Dispatch

New fiction.

A good day: woke up from an extended dream based on an idea for a story I had just before bed. Worked on it over the course of the day in anticipation of tonight’s Dodo Eraser prose reading. And keeping with the spirit of the proceedings, here is the story. Might do more of these. Thanks for reading.

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Eight months after the invasion failed our newspaper had electricity again. Someone in the Army’s logistics division owed my editor-in-chief a favor and in exchange for some promised puff pieces they agreed to connect the building with our sole working printer to the fragile power grid. The printer was a tiny machine, a by-now ancient letterpress kept in a storeroom we affectionately dubbed the museum, but it fed two-dozen one-page news prints an hour into our grateful, ink-stained hands. Before this we published the paper by hand, with whatever we had on hand. The shreds of cardboard boxes, old envelopes pilfered from Post Offices, or the blank pages of legal orders we found in a backroom at the municipal court. With power, we approached something more consistent, and now we could work at night. We estimated an official circulation of about 500, an amount we considered a small miracle, though we told ourselves we easily reached half of Boston. People devoured our editions at the ration stations set up in the rubble of the Common and the worksite at the Waterfront where soldiers and civilians were lifting one of the invaders’ landing craft out of the harbor. I even sketched the landing craft, a dark and wart-pocked spear-point, and got it printed in the morning edition.

Let it be said that humanity will never lose its curiosity. Nor will true journalists lose their desire to feed that curiosity, to create and deliver the news. The invasion had shattered the public internet, though a source once told me a few satellites up there still worked, and all the easy links between people were gone with it. Everyone, myself included, kept reaching for our pockets to connect, to feel the hive mind, to feel happy or angry or sad together. We intended to rebuild these connections through the stories people told us. Meteoric terrors descending from the sky. Family members dragged away. Lakes and rivers drained down to fish bones. I interviewed a woman who shot her husband rather than see him bleed to death after an invader sliced through the door he was barricading and severed his arm. I interviewed a fifteen year-old boy who dragged his unconscious grandfather into a swamp and hid for a week, surviving on scalding rainwater and tree bark. We printed everything. I believed everything.

One day I got a tip about a shipment of seeds and fertilizer out to Western Massachusetts. I grew up in Fallston and felt the pull of home so after two day-ration bribes I was allowed to ride in one of the trucks. We crawled out of Boston along Route 2 and as we slalomed around ruined cars I gazed out at the broken skyline, the Prudential Building cut in half at the heart. I wanted to see it rebuilt but I knew it wouldn’t or shouldn’t be. It will go back into Boston. Devoured and reused for something new, something more, because no place is ever the same after war.

The convoy picked up speed through Concord. Unbound by the stoplights thrown and tarnished in the trees. We drove past bombed-out Emerson Hospital where my uncle was once held against his will, screaming about enemies none of us could see. Burnt-out ambulances crowded the entrance ramp. I stole the manifest from the glove compartment: seeds for corn, tomatoes and asparagus. Germs to feed the thousands who remained.

Three women with rifles blocked the way through Athol. The trucks stopped and for a while there was no movement. One of the women fired a flare and took a few steps forward. The driver of the first truck got out and approached her. I leaned out the window and watched the woman’s face grow proud and agitated as she spoke. The driver took his baseball cap off and wiped the sweat from his bald head. He turned, saw me watching, threw an angry look and jerked his head. I sat back in my seat and scribbled my surroundings: an exit ramp a hundred yards away, yellow grass and yellow trees, the speck of a hawk in the cloudy sky. Finally the driver walked back and the second driver joined him. I heard the cargo door open, hang and slam. Then the first driver walked back around, two crates stacked in his arms. The second driver climbed back beside me. They need some help, he told me. Looks like a robbery, I told him. They need some help, he repeated, and then he said, They need help and they’re taking it.

We left the highway and swung south to Sunderland. One of the trucks struck gnarled metal on the road by a busted-out factory so we lost an hour to replacement. As we waited I slid beneath a chain link fence to wander the factory’s courtyard and take photos with an old disposable camera. In a tool shed I found three small skeletons curled around one another. I knelt and touched their rotten clothes and shoes. One of them clutched a wedding band. I stood, took a picture, and returned to the trucks.

In Sunderland we met a group of farmers at a small but intact church. I helped unload the truck and accepted a skunked beer afterwards. It was too hot for spring. It had been hot all year, even in January when strange flowers bloomed in Boston where the dirt peeked out from the rubble. Our sports editor wrote a poem called January Blooms where two lovers escaped the city on a boat and survived a storm on a wave of flowers while dark lights searched for them in vain. The editor in chief refused to publish it. I asked a farmer when they’d start planting and he told me immediately. There’s water in the ground, he told me. Thank God, the invaders never checked the ground before they lost.

A man who’d watched us unload the truck approached me. He asked if I was a reporter and I said I was. He grinned and said he had a story for me. I followed him two miles past broad fields where farmers tilled the soil by hand. We wandered through a town in flux: houses broken down for spare wood and metal, others re-rising with repairs. Every so often someone came by with a horse-drawn cart. One thing I needed to get down, so I’ll say it here: people will always find a way to live again, even reverting to the way people used to live before any of us were alive. Maybe it’s a memory in the blood. In our spirits.

The man and I turned off the road and walked along a dirt path until we came to a squat, one-story home with a barn out back. The smile on the man’s face grew as he led me to the barn door. He pulled it open and daylight filled the barn. Chained to a pole in the center was an invader. Its three eyes turned to us in angry fear. Pustules screamed on its rotting purple face. A torn metallic jumpsuit hung on its body. The man had fastened a bowl around its throat and filled it with enough water for the invader to take panicked, infrequent breaths. Little fucker’s thirsty, the man told me. Here, let’s give him a taste. The man unzipped his pants and pissed into the bowl. The invader shrieked and buckled against the pole. I took my camera out and though I knew we could never print them, I took a picture. The man insisted I get one with him.

Mail it to me, he said. Or bring it out here. You can stay here. With me and my friend.

How did you capture it? I asked.

You don’t want to know, he said.

I pocketed the camera and told him I needed to get back to the trucks.

Whatever, the man said. Nobody’s got a home. Not anymore.

Then the man kicked the invader and laughed.

Outside I stood in the yard and listened to the sounds in the barn. The laughter. The wet shriek of the invader. I felt a great rush of pity, for the man, for the invader, two living things who never should have met, who never decided to meet, but only met because it was decided for them. Countless choices made for the choiceless, you and me, the choiceless who are always first to die.

I took one last picture and began the walk back to the road.