Mrs. Miriam Kelly was seated up on the porch when her husband came out of the machine shed. She glanced at him briefly, as he wiped down the apple picker with a grease rag, her gray eyes shaded with one hand against the sun. Then she turned away, shifting her look decidedly to the fence line. That afternoon Mrs. Kelly had found herself thinking about the city. She was seventy-four, and the several years worth of summer country light had turned her skin a tough and rust-colored brown; though there were those days when her skin was a bleached bone white—those days she’d recall, to the folks in town, or even to the most impassive of strangers, when she had lived with her husband in the city.

“Back then of course,” she would tell them, “I was a head nurse out there in Atlanta. We had a small apartment, on Coral Avenue, and it cost us eighty dollars a week. I was a painter, before that, and my husband was an engineer, although he was a teacher later on at the university. That’s about when he hurt himself falling off a ladder. Not that the fall was so miserable,” she would add, “it’s certainly true that we wouldn’t be here without it. You see the thing is—” and Mrs. Kelly, quick to point out the dangers of the city to others, would turn her voice more sober, as though she were engaging then in a long rumoured secret—“well I never much did like the city, anyway. It’s all those murders, and whatnot; those burglaries and the kidnappings. Why, just last week, I saw on the news about this twelve-year-old girl—kidnapped on her very own lawn! Her mother must have been washing clothes or something, I don’t know. Wasn’t until two weeks went by that they found that child in a suitcase. Sure as rain they pulled it right out of the lake. And you want to know something else? Newsman said they suspect it was an old boy from out of town! Huh! Imagine that.”

Mrs. Kelly was always apt to tell them that she felt safe now, in their bright country home. In those big open spaces, she’d say, you can see everything. It was only the people in the city, on their cramped and noisy streets, and in their stolid, featureless apartments, who ever had to deal with such atrocities.

“I’ll finish up a little later,” her husband said, startling Mrs. Kelly from her thoughts. 

She looked at him again with unease. “A little later?” she said.

“Hands are tired.”

“Oh.”

“And anyway,” he said, “there’s time.”

Miriam stood and crossed to the porch railing. “Did I tell you,” she started, “I met this woman in the grocery store. She was from out of town, of course, only visiting. I told her about the boy and the search party, how he’d been missing for a week. I told her they’d found his car in a ditch. She had no idea—would you believe it! Imagine that,” Miriam said.

“It’s that clutter,” said her husband, still wiping down the picker, “all that noise.”

“It must be that they hear it so often, one person missing is all the same as another,” she said. “So I told her—I said if she ever wanted real security. But you know, dear, as well as I do—”

“I know,” he said.

“Then she told me she lives on the eighth floor. She said she’s perfectly safe and comfortable, and she has a large dog and a husband. Well, I just wanted to laugh, of course. I would have had the right too, I think. But it’s just as well.”

“Just as well,” he said, looking up at her through the four iron claws of the picker, “they don’t bring those troubles here. It’s the whole reason we moved to the country, anyway. It’s like being on the right side of a giant dust cloud.”

She sat down again. “You know dear,” Miriam said, “they’ll pass this way quite soon.”

“Soon—”

“In twenty minutes.”

“Twenty minutes, huh.”

“Yes,” she told him hesitantly, “that’s what the radio said.” Mrs. Kelly gestured at the battery radio. It was sitting on a metal end table, next to an ironstone pitcher filled with tea. “They’re on the sixty now.”

“Fine,” he said.

When he had finished cleaning the picker he set it upright against a wooden house post, then he climbed the porch, on bad knees, and shuffled to where she was sitting. The volume of the radio wasn’t too high, but they could both hear it still over the sound of the distant cattle. “Sixty,” he commented. “That’s awful close, ain’t it?”

“It isn’t too far away,” she said, “it isn’t very far at all.”

“Ain’t that near Jackson?”

No matter where she was, Mrs. Kelly, through the development of an unusual caution, was always positive of the closest highways. She corrected him and said, nervously, “Fairfield.”

“You know they found his car in Guthrie.”

