I am back at the bar. We have had three customers in the past four days. This leads to drinking, and thinking too much about the past.
Perhaps I shouldn’t reveal this here, but we have food underneath the floorboards. Staples like honey, sugar, and pasta. Although I doubt anyone will ever eat a spoonful.
We always had enough provisions here during the Haircut, even when the scavengers came. Buber was too important to suffer. But there was always the underlying fear that things would turn, and the supply chains would collapse. That there simply wouldn’t be sustenance anymore. That the next freighter could land with tons of rotting maize, a thousand parnsipheads spilling from the hold and tearing up the landscape.
We heard so many stories from those who visited the bar. Some were so skinny their clothes were like tents. We helped when we could, but often hid our supplies in the beer cellar. The farmers doubled as security back then. Once when driving with my grandfather near a pumpkin field (we had pumpkin fields then) something lurched towards us, covered in pulpy orange flesh and seeds. I never found out if it was alive or dead.
Think how weird it is that we don’t even know what planet the Haircut started on. That in the billions of acres of crops feeding a hungry universe we can’t pinpoint patient zero. One month everything is fine, and then suddenly parsnipheads shamble across the stars.
But if you think about the situation logically, their arrival was inevitable. Think about all the planets we took over and turned into farmland. Something like this was bound to happen. This wasn’t a fight back. Merely the odds of finding something incompatible with us in all that space.
This was never a war. There is no record of any strategy, or even communication between the parsnipheads. The problem was they kept coming.
Which is why we keep food under the floorboard.
I am thinking too much. It will be good to get customers in again.
