Photo: NASA

By Andrew Sharp

The squeegee left a band of clean glass behind as Lucas pushed the cleaning solution down the window. The stars blazing out of the dark sky were now sharp, dusted off, as if they had been washed clean by a sudden rain shower. He paused to take them in, just for a second. The view was breathtaking, but Lucas’ breath was not taken. The stars made a nice picture, but they did not rise or set. The view would keep. Sometime he would take time to sit and look at them again, when they did not come crowding in on him, their immovability and remoteness squashing him.

When he had imagined star travel, back home in Indiana, the stars had always been slowly floating by the window like billboards in the cornfields off the interstate. In his mental picture, an occasional comet would flash past, or a planet would loom up and slide by the window, a glowing bulk. But the planets were long gone. If there had been billboards outside, their passing would have been only an impression, a sense that the emptiness had been disturbed, here and gone before the eye could track. But despite their rushing speed, the frozen stars mocked the fragile and tiny ship’s efforts of the to reach them.

It, he remembered. They were not traveling to “them,” they were traveling to “it.” One lonely star, or more precisely, one of its planets. They hoped. After that would be only more vast emptiness, the next star yet more generations away.

He hungered to see something more than pricks of glowing light on the other side of the newly clean glass. He would have killed to see the large blue earth hanging there again, as it had been on the departure day. He had expected to feel a tinge of regret in his excitement as they prepared to fire the ship’s nuclear engine. Instead, it was like the day he stood at the edge of his grandfather’s coffin, staring at the face that was so familiar and yet not real, almost unable to feel that this was the last time, and desperately wanting it to not be the last time.

People in Asimov or Douglas Adams buzzed off to other planets and never felt this way. They were going to hop in a wormhole and be back in a few weeks. A few hours in hyperspace, and they were sitting in a warm bar on a new and exciting planet.

There was no cheering along the ship’s windows as the 287 passengers had stared out while the floor began to vibrate under them. Then they had pushed out of orbit, gaining speed so gradually they hardly felt it. As the earth began to shrink more and more quickly, the crowd drifted away from the window for the launch party, but Lucas had stayed for hours, watching it become a star.

“Hey Lucas!”

He jumped. Max and Carlos were looking at him.

“You’ve got to stop thinking about the theory so much and just squeegee,” Max said, grinning at him.

“Sorry,” Lucas said.

“You OK?” Carlos asked. He was always able to pick up on what people were feeling, and if they were down he was eager to make them feel better. Max expected people to get over things. They were a strange mix—Max, the stern-looking ex-soldier, who cared more than he pretended to, Carlos with his slow smile and gentle goodwill, and Lucas, the one who thought too much.

“I’m fine,” he said. “Just forgot what I was doing for a second.”
He was not really fine. The problem was that he was not a space traveler, and neither was anyone else on this ship. They were space prisoners, serving voluntary life sentences. When they had walked up the ramp for the last time, they had known they would never leave it. They were rememberers, like living files, here to pass on human culture. They were, as Max put it bluntly, gene carriers. Behave, keep the ship running, and die. Repeat.

These ideas, if Lucas had said them out loud, in the wrong place, would have caused a thoughtfully alert expression on the face of the ship psychologist, who dealt quickly with those who strayed from orthodoxy. They all knew, of course, that all it would take would be one crackpot to ruin everything, go crazy and tear apart their peaceful society. They had to be good neighbors, or die. The authorities were very careful. Not that that had been going so well.

The psychologist would remind Lucas, if he were crazy enough to go to her, about their happy and contented lives. What more could they want but food, housing, meaningful jobs, a stable society, and a couple of good bars to choose from to relax in after work? Generations of humans would have killed for such a life, even if it was a tad small in scale.

His squeegee hit the bottom of the massive window frame. He glanced at his watch—5:30 p.m. earth time. Quitting time. The lift whooshed quietly into motion as Max pushed down the lever, and like ants they crept their way down the gently sloping outer wall. Lucas leaned on the rail and looked out over the familiar landscape, slowly rising up toward them. The first thing a newcomer would have noticed with surprise was the vast openness, then the breeze, then the trees, and how like a small slice of earth it was. Something generic and Midwestern—Ohio, maybe, or Illinois. Pleasant. It was not the fluorescent-lit hallways of Star Trek, or the airplane-like interior of a Star Wars ship. It was a square half mile, 320 acres, of fertile Ukrainian soil lifted out of Russia’s breadbasket as that region’s primary donation to the cause. He could see a few small joggers bouncing along on the gray gravel path around the outside perimeter.
Three hundred twenty acres made a big farm, but an extremely small world. A 320-acre trap that seemed shrink every day. Complaining was unreasonable, of course; even this size had cost as much as most nations’ entire five-year budget.

From this height he could see down on the roofs of the cluster of small houses and apartments, the community center spire rising up out of the middle, surrounded by the library, movie theater, and a few shops and restaurants on the nearby streets. He could see a few solid citizens taking the path he was going to take in a few minutes, through the door of the Blue Boar, where the huge fireplace looked exactly like stone, the fire looked exactly like a wood fire, and the engineered yeast-and-algae beer tasted almost exactly like beer. He could only faintly remember real beer now, anyway.

