справување

-30

Point [124]



This evening is pretty. The clouds made a cup for the sun. The sun sank down into that hollow and then the clouds slipped north to close the circle. Now the center glows like a hotter forge than anything we humans can make. I still feel the afterimage of the sun on my skin, though it's no longer shining here. It's been warm, and I'll probably be burned tomorrow since we spent all day harvesting the old Bellfontaine peach orchard and then walking back home carefully pulling the wagons (these are super ripe peaches so the slightest jostle makes them bruise).

Tomorrow Angel and I will be canning our share of the peaches. Angel did canning as a teen, back before they moved to the state, so they know the proper way to do it so you don't get germs in the jars. We've already made a lot of blackberry jam and other preserves which are pretty good. They've never made salted meat before but the village got a driver who came over from the coast with a big load of salt so we're going to try salting down some pork once George Packard kills his pig.

Strange, I was just thinking how warm I was, and now my hand is shaking. Might be exhaustion? Maybe I should go see that doctor who's building a house in the village. It's kind of funny that everyone else is going up to Cemetery Hill to harvest wood and she's just scavenging the wood in the houses people left here. People are kinda superstitious about the old houses - I remember Jane Williams being really reluctant even to just climb over the fence into the peach orchard, today. I've never found anything particularly scary about them, except that some of them have spiders and bats and raccoons which can be dangerous if you mess with them. But yeah, I suddenly don't feel very good, just in the last few minutes of sitting here.

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Points [18]

-4

Point [120]



All that energy from the sun today has sunk into the ground. I can feel the heat rising off the pavement here. It's still in very good condition, apart from the cracks - maybe even a little better than the highway out there, since people have been using that for so long. This road doesn't connect to other roads and no one's settled in this place, because of the lonely foundations and all the brush and wetlands. People have been harvesting stones from some of the old buildings but most people get their rock from the quarry because all the rock there is in one place. I've been down there and seen people coming all the way from the city to the south to load up rocks in their big bouncy jeeps and wagons.

A new family arrived to Robison today. They came from the south and west, from a town the name of which I vaguely recognized, called Alsea. The mom said she'd named herself after the town. The daughter was named Stjarna and she's pretty cute. They're staying in Andi Kostov's school for tonight and they're gonna start building tomorrow.

Angel, Visnin, and I spent all day in the garden harvesting tomatoes and peppers and slicing them up so they'd dry on the roof. We set up the mesh covering so the fruit flies and stuff wouldn't be able to get to them. Sun-dried tomatoes taste really good. The only thing I didn't like was when Visnin was sharpening the knives and they made that nasty grating sound. But that's a real small annoyance in an otherwise good day.

. . . For some reason I got these weird images in my head just now when I thought about the knife-sharpening. Looked sort of like the pictures we had of Earth back where I went to school, but it wasn't Earth. Maybe I'm thinking about the future of Earth? And there was a weird black plant thing . . . I don't like those images. Wonder why I thought them up.

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Points [24]

SpoilerShow

Just realized the title changes

-20

Point [100]



There's a strong wind today, coming up from the south. Real warm. You can't feel it as much in town, but today Angel, Visnin, Bud and I went up north to herd a bunch of sheep south to Robison. We bicycled up the highway, which I've only gone on a few times. There's another creek, bigger than the one in Robison so it still has water all year, and the bridge over it is a lot worse than the one over ours so we walked our bikes carefully. There's also a bunch of river forest with grey-leaved ash trees that we heard whistling noises from that sounded almost human. Weird birds!

So, why did we go up to the old crossroads, where all the houses are dead except for the store that's perpetually got a "Come Back Later!" sign and a grandma who goes around on crutches in her backyard garden? Well, one of the farmers who lived out here up-and-left north for the big city a good month ago and never came back, and now his farmhand Jacob wants to get out of dodge and stop looking after his hundredhead of sheep in case old Casey comes back. This Casey guy was apparently going to look for his kid who was still going to school up in the big city when the Day of Light hit, but everyone here knows there's pretty much no way the son could've survived. And definitely no way Casey survived, since there's nasty looters just twenty miles north in the old capital - gotta be twice as bad up in what's left of the big city. Even if he does come back, there's no way he can fault us for killing a few of the sheep after he abandoned them. Jacob met us at the pasture a little west of the highway and showed us how to spook the sheep so they'd keep moving. Then the five of us plus Jacob's four dogs herded the flock south back down the highway. The sheep didn't like walking into the wind and sometimes they'd just all stop moving as a group. It was especially hard getting them through the creek zone, because they kept going for all the plants. Finally we got 'em down to the field just across the creek from Robison and got them grazing on the kinda browning grass. We'll have to put in fencing to make sure they don't just graze everything at once, but the rest of the village will help with that. Bud gave Jacob his horse Easter, and some supplies, and Jacob said thanks and went south. He wouldn't be persuaded to stay on in Robison - said he was originally from the deserts in the south, and didn't want to stick around for another winter up here.

The whistling we heard in the bushes reminds me of some sort of dream I had, I think. A voice speaking words I couldn't understand, seeing something many-stranded growing that consumed everything terrible about the world along with everything good and just made something new. That's a weirdly . . . beautiful? image. But also sad. I should draw it so I don't forget.

