Here’s the first chapter of Citizen Second Class
The last time my whole family was together, my mother still had both legs and Grammy still remembered we didn’t have a president anymore. The pictures, taken in the soft light of early morning, show my sister and my parents standing together, looking sharp in their uniforms. In our old gray dresses, Grammy and I seem washed out, present but somehow incomplete, diluted. By the time the sun rose to a hard glare, the ones in uniform were on their way to their posts, answering the call of duty. I was left to care for my grandmother.
“They’re off to close the distance between ought and is,” Grammy said. “Good luck to ’em, cuz, good God, that’s a need! All our lives we’re told to make stacks and save wads and now we can’t even make change. Sometimes life feels like we’re set to fight a forest fire with nothing but a water pistol and a box o’ dry crackers, dudn’t it?”
She put her thin stick of an arm around my shoulder and said, “And here you are, stuck in the sticks with an old lady to watch out for, makin’ sure I don’t wander off. Won’t exactly be your halcyon days, huh? You feel left behind? Or left out? You could stick me on an ice floe, maybe.”
“I don’t think there are any ice floes left, Grammy.”
She chuckled. “Looks like you’re stuck, then.”
I didn’t mind. I loved her and I didn’t want to be a part of any battles. However, in the war for the future, we are all drafted.
I thought I was relatively safe growing up in a little town in Georgia. However, the tendrils of conflict wound their way everywhere, even to our tiny part of the world. I had to leave my little town of Campbellford. If we were to survive, we had to take drastic action.
“They say this winter will be the warmest yet.” Grammy fanned herself on her rocking chair on the front porch. She used to rock for hours out there. Grammy didn’t have the energy to rock in her chair anymore. She sat still, listened to the quiet and complained that her nightly concert of frogs and crickets was gone. The marsh had dried up.
“Lots of traffic used to come through Campbellford on their way to some damn place, to and fro. By times one or two of those automatic trucks still blows past, just ugly gray boxes they are, all speeding, all dangerous and never stopping around here. Not a single driver in them. That used to be our number one job by population: drivin’ truck and deliverin’ things hither and thither. Now that there’s more trucks barrelin’ up and down the roads and no drivers, I think that’s why we got stuck with all this extreme weather. The air, Kismet! It’s so darn close.”
“Humid, you mean?”
“The air never used to be so close!”
“I know. The humidity makes my hair all frizzy.”
“You have quite a mop on you, more of a hair don’t that a hairdo. Get the scissors, I’ll give you a trim.”
Grammy wasn’t dangerous but I wasn’t about to hand her scissors. Her creeping dementia had already made me elder-proof the house. If she cut my hair, I’d worry she might not stop cutting when she got to my ears.
“I’ll get you your hand fan to keep the heat at bay,” I said.
“I got no energy to be wavin’ that thing at myself all day.”
“Then I’ll fan you.”
“I don’t pay with anything but smiles and a nod. You goin’ out lookin’ for a job tomorrow?”
She said tomorrow like tomorrah. I once asked her where she got her expressions.
“Wasn’t always stuck in a rocking chair in this little town. My family lived on turd stew sometimes but we used to move all over and live all over. I talk same as I did when I was your age. When I was young, so was the world. The world’s as old as me now and lookin’ no better. I don’t care for it.”
“You look lovely, Grammy.”
“My grandmother would have called that statement a bunch of horsefeathers.”
“What would you say?”
“I say, break all the mirrors!”
I ignored her and ducked into the house for a moment. “I can’t find the fan!” I called. “Where’d you put it?”
By the time I returned she’d forgotten what I went searching for. “Ah! A fan,” she said. “Can’t keep the stink off but maybe we can wave it downwind. Good idea.”
She gave me a smile and a nod as I fanned her. It was payment enough, but where memory failed, habits took over. She didn’t leave her favorite topics alone for long. Whenever she was annoyed, she would bring up my lack of employment. I helped out at the town’s food bank but the work wasn’t steady and paid in tins of fake fish.
“Maybe there are still things to do like changing tires on those robot trucks, huh?”
“I think the robots pretty much take care of the robots,” I replied.
“Incestuous business,” she said. “Or is that … what’s the word?”
“Nepotism?”
The way her eyebrows knitted together, I suspected that was a word that was now lost to her vocabulary.
“All you got is odd jobs, Kismet.”
