Revision or Why I Keep So Many Drafts

Revision.
Everyone has ideas, but good ones…oh, they come from the source. Like most writers, I have ideas that exist in all their platonic beauty on the upper shelf, where I can't quite reach them. We love to talk about where ideas come from, but it's harder to talk about how and why the final object comes out looking so plain when the idea is still sitting on the shelf glowing. I have short stories that take years to complete. Maybe I'm waiting for the moment the idea loses its power over me so that I can focus on what's good enough about the story.

Anyway, we're not going to talk about the idea triumvirate—getting them, keeping them, letting them go. What I'd like to resolve for myself is how revision can support a good idea or kill it. Also known as Why I Keep So Many Drafts.

I'm going to use the first paragraphs of Madison as an example. As I've said before, I wrote this novel in a white heat last summer. It shows.

From June 28, 2008:
Cooksey wasn't memorable except for the fact he could read. The first time I noticed him we were all on lunch break and he had a copy of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire open on his lap.

I walked over. "Do you think it's an apt comparison?"

He looked up at me, one more stringy-haired, beat stranger who'd come to the valley to work for my dad. "Have you read it?"

"Saw the movie."

"Madison!" yelled Dad. He never liked us talking to the migrants.

What did I know, as the author that you can't see in the text? This is a PA world and there are no movies. Madison is the most popular baby name for 2008. Madison is a girl. At this point I didn't know who Cooksey was or why Dad was so grouchy about migrants. What was the most important thing about this for me? Madison is curious, mouthy, a little rebellious. I was working on her voice.

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From September 1, 2008, the first time my critique group saw it:

In a world with no television, people ought to be reading. That was my opinion. Yet I never saw anyone do it until a migrant named Tierney pulled out a copy of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire and started to read it during lunch break.

I carried the water bucket over to him. "Do you think it's an apt comparison?"

He looked up, one more stringy-haired, beat stranger who'd come to the valley to work for Dad. "Have you read it?"

"Saw the movie."

"Madison!" yelled Dad. He never liked us talking to the migrants.

The lead male has a new name. I use Cooksey for another character in the book so it's not lost. Still love the name. And honestly? Even now I'm not sure I like Tierney. It has an ambiguous pronunciation and it's Irish which seems like overkill since my last name is too. I just don't know.

I'm still married to the book in this version. What did I like about it? I had in mind an old Everyman edition, cloth cover, red, with gold lettering. Foxed pages. In my childhood home the Everymans were on the highest, dustiest shelf. It would probably be among the last books you'd burn if you were freezing to death. Also, it reminded me of my father, a little personal Easter egg for him so he'd know I'd been paying attention as a child.

The movie thing—well, I knew it was going to be a joke later on when readers understood there hadn't been a film industry in ten years. What I liked about it was Madison's punchy, ironic yet juvenile response. That was the essence I wanted when I wrote the line and the reason I kept it through two drafts (that or laziness).

Beat is still here, beat in the original beatnik sense, which I imagined might make a comeback in a PA world. And if it didn't, I was going to make it come back by using it 500 times throughout the novel. I was riding that dead horse but good.

What's good? "I carried the water bucket over to him." This action raises a lot of questions. It's the first tool we see in the book. And M. is doing something besides running her mouth.

What's bad? "That was my opinion." If there's one thing you don't need in a first person narrative, that would be it. But I'm still voice building so I forgive myself. Notice I kept the equally pedantic line about an apt comparison. I'm in love with my PA world and I'm writing too much. But M's smart and that's important to me—and her. The line is a place-holder for the perfect smart question that will arrive as if by magic from my crit partners.

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From January 31, 2009:

The first time I saw anyone read a book on the farm was when a man named Tierney pulled out a copy of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire during lunch break.

When Dad wasn't looking, I carried the water bucket over to him. "Do you know how to read?"

He wasn't much, just one more stringy-haired stranger who'd come to the valley looking for work. "Do you?"

"Madison!" yelled Dad. He never liked me talking to men.

"I learned." I ladled water into Tierney's bowl and went to the next person.

This is very close to a final version. I've still got the Everyman in the first para, but I've removed the preachy opening line, the movie reference, and beat. I feel like M is responding to something she might actually see in her life—a guy a reading—and she's asking a question she might really want to know the answer to.

By now, I have finished writing the novel and I don't feel like I have to prove anything on the first page. Just tell the story.

Also, I switched out the word migrant. I hit that word hard in the next para, so I don't care about making a point here. What's important to me is M's tiny act of rebellion—she says something to Tierney after dad calls her off.

