The True Things Archive

Write a 1000-word article about the new Ford F690 and its patented GREEN emission system that studies have shown to reduce greenhouse gases.  

Callie hit the return key and skimmed the article that popped up instantly on her screen. She found a few bizarre artefacts—a reference to elves, a tangent about finger painting a rainbow—and quickly edited them out, then copy-pasted the result back into the AI. 

Can you rewrite this article in the style of  

She checked her list of authoritative-sounding journalists from the early internet age, plucked a few names at random, and had the AI rewrite the article six times in six different styles. A quick skim to delete anything too bizarre, and the articles were ready to deploy.  

Write a 1000-word article about the new Ford F690 and its crash test rating in the context of a recent car crash between a Ford F690 and a Subaru Forester, in which the family of five in the Ford F690 did not receive any injuries, but the baby in the Subaru Forester was internally decapitated and the three-year-old girl permanently paralyzed.  

Callie pulled up an image-generating AI on her other monitor and entered a few prompts. She edited the car crash article and its four major news outlet themed spinoffs while she waited for the visual AI to generate cute family photos of the Ford family and the Subaru family. Then it was time to package up five articles, post them on the major news outlet websites (her client was of course covering the “advertising” fee), and call it quits for the day. 

She turned off her laptop. The two mismatched monitors hooked up to it went dark. Her cat, Winston, glared up at her with his one baleful eye from the passenger seat, where the portable power source had just stopped humming.  

Her workstation was across from the galley kitchen she’d installed after gutting her mom’s old minivan and converting it into a home. Platform bed in the back of the car, with storage boxes and litter box underneath. Everyone doing van builds online seemed to be choosing to live this way so they could travel and save money. Callie, and everyone she’d talked to in the parking lot of the Plattsburgh Wal-Mart, wasn’t even managing the “save money” part. Crawling over her sleeping pad, she unlocked the rear doors of the van and opened them to let in fresh air.  

Winston mrowed his disapproval.  

The icy wind briefly freshened the space, before bringing with it the odors of the parking lot: feces, urine, gasoline, cigarettes. In the neighbouring vehicle, someone dumped out a water bottle into a pile of dull yellow slush. 

“Hey! You with the cat!” 

Callie looked back at the passenger seat, saw that it was empty, and snapped her gaze back in the direction of the shout. A man in a red parka was pointing to a tabby-coloured streak heading directly for the main road. 

Callie jumped out of her van, right foot coming down square in a pile of partially frozen human shit. She slipped, fell on her butt in the snow, and scrambled to her feet again.  

Winston had not left the warmth of the van since he’d climbed into it two months before. 

When the battery wasn’t humming with warmth, he nestled in Callie’s lap or on her shoulder. During the rare periods that the van was gassed up and being transferred to a new location, he planted himself on the air vents and purred. 

That he would voluntarily exit the vehicle had not crossed Callie’s mind. But it should have, she chided herself as she helplessly watched Winston sprint towards the wheels of an oncoming semi truck. 

At the last second, he veered sharply to the left and put his paws up on the rear bumper of a hatchback that, judging by the lack of crusted snow on the windows and roof, had only recently arrived in the parking lot.  

Callie hurried over and was reaching down to scoop Winston up when the hatchback’s rear door opened up and a man with frizzy gray hair peered down at the cat. 

“Melba? Is that you, girl?” 

Winston ducked away from Callie’s reaching hands and jumped up into the hatchback. “Winston is clearly male,” Callie crossed her arms over her chest.  

“Melba, despite her genitalia, embodies the divine feminine. And anyway, she’s a cat. She’s above petty human concerns, like gender.” The man in the hatchback grinned, stroking Winston/Melba from ears to tail. The cat purred and pressed up against his hand. “I called her that because she loves licking melba toasts. Doesn’t eat them, just licks them. For hours. Until they turn into this nasty paste that smells like cat food.” 

“I called him Winston because he looks like Winston Churchill.” 

“The old PM had two eyes and much less hair. Though I do admit there’s a certain resemblance about the chin.” 

There was a lilt to the man’s voice that she couldn’t place, something British, or maybe Australian. Swedish? She’d always been terrible with accents. He looked to be anywhere from forty to fifty-five, prematurely gray, with crow’s feet deepening around the corners of his eyes. 