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Points [14]

Draw us a picture why don't you

Point [100]

Draw us a picture why don't you

"What? Who's there?"

. . . Did I imagine that? Why would I think there's an "us" here? . . . I'll draw-



???

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Points [14]

- 2

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Lovely picture and mental image, by the way.

Point [98]



"Gah-"

Suddenly got a headache, like a sharp pain in the crown of my head. It's not fading, just . . . spreading. No blood or bump when I touch it, though. Maybe I fell and hit it on something hard, and then forgot about it? If it was something like the foundation stones, maybe I'd be able to get hurt without having anything in my hair. But that's honestly a lot scarier than just having a weird headache, so I won't think about it.

Today was mostly calm; otherwise I'd think the pain is from stress or heat or sun or something. I just did laundry and patched rents in the clothes with Angel and Visnin. Angel talked about the country before the earthquake. It sounds like some of the things we lost were not so good, not that losing them really makes up for the state of the world now. Angel used to have a lot of hope, but each new leader failed to improve the things that were wrong. Angel and Visnin had left their old nation because of a war between rebels and the government, but now they were in a state where the government killed people without anyone ever fighting back. And that was only the war of guns; there was a war of starvation, homelessness, and illness waged by businesses on us and our neighbors. I saw some of that when I was growing up. They never brought the stores back to Medina, and people started moving out when their landlords stopped paying for water. Though the government didn't help, refusing to pay for road repairs where we were, which meant that no one wanted to come out to our town anyways. My parents tried to get the town to pool resources, but they were still seen as outsiders and called bad names to boot so they couldn't cause any change. Robison seems a lot better in that way.

We had a visitor come down from the crossroads a couple miles north of here. I recognize him a bit from the few times he's come to the grocery store since we got it set up; he was called Jacob, and asked if he could sell a flock of sheep for a horse or a car and some gas. Bud offered one of his horses, and the guy said to come up to a certain address the day after tomorrow and we'd run the sheep down to Robison. I'm gonna go with him and Visnin! Ugh, I hope this headache is better by then.

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Points [23]

SpoilerShow

Thanks! Sorry for the wait - I was honestly considering just abandoning the command format and saving this concept for a future project, but if there's still interest I'm perfectly able to continue.

-20

Point [78]



I've had a headache for all day, and something feels mentally wrong, too - it's not just the pain. I saw an unnaturally vivid aura around the sun, not that I'm intentionally looking at the sun all the time, and sometimes I felt like I heard someone calling my name but no one was. Yet the moment I got here to this place, my headache started lessening! Maybe it's because the air is a bit less torrid around the dried-up ponds.

I was thinking about drawing something today, but the headache made that impossible. Now the light's already gone so there's not much point trying to do it when I get home. Visnin wasn't happy that I was just staying inside in the dark all day. He tried to get me to at least come out and weed with him and Angel. But I was not up to it, and they can weed just fine without me. Besides, the soil is as hard as blacktop at this point. They have to pour water on the garden for like half an hour before it even becomes possible to pull things out.

Things have been quiet in town today, save for someone selling dogs pulling up at the store and showing pups out of the back of their truck. Some people from around here got a taste for dog after the earthquake, but most people just wanted to see all the different colors and breeds. Bud bought a terrier with big fluffy whiskers and named it Erica, and he brought her by and told me about all the other dogs. The dog seller said there were some riots up in the towns along the river to the north, after the last of the fresh fruits were sold up. Bud and Visnin figure we might be getting more folks from the cities coming down here to the lee of the mountains soon because of the fights. (Sometimes when I think about it it's hard to believe things have changed so quickly.) Anyway, I'm glad Bud came, because it was kind of lonely sitting inside all day.

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Points [14]

SpoilerShow

"I'm perfectly able to continue" he says before initiating a 5-month hiatus :v

-14

Point [64]



Pain's been bad for days now. When my eyes are open I see shapes moving in the corners of my vision. When my eyes are closed the light remains, red and white and sharp. Angel thinks it might be migraines, since they're more common in teenagers. I don't know. I just want the pain to go away.

It's consumed my life, really. Even when I'm sleeping, I have nightmares - a strange voice giving me directions that don't make logical sense to a place that I can't physically reach. Last night the dream was set in a field at sunset or sunrise, the sky black like night but starless, with only the perfect blinding circle on a treeless hilled horizon. The torrid field had an infinite number of paths, but each time I started down one, another infinite million opened up anew. When I looked backwards, it was the same. I woke up around noon, head hurting even more than when I went to bed. Visnin had left me some salted oats for breakfast, but they were cold by then, and for some reason I found that so sad I cried all through breakfast. Something's happening to me. I don't know why.

This year has been so terrible. First the Day of Light. Then Bud's parents. My family's home country. My head. Everything keeps getting worse.



I don't have the energy to question this voice.

. . .

Or maybe I do? The pain in my head is shrinking. The sensation of heat coating the inner layers of my skin has lessened. Something feels unnaturally meaningful about that word, "calm." "Who said that? Where are you?"

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Points [11]

I've mirrored this adventure on MSPFA (please let me know if the gif in the icon is too flashy).

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