Wretched quiet. No bird songs. No rustle of squirrels. Trees full of silent leaves that even the wind has forsaken in the oppressive summer heat. No planes bound for JFK or LaGuardia streaking across the perfect blue of an indifferent, blazing sky. No relentless hum of traffic beyond Central Park. No joggers, no homeless, no perpetrators.

          We are alone.

          We are alone in a stillness that should be inspiring. Men had once sought solitude, praised it, wrote poetically of it. Now, it is ghastly.

          It’s ludicrous, really. So much alarm about overpopulation back then. So much reaction. So much overreaction.

          Today, in the year of our death 2284, this Earth, this unfortunate globe once predicted to be facing catastrophic population numbers, cradles a meager 90,000 people–if the last official decline estimates were correct.

          Ninety thousand people scattered around the world with little or no hope of increasing that dismal figure. Generations of sterility operations, abortions, government-induced population control, and the disintegration of the traditional family, have doomed mankind to underpopulation.

          And I will die alone.

          “Damon…” Evelyn’s feeble whisper, loud in this anomalous silence, echoes in the stillness of empty park benches and overgrown jogging trails. Emaciated and glistening with fever, my friend lies splayed out in the shade of a silent tree. She will soon be dead. Her body is misshapen with starvation, her bloated stomach mimicking the pregnancy she will never experience. Angry red streaks mar the pale skin of her swollen right leg.

          As much as I fear being alone, I wish she would die. In the awful silence around us, her raspy belabored breaths rattle and scrape into my ears unmercifully. I stir the dead leaves and old trash in the scraggly grass as I walk to her, trying to drown out her ugly, annoying sounds. I bow my head so I won’t see the death and desperation in her eyes, so she won’t see the betrayal in mine.

          The irony of the situation overwhelms me with its cruelty. Mass starvation had been prophesied because of overpopulation on a polluted planet, but few had foreseen a population decline triggering a starvation catastrophe.

          When moving food to the odd groups of people isolated around the world became impossible, people ate only what was available locally. Evelyn and I have never known coffee. Or chocolate. Or bananas. These are only words passed down by people before us, words spoken with much traditional smacking of lips, but hollow and unintelligible, words with an ethereal past to which we can attach no taste memories.

          Bending down to hear Evelyn’s hard-formed words, I try to encourage her, but no answering spark of hopefulness animates her sunken eyes.

          “Damon…I can’t make it.” Her breath smells of infection. “I wish I could….” Her eyes close momentarily but snap open with unexpected fervor. “You must go, Damon. Go…find the knife.”

          I refuse to look at her festering leg, unwilling to consider the gruesome task before me. She is only sixteen, but infection from a broken leg has staked a claim on her life.

          We have no sharp blades for any uses, much less such a critical one. The few animals we’re able to find and catch for food we hack to pieces with blunted tools we can no longer replace. Our deserted stores were emptied in a distant, riotous past.

          Evelyn and I gambled on this trip to New York City when we found the wagon. Its deep wire mesh sides could accommodate Evelyn in a roomy sitting position, and the stubbornly solid material of its tires appeared serviceable. That serendipitous find in a kudzu-covered collapsed garage had signaled to us a remarkable reversal in our fortunes. It gave us a tenuous, desperate opportunity to stay Evelyn’s death sentence.

          An emotion we didn’t recognize had fluttered within us, marked by an unaccustomed warmth in our hearts, an unusual turning up of the corners of our mouths—our first experience with joy. The pleasant feeling so thoroughly captivated us that we prepared badly for our trip.

          Evelyn struggled with her crudely formed crutches as she gathered our ill-thought-out provisions. I refused to admit my misgivings about the effort required to pull the wagon and had no conception of the time needed to cover the distance with it to New York. I didn’t know if New York City really even existed. Unwilling, however, to dispel the gentle softening of the contours of Evelyn’s face, I kept my doubts to myself.

          The pleasurable fellowship that had blossomed between us, alien and wonderful, ran us afoul of common sense. In the hottest part of a sweltering day we set out for New York to search for an overlooked knife, a hospital knife, a needle in a haystack of tall buildings.

          Our arrival there had been less than triumphant. The journey severely taxed Evelyn’s weakened stamina and made ugly inroads into mine. Our newfound joy and camaraderie departed, replaced by a despair far more unbearable than any we had known before.

          The heat stayed with us.