Callie reached up to touch her own incipient wrinkles, unsure how to proceed.  

“I’m Rudy. He/him,” he said. He sat up, feet in holey grey socks dangling dangerously close to the slushy ground, and extended a hand in fingerless gloves. 

“Callie. She/her.” She did not take his hand, and eventually he dropped it.  

“Well, Callie, it seems that we are both employed by this cat.” 

“I have cat food and a litter box in my van. Whereas, you-” She gestured to the cluttered interior of Rudy’s car. The space not taken up by dirty clothes and blankets was packed with decrepit paperback books, most of them waterlogged; plastic bags filled with old and no doubt dry ballpoint pens; and cloudy, translucent plastic boxes with faded labels.  

“Then you should take my Melba—sorry, your Winston—and install him where he will be most comfortable. Just-” 

Rudy turned around and rummaged in a tangle of blankets. 

“Here.” He passed Winston to Callie, then handed her a dented box of melba toasts. “I’ve been saving them.” 

Back in the van, Winston licking a piece of melba toast with the dedication and intensity of a monk illuminating a manuscript, Callie took out her old composition book and a pencil for the first time in ten years. In another life, before her mother got sick, before the hospital bills consumed her parents’ savings and her savings and her sister’s mortgage and plunged the whole family into bankruptcy, she had been working her way up the ladder of a dying news conglomerate by reporting on traffic conditions. 

Did the news even exist anymore? Callie “published” her AI-generated articles on websites that looked like the old news outlets, but after combing through those websites she couldn’t be certain that any other articles were written by human beings recording real events. Ditto the photos attached to the articles. They all had the otherworldly quality of images reverse-engineered by a computer intelligence from a text prompt. 

She half-expected the pencil tip to break off when she began to write. It held firm. Her hand cramped up when she was only three lines in, and she had to put down the pencil and shake out her arm. 

It was coming back to her, the ability to look at a sea of cars and pick out patterns. They’d started her out in the helicopter before budget cuts. Then, it had been two years of biking over to the nearest traffic jam and riding up and down the sidewalk along the line of cars, finding the source of the congestion and cataloguing the effects upstream and downstream. 

A parking lot full of people living in their cars was a different phenomenon than a traffic jam, more of a stagnant pond than a temporarily dammed river. But there was still a little movement, and that movement made big ripples.  

Rudy’s car was one of five compact vehicles that had arrived on the outskirts of the parking lot after the two converted school buses belonging to family vloggers left for more picturesque surroundings. Tents that had been inching towards the parking lot itself from the strip of grass by the highway immediately halted their migration when the empty spots were filled. This was fortunate for Callie and the others in the vehicular overclass—the police came down quickly on a parking lot with so much as a single tent in a parking space, turning a blind eye to people sleeping in their cars as long as they didn’t park within the first ten parking spaces in front of the Wal-Mart.  

The demographic shift from two sets of family vloggers with composting or chemical toilets in-vehicle to five individuals with, at best, designated pee bottles, was wreaking havoc with the already borderline sanitation situation. The single Port-O-Potty by the tent city had long ago become unusable. Access to the Wal-Mart washrooms was controlled by the rent-a-cops. Callie, as a white, middle-aged woman with close-cropped hair who dressed in clean, plain clothing, could slip in and out of the washrooms without triggering the rent-a-cops. An unkempt Black man like Rudy would be driven off instantly. He would be forced to contribute to the plastic dog poop bags of human shit that dotted the parking lot (the trash can outside the Wal-Mart had been removed when the store manager discovered that it was mostly being used for human feces.)  

New people didn’t have exclusively negative effects, however. When the school buses left, they broke up the snow pack at the rear entrance of the parking lot. The staggered arrival of the five new cars further tamped down the snow and pushed aside chunks of ice. This meant that Dana, the outreach nurse, could reach the back of the parking lot in her car again. The rent-a-cops knew her vehicle and chased her off when she tried to drive through the front entrance (regularly cleared for customers), which meant that she had to pack in her Narcan and fentanyl patches on foot from a couple miles away. With vehicular access, she was able to bring in her wound dressing supplies and do a daily insulin run, thereby decreasing the mortality rate in the parking lot significantly.  

