The two women stood on the sidewalk, swapping a cigarette back and forth in the cold. They’d both told their husbands that they had quit, and always blamed the other one for why they still smelled like that.

“New folks movin’ in down the block.” Said one of them, pointing at a moving van a few houses down, before handing the cigarette over.

“Umhmmm.” The other was too busy inhaling to give a better response.

“Plates on the car says Vermont. You know what that means, right?” She paused for effect, then hissed out the accursed word: “Yankees.”

“What in the hell is that?” Coughed the other, giving the cigarette back. A man was pushing something that looked like across between a wood chipper and a lawn mower up the driveway.

“I…I think its a snow blower.” She said between drags. “Who the hell keeps a snow blower in the South?”

“A yankee serial killer, that’s who. Probably uses it to chop up his victims. Whilst naked and all painted up with clown make-up. Why else would you need that in down here?”

“Mmhmm. Ain’t that the truth.”

“Damn yankees,” she spit as she stomped out the cigarette.

Memphis Note
The Civil War’s been done for years, a hundred and fifty of them, to be exact. But, that doesn’t do anything to lessen the inherent, irrational distrust people in the Deep South have for Northerners. In the South, “Yankee” will forever be a derogatory term.

Steam rose from the soup as Tim poured it into the bowl. He held it in this hands and felt the heat spreading out into his frozen hands. Being a Shelby Farms park ranger in the dead of winter as almost as bad as being one in the heat of summer.

As he was unwrapping his sandwich, a terrible hullabaloo kicked up from the other side bay window. A blue heron was flailing about on the porch, one wing stretched out like it was hurt, the other flapping wildly. Tim recognized the tag band on the bird’s foot. It had nearly frozen to death last week after it fell in the lake. He had to bring it inside to thaw out.

Now it had apparently done something else stupid. Tim swore as he slipped on his heavy coat and gloves and made his way to the porch door.

Stepping out into the cold, he shivered immediately. Something was amiss; the heron had suddenly gone quiet. And apparently vanished from where it was on the porch.

The door clicked shut, and Tim looked up, stunned at what he saw.

The majestic bird was inside the visitor’s lodge, scarfing down his lunch.

Memphis Note
Shelby Farms Park park is one of the largest urban green spaces in the nation. It has its own lake, miles of trails, even a herd of buffalo. And last winter, it had a blue heron that nearly froze to death and was saved by a park ranger and judicious use of central heating.

The Loop encircled the city, like a great snake swallowing its own tail. A snake of asphalt and concrete and rebar, littered with metal signs scrawled with strange words and numbers from the old tongue. “INTERSTATE” “40” “EXIT” and other marks that no longer had any meaning.

The city within was naught but a blasted out ruin, obliterated when the last of the superpowers raked their nuclear fury across the sky. Billions died instantly and millions more starved in the long winters that came after.

Like the roaches and the rats and the other things that knew how to scurry and hide, mankind survived into what came after. Broken, separated, but alive.

Hidden amongst those ruins was the beating heart of one of those shards of humanity. It sustained them, it purified them when they were sick, and in turn they charged themselves with its protection and upkeep.

It was the Pump, the last one in the city, its wells reaching down, deep down to where the fallout couldn’t touch. As far as they knew, it was the last clean water in the world.

So, they walked the Loop, keeping vigil on their beating heart, their font of the life.

Memphis Note
Time and time again Memphis has been noted for it’s clean, fresh, delicious water. The source of that water is a saturated level of sand, deep below the surface, nearly invulnerable to modern pollution.

The farther they got from their home, the more color drained out of the world. First the sky went gray, then the woods, and now, as he glanced around the riverboat, he saw that his people were starting to lose their color as well.

He looked over them, past the churning of the paddle wheel and the icy expanse of the river to the shrinking pillars of smoke that marked the Memphis harbor. Closing his eyes, he looked even farther, to the hills of Mississippi where he was raised. Then to the great mound Nanih Waiya, the birthplace of his people, and the smaller mounds around it, that entomb their history. The sacred place fixed in his mind, he said his good-byes to the land, and to his ancestors.

Opening his eyes he thought of the thin white man with the bizarre accent that had stopped him while boarding the riverboat. The man asked why the Choctaw people were leaving. He had looked at the man for a moment, thinking of the million hateful and angry things he wanted to scream in his face.

“To be free,” was all he could ultimately say.

He hoped he had not lied.

Memphis Note
Memphis was the final point east of the Mississippi for the Choctaw Indians on the Trail of Tears. From here, they were loaded into riverboats and taken across to Arkansas. Alexis de Tocqueville was here to witness their departure, and those were the words on Choctaw told him. They were leaving “To be free”.

Clive pressed his nose to the glass, his breath sending jets of condensation, fogging the glass.

Outside the white was beginning to abate. Patches of black were appearing on the street, cars were driving past more frequently, and the persistent dripping sound coming from the eaves of his house was maddening to him.

He pushed away from the window and turned back to the kitchen table, covered in a myriad array of ignored homework assignments and procrastinated projects. How was he supposed to know that the weather would change so quickly?

He didn’t mean to get into this position, but what was he supposed to do? That provocative streak of white on the TV weather, that saving grace to any lazy student, it was supposed to have done more than this!

Under his breath Clive said some very impolite things using words that his Mother forbid about the TV weathermen. They’d been the ones that had gotten Clive into this situation, them and their tall tales of “Snowpocalyse” and “Wintermageddon”.

Clive barely even knew what those words meant, but he was sure they hadn’t happened because schools were open tomorrow, and the only world coming to an end was his.

Memphis Note
Memphis is scared of any sort of frozen precipitation. If we get even a dusting of snow, the whole city shuts down. Which, deservedly, gets some derision from the populace. But I think those people also forget that we get ice. Ice falling like rain, coating everything in inches of slick death. We’re scared of it all because the worst of it is really, really bad.