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From April or May 2009:

The first time I saw anyone read on the farm was when a man named Tierney pulled a book from his back pocket during lunch break.

When Dad wasn't looking, I carried the water bucket over to him. "Do you know how to read?"

He wasn't much to look at, another stranger who'd come to the valley looking for work. But I liked his eyes. Blue. "Do you?"

Dad came back from the barn. "Madison!" He didn't like me talking to the help, especially men.

"I learned how." I ladled water into Tierney's bowl. "What's the book called?"

He uncurled the paper cover. "It's a dictionary."

"Madison, what does it take?" yelled Dad. "An engraved invitation?"

Dictionary. I carried the bucket to the next person. I'd never seen one of those.

The Everyman is gone. No one cares but me anyway. Even my father probably won't care—he'll be too busy wondering why Dad in my book is such a loudmouth.

Blue eyes, no stringy hair. He's the romantic lead, okay? Other people have to fall in love with him too, especially the author. When I made this change, I built up the romance in the rest of the book. Maybe I was swallowing a bitter pill, but there have to be BIG motivations for these people.

Now we see that Dad was away and has just come back—when the cat's away the mice will play. Tierney has a bowl for his water, not a cup. What kind of place is this? And the big change—a dictionary. I still may be a little enamored of this idea so don't be surprised if I cut it later. Books are rare in this world, reading isn't taught. For an educated man like Tierney, a dictionary might be a precious object. Words themselves might be precious. And how many times have we all tossed aside some battered paperback Websters in this world? Think about paperbacks and plastic water bottles and Styrofoam takeout containers. Might they have value in a PA world?

And over all, this little scene has two more lines of dialogue. It's more of a conversation now and it lasts a tiny bit longer. I am trusting these people to do and say what they want to advance the story.

Have I preserved the idea through all these rewrites? Yes and no. Madison is not exactly a mouthy smartass in this last iteration. I haven't rung any PA bells. Instead, I've established a few key elements that I hope will grow in the rest of the story:

• There is something off about this reality.
• Tierney is attractive.
• Madison is curious and bold.
• Dad gets angry a little too quickly.
• It's a farm.

One idea is started and completed: That's a book. Do you read? Yes, I learned how.

Lesson over. What am I reading? I finished The Sparrow. What a book! I highly recommend it. I'm now reading the third Moe Prager. It's just, yeah. I love Reed Farrell Coleman. I love the idea of RFC. I adore Moe. But, hmm.

5. What's an Exclusionary Unit?

This has been such a long week. . . lots of domestic disturbances. . . no bike riding. So here is another chapter full of my Frankenstein attempts to create action. It's funny how leaden and lumbering language gets when you are trying to talk about things happening quickly. Amid magazine rejections (oh, there were some!)I managed to get almost done with a short story. I've reworked this chapter a lot because there are some historical reveals and that made me crazy during first draft. I honestly didn't know what happened to Madison's world, but I didn't want to break stride to do world-building. I could pretend that she simply didn't know, and that worked well enough until I started asking people to read later drafts. I confess, I don't do outlines. Nothing kills desire like boredom, right? Besides, what was important to me was the tone and voice of the novel. More stuff to do: Yes, in my spare time, I need to promote this blog. But feel me on the rejections. Ouch! Who wouldn't shut the door for a few days?

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Chapter Five

The next morning, I crawled out of the hay and folded my coats. I was alone in the loft. Tierney's bed had been kicked apart and his coats were gone. I hobbled to the old house, barefoot, looking for Tierney. Wherever he was, he had my damn shoes.

The wringer-washer was in a corner of the back porch, and I took a moment to turn the crank and examine the old split rollers. It was dusty but seemed to work. A thing like this was worth, oh, it might be worth two suckling pigs, or a portion of slaughtered hog. A woman might trade a half-pound of coffee for it. It certainly would earn its worth many times over in time saved. I couldn't let it sit by for someone else to find.

I carried it to the truck and loaded it carefully. After that, I went out into the weeds far from the truck to do my business. No toothbrush, no soap, no water, no paper scraps. And I was barefoot. By the time I hobbled to the truck again, I was in a sour mood and Tierney was heaving the wringer-washer off the side of the truck.

"Are you crazy? Stop that!"

"It's not coming." He stood on the truck bed next to the gun with its fat belt of ammo. A tendon bunched in his jaw like a horse that had set his teeth against a bit.

