A New Home

“Find the woman wearing a heart-shaped locket and she is the key to your survival. With her you will help build a new world.”

My great-grandmother believed in prophecy and I listened to her stories. My parents and grandparents were firmly grounded in the literal, all being scientists, and only believed in the observable. Prophecy was voodoo and mumbo-jumbo from my Mamaw who lived in New Orleans, but I loved the stories she would feed me every summer.

My parents shipped my brother, sister, and me to New Orleans every summer. I loved Mamaw’s stories even when they sometimes gave me nightmares. I would see people in my room in the lightning flashes during thunderstorms that never actually occurred. But that happened to me always, not just when I was visiting. I told Mamaw about them too.

“Those aren’t people here now, child, they are from the future. They will not hurt you, they protect you. You have the gift of second sight into other worlds. You are interstitial.” I had to look up interstitial in the dictionary in Grandaddy's office library.

My Grandmama Anne, my father’s mother, was a psychiatrist, and she said her mother’s stories were scaring me when I kept waking up with nightmares. Mamaw wasn’t allowed to watch me anymore the summer I turned nine, when her visions became clearer and I was not yet wise enough to keep quiet about them. I would sneak into Mamaw’s room while my Grandma Anne lost track of me, while she was busy with clients, tutoring my brother, or teaching my sister to cook, and Mamaw would tell me her stories.

Mamaw would give me sweet mint tea and double chocolate Milano cookies. We would sit in the sunroom attached to her bedroom and she would tell me stories of her life as an opera singer traveling the world. She would also tell me her visions of the future.

“Listen, child,” Mamaw would tell me, “I have dreams of the future, your future, your new home, and you best heed my visions.”

“But Mamaw, aren’t the visions for you?”

“I’m not in them, Alma, not as myself, but you are. I’m long gone, but I will be right beside you in a way.”

“You mean dead? Will you be a ghost, Mamaw?”

“Yes, we all die, but I won’t be a ghost. Many people come back in a different body and this is what I see, what happens in my next life.”

“And you know me in your next life?”

“I will be close to you, but I will be a boy.” Her face is smooth and tight, not wrinkled like many older people. Her green-gray eyes, which were passed on to me, are sharp, yet dreamy at the same time. My mother says Mamaw is very enigmatic. I had to look that word up in the dictionary too.

“I’ve had a good life. I’m ready to go at any time, but not before I pass my wisdom to my great granddaughters,” Mamaw told me.

So I thought she was telling stories of the future to my sister Julia too. I made a mistake telling my older sister about Mamaw’s visions of New Orleans flooding in a big hurricane and wars that will change everything in the world and in America. Julia told my grandmother that Mamaw was putting scary nonsense into my head and they forbid me to see her. Maybe Julia was jealous, because my Mamaw had something special with me that she didn’t have with her. Then I was sent to my stern Aunt Vera’s house as punishment for the rest of that summer in New Orleans, and made to go to church almost every day it seemed. I still had nightmares with people in my room.

At the end of the summer, we returned to our parents in Chicago and went back to school. I never forgot the stories my Mamaw told me. That summer I turned nine was the last time I saw her.

Over a decade later, when the war started and New Orleans was permanently flooded in a hurricane, I called my mother frantically saying Mamaw was right. I admitted that Mamaw said Jude, my brother, would not survive the war and neither would she and my dad. When my brother was killed as my Mamaw predicted, my mother finally believed me and sent for me from college in California. I stalled, telling her they needed to come to me instead, and Chicago was not safe. She would not listen and neither would my dad. Then the bomb was dropped and my estranged sister and I were the only family left, safe in California, which became its own country of Pacifica with Oregon and Washington.

I mourned the loss of my family along with so many, then the plague began and took my very religious sister. She didn’t believe in wearing a mask to protect her. God's will would save her. I brought her back to Berkeley with me in an urn and scattered her ashes in San Francisco Bay by the Golden Gate Bridge. Mamaw never saw that coming though.

The plague ravaged the world and the people left in it after the big war. There are still battles over water and fuel, but I am lucky. I have my little house in Berkeley on an acre which I inherited from my brother, who luckily had a will. It is fully sustainable with solar panels, a windmill, and a small desalinator which creates fresh water. My older brother was very progressive and open-minded, always listening without making fun of me when I talked about Mamaw’s visions.

I hide behind my tall fence with its alarm system and two big dogs to protect us. I live with my boyfriend from college, Jack, and his little brother Caleb. We have guns and know how to use them. We pray that militias don’t steal our compound and kill us.

