If anything, Sheila hated the sunrise. It was always just… there. It never stopped, even when it was dark. Consider the spheroid nature of the Earth and the on-the-ground functional infinite measurement of its circumference. The sheer geometry was too much for her some days and she considered taking a rifle out for potshots at unknown targets in the distance as a measure of protest. It was Wednesday, after all, and, like almost all the rest of them before, a day she had woken up for. But there were chores to be done, and if her life had taught her anything of note it was that for as long as she could consider days there would be another one in, at maximum, twenty-four hours no matter what she did.
When she heard Steve’s truck stop revving and return to normal operation, she went back inside the house, making notes in her mind of its general status- roof seemed to be in good condition, the pipes were properly wrapped, the boards on the windows were secure. Crossing the threshold she walked into the kitchen and checked the trash barrels. One was full, so she’d be making a trip to the edge of the property today. Food for the Hermit added itself to her mental checklist and she passed through into the dry room to check on the laundry.
You still have to do all the normal things. We believe that’s understated. No matter what happens in the world at large, or to you in a vacuum, all the shit you don’t actually want to do but do anyway probably needs to get done and it’s probably you that has to do it. Reams of display- whether entertainment or otherwise- seem to gloss over the reality of this, that the reason it got done at all was not necessarily because everything was perfect but because more than anything it needed actual doing. It wasn’t important because it was normal. It was normal because it was important.
A wave of air like sandpaper ground Sheila’s eyes to the lens as she opened the door to the dry room. Then the seal, an Amazon purchase that had functioned well beyond its 3.7 star (424) rating, slurped back into itself as she closed the door behind her and stood in the center of the room, dreaming of becoming a scarecrow. After a few minutes, having not transmogrified, she let out a hmph and shifted her gaze to the shelves that lined the room and were her purpose.
Everything was dry. A solid start to the day, even if it had been the same as many previous ones. One comfort Sheila did find in repetition was that it was repetition within, but not succumbing to, catastrophe, which is the sort of PTSD response that’ll manifest itself after you’ve been through enough. The drying racks, off the ground and at chest height on special shelves designed to collect runoff for inspection and disposal, were holding their weight. A positive sign- she hadn’t trusted them- and she started pulling pieces of clothing off one by one and folding them neatly before shelving them behind a plastic tarp in an alcove in the corner. Chore One: done.
She slurped back through the door seal. Time for Chore Two, which she didn’t particularly enjoy but, as with all chores, had to be done. A pair of boots beside the door accepted her already-shod feet- the benefit of being a smallish person in a world which had once held some very large ones- and she exited the house to a squelch of mud and a watery re-confrontation with the accursed rising sun. A short trudge to the barn brought her into eye-contact range with the mother cow, but as usual she didn’t know which of its heads to look at so avoided them altogether while she collected the feed in a bucket, walked over, and poured it into separate troughs. She stroked the head of the one in front of her- they were easier to deal with up close, in frame as it were- and glanced across its neck to the subdivision behind. Still a few weeks from the split, she thought, and she trudged back to the feed silo to get another bucket’s worth.
Cow fed, she grabbed a basket from the hutch inside the sliding door and turned her attention to the laying shed. Gentle clucking belied the horror inside, and Sheila, farmer though she was, decided that today was not going to be the kind of day where she investigated that. She scanned the exterior for signs of predators, found none, and then collected the eggs from the laying box. Good enough. Only one had fallen out, which was good, but the sheer volume that remained made her think for the thousandth time that she and Steve needed to find a way to divert some of them during the laying process. One box was never meant to catch so many at once. She took them inside, placed them on the counter in the kitchen, and looked again at the garbage.
If we were to fast forward your life, what would it look like? Does Sheila’s day appeal to you, with its casual drudgery and monotonous conveyer belt of mandatory tasking? Us too, in a way. There will always be an appeal to mindless repetition, given that the mind will wander whither it will on occasion. But consider a lifetime of this. Consider what becomes of you when you’ve finished the morning chores and have to shift to the afternoon ones, or the evening ones. The challenge of such a life, which is neither insurmountable nor wholly odious, is finding the moments of glorious differentiation and capitalizing on them each and every time. We feel the need for nearly one hundred percent efficiency with those moments is required, and we consider it not only possible but probable that the forced repetition and mindlessness of the other 1,437 minutes of the day are what allow for that kind of maximized opportunism. It is because the mind wanders that it is capable of seeing.
Still, a wandering mind is not a particularly reactive mind when a mindless task becomes mindful. When the axe decides, and it does decide, that today is the day to slip a wandering mind may miss it and then later the foot to which it had once been attached. We wonder at that, whether the distractions born of mindlessness are somehow more evil than the distractions born of themselves- whether it is worse to fall victim to your own failures or those driven by outside forces and intruding in. It seems likely that those confronted continuously by outside forces are more likely to notice the axe’s truculence and accordingly adjust. They are, after all, attuned to the pique of life.
Sheila leaned on top of the trash in the bin, finding islands of Less Gross to use as push points as she forced it further down into the barrel, then pulled the strings up and tied it off. She washed her hands, dried them, and gave a yank to the tied strings. They pulled at the edges of the bag and tried to rip themselves free. She noticed it just in time and let off, then reached down into the sides of the bin to help it along. With her face next to the week’s refuse, she wondered why she’d wasted her time washing her hands when she should have known all along this was going to be a part of things. She hugged the back and pulled up. The bag slid free and she transferred the weight of it onto the strings in her left hand. One of them popped. She set the bag down, sighed, and washed her hands again.
The hermit’s name was Rob McKenna. He knew how to fix things but not feed himself, and as Sheila cleaned herself up and collected the assortment of food she planned to give him she wondered at that. When the arrangement had first settled itself upon the occupants she’d chafed, wondering how it was suddenly their job to make sure Rob McKenna didn’t die of starvation, how that was her new normal. But over time, she came to see the codependency as a way to celebrate the old world without being maudlin about it and stopped having quite as much of a problem with giving away actual resources to a person who was only useful when something broke. After all, that’s the only time you need someone to be useful. So she gathered food- mostly eggs, because he seemed to like those and it honestly relieved a burden on them anyway- and took it to him when she went to the garbage cliff, and struggled home with anything he’d fixed in the meantime. Sometimes he fixed things that weren’t even theirs, and those were often good and useful days.
Away with me, she thought. The bag was tied, the animals were fed, the laundry was folded and dry. Time to go see what the old bastard had managed to rig up this time. She slipped a backpack on her shoulders, a knife into her waistband, and her feet into her giant overboots, grabbed the bag in one hand and the basket of eggs in the other, and pushed out the door and through the muck.
