Three Schools

The kitchen is cold enough that your breath shows. A woman sits at the table in her coat with a headlamp on and a legal pad in front of her. Through the doorway two children are asleep on a sofa under a heap of blankets, and in the grate the legs of a chair have burned short.

On the table an old battery radio sits with its back off and its batteries lined up beside it. It hisses. She reads off the pad in a flat voice: Three schools. The library. A church in Dove Springs. A brewery. A few hundred houses. The radio says each one a half second after she does.

Somewhere out in the dark a generator is running. The clinic on Riverside, she says, and goes back to the pad.

She pulls an envelope from under it, a dot on the back for each place on her list, and draws a line from a school to the library. The headlamp dims to yellow. You put a hand flat on the envelope, and she draws the next line.

One of the children says something in her sleep about a dog.