She Looked up at the Ashen Sky. Another Heavy Snow Would Fall That Afternoon. Three Major

August 2068

She looked up at the ashen sky. Another heavy snow would fall that afternoon. Three major storms in the span of only five days. The drifts along the sides of the trail now towered above her head. Two months of cold and fatigue had made her indifferent to what was about to happen to her. This, she thought, is how nature makes dying easy. It makes you not care anymore.

She turned as she heard Buck stumble behind her. One of his hooves had slipped on the icy sheet covering the trail, and he’d fallen forward, his legs buckling beneath him. Sophie reached out to rub his snout, bending over his head to whisper words of encouragement. His ribs now clearly showed from beneath his matted coat, where only a few months ago they did not. Back when he was a gift left by others who had lived before her on the dying planet.

Buck was not long for this world if she didn’t manage to find some forage for him soon. The trees were barren of leaves, the ground covered by at least two feet of snow. Even if she were able to dig beneath the layers of snow, she knew that any remaining vegetation was contaminated with radiation. They were both sick from it, practically vibrating with the isotopes they’d ingested in their food and water. He far worse than she from the two years he’d lived in the irradiated world, to her two months.

She still had some squirrel she’d managed to catch in one of her snares three days ago, and had held it in front of Buck’s nose that morning, but the mule deer had only stared mutely at her, deeply insulted, before turning away.

By the time the snow started to fall a few minutes later, Sophie had rigged the canvas tarp over him, built a fire from newly-downed tree limbs that she’d scavenged and tied to her rope sled earlier that day, and lay next to the deer in a futile effort to protect him from the infinite cold.

She tried not to fall asleep. She listened to the hushed sounds of the snow and the creaking of dead trees beneath their added burden. But within minutes, the screams of the children she’d watched being herded like cattle onto the freight truck, its exterior painted absurdly with large bright letters that defied what was going on within, invaded her unquiet mind. The screams had ended just before the giant machinery inside the truck ground to a sudden halt.

It was only today, two weeks later, that she remembered what the garishly colored letters had spelled. ‘MoreGoldInSaks’. And then, inexplicably,‘Too Big To Fail’ in slightly smaller font beneath them. But mostly what she remembered was that she had cowered in the brush by the side of the road and done nothing but slowly breathe in and out until the truck had trundled away.

January 19, 2012

“She didn’t feel any pain.”

“What?”

“Your mother. She didn’t feel any pain.”

Sophie stared at the two cops standing on the porch outside the door. Their asses looked predictably lumpy and misshapen in their police uniforms. It was especially a problem for the lady cop. Sophie tried to remember why they were there. It seemed important. “How would you know that? You’re not a doctor.”

The guy cop stepped forward. His mouth was moving, but the sounds came out all wrong. “By all accounts, she died instantly.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The female cop turned to consult with her partner. “She’s clearly in shock. We should take her to the emergency room.”

“I’m not going anywhere until I speak with my mom.”

The male cop seemed exasperated. Sophie disliked this guy more with each passing second. “That’s just it. You can’t. She’s gone. She was killed in a motor vehicle accident.”

Motor vehicle accident.Copspeak for car wreck.

“Yeah, no, that can’t be right,” Sophie murmured. “She just left a few minutes ago. To go to her writing class.” Sophie noticed a strange look fleetingly pass between the two. A secret look. “Okay, you know what? You have the wrong house. So there’s that. Plus neither of you are doctors. You’re just a couple of cops.”

The forehead of the female cop got all crinkly. “Honey, we need to contact your relatives. You said your dad doesn’t live here?”

“Yeah. I mean, no, he doesn’t. It’s always been just me and my mom.”

The lady cop was moving closer, her arms opened wide to embrace her. As they closed around her, Sophie heard a wailing sound coming from close by. It was deafening, really. She wished it would stop. It took only a few seconds to realize that the wailing was coming from deep within her own throat.

“Honey, you don’t have to believe anything right now,” whispered the female cop as she hugged her close. “You just have to trust us, okay? You can’t be alone tonight. Who’s your closest of kin?”

The wailing noises started to sound more like screams.

Sophie felt the female cop hugging her hard and then pulling her back inside the house. “We need to get you inside.” She spoke gently, infinitely patient. “And we have to find the phone number of your grandparents. Or your aunts or uncles. Do you have any aunts or uncles?”

The screams continued echoing in Sophie’s head. She was whimpering now, like a small child. “I have an aunt, but she lives in Massachusetts. And another one in Vermont.”

