I don’t like the word riot. But you know, folks were upset. And maybe folks had been... upset a few times already in a couple different places. If I was to be fair, I might have to say a couple of those places had been upset enough to be a teeny bit on fire. I don’t have a right to judge and don’t intend to.

Outside of Memphis, we didn’t see much of that sort of thing. We had other problems, and chiefly our main one was the issue of migration. People were moving and in big numbers – for some of the reasons I’ve mentioned, and for a whole host of other causes. They’d been coming from two different directions at once: from the cities which were overburdened, and the small towns of the wide countryside which our roads could no longer afford to service. Both sides collapsed on the middle country, on river country, and they came with two (let me tell you) widely different points of view.

The government was thankfully helping folks move. At first we’d had some measure of our neighbors leave us, looking for opportunities. In particular, I know anyone who understood or worked computers was being paid a king’s ransom to ship out towards the west coast in special convoys. Plus we had all those middle level professionals who’d lost jobs… Anyway, after that short shrinking, folks started flooding into our sub-division in numbers so big they were sharing two to three families a house.

My mother changed jobs to be a part of city planning: they called her a data entry engineer. At dinner she would always be talking about sanitation or water planning, or the trouble of running new wire. Our town was a reflection of mom’s spreadsheets, with daily construction like crazy, workers digging up the dirt and streets by hand everywhere. Meanwhile if you went east outside town, we were plowing up fields like mad to grow food nearby. The need was so great, city council opened up the jails and put both the convicted and accused to work. Oh Lady, that was a controversy, there. Even so, with as many bodies as we were turning to the task, it was never fast enough.

In September, Leilung gave us our first lucky break. We’d thought he’d take the course piggybacking along the Caribbean and on his way to Florida: that was the fortune being told on every channel after Recife. Instead, he held to the continent until he reached the mouth of the great Amazon River, the biggest in the whole world. It could’ve been, that slippery ’lectric veck was hurt, as word was that he wasn’t flying much. Course, it could just likely have been he’d gotten sick of our submarines because I heard that too. For whatever reason, he chose to swim inland up that waterway and disappeared. The last we saw of it was captured in Santarém by some foolhardy soul with a cell-phone. Grainy, and shaking, the video only showed its passing as a great hump of river water, rolling against the current and lit beneath by an eerie glow.

My eyes were red from crying that November. After Beijing, I think everyone was a mess. We didn’t have much good news, really. The titan was dodging the Pacific fleet like a deadbeat dodging an injunction. The fiend was rampant and amok like a whack-a-mole, and the Navigator had just shown his face (on prime-time, high-definition) in some loony-toon caper to kidnap the Emperor of Japan. But here in the States, our worry was still most reserved for the dragon, and the murmurs he’d now reemerged from the deep forests of Columbia.

It was late evening in the harsh yellow lamplight of the corner fuel station. All the gas pumps were long since shut off; instead the overhead canopy had been stacked across-top with government solar panels. From the roof, tangles of wires ran down to a man-size rubber obelisk and then along from there to separate metered junction cables. That was where we paid to refill our batteries. It was a late hour to be charging, as the station was swapping over to reserve, so there weren’t many other neighbors with me. Sometimes we talked, sometimes we didn’t. Our family’s phones were plugged into the station and drawing down amperes, so I sat alone on a curb with my mom’s work computer in my lap. This new kind was portable and folded in half like a book; it even talked to the internet through an antenna, no wires needed.

I kept the glow turned bright and the sound turned low. It was easy sometimes to lose yourself for hours, trying to make connections with friends and strangers indirectly. We shared things like news and gossip, posting to one another in places where we knew our parents would never see. I clicked a video closed with a scramble. It had showed me nothing but the shaking of deep rainforest, a lemon incandescent sky, and a warbling roar so tremendous if overflowed the audio channels. I could not bear the screeching static, and once I’d shut it I apologized aloud to no one in particular. Then I turned back to the machine for my comfort.

Choosing to pass over the flooding of Singapore, I moved to select the next weblink instead. Then the tyrant appeared on my screen in all her glittering elegance. Her voice was my anchor. Her laugh was my oasis. As she applied her thousand-shade-heartache eyeshadow, I drank up her gentle advice about color blending and her biography of Cyrus of the Achaemenids: the man who defied the Medians and built his empire half-and-half out from love and the sword. Then it was over and the bright winked out. So I scrolled backwards through history to rewatch her appearances again. And again. Until I didn’t feel like crying and it was time to go home.

That was the night I got robbed. Just on my way walking home, just by some random guy. He stole our phones and mom’s computer, even though they’d trusted me to keep our things safe. I… I, ah...

Anyways it’s not like it matters now. The cops caught him, and while he’d sold our phones, we got the computer back. Then they took the man to a tree by city hall and hanged him from it.

I wish – I don’t know. I just wish they hadn’t’ve did that.

By the end of November, we’d counted the results of the election and surprised ourselves. Against all expectation, and the smugness of our leadership, we’d voted out the aldermen, half the judges, the assessor, and both our state and capitol congress-men.

Mom and dad had a small neighborhood dinner to celebrate. It was nice. We brought out the nice candles and the cheap brandy. I guess we were glad to be reminded there was a limit to our appetite for meanness. Dad did have to take a new job, on account of his talking politics while on his route at the corps. But I think he and Mom decided it was an fair price to pay for having done some good.

That feeling of normal, that space where problems were solvable, where the rules made sense, we hung on to that as long as we could.

The Second Bitter Winter probably started in my reckoning with that first early cold snap. It came in middle December, maybe? All those lawns we’d torn up in Summer to make way for vegetable gardens got hit hard by a sudden and enduring frost. The sprouts, the arugula, I think even the leeks took a beating. It mightn’t have been so bad, except one of the regional canners had contaminated a season’s worth of bottles. Pickles, preserves, marmalades, all manner of things we should have been able to rely on were riddled through with mold, and botulism too.