A meticulously constructed, quietly devastating story of precarity in a day-after-tomorrow future in which drought is rendering the south-west of the US uninhabitable. The life of thoughtful liberalism the narrator hoped for is gone. She lives with her two dogs in a house she bought with the last of her savings, fears that her charity to passing migrants has made her vulnerable, worries about paying taxes and buying water, and that her business, sculpting lifelike dolls of newborn infants, may at any moment give out. There’s little drama, but the story is saturated with anxiety, a sense of things falling apart. One of the narrator’s best clients turns out to have been using her dolls as part of an odd, sad hoax; her home is broken into and one of her dogs goes missing; she buys a gun for protection, but a confrontation with a pair of migrants ends in misunderstanding rather than a shoot-out. There’s no triumph in survival, no colourful Mad-Max style anarchism, “just a couple of guys from Nicaragua or Guatemala . . . And me, sitting watching the desert go dark, the moon rising, an empty handgun in my hand.”
First published in Eclipse Three: New Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2008. Collected in After the Apocalypse, Small Beer Press, 2011
A Personal Anthology 