Photo by Haylee Marick on Unsplash
Our town was never one to have a huge crowd of people. These days the conversations over a letter at the post office disappeared, the stories between sips of coffee at Stewart’s Diner were no more and the casual beer on the front porch with your neighbor down the road was a thing of the past. These days I’m lucky to see five people a day and they’re all carting wheelbarrows full of vegetables off to be transferred. As for me, I have it pretty easy; I’m just feeding the food. I flip a switch on the outside of these big bubbles full of any kind of vegetable or fruit you can think of. There are so many it would take me a lot of time to list them off and I’d probably get distracted for the next time I need to flip that switch to draw up water from deep down in the earth and spray it in a mist over all those crops. Mike tells me I do a nice job, but it’s a simple life. My grandfather wasn’t happy when they turned our family home into a shack to make more space for the fields. My dad said he understood what Speakeasy Solutions needed to do and that was send a lot of the crops all around to feed the remaining people after those nuclear blasts.
Anyways, not only do I feed the food, but I also keep the food warm enough to grow. It’s kind of like I turn on their heated blankets for those frigid days and nights, which seem more frequent these days, but I’m never really sure if that’s true. I put the big ribbed hose into the fuel tank, flip the lever, it fills the tank and the large outdoor boiler kicks on, which sends the hot water through copper pipes pulled from the houses in the old world. The pipes shoot under the big rows of crops and keep them warm. All the crops are covered in these huge plastic domes, like I said, to keep out the chemical clouds that coat the whole land like some sort of sick fog. I’m not sure if it’s still settling or seeping in from the fractured ozone or what, but it’s still here after that crossfire of missiles blew everything up.
Before everyone was shipped off, I remember my grandfather talking about those firing fingers that hit the button to blow up the world. He’d remove his oxygen mask for a minute, spit his brown tobacco in the coffee can and ramble on about who was to blame and this and that. I was ten at the time and didn’t care much for politics. Sooner or later humans were going to either kill themselves off or destroy the planet and my grandfather really wasn’t sure who to blame for both happening at the same time. For a senile guy, I think he had a point. We had killed off 75% of the people between the nukes going off, the roaming violence in the aftermath and those thick chemical clouds that caused people to hack up that bloody snot. I’m taking a lot of my words from him because, like I said, I don’t remember much before the nukes and kids at that age don’t have much of a care for government, politics, or weather anyways.
Mike fixed the problem though; who would have thought someone in charge of social media could save a planet? He wasn’t always that way, rumor has it he was a quick talking gambler before he ran Speakeasy Solutions. Anyways, he had so many good ideas, this is coming from my dad; I was a little young for some of his earlier ideas. My dad rattled off things that I can’t even remember living without, like this mask and oxygen system we all wear, I wouldn’t be living without it or I’d be hacking up that bloody phlegm. On top of that, he set up universal electricity on satellites and geothermal for heating and cooling and this was all paid for right out of your account, didn’t even have to worry about it. All you had to do was get that chip in the back of your head and pay the monthly fee. He reestablished schools after the nukes and got the economy going. I feel pretty good about that stuff because I know a few things about our history and have a job that I’m pretty successful at. Mike is still kicking around, courtesy of another product of Speakeasy Solutions. Some sort of super vitamin made of all these ingredients that are all kind of pressed together. I don’t know a lot about it and really couldn’t afford it if I did.
I’m really just a simple farmer and that’s what I’ve always been, father was before me and grandfather was before him. My grandfather owned the land before the nukes went off and was able to help Mike with the food repopulation effort by sending huge stocks of crops along to some of the areas with more population. Mike had said he was a real team player, even though my grandfather still talked about how it was wrong for the government to take all those crops and leave us with a shack. My grandfather was an interesting guy, he really seemed to disagree with Mike on a lot of fronts, even though most people really got what Mike’s speeches were about. Today is different than the old days, at least that’s what my grandfather said. We were all around when it happened, but he seems to remember before the nukes better than us. My dad tells him we never sold produce at farm stands or farmer’s markets, it was always to the government, always to Mike and the Speakeasy Solutions’ Stores.
It’s different now, like I said. I still run the farm like we have been since finding out the nuclear storms were poisoning crops, which was causing awful mutations in babies and killing off the elderly and others that were weak. Instead of the food being shipped to populated areas where people ran important things like the audio feed for Speakeasy Solutions or taught the kids at schools about our history, it’s now shipped out to Mars. Like my grandfather always said, we’re going to ruin the planet or die trying. We’ve made Earth close to uninhabitable because of those nukes, but Mike found a solution and that was Speakeasy Solutions’ Space Exploration. We were getting to the end of our crude oil and that was one of the main reasons for the initial trip to Mars, but he was right and they found deposits up there. We learned in school that Mars’ land is just about as big as Earth’s but the water on Earth makes the planet bigger. So, the next step was he had pilot programs go up there and drill for oil. We brought it back here to feed fields like this, smaller size at the time, but same idea.