“Okay, good. You rest for a while and then we’ll go look for their phone numbers, alright?” The female cop sat down with Sophie on the sofa while still hugging her tightly. It was unclear to Sophie how she had managed to do this with such acute balance. Without them both sprawling forward awkwardly onto each other.

“Yeah. Okay. Can I just sit here for a minute?”

“Honey, I’m going to stay here all night with you, until one of your relatives comes to get you. Is that okay?”

Sophie nodded, rested her head on the cop’s shoulder, and within seconds sunk into a deep sleep.

When she awoke it was still dark outside, but blue light was beginning to filter through thick horizontal bands at the bottom of sky. It must have been nearly dawn. She was stretched out on the sofa beneath several blankets. Some of the neighbors had come over and brought Danish¸ tea, and coffee. She saw the lady cop drinking a huge mug of coffee Mrs. Hartley had made, a big smile on her face as she turned to meet Sophie’s gaze. But the smile was false and twitchy, powered by something other than joy or happiness. It was a smile inspired by pity.

It seemed to Sophie that everyone milling about her living room was waiting for something to happen. She felt something warm and soft beneath her head and realized that it was resting on her best friend Emily’s lap, with Emily attempting to braid Sophie’s famously unbraidable hair. She looked up at her friend’s sideways face. “Em. What’re you doing here?”

Emily looked away, in sideways mode. Evidently she was seeking some sort of guidance from the adults in the room. But no one could help her. She was on her own, adrift in an unfamiliar ocean with unknowable currents and no compass to guide her. Her eyes immediately teared up. “Oh, hey Soph. You’re awake,” she mumbled, her voice catching on the word ‘awake’. “Your aunt Laurie’s flying in. She’ll be here in a couple of hours.”

“Oh. Okay.” It was all Sophie could manage. She continued to study the room full of people who averted their eyes every time she looked at them, people who seemed almost to wish she wasn’t there, present in her own house. It took several more minutes for Sophie to fully register what she already knew to be true as she lay there looking up at her friend’s face, the coordinates of it now so oddly oriented.

That her mother had done the unforgivable. She had died.

Sophie’s world had been remapped overnight. Everything in it looked different, as if a veil had been pulled aside to reveal its true starkness. Even as she lay on the couch waiting for her aunt to ring the doorbell, Sophie slowly began to inhabit this new, immutably motherless world. She tried to find comfort that it hadn’t been one of those long, drawn out deaths, like when Janice Cadigan’s father took nearly three years to die of cancer. It happened quickly and unexpectedly. Her mother was driving to her writing class and some retard slacker in his twenties, apparently busy texting his girlfriend, forgot to place his foot on the brake as he approached a stop sign. He broadsided her mother’s Honda CRV, pushing it directly into the path of an oncoming freight truck. She never stood a chance.

In the hours to come, Sophie would learn that the driver of the freight truck, in trying to avoid the collision, had swerved sharply. That this had sent his trailer into a trajectory that not only intersected Sophie’s mother’s car, but five other cars as well. Four people died that night, including a newborn baby girl. And retardo slacker dude? As the universe sometimes does, it failed to right itself. Slacker dude’s head jammed neatly up into a gap in the dashboard where an old cassette tape deck used to be. He was gingerly cut out of the plastic dashboard, still alive and kicking, and transported to a local hospital trauma unit where he continued to live on while the body of Sophie’s mother hung quietly upside down, not a mark on her, still buckled into the seat of her overturned car.

In the months to follow, Sophie would realize that people died like that all the time. Alone and upside down, their bodies tethered to upholstered seats with their hair dangling down over their faces.

Sophie often found herself picturing how the texting driver must have looked, his arms and legs flailing wildly in the air with his head jacked up into the dashboard. For some reason, she found the image hilarious. But as always, the image of her dead mother hanging upside down, her limparms nearly touching the inside of the car roof, would take hold. A weed with roots she could never entirely pull up out of the ground.

Sophie and her mother had talked about what would happen, where she would go, if her mom died before Sophie had a chance to fully grow up. They’d decided that Sophie should live with Aunt Laurie, her mother’s younger sister, in the Massachusetts hometown where they’d been raised. Sophie had vague memories from her early childhood of an old, cluttered house that smelled like rotten meat. It had been years since she and her mother had visited Laurie, so it seemed to Sophie as if she was about to go off to live with a stranger.

