ABOUTTHE AUTHOR

Born and raised in Montana, Smith Henderson currently lives and writes in Los Angeles. His short fiction was awarded the PEN Emerging Writers Award in 2011 and his debut novel Fourth of July Creek

New York

was a 2014 Notable Book.

THE JANITOR OPENS an empty room off the gymnasium where I will tell the kids. A little room where the teachers make paper. Bottles of dye glow in the sunshine by the window.

Jay is just happy to see me, but Ruby’s eye is sharp. Sometimes she looks at me like Rhea does – did – and I feel her searching my heart. My 13-year-old daughter knows there’s more to all of this. Secrets.

“What is it?” she asks. “Jay get down from him.”

“Don’t tell your brother what to do. Both of you sit.” “Where’s Mom?” “Sit please.” “Where’s Mom?” “Ruby, she’s gone.” I can’t even see Jay – Ruby’s stare stings, I’m not going to hold myself together – but I know Jay is motionless, inert. Like this might pass over us if we remain still. “Gone where?” she demands. “She died, Roob.” The words fall out like that, just like she fell. Like that. THE ENTIRE VILLAGE turns out to dirge. They place Rhea on a bier and send her down the river to slip out to sea. Ruby stands in the water, her fists at her side. Jay wails.

When we get home, our bed is decorated in flowers. As is the tradition.

IN THE SCHEME OF THINGS – and I am someone who thinks only of the scheme of things – Ruby and Jay have it awfully good. When their mother was a baby, you expected to live only as long as the biosphere, all dreams were pegged to the ecocide. The entire biota was a husk. All the megafauna… gone. All the amphibians. All the flying, swimming, and creeping things reduced, more clever. Tiny silver dace in the streams. Little black ravens. Everything diminished or extinct, save the roaches, flies, and rats.

Rhea spent a childhood huddled like the rest of humanity on the Arctic shore, watching for rockets screaming over the water. Until every gov-corp was punched out and soldiers sat on their haunches in the sand, palms up like tired apes.

Methane poured from the holes in the soil, pilgrims dead where they fell. Forest fires under black thunderheads that paid out no rain. The middle latitudes were quaking hells. Hurricanes the size of continents. Humanity’s menopause, the Climacteric.

But we’d thrown up the Transoms. The Transoms saved us.