          Evelyn, though wan and fevered, is still determined. At the very least, she wants to die in the vestiges of the fabled comfort of a hospital, in a bed with linens and pillows, with the placebo of imaginary medicine played out on the now empty stage of past performances. At the very least, I hope to find overlooked manna in the abandoned skyscrapers of New York.

          Food has been scarce. Our past attempts at farming resulted in only a negligible amount of produce, eked out at the mercy of the elements and our inexperience.

          How I long to sell my birthright for a mess of pottage!

          But in recent history too few people have had to know too much about too many things. Technology, the marvel of man that once multiplied his effectiveness on the Earth, no longer weaves its wonders. Many deaths could have easily been prevented at one time, but the absence of doctors, druggists, medicinal supply manufacturers, and deliverymen has diminished humanity’s longevity and decimated its population.

          Slowly, oh, so slowly had it happened. Yet all so quickly. Much too quickly for the bargaining tables at which world leaders had sat, exchanging hopefully fertile men and women with long and involved contracts and alliances in the event of successful pregnancies…which too seldom occurred.

          Threats of war degenerated into impotent bluffs as life dared not be risked at any cost. Suicide became an unspoken profanity.

          Futile attempts were made to reintroduce family life and motherhood was restored to its long-disparaged pedestal. In measures blind and foolishly desperate, promiscuity was encouraged and incest became commonplace. Homosexuality, with its inability to deliver procreation, plummeted into disfavor.

          Females were placed on government prostitution lists at the beginning of their reproductive lives, and males were taught the grossest forms of chauvinism. Sex was no longer a private pastime, loving and precious, but a wicked perversion of the Biblical mandate to multiply.

          The results of these incongruous actions were the same as when society flirted with free love and unbridled sex in the past, only to discover how fatal that attraction is to families…and how vital families are to human survival. The cultural fabric frayed and rent under the burden of such misogynous social engineering.

          Morality plunged to new depths as situational ethics replaced those written in stone. The church, losing her first love and soteriological duty, boxed at shadowy social gospels, expending great and useless effort to clarify its values while the Earth ripened for divine judgment.

          Live births dwindled to a rarity, initially by design. Under the guise of family planning programs and population control, unfettered personal freedom had been oversold a long, blind time ago. In the decades of desperation that followed, fertility drugs were either useless because of previous voluntary sterility, or too late for the starving prospective mothers unable to carry a baby to full term. Human life flickered like a candle in a draft as infant mortality soared. Zero population growth exceeded all expectations.

          Abortion is remembered with horror as every silence cries out with the voices of those billions of babies killed—every empty building and abandoned car; every decrepit hospital and grounded airplane; every unused tool; every empty, begging womb. Too late we learned the choice was one of life…or death.

          Surrogate parenting and test tube babies proved no panacea. The poor health of carrier mothers jeopardized full-term deliveries, while the technology-dependent procedures slipped into oblivion with the declining population, barely remembered as bizarre dreams.

          Birth rates lessened so drastically that a geriatric majority eventually dominated most world population groups until starvation and illness ravaged the weakened elderly. Now, middle age is considered old as it had been at some long-forgotten time in history.

          Cloning, the narcissist’s reproductive method of choice, became a blight on the human race. The resultant clones were as infertile or sterile as their human counterparts. When they placed a greater strain on the demand for food, they met death at the hands of the “pure humans.” Their convenient dispatch opened the hell-gates to cannibalism.

          Everywhere, practicality and expedience wholly replaced the just restraints of law, morality, and decorum.

          Natural catastrophes placed the final blows on the dying face of the human race. Apart from people instantly killed in earthquakes, tidal waves and other calamities, death by exposure doomed the survivors. Help not only could not be sent, but disasters took place unbeknown to neighboring people because of the absence of personnel to man the long-unused radio and meteorological equipment.

          Nor have we warning about abnormal weather patterns, like this intense heat wave broiling New York. As I search the deserted streets, looking for a knife I dread using, I pick my way through myriad glass shards reflecting the unrelenting sunlight. In the undulating heat waves rising from the glass-strewn pavement, some streets shimmer like a fairyland, but Oz is not here. Only ghosts…and rats…and ghosts of rats.

          My makeshift shoes offer my feet little protection, leaving a bloody trail past violated storefronts standing as impotent sentinels. Anything worth taking is gone. There is no manna in New York.

          Near dusk I finally locate a hospital, but no well-haven. Only bones and desolation are here, an unfitting place to die. Evelyn will not find the pseudo-civilized death she desires.

