Eupocalypse Box Set

by Peri Dwyer Worrell

  The women went into a small separate chamber used for simple medical procedures and massages, among other things. Hawa watched them lift Atikem to the top of a sturdy table. Four women took his limbs to hold him still. He began to wail.

  Bilqis stook over him with a jile honed razor sharp. “This is how we will keep ourselves safe, now and always. The age of Zar-Wak Allah is over. It is now the age of Isis and her daughter Nefertiri, come again to rule all the world of human beings from its center here in Africa!”

  The giant knife descended, and Atikem shrieked. She took a small round pebble from the table, where it had lain unnoticed. Bilqis pressed it into the cut at the pubis, just above Atikem’s hairless crotch. She took up some fine-textured twine and a steel needle and sewed the cut closed with three deft, close-spaced stitches.

  Hawa covered her ears to shut out Atikem’s wailing and blubbering cries. She blinked back her own tears as Atikem sobbed and panted.

  Bilqis was obdurate. She called out, “This is the spur. All our men will have this spur and give pleasure to women to come, until as many generations of women have lived and died as there have been generations of women subject to the cutting.”

  She took up a small metal object like a piece of jewelry, shaped like the carapace of a beetle. She held it up over her head. Hawa saw that it was made in two bell-like, curved parts, connected with welded links on one side, and opening on the other like a clamshell. The old woman put the shell over the glans of the child’s penis, which it fit loosely, then pulled his foreskin up around it. He was glazed and spent from crying, and so he only watched. However, when she took two thick pins and pierced through his foreskin, in through matching holes in the metal, and back out again, he began to cry again.

  “Sit him up,” she commanded, and they complied. She took tiny small hammer and pounded the ends of the pins flat, then rolled them back to make a twist so the pins couldn’t pull free. “The scarab has long been sacred to the Afar people. Let this scarab be the sign of a man who will serve the goddess Isis and be holy and chaste. Let no man come near us who does not bear the spur and scarab. Inshisis! As Isis wills it!”

  “As Isis wills it,” echoed the women.

  “Take him to the kitchen and give him something sweet. Let him know he’s been very good and very brave.” As the village circumciser always said to the mother of each girl she mutilated.

  Hawa turned and ran away on soft bare feet.

  Might as Well Be Spring

  When it’s Christmas in the Midwest, you wake up and open your eyes to muffled silence. You look out the window and see the world engulfed in pristine glowing lightness. The lights of the tree are shining in the living room, gifts piled underneath. The first one up, you smile ear to ear, momentarily a child again.

  When it’s mid-January in the Midwest, you’ve packed away the ornaments and burned the brown dry tree on the Epiphany bonfire. You wake up and realize it’s staying dark a little later this morning than yesterday, and it will be another week until the days start to get longer again. You cringe and pull the covers up over your head, then take a deep breath and throw them off, putting your sock-clad feet reluctantly on the cold floor. You stagger out to start the fire in the woodstove before you even go to pee.

  But then it’s May in the Midwest and the dawn comes brightly in the window, but the birds are silent and the snow is above the bottom of the windowsill and dammit, it’s snowing again, you might want to get up. You might want to find something to do. But the hollow in your stomach is a gaping, burning chasm, and the shakes start as soon as you move your hands to throw back the covers. Your hands are like icicles, and your feet are cold inside two pairs of socks. You haven’t felt your toes in weeks.

  It’s May. You’re on a farm. You should have plenty to do: animals to tend, fences and stalls to mend, vegetables to transplant, mulch to lay, rows to hoe. But there’s the snow. The bud tips of the trees are thick, but brown. They tried to leaf out when it thawed for a few days in April—but no.

  You put a huge pot of water on the gas burner. It takes a long time to boil because the burner is low, and there is so little biomatter for the methane plant. The tiny amount of sewage produced by starving people whose digestion has almost completely shut down in dejection is barely a sludge in the bottom of the huge tanks. After the last of the hay (which the livestock won’t eat, because you slaughtered every single one of them) is gone, there will be no more vegetation. You make tea in the oversized kettle, the last of the roasted dandelion root from last summer. No dandelions this year. No sugar or milk for the dark, bitter tea.

  You hit the big gong in the common room. It makes a ghost of a sound. You didn’t know you were so weak. You clench your teeth. It’s painful, because they’re loose in your jaw.

  You put major effort into hitting the gong again. The cushioned mallet makes firm contact. The resounding BONG violates the silence and lingers, fading slowly into silence. A few moans and whimpers begin. You hit the gong again, and people stir.

  Your companions slowly rise, too enervated to stretch or complain, and make their way to the common room. Everyone is leaner than they were in the fall. Sunken cheeks and knobby wrists, tendons darting up under the skin like snakes, dull eyes which focus and then drift: all testify mutely that they feel the same as you. Only LaDwon’s previously plump, meaty body still looks loosely normal. And dear Amit is a skeleton, a Mexican Katrina, Dia de Los Muertos on the hoof, with incongruous calabazitas growing globular round his throat. When he speaks at all, it’s never above a rasping whisper.