“Yes. In a ditch.” Miriam took up her glass of tea. It was low, down to the ice. Her hands shook as she refilled it from the pitcher. “And,” she went on, with revelatory sips—she had an idea then that their world was soon to be over—“and he was young, wasn’t he?”

“Not like us,” he answered.

“No,” she said, “not like us at all. We’ve lived a good, long life.”

“That man,” he told her, setting the grease rag on his knee, “that man yesterday said they’d be combing through the woods, going through the river. There’s even a sinkhole out some place in Edna.”

“A sinkhole,” she said.

“They’re gonna check all the wells, too. But that’s nothing for us to worry about. You know they were saying—”

“What?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I can’t remember.”

Miriam crossed her feet at the ankles and repeated, “A sinkhole,” without much thought to the phrase. She set the glass back on the table. “Dear,” said Miriam, “I’d like you to know, if it’s over—”

“What’s that?” he said, not looking at her.

“Oh, never mind. It’s only that, well I thought you’d be done by now. Before they came around. And I wanted you to know,” she continued, “I wanted to tell you—I see it all the way through.”

“There’s one of them,” he said suddenly, swinging himself to the end of his seat. A man was coming up the road on the left, about a hundred yards from where they could see him. He passed between the shade of two high trees, carrying a map and a walking stick. Then he stopped, and, because the field was flat and dry, and there was nothing else to look at, kept on towards the end of the street. “And there he goes,” her husband said with a whistle. “I told you it’s nothing to worry about; we ain’t got a well.”

“Honey.” Miriam took up the glass again. “Do you remember when I used to paint?”

“Paint?” he said.

“Or, I suppose this was before we met. Perhaps you’ve forgotten. I won several awards, you know.”

“Did you?”

“Yes,” she said, “I’ll show you.”

Miriam stepped with some fragility into the house, still holding the tea glass. She came out a few minutes later, and the tea glass was empty, and she was smiling, and there was nothing in her other hand but for the black cordless telephone. “Suppose I misplaced them, or,” she said, “they’re in the storage unit.”

“We don’t have a storage unit,” said her husband.

“I know,” said Miriam. “I must have misspoke.”

Some moments went by, and there were more of them. Like the first man, they all came and went, with maps and gusto, and red wire flags strapped at the belt; and some were holding flashlights in advance of the oncoming dark.

“City people,” she sneered.

“It’s like an infestation.”

“How old do you think he was?”

Her husband sat back and looked at the grease rag. He looked at his hands, then glanced quickly at the apple picker. Miriam watched him close his eyes. “Seventeen,” he said. “Couldn’t have been more.”

“Seventeen,” said Mrs. Kelly, “my God.”

“I know.”

“I remember the age.”

“Me too,” he said. “Boy we were dumb, weren’t we.”

“Yes,” said Miriam, “we were.”

“Well. Teenagers get what’s coming,” he said.

“Yes, I agree. There was this girl once, when I was a nurse out in Atlanta—”

“Atlanta—”

“This was before we met, of course; there was this girl and—” Miriam stopped and thought about that. Then she said, “—it’s a shame, what happens to the young ones.”

“You’re right,” he said, “it’s certainly that.” He looked at Miriam and grinned. He looked out at the fence line. A patrol car was coming along now. It swung easily off the road, and towards them, pacing itself through the twilight. They could see the officer, he was so close then—his eyes were focused and tight.

“It’s the problem with these city folks,” her husband said. He worked himself to his feet then went slowly down the porch steps. “Always bothering people.”

“I remember now,” said Miriam reflectively, “when I was a head nurse out in Boston.”

“It wasn’t Atlanta?”

“Of course, this was before we met. Perhaps you’ve forgotten, or I haven’t told you. Anyway,” said Miriam, “they’re not like us, you know.”

“Not at all.” He bent and scooped up the apple picker.

“No,” she said, “we’ve lived a good, long life.”

-----------------------------------------

Cameron Kohuss is a writer of horror and literary fiction. He grew up in Texas before moving to California. When he isn’t thinking up his next story, he’s scouring thrift shops for macabre décor, wishing he wasn’t desensitized to scary films, or reading to hone his craft. He currently lives outside of Dallas.