"Do you have any idea what a thing like this is worth?" I walked around the truck and found the washer. The top had come off. I bent down and looked at the two parts, touching a spot of fresh metal. "You broke it!"

"Good." Tierney jumped off the truck. "You won't be doing any laundry where you're going."

"You're an idiot, Tierney."

"Need some shoes?" He reached into the back of the truck and held up my wingtips, tied together by their laces. I reached for them but he yanked them away and tossed them on the truck's front seat.

"It was worth a ham, Tierney." I got in the truck. "Think about that. Maybe two hams."

###

Slow going. The pavement was buckled and frost-heaved as we made our way north. The last people who drove these roads were probably the looters who had cleaned out the house, and that was a very a long time ago. In low spots, streams ran over the road and Tierney paused to estimate the depth before bouncing through the water. He took a road that lead us down the far side of the ridge, and it meandered through a housing development. The yards and streets were crowded with wrecked furniture and fallen trees, but only two or three places had burned. Tierney drove through the neighborhood once and circled back.

"What are we doing?"

No answer. He stopped the truck next to a tangle of brush and vines that had once been someone's yard. I saw a moss-covered skull under a branch, the jaw crushed. We got out of the truck and he gave me a handful of rags.

"Stuff these in your shoes."

"How generous." I jammed the rags in the toes and put them on. They still didn't fit. I followed him around the first house and in the back door. While he rummaged through the kitchen, I searched the rest of the place, pretending I was an archaeologist who had just opened an ancient site. What happened to the family who lived here? It was hard to tell because successive groups of people had come later, making a fire in the living room and using the bathroom floor and the hallway leading to the bathroom as a toilet. The stench was blistering. The family must have owned a lot of pink toilet paper because bunches of it peeped through the excrement, still vividly pink. For once, I didn't want to go upstairs.

Tierney scored a package of pasta. We went on to the next house.

All together we searched ten houses. In some ways they were all the same, furred and peeling walls, mushrooms sprouting from the swampy carpets, utterly destroyed furniture. But Tierney found something in every house. He looked behind stoves and on top of cupboards. He removed drawers and searched inside for things that got pushed to the back. In one place he found three ramen noodle packages.

I looked for shoes and books with no luck. Books were popular for starting fires with the waves of squatters who came after. Or maybe the family themselves had burned the books in the first long winter, trying to keep warm. And shoes were gold anyway. You never saw a corpse with shoes.

In one place we found five bodies all laying on a bed, the covers pulled up to their jawbones. The mother lay on her side, facing two smaller bodies, and the dad's mummified fingers cupped a handgun. All had small holes in their skulls. They had been dead a long time, but not ten years. I looked around the room and saw an oil lamp with a rag wick and soot stains flaring up the side of the wall. The window was sealed with carpeting. This family had lived for some time in the world as it is now, but had decided not to anymore.

Tierney tucked the gun into his belt and closed the door softly. At the front door, he picked up a shard of pottery from the yard and carved a number 5 into the door wood.

"What's that for?" I asked.

"It's a sign to others there are dead in this house."

"There are dead in all the houses. You didn't mark the doors."

"These people were from our time. They were survivors."

In a way I understood. It's not that the other dead, the Demented and the people killed right after, weren't important. They were the ones who built the houses, made deevees, wrote books. May they rest in peace. But they'd gotten off easy—no First Winter for them. They hadn't spent the last ten years hoping that it would stop raining so the beans would grow. Anyway, I was sad about the family in the last house. I couldn't shake the memory of our winters, and wondered if Dad had ever thought about finishing things that way.

Tierney went to the next house, and I sat on the curb near the truck. He came out with a frying pan and an empty plastic jug. I gathered firewood while he carried the jug down the hill and into the woods. I watched him go, thinking I had the wingtips, he'd left the keys in the truck, and all the junk he'd just gathered was sitting three feet away.

I thought about it too long. He came back with a jug of mossy water and set it down next to the wood I'd gathered. "There's a lot of water in your country."

"Too much. This wood's not going to light."

He had a lighter in his pocket and with a few pieces of paper, he managed to get the smallest twigs to smoke, then flame. "I've seen places that haven't had rain in ten years. The rivers are dry and the groundwater is used up. Everything is dead."

"How do the people live?"

"They don't."

He blew on the flame and added more twigs. When he got a good fire going, he nestled the pan in the coals and heated water for soup. We ate two packages of ramen noodles and drank the salty pan water. Neither of us spoke.

