(Style: Dirty Realism)

The wind doesn't care if you're a child. It just blows.

We live in a cluster of rusted trailers on the edge of a Nebraska wheat field. There are twelve of us. We don't have a government, and we don't have a plan. We just have the hunger.

For the first two years, we tried to be "civilized." We had meetings. We tried to organize the scavenging runs into the nearby town. We even tried to keep a school going, using the few books we could find. But the books didn't tell us how to fix a leaking roof in a blizzard, and they didn't tell us how to stop a fever from killing a six-year-old in three days.

I am Eli. I am fourteen, which makes me one of the elders.

I remember the day we stopped. It was a Tuesday in November. We were arguing about the "distribution of assets"—which is just a fancy way of saying who got the last three cans of peaches. I looked at the faces around me. They weren't children's faces anymore. They were hard, pinched, and full of a familiar, ugly greed.

I realized then that we weren't building a new world. We were just acting out a play written by the people who died. We were using the same words, the same anger, the same petty cruelties. We were just smaller versions of the monsters who had broken the world in the first place.

"Burn it," I said.

I didn't mean the trailers. I meant the books. I meant the laws. I meant the very idea of "civilization."

We spent the night burning every piece of paper we owned. We watched the laws of the land turn into gray ash. We stopped using titles. We stopped using the calendar. We stopped trying to be "citizens."

Now, we just exist.

We wake up when the sun hits the trailer. We spend the day searching for edible roots or trapping rabbits. We don't talk about the future, because the future is just another word for "more hunger." We don't talk about the past, because the past is a lie told by people who failed.

Sometimes, the younger ones cry. They miss the stories of the "Before Time." I don't. The Before Time was just a larger version of this, with better plumbing and more lies.

Last week, a group of kids from the next county came to visit. They were wearing makeshift uniforms and carrying sticks like rifles. They wanted us to "join their federation." They talked about "security" and "mutual defense."

I didn't even answer them. I just stared at them until they felt uncomfortable and left. They are still playing the game. They still think the rules matter.

I sat in the dirt and watched a beetle struggle to climb a blade of grass. The beetle didn't have a federation. It didn't have a law. It just had the drive to move forward.

I think I prefer the beetle.

As the sun sets over the flat, empty horizon, I feel a strange kind of peace. There is no more pretending. There is no more "hope," which is just a way of delaying the inevitable. There is only the wind, the cold, and the slow, steady beat of a heart that has finally stopped asking why.

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