“Ok, they’re comin’ up the right.”

“Got ‘em.”

“Hey! Nice shootin’!”

“Thank you, thank you.”

“Send the kids out to grab ‘em.”

“Will do.”

Sheila listened, mounting curiosity mixed with mounting fury in a kind of sick ice cream sundae of negative emotion. Who were these people, and who were these people to be so loud? A shudder ran down her spine and she resumed her efforts. Her knives would be clean when they came for her, that much she could promise anyone who cared to ask.

Who were they? From the radio all she could tell was that they received something, saw something, and shot something. Also that they had kids, presumably children since baby goats were not typically good at grabbing things in a manner consistent with human expectation. She knew, she’d tried to use hers as retrievers and had instead simply fed them too much for a while. She knew they had a ‘back’ and they said things like ‘thank you’. All of which added up to one thing: a threat. And she’d be damned if she wasn’t going to be ready.

She took a sip of mint tea. Mint grew wild on the hill between their house and the Hermit’s… Winnebago… and she’d grabbed some on her way home, intending to save it for some other time. But that was only because she hadn’t expected this, and she felt justified that of all the days this was the one on which she needed its soothing power.

“Kids are out.”

“I see ‘em.” A woman broke in.

“Darryl if anything happens to-“

“We know, Marge, get off the line.”

“Don’t you tell me what to do, Bo, I-“

“Quiet! I think…” There was a pause.

Sheila realized she was leaning over, her head close to the radio and her ears straining, She looked around, making sure no one could see her. There was, as usual, no one there, and she lifted her head and settled herself, like how when a cat runs across a room and slams into a door it walks off as though nothing ever happened. Sheila, however, was not a cat, the radio was not a door, and something was happening. Or at least, one of the voices seemed to feel something was happening. Unless thought was something that deserved a moment of silence, because that’s what Sheila was getting now. She reached out and turned the volume up, not thinking about how less than an hour before the mere thought of sound coming from it had made her slam it to the ground. Nothing happened.

Normally, Sheila’s patience would have ended there. Her knives were clean, the mint tea was cooling, and her itch to move was strong and getting stronger. Her chores were done but there were still things to do. The stuff she’d brought back from Rob McKenna, radio not included, still sat in a bag by the door and needed to be gone through. A rooster could probably be killed. The cow(s) needed checking in on, at least until it calved. But here she sat, transfixed, waiting for her stories to continue. It made her feel old.

“What is it?!” the woman broke back in, a raised tension in her voice unexplained by the communication gap. Sheila imagined a flurry of activity on the other end, something she couldn’t see driving emotion in a nonverbal way. “Bo?!” No answer. Sheila redoubled her efforts on the knives, ready for them to come bursting in the door any second. “Answer me!”

“Marge, get off the radio-“ a crack reverberated into Sheila’s skull bones, coming from somewhere distant within the world of the radio and shimmying across electromagnetic waves and then through the radio’s tinny speakers and up Sheila’s ear canals. Then the radio went silent.

She sat in her chair, absently running a rag up and down the length of a bowie knife she’d taken from the body of a trucker, dead in her cab on the side of the road, and waited for more story. It didn’t come. After a moment she put the knife down and picked the radio up. She tapped it, blew on the buttons, fiddled with the antenna- all the things one does when one does not know how to fix a radio- and still nothing happened. She looked at the power button: down. She looked at the power light: on. She searched for some indication that neither of those was a lie and couldn’t find it, but then that’s a normal problem to have with a device like that, and it didn’t sway her at all to find nothing. She finally simply accepted that the show was over, set the noise box down, stood, and stretched.

Her shoulders popped and she winced. Her back hurt, and in the same way one eventually realizes they’ve eaten all the candy in one sitting, it occurred to her that she’d been sitting in the same hunched position during at least two hours of stressful entertainment. She felt like a gargoyle springing to life, ready to defend the city against vampires if someone would just give her a stiff foam roller and fifteen minutes. She had the latter, but the former would have to wait for the next round of society and so she went instead to the counter and leaned against it, lowering herself slowly as the pieces of her spine snapped back into their evolutionarily assigned places.

She leaned, with her back braced, and stared at the silent radio. Several portents now occurred to her, as the blood which had previously been constricted by her ogre hunch now flowed freely to her brain. The first, obviously, was that this was bad; that society had returned and it had kids and noise and mothers screaming and people named Bo and sharp cracks where everything went silent. The second, just as obvious, was: was it? Truth be told it might be nice to have someone named Marge to talk to and someone named Bo or Darryl to gossip about. She found herself wandering, wondering if either of them had a limp or terrible teeth, and tried to snap herself back onto the path of process. She considered again her mental bulleted list, ticking off the items as they floated across the conveyor belt of thought, until her back started to hurt. She moved, picked up her tea, took a sip, realized it was cold, and drained the last of it in one huge gulp. Not much I can do anyway, she thought, taking the cup to the sink and rinsing it. They could be anywhere. And there’s Steve.

She hung the cup back on its little hookstand and realized the sun was starting to set. Connecting her thoughts she found it interesting that Steve was not home yet and considered worrying about him, briefly, before changing her mind and deciding to focus more seriously on what they might have for dinner. The meal, which she must have skipped or rushed a thousand times in her life, had taken on an outsized importance as she’d settled into the new version of everything, a pocket of normality bolstered by function and millennia of form. She walked outside, carrying the radio in one hand like a particularly useless briefcase.

The goat hung on a hook outside, draining and surrounded by a plastic cylinder made out of kiddie pools. She popped the makeshift closure and the door flipped open. Inside, the smell would probably have overwhelmed her if she hadn’t gotten used to it. It was a rolling wave of death, scented with iron and bile, and she stepped through it like a runway model on her way to the turn.

She grabbed one of the former creature’s legs, shook it, waited for anything which had previously defied gravity to shake loose, was appointed by its absence, and let go.

The blood had drained into a huge plastic tub. It was now full, or nearly so, and she marveled again- she marveled every time- at how much liquid was inside of a goat while it was outside running around. She’d been rammed by them before and there wasn’t a whole lot of give. For anyone who’d spent any time at all on a waterbed the comparison was discordant at the very least. She squatted down, grabbed one of the rope handles, and pulled very, very slowly. The key, she’d learned through countless repetitions of this action, was to be smooth. The most overfilled container would stay that way as long as you minimized disturbance, and she’d become a master. A continuous quarter of an inch at a time she moved the washtub out from under the goat, freeing up space for the carrying container she planned to cut the goat down into.

Slow, smooth pulls, with good traction and an engaged core, moved the tub to its destination. The surface barely rippled. She wondered, briefly, how much the bucket weighed- it wasn’t light, and in immediate confirmation sweat beaded up on her forehead and ran down into her eyes. It stung but it was nothing she wasn’t used to.

The radio squawked, Sheila flinched, and blood went everywhere.