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Magnificat

Part of the federal government’s responsibility is to secure our borders and provide a stable environment for our citizens to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. The region known as the Juniper is foreign soil. Her grand cities, Denver, Cheyenne, Taos, Salt Lake, Billings, are no more. At best, they are ghost towns from another time. At worst, they are breeding grounds for terrorists and outlaws.

—President Amanda Swain
50th President of the United States
February 8, 2054,
on signing the Security, Identity,
and Special Borders Injunction (SISBI)

(i)

Holy Mary, Mother of God, help me with this next part ’cause the truths I had to swallow choked me like a magpie wrestling with carrion too big for her craw.

I’d been plucked from my cozy life in Cleveland, Ohio and thrown back into the Juniper, a place where electricity didn’t work and life was cruel. In the U.S., my days had been filled with ease and comfort. Eterna batteries provided perfect energy and science provided a cure for most diseases, including cancer. America was almost a paradise—gun laws and legal systems, peace and happiness. But for the states-turned-territories—Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, and Montana—they’d become a lawless wilderness thrown back two hundred years; the most dangerous place on Earth.

And I’d grown up there. Twelve years of violence and struggle until Mama sent me away to boarding school to learn electrical engineering. She was certain the power would come back on, and she’d need me.

I hadn’t wanted to leave. I’d wanted to stay with Mama and my oldest sister, Sharlotte, on the ranch, working cattle and riding horses and carrying guns, ’cause of the Outlaw Warlords.

I can still remember that cold morning I first left home. We stood on the Burlington platform before first light, waiting for the train, a thruway that would take me to Sterling and then on to Cleveland. You couldn’t see the sagebrush around us, but you could smell it sleeping.

Mama hugged me for a long time and then let me go. Sharlotte stood cross-armed beside us, she didn’t hug me, only gave me a nod and a murmured, “Good luck.” Wren didn’t even do that. My middle sister, four years older than me and knocking on seventeen, hadn’t come home the night before. She wasn’t there to say goodbye to me. Not surprising, and kind of a relief.

The train wheezed in, leaking steam and smoke, and chugged off, taking me with it. I only went back once, two years later for Christmas. Wren had already run away, so I didn’t see her again, not until she came to get me in Ohio after Mama died of a heart attack, when I was sixteen. By then I was happy in the World, programming apps on my electric slate, watching internet videos, and hanging out with Yankee girls who hadn’t grown up loading clips for their mother’s M16.

Then Wren came to collect me. Mama was dead and the ranch in trouble. Like it or not I had to go home, and I didn’t like it, not one bit.

Wren and I left the westbound train in McCook, in what used to be Nebraska, and we walked the train platform before dawn. It felt like an echo, only this time my home was back in Ohio and the Juniper had become foreign soil.

American laws and Yankee comforts lay behind me, far away and long gone.

Wren and I had to fight our way back to Burlington for my poor mother’s funeral. Tore me up to know I’d never hear her sing again. Scared me to death to walk once more on Juniper dirt.

Father Pilate, our close family friend and a Sino-American War vet, buried Mama. We could bury her body, but we couldn’t bury her debts. Before she died, Mama went deep into debt, borrowed money to pay for my education and waiting for the power to come back. Mama then made a deal with a food distribution company executive who’d pay top dollar for Juniper beef, only she wanted our family to drive the cattle west, across the entire length of the Juniper, from Burlington, Colorado to Wendover, Nevada. What a story it would be. And great stories can bring in even greater profits.

We drove those cattle nearly halfway to Nevada, through outlaws, a blizzard, and a gun battle that left many of us wounded. Along the way we picked up a mysterious boy who I loved and who loved me, but secretly, ’cause wouldn’t you know it, but Sharlotte had romantic feelings for him, too. We made up a love triangle of sharp points and sharper edges.

Boys were rare back then, ’cause of the Sterility Epidemic. Wren had wanted to sell him, though of course, we wouldn’t let her. If she had known who he really was, well, we wouldn’t have been able to stop her.

His real name was only the first truth I learned. Others would follow, like the nature of the army sniffing his trail and why they would do anything to find him.

He wouldn’t tell me his whole story, not for a long time, but that mysterious boy carried the future of the world in his pocket like so much spare change.

Yet that’s how life is. It’s the small things that give it meaning. Or kills us dead. Big dollar bills of tragedy we can handle, but not the pennies and nickels of our daily suffering and doubt.



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Framed