Right now they sprawl as far as I can see, running all the way to the horizon or at least till I lose vision of them in this cloud. Farmers like me have a small shack to live in, our 100 year old family home was taken down by Mike to make room for more crops to feed the now booming population on Mars. My grandfather had a really big problem with that and he was taking in to talk with Mike for a little while. After that point, he kept his complaints between us.
My dad seems to be enjoying Mars and his vacuum sealed apartment up there. Mike sent him up for a bigger purpose, he was learning how to run the audio for Speakeasy Solutions up there and found it to be a great privilege to be able to help Mike out. We haven’t talked in a little while, but last time we did he said I was doing a nice job with the food, “it tastes as good on Mars as it did on Earth.” He also said it seems pretty reasonable on price. The Speakeasy Solutions chip in the back of your head uses Mike’s voice to explain the breakdown on your final bill: food production costs, oil costs for the rocket fuel and a small tax that goes to the government for discretionary spending.
My grandfather always complained about the government, Mike specifically. He said he took away a lot of rights and that wasn’t what should be happening. I’m not really sure I agree with him because the routine that Mike put in place for me and all the autopayments off the chip in the back of my head keep me structured. Before the nukes, structure was something that people said I needed and if I got it, I could be successful. Sometimes it’s tough to figure out who to listen to. All I know for sure is, I wake up, feed and warm the food, and sit and wait for the next time to feed and warm the food. I think I prefer it that way.
The mask keeps that smog out, but some days it's harder to see and I wonder if it was like this ten years ago when my dad was running this operation. When I asked him about the low clouds he just laughed and said they’d been that way as long as he remembered. Sometimes I try to squint and see the crops further down and just get a big cloud, kind of a haze instead sitting on that horizon. Just if I could see that glimpse of green from some lettuce or red from a tomato I’d feel a little better about it, you know like being able to see your friend waving at you from their porch across the street or something. I know my grandfather despised the fog, but he seemed to despise Mike more because of his control over our farm. My dad didn’t mind Mike running the business end and it worked for me and was a little less thinking, but my grandfather thought it was an overreach, that was the word he used.
Normally, I forget about the squinting and my dad and grandfather for a minute when I hear the roar of the rockets taking off down the road and see the fire slide through the chemical clouds and into that ozone. My grandfather says there’s holes up there caused by those nukes and I wonder if the ship shoots right through them and saves my dad a little on his tomato price because of the fuel aspect. Then I get a little sidetracked and think about the snow storms we get in the winter and how strange it is, me sitting in a chair out for hours in the snow and the food sitting in the bubble like it's next to a warm fire. I know my grandfather would have had a problem with this, but I normally just get pretty close to the boiler and that helps in a way. The part I don’t like is the exhaust shoots out and hits me in the face from time to time, but Mike told me that’s not too big a deal. My grandfather said something about those nukes really flipping aspects of this planet on its head. He says he remembers hot times after the nukes and he remembers these snow storms that seem to go on and on, but we need the crops. That’s how Mike came up with this solution to the problem and with that population that keeps growing on Mars, who could blame him. We needed the extra space and that’s why we have these big fields and another reason why we have everyone up there on the red planet snug in their vacuum sealed apartment with no oxygen masks on.
My grandfather was a guy who really was out there sometimes, but I always liked listening to his stories about the farm before all this happened and how he’d take my father on the tractor or when they’d turn the potatoes when it was time to dig them up and how the people buying produce off of us at the farm stand would always give my dad a little extra because he was a cute kid. I know Mike and my dad say things make more sense now, but I do miss my grandfather’s stories. I wish he was still around and could tell me those tales, things that don’t make a lot of sense and things that don’t have switches and waiting in chairs and oxygen masks and rockets and all that. Things that have Earth and green in the same sentence, but I know my grandfather was senile at the end, or had dementia or amnesia or some sort of other disease.
One day though, I found myself kicking some snow around at the base of one of those big bubbles; I moved a little snow out of the way and I saw something green there. I looked a little closer and it was the first couple leaves of a kale plant popping up through the soil and snow. It was an odd experience because it was outside the bubble. You know, it gave me a pretty decent feeling seeing that plant there and I even found a way to add a spigot on the sprinkler system, which I was pretty sure might not be alright, but it was only a little water. It wasn’t quite like flipping a switch, but it was pretty interesting to see that little plant grow. I still wonder what my grandfather would have said about that green fleck of Kale popping up outside that dome and if that was sort of what he was talking about when he talked about the times before the nukes, and Mars and Mike and all that.
Matt McGuirk holds a BA in Secondary English Education from Keene State College and teaches English at Fall Mountain Regional High School. He lives with his wife and daughter in Langdon, NH.
