Elzy woke to cold, the scent of cold, of snow, of tent fabric. The coldness felt good on her hot skin. Confusion. She wasn’t in her room…? The child fell asleep again before she could figure it out. Nothing seemed worth thinking through. Her head hurt. Her chest hurt. Her tummy hurt. Her breath wouldn’t come right. She slept again.

 

She woke. Daddy feeding her soup. It tasted funny. Daddy had put something in it to make her feel better. Try to have some, he said. You have to stay hydrated.

 

Where’s Jamie?

 

Shh, said Daddy.

 

Consciousness came and went. She snuggled down under blankets in her sleeping bag, shivering, then struggled out of her bag and threw off the blankets, burning up. In the daytime the walls were luminous. She was in a tent. She kept forgetting that. To poo she had to go outside and squat in the snow. She always had to poo. Her butt hurt. Her breath, reflected back at her face from the inside of her sleeping bag, burned her eyes. She had a moment of clarity, of fledgling analysis. I have a fever, so my breath is too hot for my eyes. And my sleeping bag is wet because I’m sweating even though I feel cold. It’s because I have a fever. But mostly she couldn’t think much. Then she had to poo again.

 

There had been other people. When she was awake enough to think through anything, she could remember that. The camping trip, not to either of the campgrounds, Blackwoods or Seawall, but to a spot way up in the woods they had to hike to, carrying all their stuff, so much stuff, all of it heavy, uphill through the snow, with Daddy and Jamie and those two women who were Daddy’s friends and their kid who was Elzy’s own age but seemed sort of shy or maybe stuck-up and then started coughing and turned blotchy. 

 

I’m going to remember everything for Show and Tell, when we get back to school, Elzy had said.

 

We’re not going back, Jamie had told her. You don’t know anything.

 

She hated it when he got that superior tone, just because he was older, but he was right, she hardly knew anything, and that was almost OK, because he would explain it all to her eventually. He always did.

 

But then everybody got sick, spotted and blotchy, and the others went into separate tents or something because they weren’t around anymore, and everything got confusing, and Elzy couldn’t think right or breathe right and now she had to go poo again.

 

Daddy?

 

Daddy had been gone a long time. She went to sleep while he wasn’t in the tent, and when she woke up, he still wasn’t there.

 

Daddy?

 

When he got back, he looked tired and sad and sort of gray in the face. He sat down on the sleeping-pad, just like he used to sit on the edge of her bed back home. He asked all his questions. Are you warm? Cold? Hungry? Thirsty? How’s your tummy? He felt her forehead, asked her to breathe deep so he could listen. This time when she breathed, she didn’t cough, though breathing still hurt. She didn’t really feel like talking. She sort of fell asleep but not really. Nothing much was really anything these days. She lay there, sort of sleeping but not really, and Daddy rubbed her ear so she felt a little better. After a while, Daddy spoke.

 

It’s just you and me now, kid, he said. But don’t worry, I can take care of us. We have plenty of food, plenty of ammunition, I know lots of wild plants we can eat, and there’s deer here. We can have a garden, too. You’ll like having a garden. There’s fish in the lake. I’ll teach you to fly-fish, how about that? No one will find us. We’ll be safe here. Don’t worry. But there’s one thing I need you to do for me, Elzy, Elzita, Elzy-Elzy-Girl. I need you to just not die. Not now. Because I need to have somebody to care for. I can’t do this alone.

 

The inside of the tent smelled cold and musty, and the daylight through the tent walls was starting to fade.

 

Elzy never afterwards remembered him saying that, but for the rest of her life, when she thought about those weeks in the tent while one world, one life, ended, and something else began, she wondered if something just like that had been said.

 

***

 

Elzy Rodriguez checked into her favorite inn, took a shower, and got halfway through getting dressed before the lovely spring air distracted her. In sports bra and trousers, she stood just inside the balcony doorway breathing and listening to the clip-clop of horse-carts and the whine of an electric cop-car in the street. Children’s voices argued from somewhere, and a crow in the winter-bare branches of the oak tree across the street cawed once, twice, three times. The deep whistle-blast of the big coastal ferry, just now leaving port, startled her but did not startle the crow. Elzy didn’t like the hustle and bustle of civilization, but her contribution to the food reserve was due, and she took her responsibilities as a land-holder seriously. She held the land and the land held her. Not much else ever had.