          In a frenzy, I scavenge the mess other seekers have left, desperate to leave this place yet terrified to leave without the knife. Evelyn must have her knife.

          I feel no relief as I trudge back to the park, coveted knife in hand, empty stomach protesting the march. The fiery sun sets slowly, squirming low between empty skyscraper shells in the west, leaving its oppressive heat behind.

          Beneath the still trees again, I imagine I hear a greater silence than when I left the park—and I’m right. Evelyn’s death greets me, accompanied by the soul-wrenching prospect of isolation. Her bone-thin body has already started to bloat in the heat.

          Yet Evelyn must have her knife. I am annoyed that her leg infection has left me one less limb to eat.

          I suppose others are stranded as I am, with no way to bridge the oceans or to cross the continents. Perhaps they, too, face life alone or with little companionship at best…certainly with no hope. Kudzu and rats are our only inheritance.

          Death, in grim, ghastly splendor, awaits its final triumphant hour, patient to the end. The outcome is irrevocable.

          Screams—agonized, shame-filled, piteous screams bursting from within me—ride the torpid breeze now wafting through the silent park. The stagnant pond darkly mirrors the crimson sunset, capturing the murky reflection of my terror-widened eyes.

 

Originally published in Prophets & Losses, Peninsula Writers Anthology 2023

© Sharon S. Anielski 2023

          Computers are high-tech math whizzes.

          Ha!  Let’s hear an R2D2 electronic raspberry to that. How smart can they be if they can’t count higher than one? And they can’t even do that except in the most bizarre fashion.

          What the world needs now is an exposé on artificial intelligence, and I am superbly qualified to do it since I don’t have a degree in anything.

          I signed up for a college introduction-to-computers course and told my husband I hoped I wouldn’t have to learn about zeroes and ones. I well remembered when our younger son took a computer course in junior high and came home with a whole page of zeroes and ones, strings and strings of them. It was scary. We had sent him to school so he could confound us with the New Math, and they sent him back babbling about zeroes and ones.

          Now it was my turn. What troubled me was that I knew I could count past one. I had done it many times. Yet faced with binary zeroes and ones, and octally misplaced numbers, and (get this) hexadecimally repeated numbers and letters, I began to hope I wouldn’t get pulled over for suspicion of drunken driving and asked what one and one were.

          My confusion reminded me of the cabbages in my Hospitality Management Quantity Food Purchasing class. We were converting recipes from 50 servings up to 500 and down from 500 to 50, and we were doing it without a net–excuse me–without a computer. The teacher said she’d walk around the class to help those who needed it. As she neared me she slowed, then waved her hand and walked on, saying, “I know you don’t need any help.”

          I remember thinking, “Here I am with 89 cabbages on my paper for 50 people and she thinks I don’t need help.” Of course, I wasn’t about to destroy her confidence in me no matter how misplaced it was, so I sat quietly, hoping my imaginary patrons really liked cabbage. Even if I had to feed them a seven-course cabbage dinner, at least I had gotten there using real numbers.

          As smart as a computer is, it can’t understand real numbers or the decimal system or the English language. Its “language” is the binary number system with only “0” and “1” as digits. All input from the user–numbers, letters, and symbols like “%”–has to be chewed up and swallowed by a computer and regurgitated as zeroes and ones. Then that binary cud is chewed and spewed out again by the computer in reverse, as number, letter, and symbol output, the stuff we humans can make sense of.

          “In fact,” states my computer textbook ominously, “any character that can be entered from the keyboard must be converted into ones and zeroes before it can be used by the computer.” What that means is that every time a computer command is entered, the central processing unit says, “Duh, say it in ASCII.”

          And some of these infernal units will start sputtering about some lost language of Ebsedic. Now come on. There are little kids who can speak Japanese. Of course, they were born in Japan, but that’s not the point.

          Now to a computer, zero is zero and one is one, but from there it gets hairy. Two is one added to the one in one which gives you 10 because one and one are zero and you carry the one. Three is 11.  This is not eleven but one-one just like 10 wasn’t ten but one-zero.

          Remember, this high-technology machine can’t get past one.  Think of it.  Even an old-fashioned mechanical cash register can count all the way up to ten–and that’s the real ten, not one-zero.

          The reason three is 11 is that you don’t carry anything, but just bring down the one. I start losing it at four, which is 100, or one-zero-zero, and don’t ask me why. Twenty-three is 10111 and 99 is 1100011. To top it off, the teachers in these classes then expect you to do it all backwards and figure out what 1001011 would be if it was a real number.