In her mother’s will, it had been stipulated that Aunt Laurie was to act as legal guardian of Sophie and receive enough money from the estate to buy a nice house. A house with a big yard, Sophie hoped, where she could keep her cats without having to worry about them getting mowed down by all the ambulances careening up Main Street towards South Shore hospital at all hours of the day and night. Laurie was supposed to receive payments every month to spend on food and clothes for Sophie, until she was old enough to attend college. Then her mother’s estate would pay for everything – tuition, books, clothes, and whatever else she needed to earn her college degree.

It was all written into the will.

Her mother had never told her what would happen after that. Sophie guessed she’d find a job, fall in love, get married, and have kids, although her mother never had much luck in the last three departments and told Sophie not to expect too much from men. They’d always leave you hanging. Better to rely on family. Nobody cares about you like your family.

Sophie wandered through the wake and funeral in a kind of fugue state. Both took place in the small townin New Hampshire where she and her nomadic mother had settled a few years ago, after years spent skipping around from one western state to another. Since the coffin was kept shut, people assumed that her mother had taken a pretty bad hit from that truck. But, exactly as the cops who arrived on Sophie’s porch that night had claimed, there was not a bruise on her. Sophie knew this because her aunt brought her to the morgue to say good-bye. Amid the gleaming stainless steel of the room, with its faint antiseptic smells, Sophie stroked her mother’s unmarked face and kissed her again and again until the coldness of her skin became too hard to ignore and her aunt’s soft sobbing gave way to such wracking wails that hospital personnel asked her to leave so as not to further traumatize the parents of the newborn girl waiting outside.

No, the coffin was kept closed because her mother had always said something to the effect that she didn’t want people staring at a dead version of her when there were so many other versions of her that were still alive.

When Sophie thought nobody was looking, she opened the end of the coffin and slipped in a bag of her mother’s favorite chocolates. A few people glanced over in alarm as she let the heavy oak lid drop back into place, but she didn’t care. Let them think what they wanted. Her mother never went anywhere without a stash of chocolate.

The reception after the funeral was at Aunt Diane’s housein Vermont, only a 45-minute drive away, where every room looked like an exact replica of a page ripped out of a Martha Stewart magazine. Sophie hadn’t had a chance to miss her mother yet and now here she was, wearing her mother’s old black dress and watching a parade of distant relatives and strangers stream by her, stooping to lean over her even though, in many cases, she towered above the older ones, now shrunken with age. Some looked particularly odd trying to lean over what they remembered to be a small child, only to follow the lines of her body upwards to discover a nearly grown woman. Almost every single one of them took her face in their hands and tried to look soulfully at her face to say something meaningful, despite the fact that most had never even set eyes on her before now. Such a pretty girl, some whispered as they tottered away. Just like her mother.

There was lots of food, which seemed a little ironic to Sophie because her mother was never a big eater. In fact, she’d suffered from all kinds of digestive complaints, which she’d thoughtfully forgotten to pass on to Sophie via her DNA. Aunt Laurie was there, along with Aunt Diane, Uncle Steve, and of course Grampy, who by all rights should have been the next to die, being that he was 92 years old. Everyone in her mother’s immediate family had the same look on their faces, sad but also greedily eyeing the food out the corners of their eyes. They each weighed at least 200 lbs, which always amazed Sophie. Her mother could never break 110, on account of her weird digestion and all. And Sophie was slender as a reed, her runner’s body lean and firm.

After the fiftieth relative did the whole soulful face-holding thing, Sophie wanted to escape − just run outside and keep on running until she was hopelessly lost in the thick Vermont forest. She had to keep telling herself that it would all be over in a few hours. That if she waited long enough, she’d never have to stare into the eyes of strangers who knew nothing about her. Who knew barely more than they did about the little girl who had grown up to be her mom.

She sat in the corner of the living room of Aunt Diane’s overly-decorated house, next to the tiniest table she’d ever seen in her life. It was so small and fragile that it looked like it would splinter under the weight of a single glass. When Aunt Laurie came waddling up with a full plate of food and slammed it down hard on the miniature table, Sophie winced, surprised that it didn’t collapse in a heap of tinder on the floor. Instead it stood straining, but perfectly still, its skinny legs splayed out and defiantly planted into the deep carpet. Laurie proceeded to arrange her enormous body on a spindly chair next to the miniature table, a chair that had evidently been chosen to match the scale of the table. Again, in clear violation of all known laws of physics, the chair didn’t immediately collapse into a pile of kindling beneath her aunt.