Callie looked at the nearly unreadable scrawl that covered five pages of her composition book, realized it would be impossible for anyone else to read, and turned to a new page. She divided the two open pages into sections: New Arrivals, Recent Departures, Sanitation Report, Where’s Nurse Dana?, and Deaths. She briefly considered a section for births, but only two babies had been born in the parking lot, and neither they nor their mothers had lived (even though Nurse Dana had been present for one of the deliveries).  

It was only after she’d finished filling out the Where’s Nurse Dana? section in careful block letters that she realized she was, essentially, creating a newsletter.  

Callie put down her notebook. She blinked her dry, strained eyes and opened and closed her hand, which had a blister on her middle finger because she was left-handed and had never quite learned to hold a pencil correctly.  

“Winston,” she said, “Who the hell am I writing this for?” 

The cat had long ago reduced the melba toast to a fishy paste. Seeing that the human was out of her trance state, he mrowed loudly and pawed at her leg to request a fresh piece of satisfyingly stale and scratchy carbohydrate.  

Callie obliged him, her tingling fingers bumping against a smooth, cylindrical object as she rummaged for a melba toast.  

She pulled back her hand like she’d touched a hot stove and checked for puncture wounds. Seeing none, she shone her phone flashlight into the box. 

The cylindrical object was not, as she feared, a syringe. It was a fountain pen. 

She had never written anything with a fountain pen. Figuring that she’d botch things as badly with the fancy pen as she did with ballpoints, she pressed the pen down on a fresh page in her notebook. 

As expected, a big blotch formed. Some of it ended up on her hand.  

The pen felt heavy and smooth in her fingers. She turned and tilted it until the angle felt right. Then, in a looping cursive that she was surprised to recall from her elementary school days, Callie wrote: 

 

  The True Things Archive  

She stared at the fountain pen. The light coming through her windshield was fading, the sky a pinkish-grey smear in the twilight. She had only a few minutes to run into the Wal-Mart bathroom before barricading herself and Winston in the van for the night.  

As she performed her nighttime ablutions in the grimy bathroom sink, squinting at the fluorescent-illuminated hag in the bathroom mirror, she considered the best way to circulate a pen-and-paper newsletter. All she could come up with was putting it in a plastic bag and taping it to a streetlamp at a central location in the parking lot.  

Which, after discreetly slipping a single Ziploc bag from the box on the shelf into her coat pocket, is exactly what she did the next morning.  

The True Things Archive (Volume I, Issue I) 

A Factual Account of Our Surroundings 

Written by an Anonymous Observer  

The newsletter had taken most of the night, and part of the morning (after her flashlight battery ran out) to print in the grid she’d drawn and redrawn six times before hitting the right balance. It covered the front and back of two sheets of notebook paper. Callie’s van, normally quite tidy, was littered with discarded pages. Her notebook was almost out of paper. Her left hand felt stiff, her fingertips numb.  

Overall, she felt better than she had in weeks.  

Her next stop was Rudy’s car. After careful consideration, she opened the rear doors of the van and invited Winston along. He lifted his head from her quilt, yawned, and went back to sleep. 

Well, she’d tried.  

She locked the doors of the van and, for the first time in a long time, looked at her own neighbours in the parking lot. In the stall to her left, a rusty Ford. The man in the red parka who’d alerted her to Winston’s flight was sleeping in the driver’s seat, mouth open in a snore that was audible even through the closed window of the truck.  

In the stall to her right, a powder blue Toyota with silver reflective material blocking every window. She couldn’t remember if she’d seen anyone going in or out of it.  

Behind her was parked a small green car, its trunk facing the rear doors of her van. Callie had caught glimpses of another woman, also in her forties, typing on a laptop in the passenger seat. Sometimes she’d seen the woman in the Wal-Mart bathroom; other times, she’d seen her being bundled off by the rent-a-cops (the woman looked Hispanic and did not regularly wash her long, black hair).  

To either side of that woman were two vans, one white, one grey. Callie had observed little movement from the grey van, but a male/female couple in their twenties lived in the white van. The man left every morning at six AM on the dot, dressed in a janitor’s uniform. The woman used to leave at odd hours, presumably to work odd jobs, but now mostly stayed in the van except to dump the urine pot and waddle in to use the Wal-Mart bathroom. Even the rent-a-cops didn’t have the heart to turn her away, despite her untidy appearance and her dark skin. She looked to be eight months pregnant.  

