gauge was critical. Too small a needle, and the knitting would prove difficult, the resulting sweater too tight and constricting. Too large a needle on the other hand, and it would create a garment full of large holes. The knitting would remain loose. One would be able to see straight through it.
Her choice made, the wooden bones removed from their leather wrist, Jahns reached for the large ball of cotton yarn. It was hard to believe, weighing that knot of twisted fibers, that her hands could make of it something ordered, something useful. She fished for the end of the yarn, dwelling on how things came to be. Right now, her sweater was little more than a tangle and a thought. Going back, it had once been bright fibers of cotton blooming in the dirt farms, pulled, cleaned, and twisted into long strands. Even further, and the very substance of the cotton plant itself could be traced to those souls who had been laid to rest in its soil, feeding the roots with their own leather while the air above baked under the full glory of powerful grow lights.
Jahns shook her head at her own morbidity. The older she got, the quicker her mind went to death. Always, in the end, the thoughts of death.
With practiced care, she looped the end of the yarn around the point of one needle and crafted a triangle- shaped web with her fingers. The tip of the needle danced through this triangle, casting the yarn on. This was her favorite part, casting on. She liked beginnings. The first row. Out of nothing comes something. Since her hands knew what to do, she was free to glance up and watch a gust of morning wind chase pockets of dust down the slope of a hill. The clouds were low and ominous today. They loomed like worried parents over these smaller darting clouds of windswept soil, which tumbled like laughing children, twirling and spilling, following the dips and valleys as they flowed toward a great crease where two hills collided to become one. Here, Jahns watched as the puffs of dust splashed against a pair of dead bodies, the frolicking twins of dirt evaporating into ghosts, solid playful children returning once more to dreams and scattered mist.
Mayor Jahns settled back in her faded plastic chair and watched the fickle winds play across the forbidding world outside. Her hands worked the yarn into rows, requiring only occasional glances to keep her place. Often, the dust flew toward the silo’s sensors in sheets, each wave causing her to cringe as if a physical blow were about to land. This assault of blurring grime was anytime difficult to watch, but especially brutal the day after a cleaning. Each touch of dust on the clouding lenses was a violation, a dirty man touching something pure. Jahns remembered what that felt like. And sixty years later, she sometimes wondered if this misting of grime that led to a different sort of bodily sacrifice wasn’t even more painful for her to abide.
“Ma’am?”
Mayor Jahns turned away from the sight of the dead hills cradling her recently deceased sheriff. She turned to find Deputy Marnes standing by her side.
“Yes, Marnes?”
“You asked for these.”
Marnes placed three manilla folders on the cafeteria table and slid them toward her through the scattered crumbs and juice stains of last night’s cleaning celebration. Jahns set her knitting aside and reluctantly reached for the folders. What she really wanted was to be left alone a little longer to watch rows of knots become something. She wanted to enjoy the peace and quiet of this unspoiled sunrise before the grime and the years dulled it, before the rest of the upper silo awoke, rubbed the sleep from their eyes and the stains from their consciences, and came up to crowd around her in their own plastic chairs and take it all in.
But duty beckoned; she was mayor by choice; and the silo needed a sheriff. So Jahns put aside her own wants and desires and weighed the folders in her lap. Caressing the cover of the first one, she looked down at her hands with something between pain and acceptance. The backs of them appeared as dry and crinkled as the pulp paper hanging out of the folders. She glanced over at Deputy Marnes, whose white mustache was flecked with the occasional black. She remembered when the colors there were the other way around. She remembered when his tall and thin frame were a mark of vigor and youth rather than gaunt fragility. He was handsome still, but only because she knew him from long ago, only because her old eyes still remembered.
“You know,” she told Marnes, “we could do this different this time. You could let me promote you to sheriff, hire yourself a deputy, and do this proper.”
Marnes laughed. “I’ve been deputy almost as long as you’ve been mayor, Ma’am. Don’t figure on being nothing else but dead one day.”