The lights of the town were starting to gleam as the overhead lights, far up in the roof, began to dim for the evening. Lucas almost expected smoke to be rising from the chimneys, and he glanced toward the “horizon” only to miss the sunset yet again. There were many suns, but none of them set.

The platform hissed to a stop at the bottom and they stepped off and began walking inland along the splashing stream that ran over never-moving boulders through the vegetable patches and fruit orchards. It was winter now in the scheduled cycle, so the patches of vegetables were mostly full of winter greens, the trees were bare, and the ship’s crew wore long sleeves in the cool air. In a few months the sweet smell of apple blossoms and lilac would drift along here, but now there was only the clean smell of the damp earth.

Of course, most of their food came not from these patches but from the towering vats of algae that rose solidly up in the distance over the dark of the evergreens on the far side of town, maybe not with the majesty of mountains but creating a shadow of the same feel of space and distance.

A small group of dirt-covered landscapers was walking toward them on the path. When they saw Lucas and the others, they stopped talking and looked past them, avoiding eye contact. Their feet scraped on the hard gravel as they hurried past, and then they were gone. Some of Hunter’s group.

“Bastards,” Max muttered. He glanced at Carlos. “Sorry. But they are.”

Carlos shook his head slowly. “We can’t take sides or we’re just part of the problem.”

“I’m not taking a side,” Max said. “I think they’re all bastards.”

“That’s fair,” Lucas agreed.

“So now it’s us against everybody,” Carlos said. “What does that make
us?”

They didn’t answer him. They were on the sidewalk along Main Street now. The street was very quiet; there were few pedestrians. Those few they did pass shot them dirty looks, or watched silently with arms crossed as they walked past.

The three pushed in through the heavy oak door into the warm air that smelled faintly of fried potatoes, and gravy, and beer. They walked past the bar, and out into the middle of the room, where they had their pick of tables. Lucas tried to decide if the room was half empty, or if everyone was just packed into the booths on opposite sides of the room. At least a few people were missing, because it had been hard to find a seat anywhere a few months ago.

They sat quietly for a long time, listening to the scraping of silverware and the soft thunk of cups set down on tables. Finally Cindy, the waitress, came over and stood silently at the edge of the table. Cindy was on Soto’s side. Carlos and Lucas ordered beer, and Max got a whiskey. Then they waited again. Light conversation felt like talking in a library, so they didn’t. Eventually Cindy stalked by, plopping the glasses down on the edge of the table. Lucas moodily used a napkin to wipe up the beer that had sloshed out of his cup.
Edgar Stoes, the newspaper editor, came in and sat down next to them.

“Hi Edgar,” Lucas said. “What’s the news today?”

“Community calendar and some interviews about the upcoming marathon,” Edgar said sadly. He had run a real newspaper, back on Earth. “Captain is meeting with the committee right now in an emergency meeting, but of course I don’t dare touch that one with a ten foot pole.”

“No,” Max said.

Edgar leaned in. “Rumor has it if people can’t get their act together something big is going to happen. Captain can’t tolerate this kind of thing. If it gets any worse, we’re sunk.”

Lucas gripped the handle of his mug tightly. He wanted to stand up, get on the table, and yell at everyone, call them the idiots they were, challenge them all to a fight if they wanted it. But that would just get him arrested, or start a riot.

“What’s she going to do about it?” Max asked.

Edgar shrugged and sighed. “No idea.” He frowned. “Where the heck is Cindy? I really need a drink.”

“Give her a half hour, she’ll be over,” Max said. “You’re sitting in the wrong part of the room for quick service.”

It was too familiar for Lucas. He had come on this trip partly to get away from his small town, where petty disputes over library fines or who knew what, important only in the small worlds of the combatants, had set up battle lines all around town. The ideals of the Starship Project—a better humanity, the only way to survive a star voyage at all—had drawn him, even as his cynicism had warned him away.
The better humanity, it turned out, when trapped together in a small community and handed lifetime careers that were headed only to the shuffleboard court, and then the ship cemetery, behaved a lot like the old humanity would have. And now he was trapped and helpless, unable to escape. At least back on earth he could have moved to Montana. Sometimes he felt like he had many years ago when he was a small child in the tunnel in the McDonald’s playplace, surrounded by kids, and claustrophobia had made him desperate to escape. He would have clawed anyone who blocked his way out.

This whole voyage is a star that is awfully close to collapsing on itself.

“Profound,” Max said.

Lucas was startled. “Did I say that out loud?”

Stoes eyed him thoughtfully. “You might want to be careful about not saying that kind of thing out loud. We could get in trouble just for not reporting you. I’m not reporting you, of course,” he said hastily.

“Oh, you just need to sleep on it,” Carlos said reassuringly. “We all feel like that sometimes.”

“Yeah?” Lucas said. He glanced around, then leaned forward and said “How does this sound, Carlos—I’m stuck on a small ship with a bunch of crazy people. If I stick it out, my reward is to be buried in the ship cemetery, and then my kids, if I ever get any, will be buried there, and then their kids are going to show up at some planet that may or may not even be habitable.”

“Next food and fuel, 60 trillion miles,” he added in the silence.

“Shut up!” Edgar said frantically, under his breath, his eyes bugged out. “You’re going to get us all arrested! These people don’t need any encouragement to turn us in, either,” he hissed, looking around. Nobody seemed to have heard, though.

