The Book Witch

     There are two kinds of people who mass consume things. One group calls themselves critiques or consoles, that they merely ingest a lot because they are trying to find the best and must weed out all the horrible things in order to find it. The other group lets themselves be called gluttons, they arguably enjoy what they are consuming more because they don’t need to feel the need to explain themselves to anyone. Alice knew which group she belonged to.

    Alice was a story glutton. Her love was in the classic tomes of Sherlock Holmes, Anne of Green Gables, Jane Eyre, and Don Quixote. It also had spread to Hunger Games, A Matter of Days, The Fault In Our Stars, Ready Player One, and Harry Potter. Her love touched poetic longing and trashy romance alike. It danced in battles and in dark alleys. It covered innocence to sin with a gentle touch. It lingered in the plots of movies, from the Oscar winners to the b movies found in the free bin at a Goodwill. It had settled like a cloud of fine dust over the storylines of video game playthroughs for games she didn’t own but wanted to hear the story of anyway. Her love had reached from bestsellers to poorly written fanfics and all the many things in between. 

    Alice knew she was a glutton. A proper critic, or even fan to an extent, would have some limit at how bad of a story they would endure, let alone enjoy. Yet, Alice loved it all. That isn’t to say she didn’t dislike certain books or authors. There were some authors whose words weren’t worth the trees that had been used to print their books and Alice loathed Of Mice and Men. That all being said, she still was glad she’d read all of the things she had. Well, there were a few exceptions but now she could honestly say that trash masquerading as a book was horrible. Her love of story surpassed mediums and time periods. 

    It was no surprise the world ended. Well, it was. But honestly, with how 2020 was going nobody was completely off guard. The sun flared and the power went off, oceans rose, the plague continued, etc, etc.

    Surprisingly enough, things were actually a bit calmer. Well, yes now every person's survival depended solely on themselves but at least there wasn’t racism, fascism, sexism, all the isms really. They’d kind of simply flown out the window when people either had to work together or die. Suddenly, race, religion, sexuality, and political parties seemed like very minor issues. Just finding another person who didn’t want to hurt you seemed like a treasure. 

    People were a lot nicer in the post-apocalypse then zombie movies said they would be. Yes, there was some fighting. And yes, former politicians tried to take power wherever they could. But hey, it was a lot more chill than everyone had always said. Alice felt like it had a Studio Ghibli feel to it, still dangerous, but whimsically so. It was a surprisingly nice break from the hustle and bustle of the modern world. Well, postmodern now, technically, but still more advanced.

    Alice had lived in the middle of the countryside surrounded on four sides by cornfields she didn’t own. Now, Alice lived in the middle of the countryside surrounded on four sides by cornfields she still technically didn’t own but were hers now because she planted and harvested them. Finders keepers, the landlord hadn’t asked for rent in the last five years, it was safe to say she owned the house now. He wasn’t a weeper ‘cause he was dead.

    Alice might have lived in the countryside of rule Indiana, but it was close enough to a decent-sized city that people often came by. She traded corn for basically anything else. She had supplies to can her own corn from raids on neighbor's empty houses but she was ridiculously tired of eating corn. She wasn’t going to starve, but some days she felt like she rather would. She was smart enough not to part with any canning jars and would instead open up the jars to put preserved corn in other things before handing it off the hungry family or group. 

    The one thing that kept her sane as her early twenties were spent in a relatively peaceful apocalypse was her books. On her raids of empty houses, she took anything that wasn’t nailed down, even then it wasn’t a guarantee she wouldn’t find a way to get it home, but her favorite find, other than food that wasn’t corn, was books. Old books, new books, paperbacks, hardbacks, even one poorly written unpublished manuscript all got carted away into her home. 

    Alice had basically everything she could need. As far as what she could tell from the groups of people passing through, this part of Indiana was one of the few that hadn’t been lost to the giant sinkhole that had apparently eaten Kentucky. Apparently, the whole state was how much further below sea level then it had any right to be. She was a point on the trail of people going from New England to the Western states in hopes they could get away from the giant mutant cats that had taken over NYC and most of the surrounding countryside. 

    People were leaving trails for those coming in later groups and so, quite by accident, Alice found herself as an important stop on the Continental Highway. She had some people stay and move into the homes around her as tenets. If she had claimed about fifty ownerless acres of good farmland and houses as her own who really cared at this point, they had made her a leader of sorts as it was, allegedly, her land and it was rather peaceful. They made do with what they had, lots of corn, and traded with people. Alice ended up running a shop of sorts, trading junk for different junk. It was both sad and funny at the same time how worthless money was. 