Jahns nodded. One of the things she loved about having Marnes around was that his thoughts could be so black as to make hers shine gray. “I fear that day is rapidly approaching for us both,” she said.
“Truer than true, I reckon. Never figured to outlive so many. Sure as sin don’t see me outliving you.” Marnes rubbed his mustache and studied the view of the outside. Jahns smiled at him, opened the folder on top, and studied the first bio.
“That’s three decent candidates,” Marnes said. “Just like you asked for. Be happy to work with any of them. Juliette, I think she’s in the middle there, would be my first pick. Works down in Mechanical. Don’t come up much, but me and Holston—”
Marnes paused and cleared his throat. Jahns glanced over and saw that her Deputy’s gaze had crept toward that dark crook in the hill. He covered his mouth with a fist of sharp knuckles and faked a cough.
“Excuse me,” he said. “As I was sayin’, the sheriff and me worked a death down there a few years back. This Juliette—I think she prefers Jules, come to think of it—was a right shiner. Sharp as a tack. Big help on this case, good at spotting details, handling people, being diplomatic but firm, all that. I don’t think she comes up past the eighties much. A down-deeper for sure, which we ain’t had in a while.”
Jahns sorted through Juliette’s folder, checking her family tree, her voucher history, her current pay in chits. She was listed as a shift foreman with good marks. No history in the lottery.
“Never married?” Jahns asked.
“Nope. Something of a johnboy. A wrencher, you know? We were down there a week, saw how the guys took to her. Now, she could have her pick of them boys but chooses not to. Kind of person who leaves an impression but prefers to go it alone.”
“Sure seems like she left an impression on you,” Jahns said, regretting it immediately. She hated the jealous tone in her own voice.
Marnes shifted his weight to his other foot. “Well, you know me, Mayor. I’m always sizing up candidates. Anything to keep from bein’ promoted.”
Jahns smiled. “What about the other two?” She checked the names, wondering if a down-deeper was a good idea. Or possibly worried about Marnes having a crush. She recognized the name on the top folder. Peter Billings. He worked a few floors down in judicial, as a clerk or a judge’s shadow.
“Honestly, ma’am? They’re filler to make it seem fair. Like I said, I’d work with them, but I think Jules is your girl. Been a long time since we had a lass for a Sheriff. Be a popular choice with an election comin’ up.”
“That won’t be why we choose,” Jahns said. “Whoever we decide on will probably be here long after we’re gone—” She stopped herself as she recalled having said the same thing about Holston, back when he’d been chosen.
Jahns closed the folder and returned her attention to the wallscreen. A small tornado had formed at the base of the hill, the gathering dust whipped into an organized frenzy. It built some steam, this small wisp, as it swelled into a larger cone, spinning and spinning on a wavering tip like a child’s top as it raced toward sensors that fairly sparkled in the wan rays of a clear sunrise.
“I think we should go see her,” Jahns finally said. She kept the folders in her lap, fingers like rolled parchment toying with the rough edges of handmade paper.
“Ma’am? I’d rather us fetch her up here. Do the interview in your office like we’ve always done. It’s a long way down to her and an even longer way back up.”
“I appreciate the concern, Deputy, I do. But it’s been a long while since I’ve been much past the fortieth. My knees are no excuse to not see my people—”
The Mayor stopped. The tornado of dust wavered, turned, and headed straight for them. It grew and grew— the wide angle of the lens distorting it into a monster much larger and more fierce than she knew it to actually be —and then it blew over the sensor array, the entire cafeteria descending into a brief darkness until the zephyr caromed past, retreating across the screen in the lounge and leaving behind it a view of the world now tainted with a slight, dingy film.
“Damn those things,” Deputy Marnes said through gritted teeth. The aged leather of his holster squeaked as he rested his hand on the butt of his gun, and Jahns imagined the old Deputy out on that landscape, chasing the
