FLOCK

“She went to get flowers?”

Dorothy repeats the words back into the empty space between us. She has a point: nothing really grows here. She glances at my notebook.

“I don't know why you bother with those.”

The minutes are a sort of prayer. I hope (probably in vain) they’ll be discovered along with our three skeletons. I hope we die all three in a row, and with the shack in good order, so if anyone does find us, they’ll know we were cordial and managed just fine on our own.

But there’s no point explaining this to Dorothy. Unlike Rose and I, she is avoidant of order, and refuses to play at normalcy. For instance, when we move to agenda item number one—what to do about the lambs—she just goes:

“Have we thought about some sort of… mechanical… killing… machine?” 

See what I mean? I sip my tepid water in lieu of a response. 

“They’re coming faster than we can handle,”

She says, opening her can of beans. Too early in the day for cans, I think, but like I said, avoidant of order.

We look out the open doorway onto the desolate pasture, sheep and their young dotting the dusty landscape like stars. It isn’t even really a pasture, not bucolic in the slightest. More like a picked-over junkyard. How could animals thrive in such a hostile place? How could we? Which makes it all the more unnerving, the way they stare back, so many more of them than us. They are multiplying in a way that seems odd, not in time with the seasons as it had been on Earth. 

But here, there’s nobody in charge, not even nature. Before, there was always a man, perched in the sky, or sat at a large table, telling us the truth. It’s how we wound up here in the first place. And through some miracle, some curse, we are, by all accounts, the last ones left. 

We’ve poured over the piles of books and papers left by our husbands years ago, for clues to aid in our survival. But they left nothing instructive. No mention of sheep. I’ve always found this to be the case with men: powerful, but disorganised.

“Which way did she go?”

I ask, my eyes scanning the horizon. Dorothy waves her hand about, pointing nowhere.

“She always comes back.”

Rose has recently taken to going on long walks, usually in pursuit of some unreal goal, something ripped from the fabric of her past. Unlike Dorothy and I, she actually loved her husband, even near the end.

The sky grows pale, and still there’s no sign of her. Twilight comes slightly earlier here – the days are one hour and fifty-six minutes shorter than on Earth. Dorothy, in her usual way, pretends not to care. 

“She’s holding us back, anyhow.” 

From what? I wonder. Maybe it’s the lambs again. We know where Rose stands on the issue. Sentimental, and with absolutely no blood lust, which is sort of Dorothy’s whole thing. 
A lamb is born with its two front hooves and its head first, like a diver. It stumbles out and immediately begins walking. At first, none of us wanted to eat them. We grew up buying lambs in bits and pieces wrapped in pale pink butcher’s paper. But we’ve since been forced to confront our role as the dominant species.
So the way it generally goes is: Dorothy does the dirty work, I supervise, and Rose prays over the souls of the lambs. 

“You know you don’t have to be here at all Rose,”

Dorothy usually says while she sharpens her axe on an old stone.

“No, no! I’m happy to participate!”

Rose’s muffled voice calls from several feet away, her entire face covered with a handkerchief. We get to work. 

But the whole thing feels filthy and unnatural. Everything that we have on this planet, they bought or created. They being our husbands. They being scientists, engineers, pioneers. At one point, they were even lauded as Gods. Even my relationship with Rose and Dorothy was their creation – formed out of obligation while clearing the dishes after dinner parties. Now it feels as though we’re in a purgatory, where our punishment is an eternal cleanup of their mess. 

At dinner, the two of us sit facing the window to keep watch for Rose. We make our usual jokes. Lamb? Again? That kind of thing. 

Normally Rose would lead us in prayer, and I would participate, lately more out of habit than anything. Crossing myself is still a comfort, when everything else about life has become exhaustingly novel. Novelty was synonymous with excitement when we first landed. But then again, we had brought everything with us: customs, rituals, crucifixes, processed foods, medicines, diapers, plastic, sunscreen. That’s how simple we thought it might be.

Two nights ago at dinner, Rose was mumbling the usual words under her breath, “bless us our lord, for these thy gifts,” etc., when Dorothy started chewing loudly.  

“I wish she wouldn’t do that,”

Rose whispered to me, peering at Dorothy from across the table.

“Do what?”

Dorothy barked back, her mouth full, eyes stood at attention.
I explained to Dorothy on Rose’s behalf that she wished she wouldn’t eat during prayer.

“I told you I’m not religious anymore,”

Dorothy retorted, her hand clenched in a fist around her spoon.

“Well some of us are,”

Rose murmured into her lap. 

“She’s not either,”

Dorothy said, tilting her head in my direction. 

“You’re not?”

Rose asked, turning to me, almost pleading. I kept quiet.

“How could you expect anyone to be as devout as you, huh, Rose? Here of all places!”

As Dorothy spoke, I remember distinctly how deranged she looked. Bean juice dribbled down her chin, which was replete with thick black hairs (we’d lost our one set of tweezers about 4 years ago).

Rose smoothed the napkin on her lap.

“Well, I would say that here, especially here, He’s all we have –”

“Who?”

Dorothy spat back.

A long silence. Then the sound of Rose’s coarse hands as she smoothed the napkin again, then again.