          I’ll tell you, give me my 89 cabbages any day.

          All the hoopla about the amazing capabilities of computers is a carefully crafted smoke screen designed to protect the world’s best-kept secret. Yes, computers are fun. Yes, they are helpful and even I can use them as long as they keep all their zeroes and ones to themselves. But computers are stupid. They can be outsmarted by a toddler holding up two fingers and a thumb.

          Obviously, computer programming isn’t for me. I think I’ll take something easier. Like Japanese.

Originally published in ComputorEdge Magazine, September 18, 1992

Reprinted with permission

© 1992 by The Byte Buyer, Inc.

   

Hi.  I’m Poppy, and I’m a recovering victim of gentrification.  The unwelcome upheaval befell my family more than half a century ago, but for me nostalgic scars run deep. Our sweet country town, Bunderlind, underwent a neighborhood lobotomy when rabid revitalizers bulldozed through it.

Those ruthless renovators fundamentally transformed Bunderlind.  What they couldn’t physically alter, they camouflaged with name changes.  By the time my family moved away when I was in second grade, our street was no longer Creek Road, but had become West Brooke Drive.  Brooke with an “e” of course.  I guess adding an “e” to Creek wouldn’t have sufficed, since a brook is so much more avant-garde than a creek.

My parents bemoaned the encroaching elites who thought names like Creek Road wouldn’t entice genteel folk from the big city to move to a backwater area like Bunderlind.  My mom used to say in her comic upscale voice, “Certainly not to the bucolic environs.”  In retrospect, I’m surprised the city elders didn’t rename Bunderlind itself, but maybe that would have involved too many politicians and mapmakers and lots more money.

 Prior to the sissifying of Bunderlind, country things happened there, things city residents never experienced.  Things that made us Bunderlinders a resilient lot.  Like the pack of wild dogs that terrorized the area for a while.  Feral, maybe with discarded pets desperate for food and companionship bolstering their numbers, they survived by preying on farm animals–much to the farmers’ frustration.  Even more so to the farm animals’ chagrin.

Today’s gentrified Bunderlinders are drawn from the same city folk who release their unwanted pets in farm country.  City dwellers tell themselves and their heartbroken children that farmers will take care of Fido or Fluffy, but imagining farmers needing more animals mystifies everyone, and fools no one.  Sadly, unlike Bunderlinders of old, forsaken city pets seldom prove resilient.  Those who do, sometimes revert to their wild natures.

We Bunderlind kids, resilient to the core, roamed with unfettered abandon through woods and apple orchards, through fields smothered in tickle weeds.  The fearless among us scurried through the culvert that ran under Creek Road, crouching through the sometimes ankle‑deep water puddling in the spooky tunnel.  The small rise that separated Creek Road’s two elevations we dubbed Perry’s Hill, because Mr. and Mrs. Perry lived at the top.  Sled trains of screaming and laughing kids rocketed down Perry’s Hill in the winter.

All this childhood running amok took place undeterred by the wild dogs.  Bunderlind kids were audacious back then.

The woods around Bunderlind abounded with vines for swinging and tall tales for telling.  Herman, my older brother by two years, terrified us with stories of the diaper-clad children who haunted the woods, seeking unsuspecting kids to fit with big ugly diapers.  The diaper kids lived deep beneath the forest floor, because everyone knew underground temperatures permitted walking around in diapers all year long.  The captives of the diaper kids never saw the sun again, only the dark scraggly underside of the woods–rooty tree bottoms and thready mushroom branchings, tangled tubers laced with squirming insects.

Even the wild dogs couldn’t find those poor kids.

Herman reported seeing diaper kids running through the apple orchard with stacks of diapers, but the rest of us never caught sight of them.  Not for lack of vigilance.  We scouted that orchard daily from ground level and tree height.

Unlike the short spindly trees of many orchards today, mature apple trees populated the Creek Road orchard like an orderly forest.  Tall, with wide leafy canopies, thick‑limbed and wonderful for climbing, Creek Road apple trees provided lofty lookouts and hiding places, as well as quick treats and shade for sweaty little bodies.  We enjoyed apple pie, apple butter and apple fights, all staples in Bunderlind, but sightings of the diaper kids eluded everyone but Herman.