We drove through the remainder of the afternoon, weaving around dead cars and fallen trees. Sometimes I had to drag branches out of the way, sometimes it was armchairs. Once it was a busted-up merry-go-round with all the animals gray and peeled lying in the road as if they'd been shot.

We came to a wide, long road, a highway. Tierney stopped before driving out on to it. It was dense with cars. If I narrowed my eyes I could almost pretend I was looking at a moving highway from a movie. With open eyes I saw piles of rags and bits of broken stuff and nothing moved but the wind.

"You want to drive on that?"

Tierney tapped the gas gauge. From where I sat it looked like we were down to a quarter of tank. "I'm tired of driving in the trees."

"And this is so much better."

"Maybe we can find some fuel."

I sighed and he put the truck in gear. Traveling with Tierney was like not going anywhere; all he did was look for more stuff. But we did travel a little faster on the highway. From time to time he ran over bones, and after the first time I felt them pop under the tires I didn't mind so much.

Late in the afternoon, the sun came out, casting weak spears of light from the clouds. The cars looked rusty and derelict in the sun. As we got closer to Portland, there were more obstacles, and Tierney had to stop and back track around them. I started seeing signs over the old green interstate signs, hand-painted in black. "Canterbury."

"What's Canterbury?"

Tierney eased around a three-car pileup. "Probably a refugee camp."

"Can we go?"

"No."

Toward dusk, Tierney pulled off the highway, turned left and drove onto an overpass. At the top, he stopped, got out and walked the length of the overpass, checking each car and truck. Same thing I'd seen him do all day in the houses. Now it was cars. I sat and watched him, wishing I had something to read.

He stopped to look at one car, opening the driver's side door and leaning inside. He walked to the passenger door and then the back doors, opening each. Finally he waved to me. It was a rusty, nasty old thing on the outside, but inside the upholstery was dry and smelled like plastic. There were no bones.

"German engineering," said Tierney.

"Whatever that means." It was almost better when Tierney didn't talk.

We bedded down for the night in the car, me in the far back curled up under my wool jacket, and Tierney in front. Before we settled in, Tierney took the wingtips, tied their laces together and looped them through his belt. I lay awake wondering how far I'd get out there, barefoot with all the broken glass and old bones. I could have gone any time, but I lay there thinking about it instead.

The next morning I had to do my personal business behind a stalled truck on the overpass. Again in my bare feet. Tierney could do it over the side, another injustice of the world. I walked back to our truck, cold and angry. Day two had begun.

"Where are we going today?"

"Portland."

"Same as yesterday." I climbed into the truck. "But we never seem to get there."

Tierney gave me the wingtips and I rearranged the rags inside before putting them on. Having shoes made a difference. If I had a shot at escaping today, I'd take it.

We drove down into the highway graveyard again, circling and back-tracking and pushing between cars. Occasionally I got out to shift a small object that we couldn't drive over. Sometimes we both had to get out. The closer we got to Portland, the more panic I saw in the arrangement of the derelict cars. People had been ramming each other, driving over the highway dividers and coming down on top of other traffic. A lot of bodies were in these cars.

Once I saw a small sedan with all the windows rolled up tight. A slight steaminess framed two people in the back seat, who were turned around and looking out the window. Their skin, though desiccated as old apples, was still in place. Even their dark prune eyes were open and staring. One of them had a string of pearls. Their skeletonized finger bones still rested on the back of the seat. Although the car's gas flap was open, the car hadn't been looted, not even for shoes.

Tierney honked the horn. What were two more dead bodies? I did my job and we moved on.

Tierney stopped often to look for fuel. Whenever he saw a gas flap that wasn't open, he'd thread a piece of tubing into the tank. Sometimes he would get a few drops of rusty looking fluid in his water jug which he would distill into another jar. I would sit and watch him as the day went on.

"You aren't going to find much," I told him. "And what you find won't be any good."

"Did I ask for your opinion?"

"No, but you could certainly use it."

He made some irritating sound. Good to know he hated me as much as I hated him.

In the afternoon he found one untouched gas flap in the middle of a massive accident. Other scavengers had missed it because you couldn't tell one jumble of steel from the next. Tierney threaded his tube into the tank, sucked on the other end and quickly dunked it into the jug as bright pink fluid began to flow.

Tierney waved me out of the truck. "Look for more containers, Madison. Clean ones."

I grabbed up all the water bottles I could find in the road, carried them back. The gasoline was flowing quickly. "More. Bigger."

"Only two hands!" Even when he had what he wanted he was still rude.

