Restart

The world only took so long to make the first time. After that, whatever or whoever made it must have gotten much better because it started getting real fast. Pretty soon, it only took a night. It was on Wednesday, before that night, that Papa and I found out it was going to happen again, from the radio, in a station that was partly static and partly an Ella Fitzgerald song. Neither was loud as the crickets, and I had to turn it up to properly here. There’s also the wind to contend with in the pickup. The pickup truck is a monster, like no one had told the manufacturer that people and not elephants were going to drive it. The steering wheel, which is people-sized, looks a little like a mistake when you first glance at it. The wheels are frightful things to get close to, like an angry cow or a frightened horse, when your face gets right up close to theirs. I like being on the inside of it.

Which is where I was. I was carrying one of Mama’s baking dishes, filled with lemon squares meant for the church bake sale. They looked prettier than the sort of things one could find at bake sales, with pretty lace patterns of icing sugar dusted on top. There were two chocolate honey cakes in the back as well, but they required less looking after than the gooey lemon squares. It was getting close to suppertime and it was becoming harder and harder to hold the squares in my lap without looking at them. It was that bit of sunset where pale green light rises over the horizon, so thin it could be a trick of the eye. The sun had just gone down, and the radio had just started behaving. Papa asked for the evening news, so I changed to the one channel that played the news in this area. Most of the time, unless you were too close to the mountain range, it was reliable. One of the news anchors was speaking with a voice that sounded like it had retired, even if its owner hadn’t. He passed the discussion to someone else, someone in a windier place that started talking about a drought, before it was passed back to him and he told us, “It’s an ongoing investigation, but a consensus has been reached, and tomorrow will be a re-start. Tomorrow the world will be re-started, just so you know. You may experience longer than usual delay as it catches up to speed again.”

I could only remember two re-start days before this one, and one of them seemed half a memory and half a dream. I wanted to see what Papa had to say, but he’d gone quiet for a moment, listening to the knews. This was how Papa learned: silence. Mama learned from noise, from moving, and sometimes it drove her up the walls when Papa just let things be. Papa turned on the windshielf wipers of the pickup for a moment to get rid of the fly. The pickup slowed down a little, and as it did, the crickets got louder, more wanting for attention, and the wind gave it to them. Eventually, Papa seemed to have learned all he could from the quiet, because he told me, “Find out if your mother’s at home, Chickadee.”

I haven’t been able to make the proper chickadee sound that real chickadee birds make in a long while, but people around here take to a nickname so well it’s like it’s been sitting on their tongues their entire lives, waiting for you. I’ve never wanted to shake it loose, but it’s hard often to remember my real name, not that I want to. No one but the doctor has used it in all of the years I can remember. You could as well shout flycatcher or wren across the grass and I would respond to it more quickly. It isn’t anyone else’s fault that I was named wrong in the first place, and my parents and I have put that transgression behind us. I start to look for the phone.

Papa talks and drives at the same time. He can’t multitask, but he says that he wouldn’t need to anyway. Parts of him are doing different tasks at once. He holds the ear up near his head, and clamps it between his ear and his shoulder when he needs to shift gears. Eventually, I put my hand on the gearshift, so all he has to do is hold down the clutch and give a signal. “Things are never exactly the way they were before,” he said. “Every time it’s a little different, no matter how caught up the world is. You planted tomatoes today. Will they be there tomorrow? I think all this re-starting is causing the problems that make us re-start.”

“It’s a circle, then?” Mama said. Her voice was filled with more static than the radio, but Papa had turned up the volume to make it clearer. I don’t think that is how to make it clear, but it helped. “It would be useless to do the washing, then. Sometimes the clothes go missing. I’m going to count how much we have in the biscuit tin. Last time we lost a few dollars in the re-start. I could start that book Lily leant me.”

“There’s not much else to do,” Papa said. “Is dinner still being cooked or are we counting potatoes, too?”

“I think dinner can still be made. Did you drop off the lemon squares yet?” Mama asked. Papa made a noise. Mama, through long exposure, is not as annoyed with these noises as most other folk are. She isn’t charmed, either. It’s as though he actually has spoken. “You were supposed to. I hope you do it before coming home. I hope the pastor is still at the church at this hour to take it.”

“I’ll leave it on the altar,” Papa said. I could not tell if he was joking or not. I’d asked Mama at one time or other and she said Papa was being disagreeable, because he believed in God but sometimes got testy with his ways. Then she’d told Papa that if he blasphemed around me she would clean his mouth out with soap. I’ve seen her do it to Sonny, and when you see soapsuds on another person’s teeth and getting snorted out of their nose it is really enough to put you off cussing or blasphemy. At least in front of Mama.

“It won’t hold overnight unless it’s in a fridge. You’ll have to give it to his wife. Their house is on the other side of the bridge,” Mama said. “But check the church first.”

“Or they can pick it up in the church tomorrow morning,” Papa said. It wasn’t that late after all, but I suppose the pastor and his wife had dinner at the same time as everyone else. I thought it might be worse to interrupt the Daniels’ at dinner than to leave the lemon squares to get more larval in the church overnight, but not according to Mama. Papa was looking unhappy to have the phone in one hand when it could be on the steering wheel. He and phones didn’t get along, even less than he and words. “We’ll be home either soon or later.”

