Prospero's Half-Life (46 page)

The landscape
itself never quite seemed to change. It was flat, overgrown land as
far as they walked. Instances of farms petered out after the first
few days, and they were truly in lonely country; Carolyn remarked
several times on the silence, and their lovemaking took on a muted
quality, as if the silence itself were a sacred thing that could
not be broken for any reason.

They passed a
rusted old sign on their ninth day of travel that could still be
mostly read; “Welcome to Huron East” it read. Past that was a sign
half-hidden amongst the riot of weeds along the edge of the
crumbled two-lane highway. “Huron County” it read, “Ontario’s West
Coast”. Carolyn had found this inordinately funny, although the
meaning behind the humour in it escaped Richard entirely. He smiled
indulgently, though; hers was the only laughter he ever wanted to
hear again.

Eventually
they began to see farms again, cutaways of order amidst the chaos
of growth that had sprung up over nearly three decades. They
avoided them without question, although the scenes of domestic
tranquility that they appeared to be tugged at Richard’s heart. He
knew that there was no way that the men and women that ran such
farms would ever consent to helping them; there wasn’t enough to go
around, he rationalized, to be helping two random strangers that
appeared on one’s doorstep in the middle of the night. They
gathered food where they could, scavenging roots and berries as
supplement to the game that Richard hunted with the rifle they’d
brought along, but it never seemed to be quite enough. In the dead
of the night, he wondered if he was perhaps wrong about other
people, but his cynical nature took over and he told himself that
it was best not to insult the rational self-interest of other
people by parading your needs in front of them. Still, the argument
felt hollow in the full light of day, a cheap justification for
maybe being afraid of other people. Regardless, they continued to
avoid other people.

They made it to the lake at the end of summer and surveyed the
coast for cottages that had stood the test of time. There were a
few, and they decided on a rather solid-looking brick structure
that was nestled at the bottom of a cliff that ran along the edge
of the lake. The windows were smashed and the interior was mouldy,
but with time and care they were able to clean it up and make it
worthy for winter. They scavenged for food and salted a good deal
of meat before the snow locked them in; they spent that first
winter eating salt-cured venison and winterberries for vitamin
supplement. They spent a long time reading; neither of them had
ever had much of an opportunity to do so, and this naturally
presented the perfect chance. He reread
On
The Beach
during the season, but found it
to be less depressing on the second read-through. Half-dozed
alongside Carolyn, in a bucolic scene of winter content, the themes
of the book seemed less of a black pit of despair, and more of a
love letter to the unending strength to human relations. After
reading it, he spent a great deal of time staring out at the snow,
and thinking.

Besides
reading, they made love like rabbits; with little else to do, they
took pleasure in the touch and tantalizing warmth of each other’s
flesh. By the end of the winter, as the earth tilted back towards
the sun and the heat cracked the freeze that had blanketed them, it
had become very apparent that Carolyn was pregnant. They were
overjoyed, although as time went on Carolyn became deeply concerned
about being forty-six and pregnant for the first time. There were a
number of medical books buried in one of the nearby cabins, and as
she pored through them she became even more worried. There were any
number of complications that might happen, she stressed to him. She
became deeply frightened by the concept of having the baby, and as
the months went on and the spring turned into early summer Richard
spent more and more time staring out at the lake, which he thought
might hold any number of answers, if only he could make it
talk.

Eventually, on
a fragrant summer morning in what might have once been June, he
grabbed the rifle from it’s place in the corner near the swept
fireplace and made to leave. He made sure that Carolyn would be all
right for several days alone, portioning out food and setting
things up so that she would not have to move very far to do
anything. When she asked where he was getting off to, his eyes went
faraway, and he replied that he was going to the nearby farms, to
see if there was anyone there with experience in delivering babies,
particularly problematic ones. Carolyn looked doubtful, but Richard
merely shrugged his shoulders.

“
We can’t do this on our own,” he told her, “we never could.
Sometimes, you simply have to rely on other people”.

Trevor Zaple was born in London, Ontario, in the midst of one
of the periodic sessions of brutal recession that characterize life
in Ontario. He grew up in the picturesque rural surroundings of
Seaforth before fleeing to a series of dying industrial burgs
across Southern Ontario. He has a bachelor's degree in Contemporary
Studies granted unto him by Wilfrid Laurier University, which has
about as much meaning as it sounds. He lived fondly in Toronto's
Parkdale neighbourhood for several years before retreating to yet
another dying industrial burg. He now lives with his wife and
daughter in St. Catharines, Ontario.

Disappearance

Prospero's
Half-Life

What You See Is
What You Get

The Eden
Stream

9th Street
Blues

Hospital On A
Hill

"
Never a dull moment! A unique take
on post-apocalypse fiction, with a sprawling but well-controlled
cast of characters and chase sequences as exciting and suspenseful
as anything I have ever read. Would make a tremendous television
mini-series
"

-Amazon user slickdpdx

"
The prose used within this book
drips with the loving consideration of a man who delights in the
english language
"

-Amazon user
Heather Friesen

"
An uncanny, poly-perspectival
combination of bone-curdling psycho-social insights, darkly complex
Canadians, scheming politicos, singing prophets, and rugged and
flimsy individualists encountering displacement and correlation,
vile erotica, and subtle narrative injections of theory. If Walt
Whitman had a nemesis, it could have easily been Zaple."

-Amazon user Sallow Siserary

"
One hell of a book! It's
definitely not for a faint of heart, because disappearance of
people in this thriller conducts to a disappearance of morals, good
human nature, innocence and maybe even hope."

-Goodreads user Touchka

Twitter:
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Email:
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