Callie didn’t like to think about the pregnant woman. In this place, a pregnant woman was a dead woman walking.  

She hurried past the white van, circling around the Ford to reach the aisle between vehicles, and took the aisle all the way to the center of the lot, where the semi-cleared road to the back entrance lay. Rudy’s hatchback was the car closest to the back entrance.  

He opened the trunk as soon as he saw her coming.  

“Did you like the pen?” 

“I used it,” she said. “Where did you get it? Where’d you get the ink?” 

“Scavenged the pen, made the ink.” He gestured to the boxes in his car. “Charcoal, lye, cooking oil, methanol, dish soap, water. The hardest part is turning the cooking oil into vegetable glycerin without a good roaring fire or a decent stove. My supplies are all running low.” 

“So why waste it on me?” 

“Why not?” 

Callie shrugged.  

“I used to be a professor,” he said. “East Asian studies. Rutgers.” 

“I’m sorry,” she offered. The humanities programs had all been shut down five years ago. Along with most universities and colleges—there weren’t enough young people to fill lecture seats.  

“The job was mostly bullshit by the end, anyway. Now I can focus on ink-making, paper-making, and calligraphy—my true passions.” 

Callie made a noncommittal sound. In her experience, people would keep talking at her indefinitely unless she faked a prior commitment and ran away. There was no faking prior commitments when you were homeless in a parking lot, so for the past couple years she’d avoided engaging with anyone to prevent being trapped in an hours-long recounting of a life story, an endless recital of the latest conspiracy theories, or a short proposition followed by a brisk groping.  

Rudy didn’t seem like the proposition or conspiracy theory type. She could endure his life story in return for more ink. 

“Hey, what did you end up using the ink for?” He asked. Callie had already started to tune him out in expectation of a long, boring recital of the same story every humanities professor had to tell since the cutbacks. She dragged her awareness back to the conversation.  

“Hm? I wrote a newsletter. I posted it up there.” She pointed to the streetlamp where she’d taped the Ziploc bag.  

“Can I read it?”  

“Suit yourself.” Callie shifted to one foot, then the other. Her right knee creaked. “Can I have more ink for the pen? I think it’s running low.” 

Rudy reached for a box that rattled with glass vials of homebrew ink. He showed her how to remove the ink cartridge from the pen, refill it with new ink, wipe down the nib. Then he handed her a stack of creamy, white paper. 

“You’ll have to line it yourself. Do you have a ruler?” 

“I can lift one from the Wal-Mart.”

“Don’t risk it.” He rummaged around in a duffel bag and pulled out a metal ruler. “I’ve got three of these.” 

She thanked him and started back towards her van. If she was going to eat for the next week, wash her clothes at the laundromat, and pay for a shower at the gym, she needed to pick up more freelance “writing” jobs from the online job board today.  

“Hey! Hey!” 

Nurse Dana waved at Callie from the side door of a black Dodge Caravan. Callie had never interacted with Nurse Dana. She’d once considered asking her to check out a mole on her back, but by the time she worked up the courage to ask her, the nurse was administering Narcan to three people in the tent city and the suspicious mole suddenly seemed like a very insignificant problem.  

Callie picked her way through a dense patch of poop bags to where the nurse was peering into the window of the minivan. 

“Have you seen anyone come out of here for a while?” Nurse Dana asked. 

“No, but I don’t walk by here often.” 

The nurse walked around the minivan, tapping on the windows. She took a pair of safety glasses from her pocket, fastened them over her bifocals, then pulled a bright red hammer out of her backpack and broke the driver’s-side window.  

An odor of putrefaction filled the air. Callie clapped her hands over her mouth and nose. Nurse Dana leaned into the broken window. 

“Fuck,” she said. “Don’t know if the diabetic coma or the cold killed him. Either way, at least he probably died in his sleep.” 

“I…uh…” 

“Your ‘deaths’ section was incomplete,” Nurse Dana pointed out. “Help me make a full inventory for your next newsletter. You owe your readers a full account.” 