We were close to an on-ramp, so I wandered between the oncoming vehicles, looking inside. Almost every car had coffee cups with lids or water bottles, but I never got used to opening the cars and reaching over dead bodies. The smell after all this time was faint, organic but not altogether unpleasant. Sometimes the act of opening a car door was enough to make a skeleton disarticulate itself all over the road.

I reached for one water bottle and came away with a bony hand still attached. I screamed and threw it away, then stood for a moment catching my breath. That's when I saw buildings on the other side of the ramp, behind a parking lot circled in razor wire. I could just read the lettering on a billboard-sized sign:

"Canterbury Exclusion Unit #0493."

This was it. Although it was cobbled together from a shopping mall, it had an official look. Refugees could be inside, or some form of government. Maybe someone could help me get home.

Tierney was many car lengths back, still hunched over his tube. I started walking quickly. Once off the ramp, I broke into a shuffling run, keeping cars, trees and utility poles between me and Tierney, in case he happened to look up. There was no entrance in the front. Razor wire enclosed a parking lot and nothing moved inside but leaves and bits of paper.

Now that I was closer I saw shacks on the roof of the largest building. Too small for houses, possibly guard towers where soldiers waited all day for people to shoot at. I watched the shacks for a moment, wondering which bothered me more—Tierney catching up with me or the possibility of getting shot. After a few seconds, I hurried on.

The entrance to the place was on the far side of the complex. I was relieved to put the width of the building between myself and Tierney. The doors were steel reinforced and tightly closed. I tried the buzzer first, leaning on it a couple of times and feeling a faint vibration on the other side of the door. After a few seconds, I tried the door knob and it opened with a dry squeak.

Inside was illuminated by a green-tinged glow coming from boxes high on the walls, very faint but enough to cast light in the place. Weak solar was still working, somewhere. The second thing was the shivering scent of old, old decay, as though I'd just opened an abandoned refrigerator.

"Hello?" I called out and was immediately sorry. My voice echoed and swelled, coming back louder than before.

Something, somewhere, slid across the concrete floor.

I froze, fighting the blind impulse to run for the door. Instead I held my breath and listened. After a moment I breathed again, and went forward. I was in some kind of waiting area. Two plastic chairs stood outside a glass-framed office. Inside the office, I saw filing cabinets, a desk of papers, a soda machine that looked--amazingly--plugged in and lit up.

Beyond the office was a long wall bisected with another door, locked from this side with a complicated bolt system. The organic smell was worse close to this door. Undisturbed.

As I turned toward the office, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and heard the dragging sound again.

A person lurched into view, wild-haired, tall but without a beard. He or she—it—dragged one leg as it shambled out of the gloom, arms out stretched. It wore the remnants of a uniform with a bit of needlework over the breast pocket.

"They're all here." The voice was cracked and hazed, but still feminine. "Check the records."

"Who's here?" I asked.

The woman stopped a few feet away from me, but her smell made the rest of the trip. She reeked of death and mildew, something like a dead cow I once found floating in the creek, long dead and stewed in water. I stepped backwards, my body knowing before my brain that no one could smell like that and be sane.

"Want to see?" she asked and began to laugh.

I turned to the door I'd come in, but lost a shoe and stumbled. Like an animal, the woman was on me, reaching for my neck. I wrenched away, pushing her off balance, and ran to the office, locking the door with her on the other side. She raised fists crenellated with yellow fingernails and pounded against the glass.

The glass shivered with each blow and wouldn't hold long. I searched the room for a weapon, turning out desk drawers and going through cabinets. There was nothing but dust and old papers, and one small thing made of plastic and metal. It fit in the palm of my hand, a thing with four opposing teeth encased in a rigid plastic grip, like the mouth of a snake. When I squeezed it, the teeth came together, making a small clacking sound. I didn't know what it was supposed to do, and it wasn't much use now, but at that moment it was all I had.

The creature hurled a chair through the window, and the glass exploded into the room, sending shards flying across the desk. The woman climbed through the window, over the spears of glass still jutting from the window frame. Her thigh hooked a shard and the tip plunged into her. She kicked herself free and came on. I pushed the chair between us, she swept it aside. I grabbed an old keyboard and thwacked the side of her head. As she reeled, I caught her lower lip between the teeth of the little tool I'd found.

The creature howled from the pain and shook her head, shaking me with it. I felt blood and warm breath on my hand. Was she Demented? Or just crazy? I squeezed harder, released the tool and took another bite on the creature's cheek. She grabbed for my neck, nails tangling in my hair.

