What Comes After

August 25

"Put the soil in with a little more love," Grandma loosely said in Chinese as Mom and Mira shoveled our pretty rock-hard soil into the cans.

Mom said the equivalent of "Whatever" in Chinese and put the soil in more gently.

All morning was spent cleaning out old cans to make them pots. We tried cutting the cans to make the bottoms breathable, but the scissors were too dull, and Mom was worried that we'd stab ourselves and get tetanus (though I'm pretty sure that we already got vaccinated for that). So we just washed old cans and put them side-by-side underneath the greenhouse until we've crammed as many as we could.

While all of us were doing that, Dad was in the garage, searching for anything that might be useful, and he actually managed to find a bag of potting soil from a long, long time ago, though it only had enough soil to fill ten cans. Which meant that some people had to dig up soil from our garden for the vans.

"I'm going to fix up the bottom of the greenbox," Dad said. "To make sure that the bottom doesn't start to get dirty and help with excess water."

He quickly ran off into the garage, probably to avoid the joyless work of shoveling dirt. Sometimes, Dad was very immature. But, to be fair, I also didn't want to spend hours trying to break apart our rock-hard oil, so I said, "I'll go make support structures, like those crisscross ones—"

"Trellises?" Mira suggested.

'Yeah, those things," I said. "So, yeah, I better get going to do some building."

As I was leaving, Mom shook her head and muttered, "Men these days."

And apparently May also followed me to my room since she refused to shovel dirt, and as we dug through drawers to find tape, popsicle sticks, and yarn, Mom and Mira were shoveling dirt into the forty cans that remained. There was a corner of the garden with softer soil since I remember composting vegetable remains there for a middle school experiment, but they could only fill half of the cans before running out of dirt and hiding the rock-hard soil underneath.

So they had to dig from the rest of the garden, soil cracked and hard from years of neglect and drought (It's crazy to think that about a third of my life was spent in drought, including all of my middle school years). When I looked outside, they were pouring a bit of water on the ground, probably trying to soften the soil, before Mira came in a couple of minutes later to call Dad outside.

In the meantime, May and I were building these trellises. We laid down the popsicle sticks, spaced a few inches apart and laid yarn across the popsicle sticks, taping each segment of yarn to a popsicle stick, so that it looked like one of those farm fences. We did that multiple times until that farm fence morphed into a crisscross of yarn and popsicle sticks, basically becoming a trellis.

"That looks great," Mira said and picked our creation up. "Yarn to make this. That's pretty cool."

"It's really random, but I remember reading it online in a comment for a zombie book," I said. "Who knew that it would be useful?"

I looked outside at Mom and Dad pounding away at the soil. "So, what's happening out there? Why'd Mom send you back in?"

Mira sighed and looked down. "The usual thing she says, all the ash in the air, especially since it was taking way longer than usual and the water wasn't helping soften the soil that much."

She looked at me. "I was thinking about going to the ocean tomorrow."

May and I's eyebrows shot up. I didn't know why she'd want to go to the ocean. I don't know why anyone would want to go to the ocean unless they wanted to see death and heartbreak and random corpses littering the soggy soil and algae-stained rooftops of the formerly seaside mansions, now partially underwater.

"What?" I said. "Why? It's not like there's even a beach."

"It's not even for a beach, silly," she said. "And I just meant the edge of the tidal zone, not the actual ocean. I just want to grab some kelp to fertilize the soil."

"No," May said and joined the conversation. "Our house is going to be so stinky."

I ignored May. "It seems like a pretty good plan," I said because it objectively was a smart idea even though there was this undertone of panic in my voice.

Mira turned to May and me. "I was thinking of making it a whole family thing. Plus, maybe it'll be nice, not in a good way but in a relieving way, to just face down the threat of the ocean, together."

"Maybe you all can go ahead," I said. "I'll stay behind. Just in case there is an earthquake and tsunami and everything so that at least one of us stays alive."

Of course that was a flimsy excuse. I just didn't want to go to the beach because it reeked with the stench of death. The last three times that I visited the beach— the school trip before everything, the rotting corpse that plagued my nightmares, the time that I found out that Charles and his family were starving— were all tinged with the feeling that everything was falling apart. The first was my friendship, then it was my mind and my dreams, and then it was Charles and his life. It was just too loaded of a place to head to.

But I held my objections behind when Mira said, "C'mon. It'll be family bonding but without those boring board games."

"Fine. I'll come if Mom and Dad agree to this," I replied, hoping that they wouldn't force me to go. There's just something so hard about saying what I'm thinking, just worried that Mira or Mom or Dad would get worried that I'm worried, and then I'd have to spill all of my secrets for them to understand without coming up with some paper-thin excuse. I guess it was just better for them to think everything is fine.