Max looked almost sympathetic. “Look, Edgar, don’t freak out. He’s right, OK?” He kept his voice low so it could only be heard by those at the table. He fiddled with the salt shaker, tapping it on the gleaming table top. “No sense pretending. We might get there and the planet might already be inhabited. Might be sitting out on their orbital porches with nuclear shotguns, taking potshots at strangers. Not that we even know if this piece of junk will stop. Kind of hard to simulate 10 percent light speed with a wind tunnel.” He held up his hand as Carlos and Edgar simultaneously tried to interrupt. “The key is, Lucas, just don’t care so much, OK? Stop trying to be a philosopher. Life is no more meaningless out here than it was back on earth. We live, we work, we die. It’s pretty nice here. Like a vacation almost, compared with some options.”

“Geez,” Edgar said. “I thought I was grumpy before I started hanging out with you guys.” Suddenly he sat up straight. “Hey! I still don’t have a drink!” He pounded the table with his fist. Cindy glared at him from the bar.

“Don’t worry about it now,” Max said. “We’re done, unless you want to drink alone. Let’s get out of here.”

They said goodbye to Edgar out on the now dark street, lit by glowing street lamps. As he walked away, a shadow moved by the tavern wall and Heinrich stepped out.

“It’s a fine evening, gentlemen.”

“What do you want?” Max said shortly.

Heinrich held up his hands. “Hey, easy, I just want a few words.”

“We’re not interested,” Max said.

Heinrich narrowed his eyes. “No need to get pompous,” he said. “We want a peaceful ship, same as you. That’s what we need to talk about.” He held up his hand as Lucas tried to say something. “Just let me finish. We need you guys. Hunter…”

“Get lost,” Max said. Lucas was envious of Max’s bluntness. He would probably have been stuck here for a long time, listening to Heinrich.

Heinrich’s veins stood out on his neck. “Suit yourself,” he spat. “I could have kept you safe.” He turned to leave.

“Wait just a minute,” Max said. “What are you talking about?” But Heinrich was gone between the tavern and the library. They stared after him.

Two weeks later, the maintenance crew was high in the air again working on the ceiling, replacing the thousands of dirty air filters and collecting them for cleaning. Lucas had kept quiet—and out of prison—but Soto, one of the ringleaders, had not. He had been arrested last night, and rumor had it that his rival Hunter might be arrested any time. Nobody went to the Blue Boar any more.
The crew sat dangling their legs off the work platform near the top of the vast dome. Far below through the safety netting, Lucas noticed a small crowd gathering outside the courthouse. The other two noticed as well, and they all leaned over the railing to get a better look through the safety netting.

“Uh oh,” Max said.

The heavy boom was so completely outside the plausible that for a couple of seconds, they just tried to understand what they had heard. Lucas dropped the filter he was holding and it bounced on the netting below. They looked at each other in horror. A column of black smoke was rising out of the courthouse, and they could already smell it, sharp and ugly. Small specks on the street were running from the smoke. Now coming back. Now gathering in clusters. Some of them weren’t moving at all.

Lucas had wondered sometimes, in his darkest moments, what he would feel if their little society started to fall apart. Instead of the despair and resignation he had been expecting, he felt only an icy rage at the fools who insisted on ruining everything.

Max jammed the lever on the platform down, pushing it to full speed, which wasn’t that fast. It felt dream-slow in their impatience. As they dropped down along the outer wall, they were carried away from town toward the outside edge of the ship. When the lift hit the bottom they all took off running back through the small grove of trees in the arboretum toward the column of smoke.

They were almost to the town when the ship turned upside down and everything disappeared. The air roared around Lucas. Heavy blows beat his body all over. Then everything stopped moving.

Lucas carefully lifted his head and felt for his legs and body. They were still attached, which the piercing pain affirmed. He looked around. The administrative office next to the path was half gone, burning, piles of smoke rolling out of it. Carlos was sitting a few feet away on the path, slumped forward. Max was gone.

Lucas ran to Carlos and touched his shoulder. Carlos looked up at him. He was crying. He tried to say something, but coughed instead. And then he stopped crying.

Lucas gently laid him back on the path, and stood up. There was shouting in the town, some screaming. A loudspeaker was blaring something.

Something was flapping at the front of Lucas’ torn shirt, and he looked down at it. His ID card that gave him access to the computer complex. All the maintenance crew had one. He looked at it. Then he began to run away from town, almost enjoying the shooting pain in his fierce rage and hurt.

No one was in the lobby when he swiped his card in the door and walked in. A message console was buzzing, unanswered. A door down the hall hung open.

He quickly walked into the maintenance shop and grabbed a heavy wrench. Then he ran down the hallway to a heavy gray door with a “WARNING: Authorized Employees Only” sign. He swiped his card again. The door clicked, and he heaved it open and walked in to the cool room filled with the massive computer system, quiet, humming. No one was there. He walked up to the cluster of machines that ran the backup system and the central control system.

They never thought anyone would do anything but try to keep these running, he thought.