“All the jobs are odd now. It’s not like when you were young and Jesus was still a carpenter running his own business.”
“Ain’t that so,” she said. “Even his business went bad. Nobody’s paying our savior any attention anymore. Everybody needs Jesus but we’re past the point of no return, aren’t we?”
“It’s not that bad. Not quite yet, anyway.”
“Isn’t it? You only say that because you don’t remember how it was before.”
“Then I guess I’m lucky. When you don’t know how good it was, you can’t miss it.”
I didn’t know how much worse things could get. Not then. We called it the Slow Apocalypse because the troubles had taken so long to mount. The future was a dark and looming cloud, but its shadow had taken over the landscape for so long, we were more fatigued than frightened.
The collapse started slow, like when the swamp and the jobs dried up at the same time. Lots of people’s jobs were going away and who’s really going to miss a swamp? With the frogs dead and the crickets gone to wherever crickets go, the nights were quieter. When the power rationing began, we told ourselves that was just the way it was and, with not a light in sight all the way to Atlanta, the stars seemed brighter.
“No shine from the humankind,” Grammy marveled. “No light to compete with the Milky Way. I haven’t seen the night sky so well since my eyes were good and I was younger than you.”
The cost of chicken was the first thing I really noticed. Grammy used to prepare chicken breasts for me, skin off and baked not fried. It was supposed to be healthier that way, for those who cared, for those who still clung to the idea that a longer life was important.
“I prefer the old way, Southern done, fried up with lots of grease,” Grammy told me, “but we gotta keep you strong and healthy for what’s ahead.”
“What’s ahead?” I asked.
“A whole lot less than what’s behind.”
Then Grammy stopped buying chicken. The price climbed too high. “We used to keep chickens in the yard back in Raleigh. We were poor but we never went hungry. Mostly we lived off the eggs but even the eggs are getting up there.”
“Up where?”
“Up where we don’t belong, with the rich folks.”
The pig fever epidemic had hit hard the first fall that Daddy, Mama and Sissy were away. China slaughtered almost all of them.
“They got a few pigs left in a special zoo underground somewhere,” Grammy said. “Keepin’ ’em around so’s they don’t go extinct, preserving the DNA so they can bring ’em back someday. If that grand resurrection happens, it’ll be long after my day. Too bad. My mother used to make me bacon on grilled cheese when I came home from school each day. I used to love head cheese and trotter stew.”
“Trotter stew?” I made a face and she laughed. Later, when all was quiet and I had some time to think, I wondered if Grammy was trying to turn my stomach on purpose, maybe to make me miss bacon less. The veggie bacon from the food bank wasn’t quite the same.
Then, when the embargoes began, the grocery store changed. There was still stuff on the shelves but nothing was fresh. “Food all tastes the same now,” Grammy complained, “as if it’s the same crap in different molds, processed up the wazoo and bland. Even the packaging is bland now. They don’t even have to bother with making the labels colorful and pretty anymore. You get what you get and you’re told to be grateful. Unless it’s the outhouse, I forget why I walked into a room these days. My memory of better days is still good, though. That’s kind of cruel, isn’t it? Makes you think God got tired of us and wandered away to work on more interesting projects.”
A little weary of her whining, I reminded her there was a war on.
“Always was, always will be,” Grammy spat. “And when do you think your mother, father and Sissy will get back from it? You listen to the news. How we doin’?”
“They say we’re winning.” Even as I said it, no strength bolstered my words. “Let it alone, Grammy.”
I missed my parents. Rich and Kacy Beatriz were both Army infantry.
“We met while we were on containment duty,” Mama told us. “I looked over and here was this big man with a jaw like a steam shovel and I thought, ‘Now that’s a man.’ Rich looked over at me and our eyes met. We knew right away, like we’d been spending our lives waiting for the other one to show up.”
Mama and Daddy were married by an Army chaplain in a tent on the side of a hill looking out at Alcatraz. They had one night of leave, conceived Sissy and went right back to manning the barriers the next morning.
I loved that story. Despite the demands of their work, my parents saw each other’s best selves. Bad times don’t always build heroes but they met at a time when they could still believe in their mission to protect our country.
“Your daddy and the propapundits say good times are comin’ back,” Grammy said. “They’re taking their damn time and mighta gotten lost along the way. I wonder where they all are right now.”
“Leave it alone, Grammy. They’ll be back when they can come back.”
