Once Upon a Time in Nowhere (Two Stories from Somewhere Else)
an excerpt

Her name is Lily, after a flower I have never seen. She’s seven. She lives with her mother, her father and her older brother Kieran, who’s fourteen. She has a dog named Sam. She has a cat named Greg. She likes wool, scotch tape, and the color blue. And she can talk to plants.

As if every little girl can do that. More than I really wanted to know.

“Interesting day,” Annie says, leaning against the windshield of the van. “I mean, it’s not every day you meet a little girl that might, you know, solve world hunger.” It’s the noon sun, getting to her. Makes her crazy. We’re too used to living off the darkness but now we’re too high on wonder and food and thought to sleep.

“Interesting indeed,” I agree drolly. “Annie, we can’t go back, can we? I mean, what if one day we’re not lucky she’s the one that wakes up? What if it’s her mom or dad or that brother she was talking about?” I bite the side of my cheek. Annie shrugs and she digs around in her pockets for a cigarette. She only smokes when she’s nervous, tobacco is hard to grow in vats of synthetic water and expensive to buy. She lights it, staring intently at the flame from her red and green and white lighter. Her thin, white fingers rest on either side of the painted on bull.

“We’re careful,” she replies after a long moment, lips working around the cigarette in her mouth. “That’s what we’ve done. That’s what we’ve always done. That’s what we’re going to do for the rest of our lives Dame. Life is full of ‘what if this goes wrong’ or, ‘what if that goes wrong’. Life is full of paranoia. We’re waging a constant war on Murphy’s law and you know what?” She pauses, sitting straight up and glaring straight through my pupils. “Eventually, we will lose.” She leans against the windshield again, taking a drag of her cigarette and blowing the smoke from her mouth in a steady stream that dissipates quickly in the breeze.

I nod. I nod because I don’t have any response, because she’s right. Lily has food, food that we need. Annie knows this and I know this, and in time Lily will come to know this too. We’re going to use her for everything we can.

“You know,” Annie says, sliding a pair of big black sun glasses over her eyes and letting her blond hair snap around in the wind that’s begun to pick up, “it’s better us to use her from everything she’s worth than to led the ‘great and benevolent sky’ take care of it. We’re really helping her.” Another slow drag on her cigarette.

“Liar.”

“We all soothe our conscious somehow love.”

I know that she’s right.