Sunset.

Sunset.

He pushed aside the splitting timber gate and walked the barren path to his front steps. He stood before the boarded windows of his house and decided to sit a while before going inside. The light at this time of the year, even with nothing much to fall on, reminded him of his childhood. The pink of the clouds, the rusty sky. The breeze swirling with metallic dust. Then, it had been seasonal. Now, it was permanent.

‘Close the door,’ she said as he brushed off his clothes.

He stepped inside and yanked the handle towards him. Humidity had swollen the wood, but he didn’t own a chisel, and if the door wasn’t properly closed, a strip of dust would gather on the floor. He secured the bolts and twisted the key in the locked.

‘And the curtain,’ she added as he began to loosen his boots.

He stopped tugging at his shoes to pull the patchwork of old clothes across the door. The red pest, as the dust had come to be known, often worked its way in through the cracks.

‘Where’s the firewood?’ she asked as he finally pried the undersized boots off his feet.

The soles of his last pair had worn too thin to reattach, and a size too small was all he could find at the Salvage.

‘He said he has no use for Orwell.’ He placed his boots on the shoe rack. ‘The irony.’

‘Then where’s the book?’ she asked sharply.

‘I traded it for some apple seeds.’

She looked up from the circuit board she was soldering. ‘Apple seeds.’

‘I figured we could try to grow them. It’s probably hopeless, but it’s better than nothing. We might get lucky. We can’t keep living hand to mouth.’

‘I’m not selling it,’ she said flatly, ‘if that’s what you’re about to suggest.’

He had expected her to say as much. ‘We don’t really have a choice, Riley. We need a new water filter.’

‘We just replaced the last one!’

Smoke rose from the solder like anger from her nostrils.

‘That was six months ago, and we were lucky it lasted that long.’

The neighbours seemed to replace theirs every few months.

‘And next week, Sam? What will we sell then? Hmm? The carpet? An organ – an eye?’

‘That’s next week’s problem,’ Sam said as he slumped into his chair. He began to rub the throbbing from his feet. ‘We have to survive this week for that to matter. Besides, you didn’t like it when I bought it. Why are you so attached now?’

‘Of course, I didn’t like it,’ Riley rolled her eyes. ‘Why would I wear a locket in the shape of a heart? I was twenty-five, not twelve.’

‘So, why are you determined to keep it now?’

‘I don’t know,’ she paused. ‘It’s the life we had. It’s a reminder that once upon a time you could walk into a store and buy whatever you needed if you had the money. And we had the money.’

‘That’s reason enough to get rid of it; you’re never going to adjust if you’re clinging to the past.’

‘I’m not clinging to the past – it’s a reminder of all the useless junk we bought. The things that did nothing – had no function – that we wasted our money on.’

‘So, you’re punishing yourself because wasting money didn’t bother you all those years ago?’

‘Yes, because it should’ve! If it had, we wouldn’t be here now.’

‘I don’t think that’s true,’ he admitted reluctantly, reclining in the chair. He closed his eyes. His toes continued to pulse faintly, but he’d given them all he could spare. ‘Everyone’s here now. Why would we have been any different? We were never going to quit our jobs and sell the house. Not to move out to the middle of nowhere to start a farm, that’s for sure. As if I could’ve convinced you of that! As if you could’ve convinced me!’

Riley slapped the solder and its iron onto the table. ‘Isn’t that entirely the point? As clever as we thought we were, we still didn’t have the foresight to consider the possibility that we were going to end up here.’

‘Of course, we considered it,’ Sam yawned. ‘We just didn’t believe it would actually happen. That’s why we kept saying imagine if, like it was some kind of fairy story.’

‘More like a nightmare,’ Riley muttered as she got up from the table and went into the kitchen. She took a log and some kindling from the dwindling stack and arranged them on the lowest shelf of the oven. When fire spread from the match in her hand, she shut the door and lowered a pot into the hole left by the removed element. The water had a brown tinge that even the filter couldn’t remove. They had assured her it was harmless. She took a scoop of rice from the open sack and tipped it into the water, then returned to the lounge to finish soldering the motherboard.

‘What’s –’ Sam began.

‘Rice,’ she said sharply. ‘Like we’ve had anything else for the last four months.’

‘I was going to say, what’s the board for?’

‘The inverter.’

Sam sighed. ‘Well, if you can’t fix it –’

‘If you mention that locket one more time, Sam Porter, I’m going to strangle you with it. If I can’t fix it, you can pocket a board from the Salvage. I will not go without power.’

‘There aren’t any boards left at the Salvage. We haven’t dug up anything electrical in weeks.’

‘I don’t know why the government doesn’t do something about it. It’s not right.’

‘Like what? What do you want them to do? Anything major we dig up, they take. Anything minor is offered to the supervisors, then us, then the public. Trust me,’ he yawned again, ‘we have it better than most.’

‘How can this possibly be better than most? And don’t say the developing world have it worse than us; they’ve lived like this forever.’

‘And we’ve never given a shit.’

‘At least they’re acclimatised to it; we don’t know what we’re doing. We’ve never had to live like this.’

‘Yeah, and it’s only now that we have to, that we think it isn’t right,’ Sam murmured, as he surrendered himself to sleep.