“You gonna look for a job, Kismet?”
“Leave it alone, Grammy.”
My sister found work following my parents into the service.
“Smart as a whip, that girl,” Grammy told me. “But too good for this place, always had her eye on the horizon. Your sister always wanted to be somewhere else even though all places are pretty much the same.”
Sissy was born Susan. She got her new moniker after I was born. I couldn’t pronounce her name properly at first and Sissy stuck.
She joined the Air Force. She wanted to take the training in New Chicago to be a doctor. They call it New Chicago but they really mean North Chicago. Chicago officially became two cities but they say it was always two cities, anyway.
Late at night when it was too hot to sleep, I’d sit in Grammy’s rocker and watch for meteors. My grandmother could still name all the constellations but, even without light pollution, she couldn’t see the stars very well, anymore. The diabetes got to her eyes.
Grammy’s memory was getting worse and so was her outlook. “Some nights I lay in bed in the heat and I think one of them big rocks will come down from outer space and put us out of our misery, put us down like a dog. But it ain’t all over. You got some livin’ to do yet. Don’t you worry. There’s still time for you.”
She told me the same thing many times. Even though the news was new to her each time, I sensed less and less conviction.
After she was down for the night, I’d sit out on the porch and wonder how much time there was left and how I should spend it. Time used to be malleable. It could stretch and compress and play tricks. Now it seemed a short and tired thing. Just like our money, it was limited, easy to spend and almost as dried up as the swamp.
It’s true you don’t miss what you never had but I did remember the noise from the frogs and crickets. It was a wild thrum, call and response, a choir whose church was nature. I liked the quiet but too much silence can get to a person. You think you like something and then you get too much of it.
That was how I felt when I got the encrypted message from my sister. My bracelet lit my face, the only electronic glow for miles. Tears slipped down my cheeks as I read and reread her plea. I hadn’t heard from her in a long time and she’d set the note to be delivered months after it was written. She made it clear I was needed, that I was the only one she could trust for the task she’d set. My instructions were short and precise. I had to leave Grammy behind to answer my own call of duty.
I memorized the message and erased it. Then I walked down the road in the dark and knocked on my closest neighbor’s door. Lisa Gott was at her kitchen table reading by an oil lamp. I told her what I needed, what Grammy needed to know and what she didn’t need to know.
Lisa’s husband Buddy was away, stationed in Vancouver, Washington. She understood and didn’t hesitate to agree to help.
I needed her to say yes but, to be polite, I asked, “You’re sure? The refrigerator isn’t even hooked up anymore but Grammy keeps putting things in it. If she runs out of clothes in her bedroom, sometimes that’s where you’ll find them.”
“Kismet, after what you did for this town, for Buddy and me?”
“I took no pleasure in that — ”
“It was necessary. You came through for all of us. You’ll never hear no from me.”
The next morning, I assured Grammy all would be well in my absence. “Lisa will check in on you. The money from Daddy and Mama will keep coming. You always said the wars will never end so you can depend on the money. If you’re short, Lisa can help out with rations from the food bank.”
“You gonna leave a blind old woman to her own self just like that, huh? Just like Sissy and your father. Like your mother, you’ve got that wanderlust. That’s the trouble.”
“Grammy, I love you, but you keep telling me I need a job. You tell me that every day. It’s time I looked where the jobs are. That means going farther down the road.”
“Well, bless us and bless you,” Grammy said sourly. “You know the difference between a hot clammy night you can’t sleep and a sweaty sultry summer night, Kismet?” Grammy asked. “Your mood and your company. You want to survive in this world, you need an umbrella for your troubles. Go into Atlanta and see if y’all can find the right people to keep you safe.”
As I walked down the dusty road headed south past abandoned farms and empty buildings, ragged yellow ribbons were tied around many of the trees. It seemed everyone from the area had at least one family member in the military.
I pushed that thought away and focused on breathing and walking, just like Mama taught me. I told myself I was on an adventure. Bad times can make heroes. I wanted to believe that. I wanted to make it true.
Citizen Second Class is a dystopian tale set in Atlanta. These strong women resist those who would oppress them.
Read the rest here.
That link will take you to the sales page for Citizen Second Class in your native Amazon store. Thanks for reading and thank you for being a reader. I hope you’ll soon become a fan.
~ Robert Chazz Chute
