to Alex as if of one mind. The Blockies quivered.
Alex whispered, “I’m still going to call you Skeezy. And maybe you’re Picasso and you’re Betsy-Boopsie. And soon you’ll meet Maisie and Mrs. Chocochip and her baby and Frumpy Bob and the others.”
She leaned up to the strange fleshy planimals. “And you three, what should I call you?”
The lights registered enough warmth, priming the Blockie’s cells. Alex said, “Okay Lumpy, Grumpy, and Doc, you three Blockies got no brains. So I’m in charge here and I will do my best.”
***
The next day, hurtling down Howler’s Lane, Mr. Hank’s box truck squealed to a stop and shoved a cloud of road dust over the yard. He wobbled over to their house and stapled papers to the door. He and his truck bobbled to the next house.
Alex took the papers and began crafting a paper airplane. She folded a fuselage along the words “By order of the Township of Benville, Wisconsin…” She creased a nose cone. The edge of the outer wing displayed “all home-farm chickens must be relocated due to immediate public health concerns.” She focused on strategic folds for airfoils. She tossed her paper airplane. It spun and plummeted into Miss Lasagna’s grip.
Alex fumbled with Miss Lasagna’s eyeball and shoved it back into the doll’s head, linked to the home networks. She sat her next to Mrs. Chocochip, who cooed. Her elegant feathers and dark eyes featured in Miss Lasagna’s pictures. The doll took portraits of Maisie and Frumpy Bob too.
“This is all wrong,” said Alex, “They shouldn’t take my friends.”
***
Alex strapped Miss Lasagna to the handlebars of her recycled bicycle, and pedaled along pastures to Chuckles’ house.
They crowded down in front of the Lancy’s wallscreen. In Space Survivor: Mars, Commander Maxwell wanted to save the Martian farms from an ugly fungus that destroyed spinach crops and threatened the blue-green algae that produced the planet’s oxygen. But evil forces declared Spinach Was Bad. Maxwell had a fit. Spinach Is Good. For reasons of public health and preventing the fungus from spreading, the bad guys (all robots, of course) took his spinach away and Maxwell stomped into their production facilities and stole all his spinach right back and blew up their bad robot leaders. Maxwell thundered his war-cry, “Nobody takes my spinach!”
“Chores dear,” said Mrs. Lancy from the kitchen.
Alex helped Chuckles measure his Eco-Pod’s efficiency ratings. Smaller than Alex’s coop, the pod was a Barnard’s kit donated to Chuckles and his mom. He said, “My Mom’s been working so much. But
I can do some of this. Sixty-one. That’s great! What’s your efficiency rating?”
“Oh, just a little more,” said Alex, still distracted by the loss of her chickens.
Later that night, Alex couldn’t sleep. She printed dozens of Miss Lasagna’s photos of her birds. She snuck out and rode her bicycle down the road. She stapled the pictures on outdated utility poles, all the way to the city farming facility at the blind corner where Center Street wound back onto Dead Man’s Hill, a slippery gravel incline. On every photo she wrote, “Nobody Steals My Chickens!”
***
Mr. Hank and his city truck rumbled into their driveway.
Alex yelped and jumped into her closet to hide, embracing a picnic basket. Her chickens were disease-free, she was sure of it. She did the testing herself. And they were her friends. She pressed the basket’s lid down as hard as she could, until she had to pinch her forearm so that she wouldn’t cry.
Dad cursed at Mr. Hank, who said, “We’ve been through this. Law’s the law, like it or not.”
Alex snuck out of the closet to the stairwell, better to hear the adults.
Mr. Hank’s voice sounded flat. “The city facility’s safe and healthy. You have my word.”
From inside the truck, Frumpy Bob squawked as loud as the ten foot tall SuperChix, the robot rooster attraction who frightened and delighted children every year to the county fair. Mrs. Chocochip pushed her head out of the basket and pressed against Alex. She pressed the chicken back down, for her baby. Frumpy Bob let out a hellacious rooster howl. Mrs. Chocochip smashed out of the basket and flew down the stairs. Dad caught the hen mid-air and passed the chicken to Mr. Hank.
Dad glared at Alex. “Young lady, we are not law-breaking misfits.”
Tears ran down Alex’s cheeks. She clutched the basket, which still contained Baby Chocochip, who chirped.
Mom said, “Oh Alex, you didn’t?”
“I’ll take care of her baby, I will, they’re my friends, I had to, Momsy, I had to.”
“No, we have to do the right thing, and send her with the others. It’s best if Baby’s with her mother.”
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