“Oh you mean like Him? With a capital ‘H’?”

Dorothy pointed an arthritic finger to the corroded aluminium ceiling. She then gave a firm shake of her salt and pepper head, the loose skin on her neck shaking violently.

“I won’t carry on with this shit. I’ve only got a few good years left.” 

I try to recall Rose’s creased hands, the sound of them going over the napkin. But all I can hear is the bleating outside. This place used to have a silent quality, as if we’d just broken the seventh seal, and some calamitous judgment awaited us. But maybe it’s already come and gone.

It’s kind of a cruel joke, an animal that is constantly being regenerated. Meanwhile our bodies, taken out of their born atmosphere, seem to be dragging us even further and faster into the future. We are all plagued with arthritis, sciatica, macular degeneration, vaginal dryness, and an increasingly acute lack of teeth.

I roll my tongue over what remains. When I first started living with Dorothy and Rose, after everyone else had long left or died, I remained attached to the idea that God liked us (even after all he put us through). But nothing shook my belief more than the teeth. Our teeth, which at some point started hanging loose in our mouths – rotting.

We sort of forgot about dentists. To us they were nothing more than a spook, a sad little obligation from a past life. The maintenance had slipped our minds until we were graphically reminded: these are our bones. Essential for eating. Even flossing felt like a false memory. I now look back on those times as a fond memory of our bonding – Rose holding my arms down while Dorothy did the pulling.

What kind of god would allow us to rot from the inside out? What kind of god would insist on the existence of toothpaste? I keep thinking of a Latin phrase I learnt in catechism, I think it was from St. Augustine: Inter fikus et urinam naskimur (we are born between piss and shit). There are plenty of indignities here. But we are building a small place for ourselves – not a paradise, but a home. We had to learn to pull our own teeth. 

“When we wake up tomorrow, she’ll be here,”

I say out loud, to what feels like nobody in particular, because Dorothy doesn’t make a sound.

I stare out into the dark. The night sky feels different here – deeper, emptier, as if there are no patterns or laws or mysteries to hold us in place.

When the morning light creeps in, Rose’s space on the mattress is still hollowed out. 

Dorothy gazes at the blank sheet. She lifts her head as if to make a proclamation, but catches my eye and thinks better of it. In the 30 years I’ve known her, Dorothy’s never been an optimist. Even the great new society we were supposed to build here – to her it was never a guarantee. And at every turn, she seems to be proven right. Even so, I’d rather not hear about it. 

In the time since our waking, three more bloodied lambs have fallen out of their mother’s wombs.

I grab my notebook and pen. Dorothy rolls over on the mattress, face first. 

HOUSEHOLD MEETING MINUTES

15 April 2101

Attendance: me – present 
Dorothy – present 
Rose – absent
Stock count: 12,458 cans kidney beans
Agenda item 1: Rose’s whereabouts 





Silence. 

We move on to agenda item two. The lambs and sheep, crowding us in. The slaughter, too frequent and tiresome. And the way they stare – did they stare like that on Earth?

A noise begins droning in my brain, like an alarm. Dorothy looks up at me, confirming that it’s a noise that lives in our world and not my imagination. She walks to the door, the hinges swing, and we’re greeted by a lamb—small, new, and bloody, on the doorstep—bleating.  

I take a step towards the lamb. It flinches at the approach of my shadow, and I’m reminded of a term from back home: sheep worrying. I take another step.

“What are you doing?”

Dorothy calls after me. 

I’m not sure, I think to myself, as I begin running. I guess it’s an attempt to rid myself of obligation. Or maybe I hope that in chasing the sheep, I’ll enter a new void, another empty space to fill with humanity all over again. Maybe I’m searching for Rose, so she can die with us, three in a row – our trinity. And I understand that term now, as I run at a pace I’d previously not thought possible: sheep worrying. 

The sheep seem worried; bleating as my slight but quick limbs flail towards them; picking up pace as I close the gap between us and confront the expanse ahead, which contains nothing, even more nothing. 

The thrill of movement, the heat in my face – it’s exhilarating, but also clarifying. I slow down, the weight of my feet forming dust clouds around me. I realise I haven’t moved all that much, maybe a city block or two. But just as I’m about to surrender to my own stupidity, I hear her.

Dorothy. Behind me. And she’s carrying a massive… something. I squint. It’s a stick. She flails it about in front of her, worrying the sheep immensely. Her movements are surprisingly graceful, like a dancer, or a martial artist. I stop to admire her, and it’s then that I realise she’s screaming; letting out one enormous groan after another, until finally, she stops short in front of me. We stare at each other, panting.

The flock stops running, too. I feel their coarse matted wool brushing my calves, and realise they are surrounding us. When I look down, I meet their many black eyes, staring at me as if waiting for a sign from above. 

“That won’t work, you see,”

Dorothy says, wading through the sea of wool,

“they need us.”

We walk back to the shack, and our flock follows. When we arrive, we turn back to the horizon, almost instinctively, our eyes searching for Rose. 

“Those must be some special flowers,”

Dorothy says, opening a can of beans. I nod. Some myths are more useful than others.