  Not that there is much to speak about. Plainly, you all must go. All that remains is planning: taking stock of your meager resources, unfurling old paper maps. In slow, croaking voices, others offer ideas for shelter, warmth, transportation—unable to articulate or follow beyond the basics.

  The rest of that May Day in Indiana, that day of snow and foot-long icicles solidly fused to the eaves, is bustling. Sighs and the occasional sniffle are heard, but no one cries or complains—not from gladness, but because it takes too much energy.

  You take your things and bundle them up, strap them into a pack: warm woolen clothing, the boots that you remade with leather soles when the machine sickness took the Vibram (you will wear those), your leather moccasins, your knife, a few photos.

  That night, everyone lies down in their beds as usual. The days are longer—the Earth’s orbit is unchanged—and it doesn’t get dark until late. Some drop into sleep, but most are in the stupor of starvation, drifting from dream to reality many times an hour. Their bodies wake them, demanding Food! Food now! and they ignore it, a habit that never feels natural.

  When the sky begins to brighten, reflected by the blanket of snow outside, there is a general stirring. The Sutokatans gather themselves almost wordlessly, bathe and dress, and assemble outside. You look ruefully at the little ATVs—useless, since the alcohol itself and everything to make it was consumed weeks ago. Pushing handcarts fitted with skis, wearing snowshoes, Jessica with the baby tied to her body in his sling, all are equipped with what will help them live—or what they’d rather die than leave.

  As planned, you take up the rear, waiting for the other twenty to file down the trail. You left all the doors unlocked. Perhaps it will save someone’s life. Perhaps it will just save the doors from being smashed.

  As you round the curve past the first windbreak, there is a slight incline in the plain and you see the group beading out ahead of you. It strikes you that from above, you must look like a column of ants crossing a vast concrete parking lot. You remember watching ants as a child—each one discretely individual, each one acting on behalf of the larger whole. You set up blocks of sticks and Legos, moats full of water from the hose, to see how they’d negotiate around the obstructions. You picked them up between your little pudgy fingers, set them back at the beginning of their course, and watched them circle, waving their antennae frantically until they found the path and resumed it.

  Finally
, when your mother called you inside, you did a dance of doom, a cherubic Shiva in sneakers with rubber toes, crushing as many of them as you could before turning and running inside without a backward glance.

  You don’t look back today, either.

  Learn or Repeat

  Lou Stonegood

  Cascade Beacon, November 27

  An Empire of Lies

  One of the oldest propaganda techniques, one used as far back as the Romans, is a method of invading a territory. As the fleeing populace sets fire to their fields to deny them sustenance, they condemn the vanquished enemy for the arson. Throughout history, many such victims of conquest have lost their lives. This week, we at the Beacon are grateful still to have both our lives and a means to communicate with you.

  On this weekend of Thanksgiving, which many of us still celebrate according to our family traditions, let us remember the first Thanksgiving. The Indians who aided the settlers of that time would go on to experience genocide and generational betrayal by waves of invaders promising a brighter future. Let us not fall victim to that trap.

  Let us also remember the whole story of Thanksgiving.

  The Pilgrims’ famine didn’t end when the Native Americans taught them how to farm the local land. In fact, the Pilgrims suffered hunger and want for three more years after the first Thanksgiving.

  Plymouth Plantation was founded based on a system in which food and supplies were held in common, and then distributed based on “equality” and “need”, as determined by plantation officials. Everyone received a like portion of the harvest. The Pilgrims were not allowed to grow food separately from the communal farming efforts.

  According to historian William Bradford, this system “was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.” Apparently, “young men, that were most able and fit for labour, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense.” This is why crop yields were so low.

  As the colony starved, they began a new system in 1623. Each family received a private patch of land. They kept all they grew on their own acreage, but now they were also completely responsible for supporting themselves. According to Bradford, this “had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been. […] The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability.”

  Before the machine sickness swept the entire world, we lived in a plantation of sorts. We were at each other’s throats for a greater share of the fictional currency known as the US dollar. Let us look long and hard at the life we have now before we run to the skirts of the nanny state again. Let us consider what strings are attached to that government check.

  Let us consider our children—spending time with us as we re-learn the skills our grandparents forgot, but also learning far greater lessons in how to be better men and women. Let us govern ourselves according to the natural laws that humanity has known for thousands of years.

  This is not to say that we must labor forever at hand-planting our fields, scrubbing our laundry, and grinding our corn by hand. Many of us already have homes that are lit by shewanella biobatteries, and we have heard reliable reports of larger batteries being built to serve greater purposes.

  On the reverse of this sheet, you may read an exciting news report about biocomputers reportedly being developed in Texas and California. The question is, will technology serve humanity in the future? Or enslave it once again?

  The maw of the state can never be satisfied. It will devour all you have created in the past few years and demand more. It will demand your wealth; it will demand your time; it will demand every detail of your personal information; in the end it will go to war and demand your children. It will pay you back in nothing but debt and worry. At this precise moment, you are at a unique and providential point in human history. Let this generation be the first to awaken from the long and bloody nightmare of government.

