Miranda

Before long we had grown rather comfortable in the cabin. A thorough exploration of the cabin’s cupboards had uncovered books, canned peas, corn, tomatoes and more beans, tins of coffee, tea, powdered milk, and something called artificial sweetener that tasted just like sugar. We also found candles and no longer had to rely on the lantern and the fireplace as our only sources of light during the night. We’d gotten so comfortable that there were times when we forgot that staying there was only supposed to be temporary. Food was no problem. The boar lasted us four days and when it was finished Kevin went back into the forest with the gun and brought back another deer. We kept the meat on the kitchen counter below a window that we always left open to allow the cool air to keep the meat cool and preserve it a little longer. Hannah and Kevin tried getting the electricity working but it was to no avail; neither had the slightest clue about how it worked. The books were really interesting. They were nothing like the books from the outside world that we had in Prospera that dealt almost exclusively with events like The Holocaust that highlighted humanity’s dark side. The books that we found covered a wide range of themes and took place in parts of the world we’d never heard of. The book that I started reading first, Shogun by James Clavell, took place in Japan, one of only a handful of countries in the outside world we knew about because Hiroshima and Nagasaki were where the first bombs in the nuclear world war had fallen. The book depicted an entire nation at war with itself because of the selfish desire of men for more power. The story was remarkably similar to what we’d been taught as students about the propensity of people in the outside world to destroy themselves over the pettiest things. Not everything that we had learned in Prospera was a lie.

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Reading those books we were amazed to learn that the world was that big. This knowledge, while eye-opening, brought with it a profoundly strange realization: we didn’t know where we were. All of the places in the books that we had found had their own unique languages and customs; if we kept moving and found our way to a part of the world where they didn’t speak the same language as us or did things in a way that was completely unfamiliar to us we were going to have serious problems.

In the cabin we had no problems. We had food to eat, books to read, clothes to wear, beds to sleep on, comforts like coffee and tea, and enough firewood to last for days thanks to Kevin devoting an entire day to chopping it and storing it inside to protect it from rain and snow. Most of our time we spent sitting in the living room before the fire, the warmest place in the cabin. Hannah stopped asking Kevin to put the gun away and never use it again and the tension between them over it quickly dissipated and they were able to start making the adjustment to being a proper couple. There was no period of adjustment for me and Lisa. We spent our time in the cabin rediscovering what we’d had in Prospera that we’d had to put on hold during our trek through the forest. Most nights we made love. Hannah and Kevin could hear us in the room next door but that didn’t matter, we had nothing to hide or fear from them, after all, we could hear them making love. They didn’t make love for as long or as often as we did but sex was becoming an increasingly important aspect of their life as a couple. The freedom we were enjoying was causing our emotions to get away from us a little. Our lovemaking, the frequency and intensity of it, was a manifestation of that. In Prospera efforts were made to suppress such emotions, Hannah told us, those emotions were only allowed some free reign during the annual camping trip. In the cabin we could explore those emotions free from fear and it felt good; we developed greater understandings of each other and ourselves and we could feel ourselves growing, moving away from the people we used to be as Prospera citizens and discovering our true selves. The more time we spent living in the cabin, the less we wanted to leave.