Foreverland Is Dead

Miranda hears the back door open, hears her come back thirty minutes later. No one seems to care that she’s stealing.
    Cyn doesn’t.
    She’s out in the meadow. Despite the bitter rain, she paces across the open field, counting her steps. If she’s not chopping wood, she’s out there. Doesn’t say what she’s doing. No one really talks about what they’re doing. Not anymore.
    “Chickens need fed.” Kat drops two steel buckets on the dirt floor.
    Miranda leans over, looks inside: seeds mixed with food scraps from the garden. The wire handles are cold. She carries them through the breezeway and braces for the weather as she steps outside. Mud sloshes beneath her rubber boots. No more shiny shoes. Kat lets her use the work boots as long as she helps with the animals. It’s the price she pays to keep her feet dry.
    The chickens come out squabbling. Miranda quickly heaves the contents through the wire fence, a pathetic attempt to spread the food, but she’s not going inside. Chickens freak her out, the way they peck. She’s afraid one will pluck out her eye. Chickens can do that, they can fight.
    She runs back to the barn.
    “Wash them out,” Kat says before Miranda can put the buckets down.
    She knows but she wouldn’t have cleaned them and Kat knows that, too. The water from the cistern is cold—always cold. She dries them with a damp towel, her hands stiff and slow.
    There’s a horse in the breezeway when she’s done. He jerks his head in her direction, nostrils exhaling like exhaust. Kat puts a brush in her hand.
    “Brush Blackjack while I tend to his hooves.”
    “How do you know his name?”
    “I don’t.”
    Kat’s got a dingy rag tied over her head, covering her red hair. Probably full of lice. She digs through a plastic toolbox.
    The horse’s coat is matted in patches, what Kat calls rain rot. She minds not to get behind him, in case he kicks. “He can snap your bones,” Kat had told her.
    Kat begins digging into the bottom of the front left hoof with a tool.
    “Doesn’t that hurt?” Miranda asks.
    “Keeps the thrush out.”
    “But it doesn’t hurt?”
    “Not any more than if you cut your hair.”
    Kat reaches for a pair of long handled pliers that pinch off the end of the hoof like nail clippers.
    “How do you know how to do all this?”
    Kat shrugs. “Thinking about it don’t do you no good. Like Cyn says, we got to survive until we figure something out.”
    Her dialect had changed . She sounds so country.
    “How come everyone gets to be good at something? You got horses, Mad’s a cook , and Jen does the garden.”
    “And Roc does the stealing.”
    Kat drops the hoof and goes to the other side. Miranda looks down the breezeway, hoping no one is around. She walks a safe distance from Blackjack’s rear end, starts stroking his right flank. Kat digs the packed dirt out of another hoof.
    “You know about that?” Miranda says.
    “Don’t take a genius.”
    “I thought I was the only one that heard her getting up at night.”
    “I don’t know anything about that, but I see her hanging around the kitchen when no one else is around. She’s got that key around her neck, what do you think she’s doing?”
    “Why don’t you say something?”
    “Like that’s going to do anything.”
    “Tell Cyn.”
    Kat snorts while reaching for the hoof trimmers. “Cyn can’t do anything. I mean, she’s trying to be a leader and everything , but what’s she going to do about Roc? Seriously.”
    The rain patters loude r on the barn roof. Cyn’s still out in the meadow with a sheet of plastic over her head. She looks lost.
    “What about me?” Miranda runs the brush through the horse’s tail. “What am I good at?”
    Kat stifles another laugh.
    “What?”
    “I ain’t going to say.”
    “Go ahead. I can take it.”
    Kat finishes filing the hoof and stands up. Straight-faced, she says, “Ain’t it obvious?”
    Miranda shakes her head.
    “You’re nice enough and I appreciate the help, but I think there’s something missing in you. Something fake. You’re a beauty queen.”
    Miranda picks the long hairs from the brush. She tries not to let her lips flutter. “That’s mean.”
    “You asked.”
    Kat taps the horse’s back leg and gets to work on the next hoof. Miranda drops the brush into the bucket. She doesn’t feel much like helping anymore, even though it proves Kat’s point.
    She’s a beauty queen.
    The rain sounds like falling rocks.

10

    The pencil isn’t