And then a gunshot rang out. The creature exhaled once and dropped to the floor, my tool still in her flesh. Tierney stood in the other side of the window, holding Dad's gun.

"Did she bite you?"

"I bit her." I bent down and retrieved my little tool, which I was now oddly fond of. "She was crazy, not Demented. You didn't have to blast her."

"Let me see that." He took my tool. "A staple remover. I will say this, you have your moments."

In the faint glow, I could read the name on her breast pocket. Denise. She wore a pair of decent-looking boots.

"My size." I removed the boots, gagging at the warm, gassy odor. Tierney reached for them but I held on, knotting the laces together. "Oh, no, you don't. These are mine. I earned them. What is this place?"

"What the sign says. An exclusionary unit. Want to see?" He went to the inner door I'd seen earlier. He shifted the bolts and pulled it wide, spilling a little of our green light into the darkness. He propped open the door with a little metal foot attached to the lower edge of the door. "Take a good look, Madison."

I got up reluctantly and walked over. The first thing I saw was metal prison bars reaching from the floor up into the darkness above. On the other side of the bars, where the light barely reached, I saw bones. I had to look for a long time to be certain of what I was seeing. I'd seen bones before but never had I seen so many. It was a sea of bones and tangled cloth, four or five feet thick and crowded against the bars. I saw hundreds of skulls, some still covered with tufts of hair, and I saw long bones and rib cages, thousands and thousands of them. At our feet, millions of tiny bones were scattered on the floor like broken beads, as though these people had died reaching through the bars.

"Demented," said Tierney. "There are thousands of units like this all over the country. Every city had them. There were so many infected that managing the disease overwhelmed the hospitals, and this was all we could do. Forty percent of the population was symptomatic in the first year. Who knows how many since? We no longer have any way of tracking it."

I pictured the Demented crushed in here, trampled underfoot, all of them finally dying as close to the door as possible. Was it any more or less humane than shooting them on sight or wrapping them in concertina wire until they cut themselves to bits?

"I don't remember much about Before," I said. "No one talks about it."

"Can you see why?" He let the door fall shut. "It's enough to dream about it every night."

Tierney went to search the office, stepping over Denise like so much trash. I went outside where it was cool and smelled of rain. June 23rd by my reckoning. Summer was still a month away. I looked at gray buildings with broken signs, loot spilled out the doors and left to blow away. In a few minutes I got my breathing under control, a few minutes after that the shaking stopped.

When he came out, Tierney handed me a can of soda. I took it and felt the tension in the metal sides. It was still cold. I couldn't remember the last time I had one. Tierney worked the ring for me and the can popped, releasing a mist of sparkles. I drank until the fizz hurt my mouth.

"It's wonderful." I passed him the can.

"The taste that beats the others cold." He took a small sip and passed it back. "Might be the last one in the world."

1.5 The rest of chapter one

I'm going out of town for a few days and decided to post this ahead of schedule. Chapter One has now been rewritten about three times: once for my critique group, once for an agent submission, and again for this post. I'm always amazed by the gap between what I see in my mind and what is readable on the page. Letting text rest for a few months is the only way to rewrite. I can't tell you how many clever lines I scrubbed during this last rewrite. And there are still a few left that should come out.

When the novel first appeared to me, I was so obsessed with Madison's voice that I had to play it big. I used to say amen every day for her voice. Now of course it annoys me, all her opinions and judgments. I'm hoping her voice carries through the edits, despite my need as the author to construct a narrative that I can live with. We both live here, Madison and I.

That's all I've got today! Here's the text:



Chapter One, Part Two

I washed the dishes and made the bread dough and then went up to my room to find a book.

Our house used to be full of books when Mom was alive. Dad's law books, Mom's art books, all my grandparents' books. Our library survived First Winter when everyone else we knew burned their books for heat. It wasn't until Aunt Margo moved in that Dad developed his lunatic hatred of learning. I hid as many books as I could in my closet and watched Margot spend the first few days of her honeymoon hauling the rest out to the woodpile for the migrants to burn on their cooking fires.

I continued to learn on my own even after the book purge. I taught myself French, including the talking part. Every summer I set myself to learn two Shakespeare plays. I also tried to teach my two brothers to read. Chris and Riley were born After, so they never went to school. By the time they were old enough, Dad had ruled on the subject of education and they never had a chance.

I had some success with Riley. He learned the alphabet and could write his own name, but Chris was far too wiggly to sit still that long. Neither of them displayed the least curiosity about what was inside a book. Since I was kind of foggy about math, I never gave that a try. Maybe one of them had scientific aptitude, but no one will ever know. Thanks, Dad.