 

At least civilization had hot showers.

 

The door opened behind her.

 

Elzy spun reflexively, ready for self-defense, as a young man walked in.

 

“Oh, hey,” he said, his eyes dropping briefly to her breasts. “Is this….” He seemed to notice her defensive stance and looked around at the bed, the open bathroom door, the items of clothing and other personal gear strewn about. “Uh….”

 

“Why are you in my room?” she asked.

 

“Wow, um, I was just trying to find the balcony. I thought this was a common area. I’ll just be going.” His voice sounded pleasant, affable, and Anglophone Canadian. 

 

“No, I give you permission to stay,” she told him. He was slim and golden, with guileless, boyish features and short, straight, chestnut-colored hair. There was something odd about his eyes...she hadn’t seen epicanthic folds in a long time, but once she knew what she was seeing, his eyes didn’t look strange anymore.

 

He blushed under her scrutiny and rubbed the back of his head. She pulled on her tunic and beckoned for him to follow her out to the balcony. Bar Harbor, M aine, spread out before them.

 

“So, who are you?” she asked.

 

“Kevin Williams. I just got into town. I build boats.”

 

“Oh? What kind of boats?”

 

“What kind do you need?” Typical salesman—except that she actually did need a boat. Come to think of it, she might need several boats.

 

“Kayak or canoe,” she told him. “I just want something so I can noodle around on my pond. I’m the Long Pond caretaker.”

 

“I can definitely do either.”

 

“Do you travel?”

 

“Easier for you to take me home than a finished canoe.” Many craftspeople worked at clients’ homes in order to avoid delivery costs—without fossil fuel, transportation had gotten expensive. But Kevin clearly meant something else, too. His forwardness made Elzy cough.

 

“Can we just talk about boats for now?” she said.

 

“Of course.” 

 

But he did not seem overly chastened.

They talked business for some minutes and exchanged contact information. Belatedly, she gave him her name. He lingered. Well, she’d said he could. She finished getting ready to go out as if he wasn’t there, putting on her blue and green cowl and neatly tipping its hood back off her head. She spread oil through her still-damp Afro with her fingers, then affixed a small, silver pin to her chest. Kevin’s eyes widened at the sight of that pin. She turned to face him.

 

“Kevin,” she said, with a hint of fond familiarity, “I will see you again. But not tonight.”

 

He stammered and fidgeted and showed himself out.

 

For a moment she regretted not asking him to dinner. She had no other commitments tonight. But for the first time in a long time, she felt like a teenager. She needed time and space to decide whether to act like one.

 

Leaving the inn, she stepped out into the first really warm day of the year and wandered down to the water and the path that runs between the lawns of the grand, old houses and the shelving rock of the seashore. She looked out across the water that gives Bar Harbor its name. The tide hurrying to its lowest point had left behind hundreds of stranded lion’s mane jellyfish like a storm of misplaced red pancakes. Sailboats, rowboats, and both electric and bio-diesel powerboats rode at mooring buoys or picked their way between aquaculture allotments. A seal lifted its head from the greenish water and submerged again. She wondered what it was like to be a seal.

 

And every few minutes, Kevin would pop back into her mind, usually naked. But after the naked bit her mind would run on, on to where the casual sex would inevitably become complicated by emotional attachment. And then it would all go wrong. Elzy had never had a truly bad romance, but she’d never had a really good one either, and they all ended the same way—and she never knew why.

 

If I’m smart, I’ll stay away from this guy, she thought.

 

And yet by that logic, Bar Harbor and its hot showers should not exist. Thirty-five years ago, it hadn’t existed. People always said “the pandemic,” as though that explained the collapse, but Elzy knew it was dependence, not disease, that killed the old civilization—dependence on fossil fuel and its over-complicated supply chains. When too many people lost their places in the line, the whole thing snapped, and billions of people starved. Those who survived, like Elzy and her father, did so by becoming self-sufficient, defending tiny garden patches and hunting grounds, one family or several together, each group alone. Why hadn’t the survivors stayed that way, isolated and safe? The new society was not as brittle as the old one, but it was hardly invulnerable. A smart people would have remained hidden under their rocks. Elzy was glad people had not been smart.