  Out of the Wild

  The Sutokatan community put one foot ahead of another for days, which turned into weeks. Bark could be stripped from trees and chewed. Fires, at least, could be built, and they could gather around them and huddle close, seeking the warmth their gaunt bodies could not hold. Josh took to carrying Augusta close to him, wrapped in a length of woolen homespun, like Ozark riding on Jessica’s back. She was a bird now, so tiny and frail, her hair just white puffs around her scalp. She spoke little, murmuring indistinctly now and then, sometimes calling him by the wrong name—a son’s or grandson’s, perhaps.

  How many bodies did they see frozen in the snow? Coyotes tore at dark objects in drifts, and they learned quickly to leave them to their grisly work. One night, they looked up and saw eyes in the brush: a stalking bobcat, its usual small prey starved out by the lack of forage.

  Josh pitched rocks at it. Juni yelled, “Go! Scat!” But it just circled the camp and settled into watching from a different vantage point. After that, Jessica took to digging a pit just big enough for Ozark’s tiny body and lying across it to sleep.

  Grimly, they marched. Toes could be lost. Ozark might cry, a keening, aimless groan which faded to nothingness and became less frequent over time.

  As they pushed further south, though, the snow became crunchy on top, where it had melted and refrozen. Further still, and there were patches of bare dirt with sprigs of grass greening up. Dandelions and plantain leaves made a welcome addition to their diet, but also gave them cramps, left them squatting in the ditches.

  The grave they dug for Augusta was barely more than a shallow ditch. They hadn’t the strength to do more.

  One day, they finally came upon a cultivated field: a half-acre patch of turnips, wan but green with small bulbous roots. There was a small house nearby, but no one home. There was no smoke, but the brick chimney was still warm to the touch from outside. A shed with hay and tack stood empty, hoofprints of an unshod mule or horse leading out of the yard.

  “We can’t just take their food,” began Gilley.

  But Jessica was already cramming her empty pack full of them, beating the dirt off the roots and stuffing them in whole. “It’s my baby starving.” She snarled. “Fuck your ethics!”

  The others were too weak to argue. They each pulled up as much as they could carry and then quickly moved on, leaving a third of the homesteader’s garden pilfered. As the day wore on, they were stalked not just by the hungry predators, but by an imaginary gardener riding up behind them.

  They camped, built a fire, and roasted the roots, steaming the greens. The animal need of their bodies kept any of them from feeling shame or regret when the starchy, fibrous roots hit their stomachs. All they felt was joy. Jessica chewed Ozark’s, pushing the food into his mouth in a kiss, and gorged herself.

  Two days later, they descended the Ozark trail into the no-name village—the crossroads where they’d wintered in Year One.

  “The barn’s still there, but fewer sheep,” Jessica observed. There were fewer smoke trails in the surrounding hills, too. No doubt manufacturing ethanol was secondary to food as a use for the year’s meager harvest. They went a little further, until they reached the crossroads.

  The trading post was still there. “Must not be a market day,” Jessica said. “See there? That row of stalls across the way are all empty today.” But there was a delicious smell coming from the trading post/café on the corner, and the group wandered inside.

  It was strange to be in civilization again after their weeks on the road. But there was an unknown woman behind the counter who saw their state and offered them warm, milky tea from an urn. “Seventeen cups on the house. Pay it forward.” She saw Ozark’s dull eyes and the cracks in the corners of his mouth and scooped him out a bowl of mashed potatoes without a word, waving off Jessica’s offer of payment.

  “So, are Gaby and Ed
around?” Jessica asked.

  “You friends with Gaby and Ed?” the cashier/waitress/manager asked.

  “It’s been a while, but yeah.”

  “They went up to close up Gaby’s house. You know she’s getting married?”

  “No! That’s great! She’d just lost her husband when I was here before.”

  “Oh, it has been a while! You’re welcome to rest here until they get back. Should be a couple of hours. If you want to lie down, there’s a hayloft in the barn.”

  “Okay! We’ll do that! Tell her Jessica is here with a few friends.”

  The crew didn’t have to be told twice, and with many a heartfelt word of thanks, they sacked in the outbuilding—enjoying the shelter, the safety, and the soft bed of hay like a premium suite at the Saint Regis.

  A few hours later, they were drifting in peaceful slumber when Gaby’s familiar voice rang out. “Jessica,” she called. Her arrival was heralded by the smell of seabutter biscuits and toasted pecans. Ed was behind her, and introductions were made. While the party ate, Jessica, Ed, and Gaby caught up.

  Jessica had left Ozark in the innocent oblivious sleep of a child, and when he woke alone, he let out a wail which made the Sutokatans smile—even Amit, who rarely spoke and had not eaten at all, letting drops of milky tea trickle down his throat.

  Jessica retrieved Ozark from the hayloft and watched Gaby count on her fingers. “Is that…?”

  “Juan’s,” Jessica confirmed. “This is little Ozark. Say hi to Aunt Gaby and Uncle Ed, Ozark.” The child perched on her knee, solemnly blinking at the new arrivals.

  “Juan is gone. He…messed with…another girl, and some of the men…”

  Jessica nodded. “No great loss. But what’s this I hear about you getting married?”