Callie trailed behind Nurse Dana as she checked all the cars in the parking lot that hadn’t shown signs of life for at least two weeks. Three of them were just abandoned. Within a few days, denizens of the tent city would move into the abandoned vehicles, clearing away the broken glass and fitting blankets over the open windows. Moving up in the world. 

The other fifteen held dead bodies. Most of them were diabetics who went into comas when the back entrance was blocked and Nurse Dana couldn’t pack in her insulin. A couple were overdoses. The rest had frozen to death.  

“Well,” said Nurse Dana, “Good thing we’re getting a cold snap this week. It’s going to take me at least ten days to get enough ambulances out here to cart off the dead.” 

She peeled off her surgical gloves, stuffed them into a trash bag strapped to her utility belt, and held out her hand. Callie shook it. 

“Thanks for spurring me to get off my ass and do my wellness checks,” Nurse Dana said. “Hope to see the next issue up soon.” 

“Um, sure.” 

“I’m not your only reader. People are talking about The True Things Archive. They’re waking up, getting out of their cars.” Nurse Dana removed the safety goggles and looked Callie in the eye. “Please keep doing what you’re doing.” 

Callie nodded. Nurse Dana turned around and began picking her way towards the van with the pregnant lady in it.  

Climbing up into her own van, already laying out the next issue of The True Things Archive in her mind, Callie heard the pregnant lady speak for the first time since she had become aware of her.  

“Hi, Dana,” she said, her voice small and breathy. “Hope you’re doing okay.” 

“I’m fine. How’s the little one?”  

The two went into the grey van, their voices muffled but still audible. Callie closed her own doors, further muffling the conversation. It continued on in the background, an unintelligible, oddly comforting hum, as she fired up her laptop. She accepted the first three jobs she saw on the board and got to work. 

Write a 1000-word article about the medical doctors recommending Minnie’s Essential Oils as an alternative to vaccination due to the patented antiviral properties of the child-safe lemon/clove blend.  

Three jobs was the bare minimum for the laundromat fee. She could skip the shower this week—the bathroom sink was plenty. And she could survive for a little while on the stale baked goods that some church dropped off in bulk at the tent city on Saturday mornings.  

Three jobs, then on to the next issue of the Archive.  

It took Callie the rest of the day to finish the three jobs. Clients were asking for more and more articles per topic, and paying less and less. Competition was cutthroat. Callie was certain that she maintained her rating on the job board because she bothered to proofread the output of the AI. At least half of the other writers on the board were bots programmed to accept a job, feed the prompt into the AI for the desired number of published articles, and post the result without involving a human in the process at all. Due to the poor quality of the results, the bots were flagged and deleted by moderators who received client complaints. 

The bots were getting better, though. Someone was refining their training data. Callie wasn’t sure how much longer she’d have a job. 

At sunset, Callie used Rudy’s ruler to lay out the sections of Issue 2 on the new, creamy paper. She wrote only, No Change, under both New Arrivals and Recent Departures. The Sanitation Report and Where’s Nurse Dana? received cursory updates. She spent most of her time on the Deaths section, being careful to locate each corpse relative to its neighbours in the parking lot, to the back entrance to the parking lot, and to the Wal-Mart itself.  

As soon as the sun rose the next morning, Callie went to the street lamp to post the new issue.  

Someone had taken the first issue out of the Ziploc bag, drawn a penis on it in red Sharpie, and replaced it. 

Callie’s stomach knotted. For a moment she was back in her first year of college, reading the hateful comments at the bottom of her short-lived blog.  

Then she laughed. 

Someone had taken the time to remove the Archive from its plastic bag. Presumably, they had at least skimmed the newsletter before defacing it and putting it back. If she didn’t count Nurse Dana’s unsubstantiated report of people waking up and getting out of their cars to read the Archive, this meant that she had at least two confirmed readers. 

That was a start. 

She took the first issue of The True Things Archive out of the Ziploc bag, replaced it with the second issue, and went back to her van for a nap. 

Minutes after she’d fallen asleep, one of the rent-a-cops banged on her windshield.  

“Hey! Hey, you! Open up!” 

Groggily, Callie threw off her sleeping bag, shifted Winston off her legs, and crawled into the front seat of the van. For the first time all winter, she opened the driver’s side door. 

“Is there a problem?” She asked.  

“We’re calling a tow truck for your vehicle. You’ve exceeded the maximum length of stay in the courtesy stalls.” 