Then he thought of Heinrich and the others — those who were still alive anyway — back in town. He screamed as he swung the heavy steel wrench into a computer. It crumpled downward, and a ventilation fan pinged to a stop. Sparks jumped. Alarms began to screech. He screamed for Carlos, and hit again. For Max. For the silly dreams he had had about star travel.

This ship was beautiful, glittering, and fail-proof, with a rotten core. They were transporting themselves, that was their big mistake. Now he was down in the middle of the rotten core, alone, with no one to stop him. He would hack it out. He would destroy it. He swung again, and again, and again, and again. The lights went out. There was a smell of wires burning.

The ship shook. That would be the protective force field shuddering off. Any asteroid — or space pebble — would tear through it now like a bullet.

He realized his hands were wet; he must have cut them on metal shards, but he hadn’t felt it. He was getting tired, but he swung again hard. He staggered. He had completely missed and the wrench smashed into his shin. He fell. Pain throbbed through his rage. It was like waking up. He would have looked around at what he had just done, but it was dark as the inside of a coffin. His head knocked on something. He put his hand out; it was the ceiling.

And there was a funny noise. He listened hard, trying to figure out what it was that sounded so strange. Then he knew what it was. It was a not-noise. The steady, three-year throbbing of the ship was silent now.

Heinrich saw the running figure disappear into the orchard along the stream and ran harder. They were cleaning up the last resistance. They had almost restored order.

He ran through the trees and saw the other man jumping over the stream in a soaring leap. He gripped his club and surged forward, but then the light sputtered and became starlight. He staggered forward and fell as the ship lurched violently and the lights went out. He put out his hands in front of him to stop his fall, but his hands never hit the ground. Incredulously, he saw the stream ahead of him ripple up out of its bed. Water bounced off stones and rose in delicate tendrils through the air, leaving the stones uncovered. The other man flailed as he floated in his eternal leap. Heinrich looked down at the ground, hovering under him.

The brilliant light of the galaxies flooded in through the now dark windows of the ship, filling it like a vast cathedral at nighttime, a cathedral with dark shapes floating everywhere through the air. The ship flew on. It had a long journey ahead.

By Andrew Sharp

September 12, 2132

President Rodriguez
The White House
1 Capitol Square
Washington, D.C. 43215

Dear Mr. President:

I wanted to drop you a line after our dinner the other day. You sounded a little upset and stressed at the time, and so even though I was uneasy about what you were saying about energy policy, I thought I would wait until later to send you some thoughts in a letter.

Mr. President, I can’t sugarcoat this — signing those agreements to cut carbon emissions would be a disaster. It has been almost 150 years since our nation’s narrow escape from the Kyoto protocol, and aside from a few halfhearted and laughable climate summits, the energy industry has not been threatened since. But now the rhetoric of a few marginal extremists has driven us to the brink of this unacceptable international treaty that would be the death of our economy.

In defiance of these radicals, I must remind you that despite all the dire warnings for the past century, we are still in fine shape. Once you get used to the summers, which I admit are a tad on the warm side, and a few violent storms once in a while, the new reality simply isn’t the Armageddon the alarmists were predicting. Yes, at first there were some troubling images on our media screens of family farms turned into family lakes, and the Maldives getting uncomfortably damp, and West Virginia rednecks taking potshots at “East Coasties” driving through the mountains with loaded station wagons. But all that unpleasantness has settled down now and it turns out there was plenty of room in the Midwest for everyone. The mega-tornadoes and the hearty hurricane season keep our honest construction workers gainfully employed. And think of all the jobs we were able to maintain in valuable sectors like industrial cleanup or advanced meteorology that would all have been lost if we had caved in to the demands of extremists back then.

And of course, a side benefit to the ongoing march of heavy industry is that we’ve been able to neatly resolve a few thorny political problems. No more election controversies in Florida! And I hardly need mention the benefit you derived from not having to win any electoral votes in the Deep South (very deep indeed these days, eh?). China and Japan could have saved themselves that little war over those disputed islands, the Falkland Islands aren’t causing any tension either these days, and the drug legalization debate in the Netherlands was settled effectively.

Since you insist on harping on the environment, where would we be without the Great Manhattan Reef? Or the Cumberland Gap lobster industry?

And now that we have finally moved the District of Columbia to the high and dry side of the mountains, we’ve put a stop to all that panic about our capital flooding. See, that wasn’t so hard, was it? Besides, you have to admit the Buckeyes are more fun to watch than the Redskins ever were.

No one regrets more than I do the extinction of a couple of unadaptive species that couldn’t cope with the sudden changes in habitat and climate, but I must point out that we still have a little more than half of the species left, and how many kinds of frog do you need, anyway? (I certainly don’t need the loud species that currently resides in my canal!)

Frankly, Mr. President, all of us in the nation’s energy and manufacturing industries are willing to make some reasonable concessions, but we have to balance the needs of the environment with practical consideration of our economy. We can’t simply shut down our extraction of the last traces of coal and oil left behind by earlier clumsy technology. We would lose millions of jobs, and besides, clean energy is still incapable of giving us the kind of lifestyles our lives depend on these days. A carbon cap would also drive the price of gasoline through the roof. I hardly need to point out what would happen to your re-election chances if people could no longer buy gas for $75 a gallon!

