A History of the Future by James Howard Kunstler

to her from Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, the Autobiography of a Horse, which had been one of his favorites as a child, and Daniel’s and Genna’s too. It was about a way of life that more resembled the new times of the present than Robert’s own boyhood in the days of Star Wars, computer gaming magic, and other techno-grandiosities that had come to such a shockingly abrupt end.
    When Sarah slipped into sleep, Robert took the candle into the bathroom, where half a pail of warm water stood on the chest beside the sink waiting for him, and from there into his own bedroom where Britney waited for him naked beneath the quilt. He climbed in and gathered her in his arms, amazed at the generosity of the universe to have arranged things this way.
    “When I was a little girl,” she said, “I had sneakers with little red lights on the edge of the soles. They twinkled whenever I took a step. I couldn’t get over how magical they were. I wore them one year to the big public Christmas breakfast when they used to hold it in the old theater on the top floor of the old town hall. Everybody followed my footsteps around the room while the high school kids sang carols on stage. It broke my heart when they wore out and the batteries stopped working.”
    “Couldn’t you get another pair?”
    “By then Daddy was gone and we were very poor. Everybody was poor. I used to be sorry that Sarah would never have a pair of magic sneakers like that, but I don’t think so anymore. There are other ways to feel special and other kinds of magic in the world. Merry Christmas, Robert.”
    Britney slid on top of him and sat up with the quilt over her shoulders, a vision in the candlelight: compact, soft, fragrant, amorously ripe, and intent. Robert reached up and drew her face down to his.

S EVENTEEN
    When Andrew Pendergast came back to his house after directing the musicians (and playing piano) for the Christmas Eve program of lessons and carols, there were candles burning in two of the front windows and the woodstove had been tended to keep the house warm for his return, as he had instructed Jack Harron to do. More than one clock ticked around the big old house and the split logs hissed as they burned in the stove. He put his hat and overcoat carefully in the hall closet and proceeded to the kitchen, placing a splint basket down on the big farmhouse table there.
    “Jack,” he called into the darkness where the back room was.
    Shortly, Jack Harron emerged from his room into the hallway squinting in the candlelight. He was physically transformed from the filthy furtive creature of the previous evening to at least the outward representation of a housebroken human being. He wore a pair of Andrew’s old wool pants, tattered from years of outdoor excursions in pursuit of minerals for his paints, botanicals for his health, and spring trout for his frying pan, and an old, frayed, lavender-colored Calvin Klein button-down shirt from days when Andrew reported to an office in New York City. Because Jack was so emaciated, the pants were cinched and scrunched at the waist with an old belt that he had punched some new holes in. And because he was shorter than Andrew he had rolled up each trouser leg. He had trimmed his beard, as Andrew told him to do, and bathed more than once in the past twenty-four hours until he’d scrubbed all the layers of grime and grease off himself.
    “Were you asleep?”
    “I guess so.”
    “Not sure?”
    “I was asleep. I haven’t slept hardly at all lately in the cold.”
    “Thank you for tending the stove and lighting the candles.”
    “It’s what you told me.”
    “Thanks for doing what I told you.”
    “It’s comfortable here. I forgot what that’s like.”
    “Sit down,” Andrew said and Jack took a seat at the table. Andrew fetched a plate from a cupboard and some cutlery from a drawer. He removed various articles from the splint basket: slices of ham, corn bread, a deviled egg, dried fruit, and nut cookies. “Are