California by Edan Lepucki EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Edan Lepucki
- Language: English
- Genre: Dystopian Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
On the map, their destination had been a stretch of green, as if they
would be living on a golf course. No freeways nearby, or any roads, really:
those had been left to rot years before. Frida had given this place a secret
name, the afterlife, and on their journey, when they were forced to hide in
abandoned rest stops, or when they’d filled the car with the last of their
gasoline, this place had beckoned. In her mind it was a township, and Cal
was the mayor. She was the mayor’s wife.
Of course it was nothing like that. The forest had not been expecting
them. If anything, it had tried to throw them out, again and again. But they
had stayed, perhaps even prospered. Now Frida could only laugh at the
memory of herself, over two years ago: dragging a duffel bag behind her
with a groan, her nails bitten to shit, her stomach roiling. Grime like she’d
never imagined. Even her knees had smelled.
She thought it would be easier once they arrived; she should have
known better. The work didn’t end then; if anything, it got worse, and for
months the exhaustion and fear tick-ticked in her body like a dealer
shuffling cards. At night, the darkness gave her a skinned-alive feeling, and
she longed for her old childhood bed. For a bed, period.
She had packed some things to comfort herself: the dead Device, a
matchbook from their favorite bar. Cal later called them her artifacts. In a
world so disconnected from the past, her attachment to these objects had
been her only strategy for remaining sane. It still was.
She tried not to take them out too often, but Cal had left the house to do
some digging, and he wouldn’t be back for at least an hour. Even though the
sky was gray, the sun weak, he’d worn his plaid button-down and a
bandanna around his neck. They still had a bottle of sunscreen, but it had
expired and was as watery as skim milk.
“Stay inside for a while,” he’d said before he left.
Frida had linked her arms around his neck. “Where would I go?”
He kissed her goodbye on the mouth, as he still did, and always would.
She was thinking, already, of the artifacts tucked away in an old briefcase,
shoved under one of the unused twin cots. It had been a rough morning.
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