And don’t tell me you are going to let a few lawsuit-happy malcontents poison your attitude toward our modern clean extraction methods. I will tell you again, we keep the water contamination and radioactive fallout to a minimum (and more or less within EPA standards, I might add).

I hope I have been able to set you free from any worry and care that has been heaped on you by these environmental extremists. I want you to enter the election season confident and riding a wave of popular support, so that I can again have the pleasure of donating an enormous amount of money to your campaign.

Yours sincerely,

J. Delany Higgins
CEO
Giant American Energy Company

By Jared Stutzman

Oh…pardon me…I didn’t mean to stare. It’s just that the stunning uniqueness and individuality of your wardrobe caught me off guard. Vintage flannel and suspenders over an ironic T-shirt with distressed skinny jeans and Converse Chuck Taylor All-Stars canvas-style tennis shoes? What’s that? Oh…you usually wear Tom’s for Men instead of Chuck Taylors…I see. Wow…it’s so fresh and original…and the hemp bracelet, too, and the shaggy hair peeking out from under your Castro hat, and your retro horn-rimmed spectacles, and—oh . my . goodness—is that really a tattoo I see on your ankle? That’s so tantalizingly rebellious…the ultimate act of self-expression. I’m really just in awe…it’s so rare to see someone dress like you. In fact, I admire your style so much that I’d like to learn everything about you—can we sit down and talk about it?

First off, I can’t help but notice your iPod—what music are listening to? What’s that? Ah. Some group I’ve never heard of, you say. Why are you so sure of that? Ah…because if I’ve heard of them, you would have to instantly stop liking them. I see. How would you describe them? Acoustic indie-folk-roots-rock-protest-punk with a touch of non-commercial jazz? And just a hint of authentic bluegrass. Ah…hum. And do you only listen to obscure music? What else is on your iPod? I see. Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie. U2, naturally. The Beatles. Springsteen. Mmm-hmm. And a “graveyard” of groups you used to like until everyone else discovered them? I see. Say what? This isn’t your “real” music collection? Ah. Vinyl, you say. Really? You’ve actually dug out an old record player and begun collecting LPs? How stunningly unexpected and unlike everyone else in your peer group! You are so creatively retro! Wait—what’s this playlist I see on your iPod… “Mix list of Switchfoot/Toby Ma…” hey! Why’d you snatch it out of my hand? Why are you acting embarrassed?

Let’s change the subject…what’s your job? A non-profit organization raising awareness of climate change, hunger, racism, AIDS, and illiteracy. Uh—isn’t that a pretty widespread list of concerns? It must be a pretty large organization. How many people are employed there? Two. Two? Two employees, including you. I see. And…what is your role there? Social media consultant and fundraiser. Mmm-hmm. And the, uh, other employee? Social media manager and fundraiser. I see. So, I take it this organization decided to add a strong internet presence to its firmly established local…oh, it’s entirely internet-based? I see. Volunteer, you say. Well…then…if I may ask without seeming too crassly commercial…on what do you subsist? How do you earn enough money to buy food? Retail? At Target? Ah. And you have multiple applications in at independent coffee shops and restaurants all over the city and are just waiting for the right opportunity. Wow—that’s very conscientious of you, to work so hard as a volunteer while doing menial, purposeless commercial labor in real life—it must be difficult not to let it affect your soul.

And where have you chosen to live? A loft apartment in a mixed-used zone downtown in a renovated factory near the brewery district? How frighteningly authentic and gritty! You say it was either that or sharing a hundred-year-old house with five buddies in the historic neighborhood just off the square? Honestly, your living arrangement choices are shocking—I’ve never heard of such things—actually choosing to live downtown—living in the center of the action instead of abandoning the city for the suburbs. You were probably the first of your friends to decide that was a cool place to live, weren’t you? No one else had that idea first? You’ve really created a new paradigm for urban renewal—it’s such a novel concept.

And where do you shop? Farmer’s markets and thrift stores…organic, locally-and-sustainably-grown, fair-trade food only—yes, I can see the “Buy Local” bumper sticker on your Subaru.* I see. Never Wal-Mart or even the supermarket. Wal-Mart is the devil. You prefer artisanal craftsmanship in all of your purchases? Hmm…artisanal means…anything hand-made. Got it. For instance? Bread. OK, yes, I can see that— the local baker’s whole-grain oat-rye-flaxseed-honey loaf beats factory produced Wonder bread. What else can be called “artisanal?” Beer. Woodworking items. Coffee. Wait, coffee? But…it’s grown in South America and Africa—how is it artisanal or local?? Locally roasted. I see. You roast your own beans? Really? Wow! You’re something of a coffee connoisseur? How unusual and quirky! How totally unexpected and idiosyncratic! And you prefer light roasts and hate Starbucks? That’s very surprising, since Starbucks serves coffee and you seem to like coffee. I’d have thought…but no—they’re too commercial and they burn their coffee, you say? Wow. You certainly don’t fit into any predetermined social categories—I’m impressed with how boldly you defy social convention and expectation. I’m curious—does this preference for local, non-corporate goods extend to other areas of consumption … say, electronic devices? I only ask because I’ve heard that Apple products are manufactured in China, and…

Moving on then. Do you attend a church? Of course. Yes. You attended an “un-church” that cycled through several living rooms and strip-mall locations for a while, but now you go to a super-relevant, indie-liturgical, community-based, outreach-oriented fellowship that meets in a restaurant downtown? You value the inclusiveness, historical connection, and congregational participation. It effortlessly mixes timeless traditions with passing fads, you say? Plus, it’s cool to pretend you’re British? I see. So, that basically means standing and sitting at the appropriate times and saying creeds together and having communion. Say what? It’s called “Eucharist,” you say? Pardon me. The pastor/priest sprinkles his sermons liberally with references to popular culture? He doesn’t use a podium? How unconventional! Your church is truly a wonderful extension of your self-expression—it neatly fits in with the person you’ve chosen to be and the image you wish to cultivate.

