Jasper Doyle

The things her grandmother told her before she died didn’t make sense to Jasper. Her grandmother had given her some practical advice, but most of it seemed absurd. Maybe her grandmother was crazy.

Some people said that she was a witch. Mostly they just referred to her as “woo woo.” Jasper didn’t understand. She had always seen her grandmother as magical. In childhood, she loved her long grey hair and beautiful, weathered hands. She would show Jasper her book collection and tell her about the goddess, the Old Religion, and she would share secrets about nature and the universe, but what stood out the most was her saying, “Jasper, you’re the chosen one.”

Jasper’s parents lived with Grandma Jasper briefly when she was in the womb. They had bonded before Jasper was born. Grandma Jasper happily welcomed them; she loved pregnant women. She would put her hand on her daughter-in-law’s stomach and say, “You are going to have a girl,” “You are going to name her after me,” and “She is going to be the chosen one.” This did not amuse Jasper’s mother, but her father would always say, “She is not as crazy as she seems.” She also predicted that Jasper’s father would marry someone blonde and uptight. She wasn’t wrong.

Jasper’s grandfather was a mystery. She told Jasper when she was sixteen, “I couldn’t stay with any of the men. I could really see them, and they hated that.” Jasper’s parents never spoke poorly of her grandmother, but they always asked, “What did Grandma Jasper tell you this time?” By the time Jasper was five, she knew not to mention things like tarot cards or crystals or how when you looked into Grandma Jasper’s blue eyes, you could see sunflowers.

“Grandma is crazy, and you’re crazy too,” Jasper’s brother would say. And at twenty-one, sitting next to her death bed with her telling her these prophecies, she started to think he was right. Maybe they were both crazy.

“Your hands don’t work, Jazz? Are you going to write this or not?” Grandma Jasper would say.

“Yes, grandma,” Jasper would say as she took notes in a brown leather-bound journal.

“When the skies go dark, you’ll know it’s time to go south. Stay off the main roads. You’ll find elders that take you in. The mother with all the children will protect you.” She went on for pages and pages, occasionally throwing in things like, “Don’t marry that blonde man, wait for the brunette, he will always love you” and “You are going to have a daughter she is going to be strong like us.”

Jasper took notes, hoping they were some kind of Alzheimers-induced poetry, the last gift to her. When she died, Jasper read them over and over again, sobbing; clutching the heart-shaped locket, she had given her before she passed. It reminded her of the one the female dalmatian puppy had worn in the animated film that came out the year she was born. As she got older, she started to love it for other reasons. Having a relic from Grandma Jasper was like having a part of her, and a decade later, she still wore it on her neck every day. When asked about the picture of the girl inside, she had just told Jasper, “It really could be anybody.”

The night the grid went down, Jasper was in her apartment with her boyfriend, Charles, who is brunette, not blonde. The blackouts had been happening and were supposedly a result of the massive technological upheaval happening around the country. There were conspiracy theories about why this was happening. One theory that Jasper found especially alarming was that they wanted population control and targeted women.

That night felt different. Jasper and Charles were eating shrimp scampi and laughing about a cartoon they had seen in the New Yorker when the lights went out. Jasper was brought out of this moment by the blackness surrounding her, and then she heard Grandma Jasper’s voice in her head, “When the skies go dark, you’ll know it’s time to go south.”

“We have to leave now, Charles.”

“What? Jasper, this has been happening.”

“What if what they say is true? What if this is just the beginning?”

“Ow,” he said as he tripped over a chair on his way to get the flashlight. “Have you been going down those rabbit holes again?”

Even though it was dark, Jasper knew he was rolling his eyes at her. She already had her bag packed under the bed. Her hands shook as she told him, “I am leaving. You can come with me or not.”

“Jazz, please calm down.” Instead, she felt a fiery rage boil up.

“Charles, I am leaving here in ten minutes with or without you.”

“What about gas and work and the fact that this will probably pass by tomorrow, and then you’ll feel crazy.”

Crazy. Jasper hated that word. “Well, you can stay here then,” Jasper said as she dug through the closet to find the journal.

“Okay, okay. Let me pack my bags and promise me you’ll explain this to me in the car.”

“I promise,” she said, already dreading his response.

By the time they were an hour out of New York, she had divulged it all.

“So we are leaving because your senile grandma told you some crazy gibberish on her death bed?”

Why do I have to be attracted to men? Jasper thought. “Yes, Charles. That is why.”

“I trust you, Jazz, I really do, but this just seems…”

“Crazy. Yes. I know.”

Jasper dug through her CDs as Charles shook his head. Finally, she put Led Zeppelin II on the cd player. Whole Lotta Love came on. “I love you, Charles.”

He laughed, “I obviously love you very much, Jazz.”

