Prospero's Half-Life

by Trevor Zaple

  His reunion with Troy Larkson was much more triumphant; there was back-slapping, hearty greetings, and a great deal of drinking involved. He felt a certain cool distance from Samantha, so he asked Troy if he knew the story. Troy told him what he could; Samantha and a group of other women had been slaves at one point just after the plague. They rebelled against their slave-masters and put them all to death, and from there forged a nation in which the concept of slavery was considered to be a natural abhorrence. Samantha, who had lead the rebellion, had become the leader of this new nation, and the principal leaders under her command were for the most part women as well, the women that had been enslaved alongside her. Richard wondered if this had all happened after she had abandoned him, or if her rescue operation had failed and she had been forced into sexual slavery for a time; Troy did not know the answer to this and Richard no longer felt that he knew Samantha well enough to ask.

  The invasion was in response to the Republic’s slave trade, of this much Troy was certain. It came about, then, that in time the others were no longer servants. Samantha gathered them together approximately a week after the collapse of the Republic’s defences and told them that they were no longer the purchased property of other men but were their own people. They cheered her loudly and for quite a long time, but Richard saw on more than one face a look of consternation, as though contemplating this newfound freedom for what it really meant. The assistants that had arrived with Samantha did not waste time in explaining in detail what this proclamation meant, from a legal standpoint. They were officially citizens without a country. The assistants were fond of pointing out that the Niagara Confederation had no legal obligation to any of them; all of them were free to seek citizenship in the Confederation, although they were warned that the path to such citizenship was arduous. Others were invited to join with the army and continue on the bloody path to London. Samantha intended to conquer the entire peninsula that was southern Ontario; she had already been centered around Stratford far longer than she liked. Simon joined up, as Richard had suspected he would, and to his surprise so did Tyler.

  “They need people to help maintain and train the horses,” he told Richard one night over well-travelled army beer. “It’s the only thing I’ve ever done. I don’t think I would be able to do anything else. So I’ll follow her to London and to wherever else we go”.

  Most of the others made the decision to follow the army’s backtrail to Niagara; the petty chiefs that had brought their hordes from the Horseshoe had told them that they were under no circumstances to try to immigrate to their lands, so Niagara was the only place they had open to them. It was a long journey – several weeks at the very least, probably months – and many of them were vocal about their concerns with the dangers of the trip. Sandra was one of these; Richard spoke with her the night before the majority of them left and her thoughts echoed Tyler.

  “People always need to eat,” she said sadly, “and I can run a kitchen. I honestly already miss my old life. I don’t miss the beatings, and the enforced poverty, but I do miss the way I was the woman in charge”.

  “I’m sure it won’t take you long over there,” Richard replied. Sandra shrugged and agreed, but he detected a hint of fear in her reply that was uncharacteristic of her. Most of the others emigrating to Niagara had the same look in their faces. Richard wished them well, but he had no interest in following them. Samantha had invited he and Carolyn along on the road to London as well, but he had declined this offer also. He and Carolyn had talked for a long time about it, after the fall of the Stratford fortifications, and they had both agreed that they wanted to get away from all of it. They were fifty-seven and forty-six, respectively, and both of them wanted silence, peace, and a world without anyone else. Richard, more than anything else, wanted to be alone with the woman he loved, hopefully for the rest of their lives.

  They had pored over a map for hours, and discussed various places where they might make a home for themselves away from the world. They settled eventually on the coast of Lake Huron; there were old cottages there, many said, and they thought that they might be able to fix one up without too much trouble. They waited until their people left for Niagara, and the armies left for London. They then travelled west, dragging the possessions that they had been able to barter for along behind them in a large red wagon. They journeyed by night, hiding out in crumbling edifices that smelled of wet decay during the daylight. The Republic had fallen into chaos, and they wanted to take no chances.

  It took them two weeks to travel in slow fashion to the lands along the edge of Lake Huron. By car, once upon a time, such a trip would only have taken forty-five minutes on a slow day; now, by trundling starlight, it seemed to take an eternity. The further they travelled west, though, the emptier the land became. As more time passed between sightings of people, they began to relax. Once in a while they would see caravans of people, their wagons looking tattered and their faces hopeless; they were obviously fleeing the violence that Samantha was bringing to the heart of the Republic. Whenever one of these caravans came into view they would hide until hours after they had passed; such people, they told themselves, were likely to be desperate, and desperate people were likely to do almost anything to get what they wanted.

  The landscape itself never quite seemed to change. It was flat, overgrown land as far as they walked. Instances of farms petered out after the first few days, and they were truly in lonely country; Carolyn remarked several times on the silence, and their lovemaking took on a muted quality, as if the silence itself were a sacred thing that could not be broken for any reason.

  They passed a rusted old sign on their ninth day of travel that could still be mostly read; “Welcome to Huron East” it read. Past that was a sign half-hidden amongst the riot of weeds along the edge of the crumbled two-lane highway. “Huron County” it read, “Ontario’s West Coast”. Carolyn had found this inordinately funny, although the meaning behind the humour in it escaped Richard entirely. He smiled indulgently, though; hers was the only laughter he ever wanted to hear again.