Where did you attend before the “un-church?” You’ve matured since then, you say. You wouldn’t go there now. Right–I’m just curious, though. You say it was a large evangelical church with three services, a jammin’ worship band, and a happenin’ youth group and college-and-young-adults outreach? That was during your years at university? What’s that? You’re mumbling a bit now. You say you didn’t know any better at the time? They were so stodgy and suburban (I noticed how you spit that word out like it left a bad taste in your mouth) and Republican—they ran their church like a factory. I see. So very out-of-touch with the culture, indeed. What about before college, where you grew up—oh, I’m sorry. That seems to be a sensitive issue. Were you a…dare I ask…a Baptist? There, there—we won’t speak of it again.

Speaking of Baptists…how do you feel about alcohol consumption? You’re snickering—have I committed a faux pas? You say that by even asking the question I’m revealing my backwardness? I see. You prefer small-batch, artisanal craft beer or European imports. Or whiskey. Or Scotch. And you can’t believe how wrong-headed the American church is on this issue…I understand. It must be interesting, with your background, to delve into this new world of fine spirits after conscientiously skipping all the keggers in college. How does it feel to imbibe alcoholic drinks now after spending your childhood and early youth denouncing such consumption? Do you ever feel guilt—or feel that you need to compensate for your earlier … I’m sorry, is this making you uncomfortable? You don’t like to be reminded of your prior convictions about alcohol? I see…well, let’s move on then.

Do you enjoy art? Do you ever! Salvador Dalí. Picasso. Monet. Not Rembrandt, so much—cabbages are boring? Ah. Michelangelo. Pollock. You seem to be somewhat eclectic in terms of artistic style (huh? Oh, yes, of course you may take that as a compliment)—what shaped your artistic tastes? Where your parents art-lovers? No, not so much? You picked it up here and there, piecemeal. You have taught yourself enough to sound intelligent in conversations about works of art and stylistic approaches you’ve never actually seen yourself? Ah. Well, I’m just guessing here, based on your past, but how do you feel about Thomas Kincai…never say that name aloud in your presence again? Ah. OK.

Well…this has been an enlightening conversation. I will go back to my boring, irrelevant, backward existence, but I’m so happy to have had my world opened by exposure to someone as cool as you. I’m so taken with your originality, authenticity, grittiness and cultural relevance that I think I need to go find a quiet corner where I can be by myself and laugh.

Author’s note: A small portion of the humor and sarcasm in this piece is self-referential. Other portions poke fun at the tendencies of good friends of mine. It’s intended as a good-natured jab at the transitory nature of lifestyle and fashion trends—a reminder that cooler-than-thou snobbery isn’t cool, and that everyone’s hair looks ridiculous 15 years later.

Editor’s note about the author’s note: This is what we call a preemptive response to the angry Letters to the Editor.

By Andrew Sharp

June, 1875
Tom Lee stood in front of his cabin and looked out over his homestead. The late morning sun took the chill out of the spring breeze, and the dandelions and clover soaked up the warmth. A couple of cows tore up new grass nearby, next to a carefully built, simple barn. A thick hedge of carefully planted wild roses kept the cows from venturing across the lane to try the short green corn spikes that poked out through the dark soil. At Tom’s feet, a small flock of hens pecked and scratched among the new green weeds.

He did not seem to be pleased with the view. He was frowning as he stared out his muddy lane. Out where it joined the main road, two black horses pulling a gleaming carriage were turning in. The driver was carefully navigating through the water-filled ruts. Tom waited with his hands on his hips as the carriage drew up to him and stopped. His banker did not come out this far from town for small talk.

The man in the carriage, dressed in a clean, carefully pressed suit, looked down at the barnyard and appeared to decide, on second thought, not to step down.

“Well, Tom, it’s a fine day,” he said, overdoing the joviality.

“Well Ed?” Tom said shortly. He did not play conversational games, and he waited for the banker to get to the point.

The banker looked around at the clearing distastefully. He saw a ramshackle barn made of scrap wood, a couple of skinny cows feeding on brambles, and muddy chickens making deposits that would give his shoes the wrong kind of shine. “You know why I’m here, Tom,” Ed Reese said.

“You said you would give me more time,” Tom said.

To Reese, time was a calculation on paper, part of a formula that factored in percentages, yields. Tom’s farm was a disappointing part of this equation. He knew the farm had just been forest a few years ago, of course, and he knew that Tom had needed a hefty loan to purchase it. For the banker the first harvests had been feeble failures that failed to pay anything toward his loan. But he could not remember the thousands of days of painfully sore shoulders and blistered palms, the countless ax strokes, hours nursing sick livestock. For Tom, those meager harvests had been proud first fruits.

