Chapter One: Food Not Bombs

She pushed the bag of groceries up against the wall to flip the light switch, holding the door open with her leg. The bulb flickered with a staccato burst of light and went dark again.

“Damn it.”

Light bulbs in this house were dying. They had been swapping bulbs from room to room in an attempt to maintain an even distribution of light: where there were two bulbs one was taken. By now they were spread thin like twilight. She could forsee a time when she would be huddled in a room with her housemates, gathered at night around the last remaining light as though for warmth. She had forgotten to buy bulbs again.

She remembered this moment months later as she looked down at a mound of loose earth, freshly dug. Her fingernails were caked with mud, her hands dirty. How exactly had all of the events between here and there worked out as they did? The fact that a light bulb has burned out is generally considered insignificant in the grand scheme of an entire life. But it is the insignificant events of the past that nourish the present as they decompose beneath us and behind us. The genealogies of events, like those of people, are built on anonymous ancestors...