Either way, by 5:00 p.m. the light's starting to go and it's time to close up the day. I'll go out to the shed and cut a portion of something down for dinner, grab something of a plant or vegetable nature to go with it, or — every third day — open a can of corn. Got a whole lot of corn still, which figures, because I don't really like it that much.

I'll cook the meat over the day's third fire, straight away, before it gets dark, next to a final can of water — I really need to find myself another of those vacuum flasks, because not having warm coffee in the evening is what gets me closest to feeling down — and have that whole process finished as quick as I can.

I've gotten used to the regime as a whole, but that portion of the day is where you can still find your heart beating, just a little. I grew up used to the idea that the dark wasn't anything to fear, that nothing was going to come and do anything bad to you — from outside your house, anyway. Night meant quietness outside and nothing but forest sounds which — if you understood what was causing them — were no real cause for alarm. It's not that way now, after the thing, and so that point in the schedule where you seal up the property and trust that your preparations, and the wires, are going to do their job, is where it all comes home. You recall the situation.

Otherwise, apart from a few things like the nature of the food I eat, it's really not so different to the way life was before. I understand the food thing might seem like a big deal, but really it isn't. Waste not, want that — and yes, he said that too. Plenty other animals do it, and now isn't the time for beggars to be choosers. That's what we're become, bottom line — animals, doing what's required to get by, and there isn't any shame in that at all. It's all we ever were, if we'd stopped to think about it. We believed we had the whole deal nailed out pretty good, were shooting up in some pre-ordained arc to the sky.