The Vanishing // Jake Kiszka

Part Three

Day 410 ~ Jake

Her eyes drifted up from the board. An air of concentration furrowed between her brows and the tip of her tongue which sat delicately at the edge of her teeth.

"Check mate!" She announced, knocking my piece off the board with a look of devilish satisfaction.

"Beginners luck." I replied, sending a hand to my ribcage to rub an ache I suspected would always trouble me from now on.

The snow had fallen in earnest. A blanket of dazzling white covered the ground, powdered flakes falling off the canopy of trees around us made for a spectacle when the sun peeked out from behind clouds. It was the first real beauty I'd taken note of in what felt like a very long time.

"And what if I told you that I was a secret master? That I'd been dumbing down my abilities all this time just so that I didn't demasculate you over a game of chess?" She gloated, raising an eyebrow as she waited for me to make my next move.

She reminded me of a sunset. With a touch of copper in her hair and those damned freckles on her nose. She had all the hope of a beautiful end and that it would bring something as equally beautiful in the morning.

"I didn't have you down as a liar." I replied, scanning the board for something that would knock her off her winning streak.

She folded her hands beneath her chin and leaned her elbows onto the edge of the kitchen table. "There's a lot you don't know about me, Jake."

I didn't doubt that. But I was sincerely grateful for the things which I had learned over the past few days. She'd carefully guided me around the entire place, shown me how everything worked and where the source of all the power came from. How to maintain all the power sources and what to do in the event of any of them breaking down.

There was a bank of solar panels on the cabin roof, flanked by a couple of small turbines. They were hooked up to a battery which powered the entire place. There was a small out house around the back, a few old generators were sat in there gathering dust in case of an emergency but she assured me the solar and wind provided more than enough for the entire place to run off for another decade.

These were things that I felt as if I should've known. Things that felt fundamental to survival. As if somehow it'd been wrong to live in a house that was attached to a network that relied on manpower to keep going. The foolishness of it.

Even the polytunnels where the vegetables grew made me feel as if I'd been missing the point entirely every time I'd walked into a grocery store. There were chickens kept in a coop, and there were two horses in a small stable on the other side of the trees. Because, apparently, someday the fuel was going to turn bad. She talked at great length about how she had no idea how to get the horses to mate, in the event of their untimely deaths she didn't want be left without transportation.

These were things I hadn't considered. Things which made me feel a little stupid when she pointed them out to me. My eyes widening in slight horror at the sheer expanse of pickled foods and canned goods kept in what she liked to call the "store". It was a small shelter, dug into the ground and covered in mossy earth to the untrained eye. But inside there was every non perishable and medical supply you could think of. Put there by her Grandma, in the event of the government falling to into it's own pit of destruction, or so her Grandma explained it.

The stark realisation that my life had been filled with convenient privilege was not lost upon me. I watched her muck out the horses and feed the chickens, tend to her plants and make sure the store was stocked up making mental notes of each little thing she did. Hoping that when the time came, I'd be able to be of some use to her.