Because we moved to the farm while I was still a baby, we were better prepared than most when the lights went out and diseases began to kill so many people. We were far from the city in a part of the world where we got more rain rather than less. Soon we were feeding a dozen other families. One of the first guys who turned up for work was George, an electrician who built solar panels in the old days. In a very little time he married my older sister, Jayden, and installed solar on almost every house in the valley.

Solar wasn't a lot of electricity—usually only enough to run the refrigerator for a few hours a day—but my brothers were constantly plugging in old things, appliances and electric toothbrushes to see what they did. One day they tried a deevee machine in a computer laptop and it worked. Until Dad found out, we watched deevees every day, whenever we could sneak away from work. We watched Star Wars and The Simpsons, and my brothers did good barter with other valley kids for disks. Because they didn't burn, everyone had stacks of them in their houses.

We took all kinds of things in trade for viewing time. Toys, books, food, if someone's mother happened to be a good cook. I wanted to trade for clothes, but if you were caught wearing something that wasn't yours, the adults would know immediately there was an alternative economy going on somewhere. The whole thing depended on silence.

Sometimes when we were watching deevees, my brothers asked me what it was like in the old days. Were there yellow people like Homer Simpson? Was Darth Vader real? What was it like to fly in a space ship? To my brothers there was no difference between cars, airplanes and space ships. In the seven years between when I was born and when they were born, the world had changed so much that all Before stuff looked like magic.

On less charitable days, I suspected my brothers were like dogs, color-blind and unable to recognize themselves in the mirror. Maybe I was getting like that myself.

###

I took my book outside to Mom's Lexus. It was parked between the trailers and the chicken shed, hidden from the strawberry field or other places Margot was likely to go. But to get there, I had to walk past three of Pinkus's men, including his nephew, Gant. They were cleaning their firearms on a picnic table, lunching on hooch and deer sausage while they worked. I said hey on my way to the car but Gant stared at me, saying nothing.

The Lexus had been parked since it ran out of fuel. The tires were gone but almost everything else was still intact, including Mom's purse which sat on the floor next to the driver's seat, full of her pictures and credit cards.

It was a nice place to sit and read. I stretched out in the back seat and propped the book on my chest. It was an encyclopedia and I was trying to read carefully, so when the door flew open and Gant leaned into the car, I was caught off guard.

"The boss's daughter, all by herself." Gant propped one heavy black boot on the floor of the Lexus. He wore a black leather vest and long shredded blue jeans. His biceps were puckered with scars.

Gant was in charge of all the soldiers that Pinkus had stationed on our farm. His father was the guy Dad got out of jail all those years ago, but like his uncle, Gant wasn't grateful for past good deeds. Staying out of jail hadn't kept Gant's father alive anyway; he'd died of blood poisoning during the first winter. Since Pinkus had no children of his own, Gant was Pinkus's heir, though it didn't mean they had any love for another. Dad didn't have to tell me to stay out of Gant's way.

I sat up, closing the encyclopedia. "Shove off, Gant."

"Mind if I sit down? Thanks." He climbed in, bringing the reek of hooch with him. He had a narrow, beaky face and close-cropped hair.

"What do you want?"

"To talk to you, Madison. That's all."

"My father won't like it. I'm not kidding, Gant."

Gant laughed and walked his fingers across the upholstery to my leg. His fingers climbed up my thigh and kept walking. "It doesn't matter if your father likes it or not. I like it."

I twisted away from him but he slid across the seat, forcing me against the door. "I'll scream. Swear to god."

"Go ahead. If you don't make me happy, Uncle Pinkus will hear about it. Do you want your dad to swing on the end of a rope? Think about it."

"Guess I'd better make you-" I swung my book at his face. "-happy."

It connected with his jaw and he snarled as he pawed it away. I reached for the door handle and he caught me by the arm, yanking me close. His lips crawled over my neck and when I looked in his eyes, I saw a black mark on his iris as though someone had taken a tiny slice out of his eye.

"That's better," he said and touched my boob.

Suddenly the door on my side flew open, and the book-reading migrant, Tierney, looked inside.

"Your dad's asking for you, girl."

For a moment, Gant's grip on my boob got tighter, then he pushed me toward Tierney. I climbed out, shaking.

"Go to your dad," said Tierney. "And don't look back."

Dad stood at the corner of the chicken shed, his face so white it was almost green.

Behind me, windshield glass shattered.

