Monk jam and cheese and

  me.  Of course they were expecting her.  A traveling companion took each gift out of a limpening daypack.  What had been a starkly sunny day was being overtaken by it.  People who cared about each other and humanity and the earth had made a spiderweb of communications about it.  Though to speak of its origins was tatamount to death sentence. 

  A man moved from between cars that seemed to have been sitting in place for a very long time.  Weathered.  The tires caving into concrete slab of a parking lot.  "We should go." 

  "Where?" 

  "Inside." 

  For three or five hours we read.  One window was okay to be left open a crack, the one pocketed in dead air. 

  "No sense saving it," was said of the gelatinous sweet in a jar.  We'd been given a third of a loaf of sourdough bread for our hike.  We ate silently as "the cloud of radiation" bristled all around us. 

  "You

  "Nancy 

  "You 

  Roused from a catnap between diplomatic rah-ows.  Bruisings really as the money trails trained debt and aid and war and all sides into one giant garbage can that hardcore, purist environmentalists wanted gone from the planet. 

  "Whaat," she sleepily growled. 

  "Turn up the speakers on that jet." 

  "Yes, yes I'm awake." 

  "Get your ass 

  "Plane 

  "Down here!" 

  "Okay, I'll get my plain ass down there." There hadn't been enough high security to go around so some of the jets bandied around up top.  While ground allies analyzed emissions and contrails and flow of luggage at airports.  With surface-to-air activity on the Continent and large swaths of population taking up cause it was better together and not government people as flaunting celebrity. 

  Husband and wife kissed casually as trained people measured everything about that type of transportation.