I’d grown up in town, or nearly, where my grandma was the only one I knew who could knit a sweater, bake bread, build a chicken coop, and keep an engine running. My parents never had their own place long enough to plant flowers even, and most people of my generation went for a double-wide if they could get one and minimum wage if they could get that, too. When I was sixteen, I tried leaving. New York City was the place people talked the most shit about, so that’s where I went, and it only took a day on the bus. I was proud of myself at first, but the main thing that city taught me was that I have a home. It’s where everyone knows whose granddaughter I am. It’s where I know every tree. It’s where, when the mayapples blossom, I know which animals are going to get to the fruit before I do. So I came back and got a job at the hardware and salvage store. I kept it for five years before Karen walked in, rangy and loose in old work clothes, her messy braid unraveling beneath her mesh ball cap. She was a woman with skills, courage, strength, a woman who was good, so good with her hands. She was older than me. When you’re twenty-two, thirty sounds wise. She’d hitchhiked all over. There were all kinds of ways to live, she said, but none better than what we could make right here. She scoffed at New York City. She scoffed at talk of minimum wage, of double-wide if you’re lucky. She insisted we live in the cabin she’d built at the Land Trust, solid as a bomb shelter. She knew how to process roadkill. She insisted that we birth Perley at home. She insisted that we do for ourselves, and I hadn’t met anyone like her since my grandma passed. Karen had told Helen that she hadn’t learned her skills from books, and it was true. She’d learned them from the old folks, just like we all did. But she left out the fact that she measured our lives against ElfQuest, going on about the elves’ self-reliance, discipline, skill at hunting, wood carving, healing. I gave those comic books the once-over and noticed right away something the elves had that we didn’t: magic.

Karen whittled fast enough to make the shavings fly and spark into the flames, and Helen pierced a squirrel with a sharpened stick, thrust it out over the heat. At my nipple, Perley clamped down with his gums. I shifted his latch. I looked from Karen to Helen. I could feel their excitement build.

“But we haven’t been to the grocery store in two weeks,” I said, thinking of the single box of macaroni on the shelf, the five-pound bag of oats, the half loaf of stale bread, the jar of peanut butter dwindling each day. “We don’t have the money for it. Maybe one of us should go back to work soon.”