The banker had probably forgotten, if he ever cared enough to know, that before all this labor, many months of meager salary as a hired hand for a local farmer had gained Tom enough to get a loan.

“I gave you more time than I should have,” Reese said, like a benevolent uncle regretfully realizing he has been spoiling his nephew.

Tom’s expressionless face reflected the numbness that now replaced weeks of desperate worry. What could he say? He bent and picked up a pebble and turned it mechanically in his fingers. It was a strange shape, and he looked at it more closely. A small stone arrowhead. He threw it away.

He swallowed hard. “My crop is just coming up. Can you give me a little more time?”

The banker scoffed. “That sounds familiar. Should I wait until you’ve lost even the wormy livestock you have? Even now I’m taking a big loss.”

“The next couple harvests will cover most of it,” Tom said stubbornly. If it rains, he did not add—unlike last year.

The banker smiled pityingly. “Of course, of course.” Then he coughed. “You have until Saturday.”

“If you think you are going to ruin everything I have done here…”Tom began angrily.

“Don’t be a fool, Tom,” the banker interrupted. “I don’t want this to get ugly, but you know I’ll bring as many lawmen as I need to. Don’t get yourself killed. What would your little woman do then?” Ed Reese drew heavily from dime novel dialogue when he needed to get tough.

Tom did not say anything, but the banker got the uneasy feeling that Tom was pondering smashing his head in with a nearby fence railing. He wasn’t far off; Tom was pondering doing it with just his fist. Instead he held it up and shook it at the banker. “This land is still mine. Get off it before I do something I regret.”

The banker shrugged. “Have it your way, Tom.” He paused. “I’ll be back tomorrow. With help.” He ordered his driver to head out.
“Go to hell,” Tom suggested earnestly to the disappearing carriage.

October, 1905
Stanley Harris gulped his lukewarm beer, leaning his elbows on the rough wood surface of the bar. His shoulders were hunched, not just because he was tired from a long day, but because he was so tall he had to lean down to the counter. The premature wrinkles on his face were darkened by coal grime that had defied his quick wash after work. He didn’t look strong enough to mine coal.

He was not enjoying his beer as much as he should have been after an exhausting day. He stared out the dirty window. He reflected, not for the first time, that he had been here at the bar too much these last few months. And when his wife had confronted him about it, he had scowled at her and withdrawn into silence. That hadn’t been their only point of friction either. As a husband, he had the uneasy feeling, he had been weighed in the balances and found wanting. He tilted his mug back and swallowed the beer quickly, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, paid his tab, and hurried out onto the street.
He leapt up onto his sagging porch, but did not cross the forbidden threshold. He took a seat on a battered bench instead. He breathed in deeply, then out slowly. The thin walls of the house, insulated only with flaking paint, let the sound of his wife’s moans out clearly. He also heard the midwife’s urgent voice. Stanley sat looking out at the quiet street, unconsciously rocking back and forth.

Eliza had wanted to leave this little coal town a long time ago. But Stanley was afraid they would go hungry, would end up without a home, or…something would happen. He had no skills, really, except drinking beer and wearing himself out harvesting coal for the use of others, and he made enough at that to keep them alive. They had to save some money first, and then they could think about going. Now that the little one was coming, Eliza would be more unhappy here than ever. He began to rehearse the whole fight in his head—she accusing him of lacking backbone, he protesting her unfairness, then…he shook his head. No point arguing ahead of time.

Stanley really did badly want to give her—them—a better life. He shivered in his thin cotton shirt as the chilly fall light dimmed. From the sounds of the shouts in the distance, the baseball game was racing against the twilight out on the field on the edge of town. Children ran around the ramshackle houses and shacks playing their own games.

A scream came out of the house and Stanley jumped an inch off the bench.

October, 1929
Eddie Stewart coughed. It was his 45th cough in 20 minutes, according to his mother. Unwilling to be overprotective, she had waited to start counting after the fourth cough. She blamed this sudden mysterious ailment on their recent visit to “that filthy farm” where his cousins lived, well outside town on a rutted dirt road. Eddie strenuously denied this, as repeating the visit in the near future was high on his list of goals. When it came time to leave he and his cousins had been desperately defending their covered wagons against a vicious Indian attack, when their mothers came up and insisted that the attack was over. Also, Eddie suspected that the dam they had built across the creek would need some maintenance soon.

His mother was not opposed to farms at all, as long as they were the kind that featured thoroughbred horses grazing in clean pastures, with servants trimming the grass and bringing cold tea when needed. She therefore had firm opinions about her husband’s family’s farm, defaced as it was with dirty animals, their leavings, and worse, being very much lacking in servants with cold tea. She had been opposed to ever repeating their week at the farm, even before the Eddie’s coughing spree began, and now Eddie’s hope was at a low ebb. He had a slight advantage in that his father had warm memories of escaping town life as a boy for farm visits. But his father was very busy, and this trip had been the first time he had taken a week off since Eddie had been very small.

Eddie had only a very faint idea of what kept his father so busy, although his father had tried to explain in that adult way that assumes children won’t understand technical terms like “commute” or “wages.” It appeared his father owned a lot of companies, or parts of them, but not content with this, was always selling and buying more.