“What? How are you going to get a tow truck to my spot?” Callie held out her arms to indicate the closely packed vehicles extending for at least ten feet in every direction. A motorcycle could thread its way through the parking lot on a good day. Tow trucks didn’t stand a chance.  

“We’ll tow whoever we need to tow to get to your van,” he said. “You need to get out of here, now. Find somewhere else to camp.”

“I’ll wait for the tow truck.” 

With a clunk and a screech of rusty steel, the red truck’s passenger side door opened. The man in the red parka leaned out. 

“Hey, lady, is this guy bothering you?” 

The rent-a-cop and the man in the red parka glowered at each other. Callie shivered and crossed her arms over her chest, wishing she’d pulled on a sweater before opening the door.

“I don’t think he can actually do anything to me,” Callie said, emboldened by the support of her neighbour.  

Across the aisle, more car doors were opening.  

The rent-a-cop took a step back from Callie’s van. 

The man in the red parka scooted awkwardly over the console and into the passenger seat of his truck, regaining an air of menace once his boots were firmly in the footwell. He sat less than a foot away from where the rent-a-cop stood, his legs tensed, ready to spring out onto the asphalt.  

“We’ll tow you,” the rent-a-cop said, turning around and speed walking back into the Wal-Mart.  

No tow truck arrived in the parking lot that day, or the next. On the third day after the threat, the rent-a-cops did take down the Ziploc bag from the street lamp and destroyed that day’s issue of The True Things Archive. Callie found a new Ziploc bag taped to her windshield when she was coming back from the laundromat.  

She posted the Archive on a different streetlamp that afternoon. 

On the fourth day, she informed Rudy that she estimated the ink he gave her would last another week, maybe less. He left the parking lot on foot immediately. Five hours later, he appeared at the back entrance of the parking lot as Callie was hanging up that day’s Archive.  

“Help me unload.” 

He was towing two children’s sleds. One held a five-gallon bucket with a screw top lid. The other was piled with broken wooden furniture. Both loads were secured with haphazard lashings of plastic twine and purple acrylic yarn. 

Callie went to help him, but the man in the red parka beat her to it. He was joined by a woman from the far side of the parking lot that Callie had only seen in passing. Together, they helped Rudy start a fire with the wooden furniture and set up his pots, mixing bowls, and propane stove. 

Squatting nearby and taking notes in the margins of her old composition notebook, Callie found herself talking and listening to people talk more than she had in years. The woman from the other side of the parking lot was named Melinda. She’d been camped by the Wal-Mart for three years, and was full of stories about the police raids her first year in the parking lot. Like Callie, she wasn’t sure if her vehicle would even start anymore, and figured she was here for the long haul. 

“Do you mind if I do a feature on you?” 

“On me?” asked Melinda. “What for?” 

“Historical interest. I might make a weekly history feature if it goes over well.”  

Melinda laughed. “How can you tell it goes over well? There’s no like button on the streetlamp.” 

“I’m not sure. Right now, I think that I’m doing well if I see more people getting out of their cars.” 

“What about people who don’t know about the Archive yet? Or who can’t read? There’s a fair amount of those in the parking lot, you know. More in the tent city.” 

Callie shrugged. 

“I was wondering if I could offer my services.” Melinda made an exaggerated bow. “A lifetime ago, I was an actor on Broadway. I’d love to be the town crier.” 

“Suit yourself.” 

Each afternoon, when Callie posted the Archive, Melinda was the first to take it out of the bag and skim it. She then went to five different places in the parking lot and the tent city to read it aloud. It made Callie wince to hear her work read aloud at first. She started writing a pencil draft of the Archive and reading it aloud quietly to herself, marking up awkward sentence structure and catching typos, before copying it over on Rudy’s good paper in fountain pen. The quality of the writing improved, and she no longer cringed to hear Melinda’s daily recitation.  

After a month and a half of the Archive, Callie knew the names of all the people parked within three stalls of her van. She was starting to recognize the faces of the people from the tent city who came into the parking lot to read the latest issue. When she heard people talking outside of her van, instead of ensuring the doors were locked and windows well covered, she often went out to greet them. Sometimes she interviewed them for the Archive. Other times, she just chatted. 

