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2312 – Week One
• Silo 17 •
JIMMY WORKED HIS way down the ladder, wondering how long it’d been since he last ate. He couldn’t remember. Breakfast before school, but that was a day ago, maybe two. Halfway down the ladder, he thought of himself as a piece of food sliding through some great metal neck. This was what a swallowed bite felt like. At the bottom of the ladder, he stood for a moment in the bowels of the silo, a hollow thing lost in a hollow thing. There would be no end to the silo’s hunger, chewing on something empty like him. They would both starve, he thought. His stomach grumbled; he needed to eat. Jimmy staggered down the dark corridor and through the silo’s guts.
The radio on the wall continued to hiss. Jimmy turned the volume down until the spitting noise could barely be heard. His father wouldn’t be calling him ever again. He wasn’t sure how he knew this, but it was a Rule of the World.
He entered the small apartment. There was a table big enough for four with the pages of a book scattered across it, a needle and thread coiled on top like a snake guarding its nest. Jimmy thumbed the pages and saw that the place where the pages met was being repaired. His stomach hurt, it was so empty. His mind was beginning to ache as well.
Across the room, the ghost of his father stood and pointed out doors, told him what was behind each. Jimmy patted his chest for the key, took it out, and used it to unlock the pantry across from the stove. Food enough for two people for ten years, that was what his father had told him. Was that right?
The room made a sucking sound as he cracked the pantry door, and there was the tickle of a breeze against his neck. Jimmy found the light switch on the outside of the door – as well as a switch that ran a noisy fan. He turned the fan off, which only reminded him of the radio. Inside the room, he found shelves bulging with cans that receded so far he had to squint to see the back wall. These were cans like he’d never seen before. He squeezed between the tight shelves and searched up and down, his stomach begging him to choose and be quick about it. Eat, eat, his belly growled. Jimmy said to give him a chance.
Tomatoes and beets and squash, stuff he hated. Recipe food. He wanted food food. There were entire shelves of corn with labels like colourful sleeves of paper, not the black ink scrawled on a tin that he was used to. Jimmy grabbed one of the cans and studied it. A large man with green flesh smiled at him from the label. Tiny words like those printed in books wrapped all around. The cans of corn were identical. They made Jimmy feel out of place, like he was asleep and dreaming every bit of this.
He kept one of the corn and found an aisle of labelled soups in red and white, grabbed one of those as well. Back in the apartment, he rummaged for an opener. There were drawers around the stove full of spatulas and serving spoons. There was a cabinet with pots and lids. A bottom drawer held charcoal pencils, a spool of thread, batteries bulging with age and covered in grey powder, a child’s whistle, a screwdriver and myriad other things.
He found the can opener. It was rusty and appeared as if it hadn’t been used in years. But the dull cutter still sank through the soft tin when he gave it a squeeze, and the handle turned if given enough force. Jimmy worked it all the way around and cursed when the lid sank down into the soup. He fished a knife out of the drawer to lever the lid out with the tip. Food. Finally. He placed a pot onto the stove and turned the burner on, thinking of his apartment, of his mother and father. The soup heated. Jimmy waited, stomach growling, but some part of him was dimly aware that there was nothing he could put inside himself to touch the real ache, this myster-ious urge he felt every moment to scream at the top of his lungs or to collapse to the floor and cry.
While he waited for the soup to bubble, he inspected the sheets of paper the size of small blankets hanging on one wall. It looked as if they’d been hung out to dry, and he thought at first that the thick books must be made by folding up or cutting these. But the large sheets were already printed on, the drawings continuous. Jimmy ran his hands down the smooth paper and studied the details of a schematic, an arrangement of circles with fine lines inside each and labels everywhere. There were numbers over the circles. Three of them were crossed out with red ink. Each was labelled a ‘silo’, but that didn’t make any sense.
Behind him, a hissing like the radio, like someone calling for him, the whisperings of ghosts. Jimmy turned from the strange drawing to find his soup spitting bubbles, dripping down the edge and sizzling on the glowing-hot burner. He left the large and strange drawing alone.