    By the end of her twenties, Alice was also known as a bit of a witch. She supposed it was what happened when there was a woman with power, who knew how to help with a variety of illnesses, how to grow different kinds of crops and a hundred other very useful lessons. The fact she only knew most of these things was because she’d read about them, mostly in fiction but also in the nonfiction she’d found while raiding her tenet houses back when they were ownerless. Half the time she had no clue what she was doing but looked confident and hoped it was a good choice.

    People began coming to her for advice in her thirties. She helped as best she could and gave advice even when she was clueless. Half her advice was advice gleaned from useful books, like the DSM or old Farmer's Almanacs. Most of it was along the lines of, “There are no zombies, but it's okay to be afraid. Remember to be the cockroach, survive.” And, “Try yelling at your plants to get them to grow better.” With her favorite piece of advice being, “Never underestimate the importance of a map and a pencil.” They often would come back about a year later saying how incredible her advice had been for them, offering gifts and recommendations to their friends and neighbors.

    When two baby girls appeared on her doorstep after a rather large group had just finished passing through with a few different highly pregnant women, Alice could only assume the mother or mothers had done what they thought was best for the girls. So she dug out an old breast pump and tricked her body into producing what the girls needed. She asked for help from a still nursing neighbor while her body got used to the need for sudden motherhood. 

    The mother and her other neighbors all asked, one how did she know she could do that, and two where did they come from. The answer to the first question was she read about giving children to childless wild animals to nurse and how that seemed to work in fantasy and so she’d done some research on it for one of her essays for college about facts hidden in fantasy tropes. She also took inspiration from fantasy and wanted to give the birth mother or mothers privacy, by saying she’d grown them. People didn’t want to believe that, but when you live next to a know-it-all whose weird advice is really helpful and who is allegedly a witch, well people ended up just accepting it. 

    She named the girls Katniss and Prim, if anyone else noticed her reference they didn’t say. It was sad how quickly people forget pop culture without the internet, it also didn’t help that they'd been living in a post-apocalypse for the past twenty-some years. A lot of people were still morning coffee and didn’t have much energy to reminisce over other things, let alone vaguely depressing books about a different post-apocalypse. 

    Katniss and Prim were rather similar, but not completely, so Alice never could tell if they were twins or not. Katniss, fittingly, had dark hair, while Prim was blonde. Katniss ended up being a bit taller in their tween years but they ended at about even heights. From the third anniversary of their finding, Alice had started trying to teach them to read and write. She had no clue how old they were supposed to be for that but supposed better too early than too late. 

    Alice still had to farm like everyone else, but she had been sticking mainly to the herbs and veggies in her own yard. Her tenants were good about giving her a portion of their crop to her and she was always willing to help when needed. But having more time with the girls was needed to teach them. Her neighbors sent their children to learn from her once she’d started teaching the girls. This added onto the list of her many hats as a landlord, trader, farmer, mother, witch, and now a teacher.

    The girls knew how lucky they were growing up. They weren’t spared from the field labor, no one was, but their mother was the book witch. They read any chance they had so they could study under her. The stories Alice remembered but didn’t have a copy of she told from memory as best she could. The girls learned more than Alice ever had at her public school and they were better for it too. She made sure that whenever she had someone teach her a new skill from bartering, she taught the girls too. 

    Alice hadn’t learned how to deliver a baby until she was in her twenties, the girls learned before they were sixteen. Alice had learned to wash laundry by hand after the world ended, the girls grew up with it as a common chore. Alice had never farmed before the world ended, the girls had been growing since the day they were born. Well, they had been growing literally since they were born but also helping farm since they were small. They managed to read through all Alice’s books by their own twenties. 

    Alice was in her late fifties when she finally knew she was going to die. Fifty was a good age in the new world. You simply didn’t see people over sixty anymore. Both her daughters were book witches, Katniss already had a family of three and Prim had taken on an apprentice when she moved out west with a group of traders. Life had been very good to Alice, a lover of stories. She had lived through the end of the world, and in so doing became a fairytale herself. 

    When Alice wandered off into the corn leaving only a letter for each of her daughters she didn’t know what would happen. When she set down under a tree, not too far from her home but far enough so that it wasn’t Katniss who found her, she closed her eyes. The book witch was holding a book, the last she would ever read. She breathed in the scent of pages and when her eyes couldn’t see the words anymore her heart took over the narrative so that when death reached out for her she knew that it had ended with a happy ever after.