The day of the raid, Callie woke to urgent voices outside her van and the sound of sirens. 

She flung open the back doors, making sure that Winston stayed inside. 

A dozen police cars filled the front parking lot of the Wal-Mart, lights flashing. The siren sounds were coming from the back entrance, where police cars were screeching to a halt outside the tent city. Officers in riot gear were trashing the tents, beating people into the sidewalk. One woman pulled a handgun and the police fired on her with assault weapons. Her body jerked wildly with the impact of the bullets.  

According to the man in the red parka—Louie—and the woman in the green car—Esperanza—the manager of the Wal-Mart wasn’t happy with the increased noise and activity coming from the car dwellers and the tent city. He’d called the police. 

Two tow trucks, one at the back entrance, the other at the front, were already hard at work. The truck at the back entrance was towing Rudy’s truck while he laid flat on his stomach, hands behind his back. He wasn’t in handcuffs yet, but he’d rightly assessed that it was only a matter of time—better an hour or two facedown in the asphalt before getting hauled away than death by trigger-happy police. 

At least the asphalt was clean. A band of car dwellers and tent city denizens had appointed themselves the Sanitation Committee before the first thaw, taking advantage of the final winter freeze to collect frozen trash and feces from the aisles of the parking lot and the paths between the tents, distributing them among dumpsters further down the road.   Callie scrambled back into the van. She put the expandable file folder where she kept back issues of the Archive into her ragged backpack. Her phone, a laptop, some toiletries, and IDs were already in there. She stuffed Winston into her coat and zipped it shut over him.  She left the keys to her van in the ignition. It’s not like she was going to be able to pay the impound fee.  

Melinda joined her as she went to the pregnant woman’s van and rapped on the windshield. The pregnant woman was Adeline. Her husband, Jorge, was off to his janitor job, and Adeline was waiting for the tow trucks alone. 

Adeline was meticulous about her hair, combing through it and putting it in twists every two to three days. When she opened the passenger side door, the neat twists covered only the left side of her head. The right side was in disarray. Sweat beaded on her forehead. 

“I think it’s time,” she said. “Is Nurse Dana here?” 

“I don’t know,” Melinda said. “We need to get you to…” 

“A hospital? I don’t have insurance or a credit card. You know they’ll turn me away at the door.” 

“The bathroom,” Callie said. “We need to get her to the bathroom. Running water. Towels.” 

Adeline moaned. “Nurse Dana said that if the contractions were five minutes apart, it was time. But she said I had to be ten centimeters dilated to push. I really wish…” 

She screamed. 

Startled by the piercing shriek, Winston scrabbled at Callie’s chest until she unzipped her coat. He yowled all the way down to the snow at Callie’s feet. She grabbed for him and he slipped through her grasp, hurtling towards the tent city and the road beyond. 

Melinda yelled at Callie to leave the cat and help Adeline. She had to repeat herself three times before Callie stopped staring at the spot where Winston had disappeared into the tent city. 

With Callie on one side and Melinda on the other, Adeline staggered towards the line of police cars in front of the Wal-Mart. 

“Get down on the ground!” An officer bellowed into a megaphone. “You are under arrest for loitering, trespassing, and unlawful gathering.” 

“She’s in labor!” Melinda screamed. “She needs… she needs clean towels!” 

They helped Adeline into a kneeling position. She immediately dropped to her hands and knees, rocking back and forth. 

“Hands in the air!” The officer put his hand on his hip holster. 

Kneeling next to Adeline, her hands in the air, Winston’s claws digging into her chest, Callie scanned the crowd of officers for a sympathetic face. She found only steely-eyed men looking at her like she was the scum of the earth, and dropped her eyes. 

A pair of hot pink clogs materialized in the sea of black boots. 

“I’m so sorry to bother you, officer,” Nurse Dana said, “I called the station and got the paperwork to get a medical exemption for one of your prisoners… yes, here’s the signature from your supervisor.” 

“It’s for the pregnant one, right?” asked the officer with the megaphone. 

“I’ll need some extra hands, if you can spare a few officers.” 

“I’ve got none to spare. It’s a big operation.” 

“Understood. Could I have two of the prisoners to assist me?” 

“They could be dangerous, Dana.” 

“I’m willing to take that risk.” 