Papa gave me the phone, and I tucked it into the seat between us. It was silent again, but there was nothing to learn. Just the crickets screaming madly outside. Papa was grinding himself up, fingers getting antsy and knee jittering like the engine. I could feel the shaking bowls of the pickup truck under my feet. The green line was almost gone from the sunset, and now pink and purple light was tripping over the clouds. There was something like reverse god fingers in the mountains, the last of the light. The light turned rosier, and Papa’s knuckles with it. When they were easy on the steering, Papa steered the pickup toward the fence. It wasn’t much of a fence, designed to keep local children from wandering off onto other people’s property. The people didn’t think much of the local children if they thought chain link was enough. Papa cruised right next to it and stopped. The headlights were too bright for the duskiness. Midges and wheat dust bobbed in their light.

“What are you doing?” I asked. The lemon squares in my lap still looked delicious but the saran wrap had treated the icing sugar patterns unkindly. Everything was just smudged sugar and lemon now.

Papa nudged the door open and dropped. I waited for the drop to finish. He walked around the front of the truck, toward my door. I struggled to open the finicky latch with only one hand, because the other was busy making sure the dish didn’t fall off my hot, jittery legs.

I went to put the squares down but Papa shook his head. He didn’t look to be in a question-answering mood, so I didn’t ask any. I just took his hand to jump down and shook the pins and needles out of my feet. We walked along beside the fence for a few minutes before Papa found a spot that was mostly green. Everywhere around the wheat looked purple and blue. The fence had gone up only a year ago and people planted thing right along its edge. Easily grown wildflowers and brambles. I grabbed a couple overripe raspberries and shared them with Papa. Our hands were purple and sticky. Papa and I looked ahead, toward the church and the pastor’s house. He was right about the re-start. A while ago, there was lattice trim on the windows of the house beside the church, and now it was gone, like it had never been there. I did not mind so much. There was a lot going into the world now. Nothing and no one could keep track of every little thing that needed to come back and grow in the time it took to get the world up and working again.

“Open ‘em up,” Papa said.

“What?”

Papa pointed at the lemon squares.

I gaped. “What?”

“Are you looking to catch midges, Chickadee?”

I shut my mouth quickly. I’d had enough of midges this summer. “Mama said it was for church.”

“Well, tomorrow, if the world has restarted, there isn’t much for her to do except make it a second time,” Papa said. We pried the saran wrap from the squares and took one for himself. The air smelled like summer and sugar instantly. Papa gave me a lemony smile and then I was a thief as well. We ate the lemon squares as best we could, though mama had only half cut them. There was nowhere to wipe our sticky hands but the grass. There was nowhere to put the squares but our stomach.

When we could eat no more, Papa stood up. He peered through one of the diamonds of the chain link fence as if it were a keyhole, and out into the field. It was almost twilight. All the shades of blue were conspiring to turn the rest of the world into black shadows. Papa stood up and took the lemon square dish. “I think if the world is re-started,” Papa said, “Something will just have to make sure that one of those changes it makes is a lemon tree. Right in our backyard, hm?”

I reckoned it was the best sort of thing that could come out of a re-start. We went back to the pick up and Papa helped hoist me up into my seat. The crickets had been chirping so high and long that it was like the roar of water. Who could tell one cricket apart from another? I spat on my hands and rubbed them into my trousers to clean them. Papa rubbed his fingers into the hem of his shirt. When he wasn’t leaving sticky fingerprints anywhere, he started to drive. He pulled up on to the road and headed for the church. There was still chocolate cake to deliver, I supposed.

From the other side of the church, where the pastor lived, headlights came into view, small and bright as the glowing eyes of a night animal.

“Is that the pastor?” Papa said. The car was driving past the church, in our direction. “I suppose we really are leaving these cakes on the altar.”

It was the pastor, in his old Chevrolet car. It rattled over the dusty road, like it was driving over beads or rocks. The engine was making a noise that said its time was nearly coming to an end. The headlights blinded us, then swerved away, then swerved back. The whole car was swerving. There was turmoil behind the wheel, driving us to pull to the side and nearly hit the fence. The Chevrolet didn’t care. It turned away from us, then followed us. There wasn’t any direction to go that didn’t end with hitting the pastor’s car or hitting the fence.

The Chevrolet hit the pickup truck. There was more damage to the truck, because Papa swerved. The lemon square dish went into the windshield first. Glass broke and lemon filling smeared the dash. The collision was louder than sound. I couldn’t make out all the noises of glass shattering and fragile things breaking. The pickup wore the fence for a moment like a veil before it tore through and tumbled. The sky jumped under my feet. Pink clouds rattled in my head.

As soon as the truck stopped moving, I started. The truck was turned upside down and the cab was crushed partly into the sand. There wasn’t much in the way of the cab left. Or Papa. I kicked at pieces of the cab until it released me into the grass and debris. There was blood somewhere on my back, hot like I stood partly in the sunlight, but I couldn’t find it right away. My hands were sticky with lemon and blood. I walked away from the truck before it could do something like explode. I wondered where Papa’s phone was. There was a lot of wreckage to search for it. The crickets hummed noisily as I walked back to the road.

It was twilight, and all of the clouds were black or purple. Cicadas sang too, in the trees. One dropped out of a tree and hit my shoulder, hard as an acorn, as I walked down the road. It was like there were no more cars, as I walked.

My lip was in danger of letting me down, so I bit it to keep it steady. I turned away from the church and the pickup and started walking home.

In the new world, I hoped there wouldn’t be any cars.

Art by Frederico Infante

Text by Lucie MacAulay