He did make enough money to afford the best doctors. After the infamous 45th cough Eddie’s mother insisted on taking him to one of these, despite Eddie’s intricately argued case that would have done a veteran lawyer credit. The judge was not paying attention and hauled him off to Dr. Stover. As it happened, Eddie wished very much he had won the debate because the doctor looked very serious and whispered in another room with his mother, who started crying. That was troubling enough, but the worst was that Eddie, to his horror, was restricted to little activity, lots of bed rest, and hardly any time outside. For someone who had only recently been carrying his rifle west with a covered wagon, this was galling.

He suspected his mother of constructing an elaborate scheme to keep him away from farms, a scheme all the more outrageous because it also prevented him from going outside on these wonderful summer nights when there were fireflies to catch and games of Kick the Can and tag with the neighborhood kids.

Eddie made somewhat of a commotion about his house arrest, with the
result that his parents had to promise to take him to see the moving picture that had come out a few months ago, In Old Arizona. Some of the kids had already seen it and everyone else wanted to. There was talking in it! Eddie couldn’t imagine what this would be like.
He was too excited to sleep that day, and also it was only four in the afternoon. The late day sun moved across the wallpaper, washing out the blue flowers in yellow-orange light, blazing across the photo of his parents after their wedding, then over a calendar with a picture of an old mill. A fly zipped up to the sun patch, crawled around, then flew down to the bed. Out in the living room, the grandfather clock chimed the half hour. Eddie groaned.

He tried to distract himself by imagining the talkie, with the sounds of voices and horses and gunshots instead of tinny piano music. It would be like being there! And there would be no need to guess what the people were saying, and then argue about it later with his friends.

He was almost afraid that he would feel better before the night the moving picture was showing, which was Friday. That was two days away. If he felt better, his parents might reconsider; it was after all, mostly a picture for adults. And his father might get too busy again, like usual. He had to cough just then, but it seemed a trifle weak to his anxious ears, so he added another more hearty one on purpose in case anyone were listening.

August, 1953
Earl F. Lee leaned on the rail of the troop transport ship and stared down at the choppy gray Pacific waves. Honolulu was somewhere out there, slowly getting closer. After that would be New York City, and then somehow he needed to get home. Getting home finally seemed somewhat likely, after months of tiptoeing through mine fields in Korea in air that was a little too dense with exploding shells to breath very freely. The Korean War was history now and no one would remember all the small events that happened because of it, like this ocean voyage—or the theft of two years of his life, Earl reflected bitterly. He was 20 when the war started and was working his way up quickly in management at the steel mill in town when he lost the draft lottery. For some, that career would have been a soul-killing dead end. But it was all Earl had asked out of life. His world was his small town, and in that reality, upper management at the steel mill was an elite position. He was on his way to riches in that small world.

They had promised to keep his job for him, but he had just found out that a recent economic slump had eliminated any available jobs. The company was regretful. Most of his friends who had stayed home had managed to hang on to their positions and were doing well for themselves. But there was nothing left for Earl. Thanks to the government’s obsession with keeping the Korean peninsula out of the hands of the commies, he was returning to nothing, to life in the unemployment line.

At least he was coming back. His best friend from the army, a guy from Chicago, wasn’t. But Earl didn’t have some heartrending tale about how one second Richard was standing there, and the next second he was gone. He was still standing there, back in Korea, refusing to come home. He had sent Earl word from the prison camp, after the end of the war, that he had decided to stay with the commies. He claimed there were dozens of other men doing the same thing. Earl would have rather Richard had stepped on a mine. Anger at having to go fight was one thing, but going over to the enemy was something else entirely. Earl was no traitor.

He was going to show Richard he was wrong. He was going to take back everything the government had stolen from him, and then some more.

***

It was almost lunchtime and I was crunching through crispy leaves back to my car. I had parked it in the frosty dark that morning and made my way into the woods to see if I could intercept a deer cruising back to a thicket to bed down. Probably there had been dozens of deer going to such thickets, but I had never been in this woods before and had selected the wrong thicket. Now I was in a hurry to get back into town and comfort myself with some hot lunch.

Ahead of me was a grassy hilltop crowned with two solitary spruce trees that towered high up over the surrounding landscape like signal towers. They could be seen for miles. As I walked up over the top of the hill I found myself standing suddenly among a small group of grave stones, some leaning over and stained with moss. The daylight prevented the cold prickling I would have felt on my neck if I had stumbled through here in the dark and caught the stones in the cold white flashlight beam. Under the warm sun, I was curious and knelt down to peer at the eroded script on one of the stones.

In Loving Memory
Eddie Stewart
Born September 1919
Died December 1929

I wandered around looking at the inscriptions. There were a few other Stewarts here, some Smiths, Lees, and Harris’, with a smattering of others. Unknown loved ones had rationed only a few sentences to tell me about the people whose last traces lay a few feet under my feet, a lifetime condensed into the most important facts: the day they started breathing, the day they stopped breathing, and sometimes extravagant additions like whether they were married or had children.

My stomach reminded me that exploring old cemeteries had its charms, but was no competition for the chili at Mama Gina’s Café. I went to get some lunch.