The officer laughed jovially and slapped Dana on the back. “You’ve got spunk, little lady!” 

Dana laughed and patted the officer on the arm. “Oh, it’s been a long time since someone called me little! You flatter me.” 

“Anytime. Say, when do you get off work?” 

“My number’s on the form,” Dana said, winking at the officer. He stepped aside to let her pass. She immediately dropped to her knees beside Adeline and began whispering to her urgently.  

“No funny business, you three,” the officer said to Adeline, Melinda, and Callie. “You’re remanded to the custody of,” he checked the form, “Dana Evans, RN.” 

Nurse Dana smiled at the officer as she hustled Adeline past him. Melinda and Callie kept their hands in the air and did not make eye contact. 

The automatic doors of the Wal-Mart whooshed open. 

“Callie, Melinda, have either of you given birth or assisted at a birth before?” asked Dana. She’d dropped the saccharine tone of voice she’d used with the police officer. 

“No,” said Callie. 

“I had a C-section twenty years ago,” Melinda offered. 

“Great. Okay. Callie, I’m going to need you to get as many towels, washbasins, and cotton sheets as you can carry. If you can find an inflatable kiddie pool, please bring that back with you, along with a hose. Melinda, stay with Adeline. I’m going to go grab a few things from the pharmacy.” 

They inflated the kiddie pool in the garden center. Melinda set five electric kettles of hot water boiling to add to the ice-cold water streaming into the pool from the garden hose. Adeline, reclining on a lawn chair, tried to follow along with a hypnobirthing breathing video on her phone while Nurse Dana checked how far she was dilated. Callie held a stack of towels and counted the number of gunshots she heard coming from the parking lot.  

“I’m almost out of battery,” Adeline said weakly. 

“Is the video helping?” asked Nurse Dana. 

“No.” 

“Water’s ready!” Melinda called out, dumping in the fifth kettle. She checked the temperature with a meat thermometer. “One hundred point one Fahrenheit!” 

“Perfect,” said Nurse Dana. “Get in the water. Should help with the pain.” 

“Is the baby okay?” 

“I heard a fetal heartbeat when I listened to your belly with the stethoscope, and it was around where it should be. Other than that, I can’t say.” 

Adeline nodded. Callie and Melinda helped her into the pool. 

“Oh, it feels so much better.” 

“Poor man’s epidural,” said Nurse Dana. “You’re not fully dilated, so don’t push. I don’t trust my skill well enough to check you in the water, so you’ll have to get out for the next check. Callie, go fetch some food.” 

“Grapes,” Adeline gasped. “I just want grapes.” 

The Wal-Mart emptied out when the police arrived. Even the rent-a-cops were gone. Callie browsed the produce section undisturbed, mentally logging two additional gunshots outside as she piled grapes into a basket.  

Adeline’s labor lasted for four hours. She pushed for two of them. The birth was uncomplicated—mother and baby would die otherwise in these conditions, Nurse Dana pointed out after the placenta was delivered. 

They fashioned a bed for Adeline and baby Rosie from an exercise mat, a pillow, and a couple of quilts. Dana sat next to mother and baby as they slept. Melinda, full of nervous energy, went to check on the raid outside. 

“They’re all gone,” she announced. “Cars, police. It’s empty.” 

Callie nodded, eyes heavy with fatigue. She filled in the last word on her final draft. 

“Good. I’ll post the next issue.” 

She stole a new Ziploc bag for this issue of the Archive, and because it was dark, picked a street lamp close to the Wal-Mart entrance. 

The True Things Archive (Volume III, Issue I) 

A Factual Account of Our Surroundings 

Written by an Anonymous Observer  

As she taped the bag to the streetlamp, she saw someone pull into the parking lot through the back entrance and quickly shut off their headlights.  

She made an amendment in the blank Arrivals section:  

One brown Toyota with a busted right headlight at approximately 10 PM, one driver, no passengers, and one cat, curled up on the dashboard. 

Most of today’s issue was concerned with Departures. But Callie was proud of the new section she’d added today—and in the weeks to come, she would claim that this was why she started a new volume of the Archive on the day of the raid.  

Births  

Rosie Dana Ruiz was born at 5:49 PM on April 23, 2042, to Adeline Logan and Jorge Ruiz. She is healthy as of this writing.