  Eventually they began to see farms again, cutaways of order amidst the chaos of growth that had sprung up over nearly three decades. They avoided them without question, although the scenes of domestic tranquility that they appeared to be tugged at Richard’s heart. He knew that there was no way that the men and women that ran such farms would ever consent to helping them; there wasn’t enough to go around, he rationalized, to be helping two random strangers that appeared on one’s doorstep in the middle of the night. They gathered food where they could, scavenging roots and berries as supplement to the game that Richard hunted with the rifle they’d brought along, but it never seemed to be quite enough. In the dead of the night, he wondered if he was perhaps wrong about other people, but his cynical nature took over and he told himself that it was best not to insult the rational self-interest of other people by parading your needs in front of them. Still, the argument felt hollow in the full light of day, a cheap justification for maybe being afraid of other people. Regardless, they continued to avoid other people.

  They made it to the lake at the end of summer and surveyed the coast for cottages that had stood the test of time. There were a few, and they decided on a rather solid-looking brick structure that was nestled at the bottom of a cliff that ran along the edge of the lake. The windows were smashed and the interior was mouldy, but with time and care they were able to clean it up and make it worthy for winter. They scavenged for food and salted a good deal of meat before the snow locked them in; they spent that first winter eating salt-cured venison and winterberries for vitamin supplement. They spent a long time reading; neither of them had ever had much of an opportunity to do so, and this naturally presented the perfect chance. He reread On The Beach during the season, but found it to be less depressing on the second read-through. Half-dozed alongside Carolyn, in a bucolic scene of winter content, the themes of the book seemed less of a black pit of despair, and more of a love letter to the unending s
trength to human relations. After reading it, he spent a great deal of time staring out at the snow, and thinking.

  Besides reading, they made love like rabbits; with little else to do, they took pleasure in the touch and tantalizing warmth of each other’s flesh. By the end of the winter, as the earth tilted back towards the sun and the heat cracked the freeze that had blanketed them, it had become very apparent that Carolyn was pregnant. They were overjoyed, although as time went on Carolyn became deeply concerned about being forty-six and pregnant for the first time. There were a number of medical books buried in one of the nearby cabins, and as she pored through them she became even more worried. There were any number of complications that might happen, she stressed to him. She became deeply frightened by the concept of having the baby, and as the months went on and the spring turned into early summer Richard spent more and more time staring out at the lake, which he thought might hold any number of answers, if only he could make it talk.

  Eventually, on a fragrant summer morning in what might have once been June, he grabbed the rifle from it’s place in the corner near the swept fireplace and made to leave. He made sure that Carolyn would be all right for several days alone, portioning out food and setting things up so that she would not have to move very far to do anything. When she asked where he was getting off to, his eyes went faraway, and he replied that he was going to the nearby farms, to see if there was anyone there with experience in delivering babies, particularly problematic ones. Carolyn looked doubtful, but Richard merely shrugged his shoulders.

  “We can’t do this on our own,” he told her, “we never could. Sometimes, you simply have to rely on other people”.

  About The Author:

  Trevor Zaple was born in London, Ontario, in the midst of one of the periodic sessions of brutal recession that characterize life in Ontario. He grew up in the picturesque rural surroundings of Seaforth before fleeing to a series of dying industrial burgs across Southern Ontario. He has a bachelor's degree in Contemporary Studies granted unto him by Wilfrid Laurier University, which has about as much meaning as it sounds. He lived fondly in Toronto's Parkdale neighbourhood for several years before retreating to yet another dying industrial burg. He now lives with his wife and daughter in St. Catharines, Ontario.

  Other Books By Trevor Zaple:

  Novels:

  Disappearance

  Prospero's Half-Life

  Novellas:

  What You See Is What You Get

  The Eden Stream

  9th Street Blues

  Hospital On A Hill

  What Other People Are Saying About Trevor Zaple:

  "Never a dull moment! A unique take on post-apocalypse fiction, with a sprawling but well-controlled cast of characters and chase sequences as exciting and suspenseful as anything I have ever read. Would make a tremendous television mini-series"

  -Amazon user slickdpdx

  "The prose used within this book drips with the loving consideration of a man who delights in the english language"

  -Amazon user Heather Friesen

  "An uncanny, poly-perspectival combination of bone-curdling psycho-social insights, darkly complex Canadians, scheming politicos, singing prophets, and rugged and flimsy individualists encountering displacement and correlation, vile erotica, and subtle narrative injections of theory. If Walt Whitman had a nemesis, it could have easily been Zaple."

  -Amazon user Sallow Siserary

  " One hell of a book! It's definitely not for a faint of heart, because disappearance of people in this thriller conducts to a disappearance of morals, good human nature, innocence and maybe even hope."

  -Goodreads user Touchka

  Get In Touch With The Author Here:

  Twitter: @TZaple

  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/trevorjameszaple

  Website: http://www.trevorjameszaple.com

  Email: TrevorZaple@gmail.com

  Blog: structurescapableofjoy.wordpress.com