Salinas/Solitary Chapter 4 (Patreon)

I poked at the tablet, trying to figure out what was in there. It didn’t go great. I feel like they tried their best, but I didn’t speak the language or read the language so there was only so much I could get. Could the tablet teach me their language? I’ve never been big on languages. English, obviously, and you pick up some Spanish living in California, or at least southern and central California. But that’s not studying, that’s just what you pick up.

I put down the tablet again, watching the sun set over the rubble. Over the ruins, I guess, but is it really ruined if you did it on purpose? The wind blew the grass around, shoved the shrubs, even tried to beat up on the trees, but it didn’t have any luck there. It took the edge off the heat, kept the air from feeling stale. 

I stripped off the top of my orange jumpsuit, tying the arms around my waist. The breeze felt good on the skin. You couldn’t really feel it right through the uniform. Just one day of wandering around and it was dirty as hell. I’m sure there are clothes in one of the boxes. That could be tomorrow’s project.

It was probably getting on to dinner time. Should I… build a fire? I don’t know how. Not without a lighter and lighter fluid and charcoal briquettes and a grill on a concrete patio or sidewalk. Watching those wildfires come racing in on the map, watching the sky go orange, then black, wondering if our tiny house would get eaten up like all the others. I’ve been lucky- never had to evacuate. I’ve seen those who had, and it’s real bad. It all spooked me. Never wanted to play with fire.

I looked around the craziness of the overgrown park. Nothing looked dry, but I doubt that means much. Probably burns like gasoline if I so much as dropped a butt on the ground. Back to the tablet. Maybe there was something in there about cooking dinner. I can nuke dinner, at least. I can do an oven pizza if the electricity wasn’t browning out.

Half the time, I’d just get tamales or something from some abuela selling out of the back of her car in a Home Depot parking lot. They keep everything warm in big metal pots wrapped in blankets. Some use coolers to keep things hot, which makes sense but always makes me laugh anyway. 

I looked up at the burning sky, and got to studying.

According to Green (the cartoon figure doing the tutorial) when the sun was between here and there in the sky (there was a little animation) I could use this odd looking metal box thing to cook. It kind of unfolded into four mirrors around a box with a glass front. You let it warm up for a while, aimed at the sun, then put your pot in there. Then you just waited a while and, carefully, took out your boiling hot pot. I don’t know how long it took, but since the sun moved in the animation a little way, I’d say more than a minute.

The sun was below the horizon, now. I couldn’t use the box-thing. I clicked the picture for hungry people with the moon over them. This time, brown turned up. He gave me the bro nod. I nodded back. First-find a stretch of bare ground, and if you couldn’t, find a bit of flat rock (or a bunch of rocks) to work on. Make sure there was nothing that could catch fire anywhere near you. Then get the sack with a little flame on it out of the same chest I got the tent from.

I had hauled the chest up earlier, when I was setting up the tent. In the sack I found what looked like a coffee can with holes in it, and a metal grate up top. There was also a sealed sack of small bits of split wood, and a roll of little pucks of wax and sawdust. I think it’s wax- felt waxy. 

Put some food in the little pot. Okay, done. Add some water. Am I making soup? Did I eat raw soup ingredients earlier? But it all tasted okay to eat. So I don’t know. In it went. Take coffee can with holes in it. Put in five sticks vertically, leaning them together like a teepee or something. Leave a gap for the puck. Get the metal rod with the flat bit of steel tied to it with a lanyard. Scrape the metal rod with the edge of the steel until you get sparks. Make sure the sparks land on the puck and nowhere else. 

Took more doing than you would think, to get the sparks and make them go where they’re supposed to. I got there eventually. The puck lit up. I poked it back into the teepee, and watched the dried sticks light up fast. Then I put the pot on top of the grate. I could see how it all worked. There were vent holes up around the top, along with the grate, and a smaller hole at the bottom to push in more twigs and wood. It got crazy hot. I was glad I was cooking on the apron around the hut. It’d start a fire for sure, otherwise. 

I sat out next to my little cook stove and watched the sky change. You could see the stars come out on the far side of the sky, and before I knew it, they were filling the sky. More and more and more of them. I’d heard somewhere there were billions of stars, and for the first time, I believed it. They crowded in, hardly leaving room for the night. 

The soup… stew? I don’t know what the difference is. Dinner got hot. It smelled pretty amazing. Tasted a little bland without hot sauce, but I didn’t see any sauce in the box, so I’d take what I could get. It tasted pretty good. Kind of bean-y and weirdly chewy. I’m sure there was mushroom in it, and some kind of fake meat or cheese. I’m not a food guy. It tasted okay, it was hot and it filled me up. No complaints. 

I kept exploring the tablet. There were guides on how to clean the pot (there were bowls in the box, but why get them messy when I can eat out of the pot?) and how to take care of the spoons. Which were made of wood and were a lot thicker than I was used to. No idea why, but they were.

Wood rots, right? So either the wood they left in the box couldn’t be that old, or they figured out how to stop things from rotting. I had no idea which was the right answer. Why not just use metal spoons? It’s not like they didn’t have metal or tools. Another mystery.

I lost track of time. I wound up scraping the bottom of the pot with my spoon, and the fire had gone out of my little stove. When I looked up, the sky was full of stars. No moon tonight. Across the middle of the sky was a band of light and dust, with even more stars clustered around it. I’d never seen anything like it.

Was that…. No, I don’t know. It couldn’t be satellites, right? It was too big. Did the moon break and turn into this? I really don’t know. But it was peaceful and pretty. I couldn’t do anything about it anyhow. I warmed my back against the adobe hut, and just watched the sky. 

Then I got bored and went into the hut to go to sleep. I got two steps in, shook a light thing, got two more steps in and turned around to go sleep in the tent. It felt too much like being back in solitary. I took the light with me, got into the tent, and went to bed. Tomorrow, I will figure out what I would do in this world.