A small tar-paper shack sat in the middle of a field of tickle weeds near the orchard.  The soft knee-high weeds with their feathery tips caressed our shorts-clad legs as we ran giggling until we dropped.  Often, simply running through the tickle weeds pleased us so thoroughly, we needed no other amusement, not even the delicious distraction of the diaper kids.  Other times, we took refuge in the tar-paper shack, reveling in its aura of seclusion, or cooking wild blackberries or elderberries over small fires outside its door.

The tar-paper walls of the shack had hollows where, on one occasion, bees made a home.  Herman proposed we smoke them out, assuring me that damp leaves would do the job by producing lots of smoke without fire.  We stuffed the walls full of leaves, then dropped lit matches on top of them.  Either Herman had been wrong or the leaves hadn’t been damp enough, or maybe the tar-paper had something to do with it, because the shack ignited.

Younger brother Ben came running through the tickle weeds yelling, “If I had a fire truck, I’d put the fire out!”  Turned out, it was too bad he hadn’t had a fire truck, because when the real thing arrived, it ran out of water.  Returning from another fire emergency with no time to replenish their water supply, the firemen thought they had enough water for a shack fire.  They didn’t.  So firemen carried buckets of sloshing water through the tickle weeds.

Even Bunderlind firemen were resourceful back then.

The culvert under Creek Road unnerved my younger self, although I did scoot through it a few times.  Even at my then small height, I had to scrooch down to make my way through the scary cement tube.  The fear of the water rising or of what might be lurking in the leaves and twigs and other muddy debris swishing around my feet unsettled my stomach, but I couldn’t back down in front of Herman.  I scampered through, even while imagining salivating mad dogs at either or both ends of the tunnel.

We Bunderlind kids did so much despite the wild dogs.  Bunderlinders, back then, were an intrepid bunch.

Situated in a snow belt, Bunderlind often seemed like a suburb of Alaska.  Winter there meant school buses lumbering over snow- and ice-covered country roads, struggling to negotiate the slippery hills.  When schools announced snow days, Bunderlinders knew road conditions were treacherous.  Conditions were never too treacherous, though, for sled trains down Perry’s Hill.

Perry’s Hill looms large in my childhood memories.  Yet, when I went back years later to view my old homestead–which had been demolished and replaced with a modern split-level house–Perry’s Hill disappointed and astounded my adult self.  How did we ever do sled trains down such a short hill?

But sled trains we did.  And did them with gusto.  Heedless of the dogs.

My girlfriend Mattie and I always made a mad scramble for the last sled position.  Herman and his friend Dugan would finagle their sled into the second-last slot.  If I tell you there were deep ditches alongside Creek Road, does that struggle for sled positioning stir a thrill inside you?  It did in Mattie and me.

With Dugan facing forward to steer their sled, Herman faced backward to hold onto the rope from Mattie’s and my sled.  Halfway down Perry’s Hill, Herman would swing Mattie and me on our sled as wickedly as he could, sending us careening into one of the ditches.  We loved it!

Dogs or no dogs, we were an exuberant lot, high in spirit and daring by nature.

One time, while attempting to climb to my feet in the ditch, my mittened thumb was stuck in what looked like the discarded bottom of a snowman.  Try as I might, I could not pull my thumb out.  When Herman finally believed me–that I was stuck–he came to help.

Assessing the situation, he surmised that my mitten had caught on an embedded twig.  In true annoying older-brotherly fashion, he scraped a little snow here, a little snow there, like a sculptor reducing a slab of marble.  He shaved a bit more snow here, and then a little more there.  When he dislodged some more snow from here again, he uncovered an animal’s ear.

The world stopped for an instant.  Herman lifted his arm high and brought it down hard on the large ball of snow.  The remaining snow fell away like a miniature avalanche, revealing a cow’s head, with my mitten caught on the bone of an eye socket.

I must have pulled out of my stuck mitten, because–besides thinking eloquent thoughts like Ewwww!!!–all I remember is making a regular‑size snowball and mashing my bare thumb into it to clean the cow off and running home to mom.

We learned that the wild dogs had torn a cow apart.  Come spring, we kids found a cow’s leg, stiff as wood.  It made a decent bat for our baseball game until my mother took it away.

Back then, Bunderlind kids were gloriously unflappable.  Today’s kids–not so much.  Too many helicopter parents running interference.  More’s the pity.

And the dogs?  They didn’t like the gentrifiers any more than we did.  They left town, too.  My father said they went on to greener pastures, but Herman told me the diaper kids enticed them underground.  I tend to believe Herman.

 

         Originally published in Hope Will Speak Out, Peninsula Writers Anthology 2020

© Sharon S. Anielski 2023