Caleb was visiting Jack when the bombs were dropped on his parents in Michigan. The state had split and the Dominionists got their hands on a dirty bomb and dropped it on Detroit, a progressive city.

Jack and Caleb’s parents lived in Detroit and Jack assumes they are dead like my parents are. Like with Chicago, the bombs were dropped by the Dominionists who tried to seize power and broke up the United States in a civil war during World War 3. We are all orphans among too many. We can’t dwell on it to survive.

We farm the two acres and raise pigs for meat and hope for the best. The climate is improving now that the paradigm has shifted and no heavy industry is happening. What was once the United States is now a broken up dystopia. The eastern part of the country is in a nuclear winter and most coastal cities are underwater from the rising sea. The heartland is a wasteland from war and is another Dust Bowl. The west is broken up into states still warring with each other and marauding militias that mostly threaten my current situation. It’s only the three of us to defend our homestead.

There is no more television where we are and no wifi since the satellites were shot down. There is only citizen’s band radio and regular radio. Lately there’s been a radio show rallying people to meet in a town on the Oregon Coast to build a new society based on sustainability and cooperation. No money will be used there, only credits earned for trade. Businesses are owned by their employees and no one works in anything they do not enjoy. The woman, Eve Tenneman, who hosts these shows, talks with people with ideas on how to build a new sustainable society that does not use the neo-feudal model of the last patriarchal paradigm.

Eve Tenneman is young, Caleb’s age, and very charismatic. They came of age in the wars and they don’t ascribe to the ways of the old paradigm. They only know chaos and stories of how it used to be. They have the capacity to imagine a better world.

When a militia comes and threatens us, they give us three days to vacate the house, or else. They have a rocket launcher and it’s loaded, ready to blow us up if we don’t give them the homestead. I am used to impermanence and we pack up what we need for the road and hope they don’t kill us.

“Where will we go?” Jack asks me, “If they let us go.”

“We will head north, to Florence, Oregon. I am interested in the town that Eve Tenneman is building. I think she’s the one my Mamaw had visions about.”

“You are staking our lives on your great-grandmother’s visions?” Jack is exasperated. Caleb looks on with big eyes. He’s afraid. We are all terrified. We jump as the voice of the militia leader bellows on his bullhorn that it is our last day.

“Yep, you betcha, have any other ideas?” I say, eating the last of our pork for breakfast. We decided to slaughter the pigs and make jerky in our food dehydrator for the road, then eat the rest rather than give them to the militia.

“It’s winter, it’s not the best time to go north,” Jake warns.

“We will travel as far as we can go with the car we are going to get in my brother’s storage, then we will have to ditch it when it’s out of fuel. If we can’t find an electric recharger, we go on foot, hitching rides if we can.”

“You sound so optimistic,” Jack says cynically.

“It’s the only choice we have,” says Caleb. I've got my bets on Mamaw.”

I smile at Caleb and pat his shoulder. Caleb has always been riveted by my stories of Mamaw’s visions. I love Caleb like my own brother. There is something familiar about him. His birthday is the same as the day my Mamaw died. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I feel her presence in him. Caleb has the same sharp, yet dreamy look even though his eyes are blue, not green like my Mamaw’s were. Windows to the soul and she said she would be present with me, but as a boy. I believe in reincarnation.

The militia let’s us leave even though one of the girls wants Caleb and we worry they won’t let him go, but she relents when another male in the militia vies to claim her. The militias all seem patriarchal. It’s disappointing that the future seems to appear to be reorganizing in the same tribal ways of the age before us. It’s sad.

We walk to the storage building and get my brother's Hummer that can run on fuel or electricity. It’s fully charged and full of fuel. My brother was a prepper and was fully prepared for an American dystopia. We stock the vehicle with provisions also in the storage unit. Jude also left about a thousand dollars in cash. My brilliant older brother, who owned mixed martial arts gyms, had a backup plan.

We drive the I-580 across the bay and pay a $50 toll to cross the bridge, then another $50 to be allowed to continue north on Highway 101.

We make it to Crescent City on bribes then have to barter the Hummer for our lives. We go on foot for several days until we get a ride to Florence with other people who heard the call.

We arrived in Florence broke and hungry a month after leaving Berkeley. We are welcomed by a group of people and a beautiful girl greets us with a tattoo around her neck of a heart-shaped locket on a chain of infinity symbols. For Caleb and Eve, it’s love at first sight. Mamaw was right and we have found a New Home, which is what Eve Tenneman has just renamed the city.