###

Of all of us kids, I was the one who had expectations. If the world hadn't gone to hell, I'd be in college, preferably some place far from here. Both my parents went to school, Mom in New York and Dad in California. Those were just names now, places I would be as unlikely to see as fly to the moon.

What was much more likely, in fact inevitable, was that I would get married very soon.

My sister, Jayden, had married well. I remembered a lot of back-slapping between George and Dad the night they worked out the deal for Jayden. Their marriage kept George in Oregon City where he could maintain everyone's solar, and in exchange my sister was the best-dressed woman in town. She worried all the time about George getting kidnapped by Pinkus or someone like him, but Oregon City had a militia and so far even Pinkus would rather barter for George's services than kidnap him. Thanks to George, Oregon City had electric streetlights, but of course they could never use them, or bad people would know they had them. That's new world logic for you, right there.

George had a brother, Travis. He was about thirty and acted like he was sitting on a tack whenever we were alone together. Dad talked about me marrying Travis, but I couldn't seriously consider spending the rest of my life with a man whose great passion was copper wiring.

I wondered how much longer I could hold off marriage. Sometimes I'd catch Dad looking at me as though weighing barter credits in his mind. Like I was pumpkin on the vine and he needed the field for something else.

###

Dad didn't come home for dinner but we had a houseful of people just the same. Aunt Margo, Aunt Gayle and Uncle Edward, their two kids, Sue-Lynn and her kids, Christine and her grandbaby, James. I was run off my feet dealing with all the children so I didn't notice until almost dark how weird the adults were acting.

They were all sitting around the dining room table when I brought four-year old Kayla in to her mom, Sue-Lynn. She was spitting mad she couldn't keep up with the big kids who were playing hide and seek. She was so tired from trying she could barely keep her eyes open.

All the adults shut up as we walked in.

"What?" I asked.

Aunt Margo looked like she'd been crying and Gayle was patting her hand.

"Your skirt, Madison," said Gayle. "It's not decent."

I 'd hitched it up to my knees to chase kids. "You'd think you all never saw legs before." I poured myself a glass of water from the pitcher on the sideboard. "What happened to that pig Gant? Dad send him back to Pinkus?"

No answer. Margo had her lips folded so tight they looked like cracked cement. Uncle Edward tapped his cane on the floor. Sue-Lynn kissed the top of Kayla's head and didn't look at me. Gayle gave me a flat, unblinking stare.

"What? Somebody die?"

"Go bring the children inside now, Madison," said Aunt Margo. "Now."

I stomped out and slammed the door. A year ago I would have said, "You can't order me around! You aren't my mother!" Not anymore. I guess that's what being eighteen has taught me—they can order me around. Mom had been dead for three years, the aunts have taken over and there's no use fighting it.

I wasn't in any hurry to get back in the house after that. The kids were still playing hide and seek, so I played It until I found them all, and by then it was full dark and Dad was home.

Twelve families lived in the valley, plus single people like Misch and Mrs. Hammett and Jorge. At any time, there were ten to twenty migrants living in the various barns, working in the fields by day and cooking dinner over campfires by night. So even though the valley was a big place, no one was ever more than a few minutes away from another person. For kids, it was great. You were never alone and almost never bored.

When there was trouble, all the families and migrants would hunker down at our farm. It didn't happen so much now that most of the Demented were dead, but every once in a while there'd be some reason we needed to pull together. Dad said we were only doing as well as we were because of geography. Directly north of us was Oregon City and south was Independent Canby, Pinkus's country. Pinkus owned the river between Oregon City and Salem, and even though that was sixty miles of territory, there was hardly anyone left alive. He controlled it with his army of men like Gant.

I wasn't sure why the families were gathering tonight. There hadn't been any infected around the valley in weeks. The migrants we had were decent enough. I couldn't think of any reason for Dad to come home with Sue-Lynn's husband, Cal, and Christine's husband, Pete, and all of them go in the dining room and close the door.

Finally, we located Riley and I shooed them toward the house, game over.

"It's better in the dark!" said Chris. "Five more minutes?"

"You don't even know what a minute is," I said. "Get in the house."

"A minute is sixty hours," said Riley. "Am I right?"

"When I'm playing hide and seek with you, it certainly feels like it."

They ran inside and I saw a slight movement out of the corner of my eye. Something shifted in the shadows next to the pump house.

"Hello?" I called. No answer. I heard gravel scraping against a boot and then silence. At the back door, I saw a big square thing lying by the doormat. My encyclopedia.