They drove straight through the night, and by the time they arrived at a hotel in Virginia, too exhausted to make it to South Carolina, they were able to sleep for a few hours, then have coffee and put on the news.

“We regret to inform you that New York is still not back on. The city is under lockdown, and the president has declared a state of emergency. Please do not leave wherever you are. LA, Chicago, and Austin are also reporting a loss of electricity, cellular service, and others issues. The president will be live from DC in a few minutes to …..” the screen went black.

Jasper grabbed the journal, “Stay off the main roads.”

“We have to go now,” she said.

They got in the car, and despite the horror of everything happening and the terror that Jasper felt, she did feel a slight sense of pride around being right, which she immediately dismissed.

They made it down the coast, taking back roads, stopping at old gas stations, getting as much money as they could from small-town ATMs; Jasper was driving, talking incessantly to Charles, who appeared to be in a state of shock.

“Who are the elders? Who are the elders? Charles, help me think.”

“I don’t know. They must be crazy if they knew Grandma Jasper. Or maybe completely enlightened.”

“Yes, that is it! The Singers!” They had lived on the same barrier island as Grandma Jasper; they had gone to meditation retreats together. Betty and Grandma Jasper had raised their children together and even shared the same midwife. Jasper had met them a few times, and she knew that they would take them in.

As they drove down the coastline towards Charleston, Jasper felt a dull pain behind her heart. She clutched the locket in front of her chest. “I can do this,” she thought to herself.

When they arrived, Betty hugged Jasper, and for a moment, it was as if she was holding her own grandmother.

“I knew you would come,” Betty said.

“How did you know?”

“Your grandmother knew everything,” she said. "And then she told everyone everything." They laughed.

“Do you know what’s going on?” Jasper asked.

“Ben is inside listening to the radio. He’ll know.”

Ben was the grandfather that Jasper always longed for. Her mother’s parents were the type of people that could be described as stodgy, but Ben was loving and warm. He had built his house in the 1970s, and it had survived hurricanes, divorce, and other significant losses, as had he. He greeted Jasper with a hug and a smile.

“What is happening?” Jasper asked.

“I don’t really know, Jasper. I have never seen anything like this. The cities are under attack; they are going into people’s homes. They are taking young women.”

“Who are they?” Charles asks.

“No one knows. Cell service is shut down.”

Betty returned with flowers from the garden. “You should go to the compound down the road.”

“What compound?”Jasper asked.

“The Douglases. They have an in with law enforcement,” Betty said.

“And the strongest weed you’ve ever smoked,” Ben added with a laugh.

“What will y’all do?” Jasper asked, surprised by her use of “y’all.”.

“We can’t leave the animals, and we are safe here. Plus, we’re old.”

“Okay.” Jasper immediately felt a sense of relief, trusting them.

When they showed up at the Douglas’s compound, a man greeted them with a rifle and a dip-filled bottom lip that bulged out. “Who are you?” he said.

“I am Jasper, and this is my partner, Charles. The Singers sent us.”

“Come on in. Stay to the right, don’t veer off the road. The swamp will take you under,” he laughed.

The swamp was the least of Jasper’s worries.

He opened the gate, and they drove in. A blonde woman greeted them with an enormous belly, smiling from the front porch. She was drenched in children. They were hanging all over her, one on her hip another climbing up her legs.

When Jasper got out, she hugged the woman.

“I loved your grandmama so much. You know she healed my body. Billy and I couldn’t have babies until then. Now we have six, and there’s another one on the way. You know I barely gotta push. They slide right out, head first like they’re going down the slide at the McDonalds.”

Jasper and Charles stared at her, then at each other.

“You know what’s happening now, don’t you?”

“No,” Jasper said.

“You better come on in and sit down.”

Jasper was worried that Charles, with his Greenwich upbringing, may be shell-shocked by this place, but Jasper knew these were good people and trusted them.

“They’re coming for the women of childbearing age. It’s population control. They don’t want us having no more babies; they wanna control who has them and who doesn’t.”

“How do you know this?” Jasper asked

“I talk to other women; we are on one of the apps where the government cant listen. And we know the cops, politicians; you name them, we know them. They are all smoking our weed. Plus, your grandmama told me she would help me have my babies, and in return, I would help women have theirs. She said you are going to be the leader.”

Jasper felt shocked and relieved. “What should I be doing?”

“Well, there’s an extra bedroom down the hall if yall want to get to it. You’re tracking your cycles, aren’t you, sugar?”

Jasper looked at Charles’s face and winked, then looked at his dropped jaw and couldn’t remember the last time she had seen it closed.

They made love that night, but Jasper couldn’t sleep. She didn’t know what would happen. Still, she could feel in her womb that she was going to play a significant role, and as she clutched the locket around her neck, she heard her grandmother say, “You’re the chosen one, Jazz” and felt a sense of relief from the usual dull pain behind her heart.