 

When the shadows grew long and began eroding the day’s thin warmth, she headed back uphill towards the town center. At the weekend market, vendors were packing up for the day as the crowd gathered around the gazebo on the Green, but the headliner of the evening was listed as “Henry the Horrible and His Marvelous Singing Parrots,” so she decided to give that a pass and took herself out to eat instead. Over a creamy seafood chowder, she looked up Kevin Williams online.

 

She came to no conclusions about whether to be a teenager about him, but he seemed to be an excellent maker of boats.

 

Monday morning, Kevin Williams stood near the local ferry dock, listening to seagulls and awaiting his newest client. They had already signed his standard contract—room and board and all necessary building supplies provided while he built two boats, one for the client and one to sell. He expected to clear a hundred and fifty shares, all profit, a share being what Americans used for money. That, plus a small completion bonus, would keep him solvent for five months, if he was careful. He always liked the beginning of new jobs, and this time his client—he spotted her coming towards him down the hill, and his stomach flipped.

 

She was slim, fit, confident, all elegant curves and light brown skin, the same shade as his but a different hue. Her black hair, threaded with silver, stood out from her head like the corona of a star.

 

“Hey,” she greeted him, “you have the tickets? I can take some of your stuff, if you want.”

 

“I’m good. I’d be a pretty sorry individual if I couldn’t handle my own crap.”

 

“I didn’t say you couldn’t handle it, I said you don’t need to. Really, it’s no trouble, my pack’s almost empty now.”

 

“Elzy, would you believe that I know you are a strong, capable woman? If I need help, I really will ask.”

 

“There are men who won’t.”

 

“There are men who can’t build you a canoe, either.”

 

Actually, Kevin could barely breathe because of the weight of the portable wood-shop on his back. He wasn’t going to admit that to Elzy, though.

 

The little local ferry, an old lobster boat with a new electric motor, hummed in and tied up. The passengers disembarked, and the father-daughter crew recharged the batteries and made some minor repairs. Finally, the new passengers, including Elzy and Kevin, could come aboard, find their seats, shed sweaters and jackets and turn their faces to the sun. A few mare’s tail clouds streaked the hard, blue sky. The boat headed off again, humming, but not so loudly as to overcome the warble of the green, slightly turbid water along the hull.

 

“Man, the sea!” Kevin exclaimed. “I can’t get enough. It’s like, God, it’s like my soul is thirsty!”

 

“You’re not from around here, are you?” Elzy asked. He, distracted, missed both the sarcasm in her voice and the fact that she must know where he was from, having seen his website.

 

“No, I’m a prairie kid. I’d never seen anything like this until a few days ago.” 

 

“It is gorgeous,” Elzy acknowledged. And he suddenly realized what an ass he must sound like.

 

“You’re used to it,” he said.

 

“Oh, yes—but that’s why I like it so much! Daddy and I lived on the island, right after the pandemic. We had to move away when he got sick, but I couldn’t wait to get back.”

 

He grinned at her, grateful, then realized what she’d said.

 

“Wait, you’re older than the pandemic?” Almost as soon as he’d said it, he wished he hadn’t. He chewed his lip. “Sorry. I know. Never ask a woman her age.”

 

“Older is what you get if you don’t die first. I’m forty-one.”

 

“You look good for forty-one.”

 

“Why are you surprised? You think people my age can’t look good?”

 

“I try to flatter you…. You just look younger, that’s all.”

 

“So you don’t think I look good?”

 

“Now you’re just being difficult.”

 

“Better than being easy.”

 

“I am not going there.”

 

“Smart man.”

 

“Hey, is that a dolphin?”

 

“No, harbor porpoise.”

“This is so cool.”

 

The ferry took a left out of the harbor, hugging the coast so closely they could see the brown and orange seaweed on the reddish rocks and the white spray of the rising tide. Eiders fished just offshore of the broken, stone-torn surf.

 

 

© Caroline Ailanthus 2024

 

This is an excerpt from the novel Bifurcation Events by Caroline Ailanthus, Salt Water Media, LLC, 2024.