Chapter 1

A cool breeze brushed against my face as I stepped outside to begin my morning. Standing in the threshold of my modest abode, I could see every other hut and cabin in our community. About 20 of us divided into 7 cabins total situated in a clearing in the middle of a dense, mostly pine forest.

The first thing on my task list for the day was to chop some firewood. As far as I knew, no one needed it desperately, but I enjoyed doing it all the same as way to clear my mind and warm up my body first thing in the brisk Acadian mornings. Besides, you could never have too much firewood when winter comes. At one end of our little improvised gravel path that ran through the community, there was a rough metal shed which housed our tools. Out of it I grabbed the axe with the red handle (it had the most comfortable grip for my hands, though it was a bit light). After quickly checking its edge, I swung it over my shoulder like a cartoon lumberjack and strolled over to our pile of unsplit logs behind the shed to begin my work.

Chopping wood is an almost mindless task. Of course, you have to be careful not to cut off anyone’s limbs, but once you’re in the rhythm of it, you can let your mind wander. Today I was thinking about why I was where I was, why we all were there. Not in a grand, epistemic sense or anything, just in the material way. What happened is still unclear, and the past months – years? – had left little time to ponder until recently. Those who were supposed to know – experts, leaders, generals – all died or disappeared a long time ago, so most of us were left only with what we knew just before shit hit the fan. Namely, the government had launched some satellite project with China. Nobody knew what it was for, really, however, and nobody knew if it even had anything to do with the collapse. Besides that, there was some level of civil unrest, though information on that was sparse, and also some freak weather from what we could recall. But all it was was speculation. What we did know was that the collapse was a right mess, worse than anyone could’ve known. I personally got the sense that maybe was always headed that way, but then again, what did I know? Looking back on it all, the collapse, and before then even, I always found myself asking one question, How did we get here?

It was at about this point in my thoughts that I was politely interrupted. Tommy popped around the corner of the shed, coffee mug in hand. The steam rose from the cup like an outstretched, ghostly tentacle, gently caressing his chin and slightly fogging his classes.

“Fresh coffee if you want! Erica just brought some back from the city.”

“Grounds or instant?”

“Instant, I think.”

I was always a bit of a coffee snob, back before the collapse. But I don’t live in Colombia, so any coffee there was had to be scavenged from the ruins of grocery stores. Most of the good stuff was taken first. That said, I did miss the bitter drink.

“Sure thing, I’ll be up in a bit.” I set down my axe against the chopping stump, I’d gotten through about twenty or so logs and I was comfortably warmed up for the morning. I threw on my leather jacket and headed back up the gravel path. Our homes were all set up more or less in a sort of oval shape, with a large fire pit right in the middle where we did most of our cooking during the spring and summer months. There I found Erica pouring coffee for the rest of us out of an old, beat up French press.

“Serving instant coffee out of a French press?” I asked. Erica looked at me funny.

“Isn’t that what the French press is for?” At this point I noticed the plunger was off to the side on the ground, unused.

“Nevermind,” I said with a chuckle, “remind me to teach you how to make real coffee one day.” I picked up one of the mugs she had laid out. The one I took had a picture of the Eiffel Tower, and a nighttime scene of Paris with the streetlights all lit up. The image was so worn you could barely tell what it was, but for the distinctive shape of the tower.

Others slowly got up and came outside their cabins to the smell of hot coffee, and soon about half of us were sitting around the fire on old porch chairs, milk crates and logs. Erica happily made pot after pot of instant coffee, seeming to take pleasure in the sleepy smiles and genuine thanks as she handed each person their cup of brown joy. Kendra and Dave were like me, coffee snobs in a previous life. They sat down next to me and we talked about how things used to be. It’s funny, looking back, we decided. We so loved our coffee in our old lives, and never wanted for it in quantity or quality, yet we never appreciated it like now, even as coffee snobs. What’s more, what little enjoyment we did reap from it was mostly overwritten by the fact that we were more focused on the job it fueled us past our natural capacity to do. Isn’t that funny?

The bag Erica had found was fairly large, but with seventeen adults in our little group, we just about ran through it that morning. Still, as I looked around the fire, I knew she had done well by us.

Downing the last swig of coffee from the Paris mug, I set out to go back to chopping wood, and back to my thoughts. I spent probably the next hour or so swinging the axe, making a fairly large dent in the log pile. I stacked all the fresh split wood on a pallet and covered it with a tarp. Hopefully, we wouldn’t need to touch it this year and we could let it season for next winter, or even the next.

As I set down the axe in the shed, I heard the scraping of a saw on wood coming from just behind the tree line, that would be Sean and James, probably, sawing up logs from a tree they felled. Christie was busy working on a way to rig up some solar electricity for the community to power an electric chainsaw and some other items we salvaged, but until then we were stuck using a large, two-person saw. If I squinted, I could see into the trees, the two brothers pushing and pulling on the saw, going back and forth like one of Newton’s cradles.